 Welcome to the November 24, 2020, meeting of the Arlington School Committee. This open meeting of the Arlington School Committee is being conducted remotely consistent with Governor Baker's executive order of March 12, 2020, due to the current state of emergency and the Commonwealth due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus in order to mitigate the transmission of the virus. We have been advised and directed by the Commonwealth to suspend public gatherings. And as such, the governor's order suspends the requirement of the open meeting law to have all meetings in a publicly accessible physical location. Further, all members of public bodies are allowed and encouraged to participate remotely. The order, which you can find posted with agenda materials for this meeting allows public bodies to meet entirely remotely so long as reasonable public access is afforded so that the public can follow along with the deliberations of the meeting. Ensuring public access does not ensure public participation unless such participation is required by law. This meeting will not feature public comment. For this meeting, the Arlington School Committee is convening by Zoom as posted on the town's website identifying how the public may join. Please note that this meeting is being recorded and that some attendees are participating by video conference. Accordingly, please be aware that others may be able to see you, take care not to screen share your computer. Anything you broadcast may be captured by the recording all the materials for this meeting except any executive session materials are available on the Novus agenda dashboard. We recommend the members and the public follow the agenda as posted on Novus unless I note otherwise. I will introduce each speaker on the agenda after they conclude their remarks. I will go down the list of members inviting each by name to provide any comment, questions or motions. Please hold until your name is called. Please remember to mute your phone or computer, speak clearly in a way that helps generate accurate minutes. Please wait until the chair yields the floor to you for any response to your name before speaking which we haven't been doing and will not be doing this evening. If members wish to engage in colloquial with other members, please do so through the chair. Finally, each vote taken in this meeting will be conducted by roll call vote. So let me confirm that all members and persons anticipated on the agenda are present and can hear me. Ms. Exton here, Mr. Cardin. Yes, here. Dr. Allison Ampey. Here. Mr. Thielman. Here. Mr. Schlickman. Present. Mr. Hainer. Here. And I am also here. I'm gonna start at the top. Our Dr. Vody. Present. Dr. McNeil. I don't see yet. Now I'm gonna start at the top. Mr. Spiegel. Here. Ms. Keys. Here. Mr. Bowler. Here. Dr. Janger. Here. Mr. McCarthy. Here. Mr. Mason. Here. Ms. Elmer. Here. Great. So I did wanna make a comment just before we got started because I did receive some emails today questioning or just curious about why there wasn't public comment scheduled for this meeting. This is a special meeting of the school committee that we scheduled a week ago, two weeks ago. I'm not sure. It's a bit of a blur at this point, but we had set this meeting with the intention of giving it as a sort of a signpost in our superintendent search process. And initially the only item on the agenda for this evening was the superintendent search process. After the given that we absorbed our Thursday regular school committee meeting that was last week with a superintendent interview, we were not able to meet as a full committee to discuss the plans for Arlington High School with Dr. Janger and his team. So we added that to the agenda for this evening given that our next meeting because of the holiday is not until December 10th. So typically in a special meeting we don't always have public comment. And had we just been addressing the superintendent candidates, I think that that would have made sense. But anyway, that's where we are. So no public comment for this evening. Thank you to those who have sent us your comments by email. So the first item on the agenda is a vote on winter sports for Arlington High School. So Mr. Bowler. Hi, thank you for letting me speak tonight. First, I want to thank you for approving fall sports. When you include practices in games we had over 500 athletic events with 348 students participating this fall. Varsity teams met with their team and coaches four days a week, sub varsity with their coaches three days a week. I couldn't see their smiles because everyone had masks on, but I could tell they were happy to be there and participating with their team and playing the sports that they love. So winter athletics is... Let's give them a minute. Doesn't look good though. Full chair leading. Okay, Mr. Bowler. Unfortunately, we lost you for a critical component of what you were saying. We got to the point where you told us that the kids were having a good time and then you moved to winter and you froze. So if you could rewind, that would be great. So the MIA moved some traditional winter sports into a track has been moved to the fall two season starting February 22nd. Wrestling has been moved to the spring season starting April 25th and no winter chair leading. Winter chair leading, usually they just chaired it at athletic events and that is not allowed this year from the MIA. The middle sex leagues actually moved boy swimming to the fall two seasons starting February 22nd. Most of the schools in the middle sex league do not have pools right now. And the ones that do have limits are one person per lane with like five lanes in a pool. So moving swimming to be able to compete with a must for the middle sex league. The middle sex league has approved having boys and girls basketball, boys and girls hockey gymnastics. And also this year we're new, we're in ski east. We have a ski team. The winter timeline right now is starting 12, 14 first practice for basketball, gymnastics and hockey this game starting after January 1st. Skiing is gonna start January 5th. We ski up at the Blue Hills in Canton. The last day of winter sports is 221. When I continue this same format as the fall, velocity teams will play 10 games, sub-velocities will play eight to 10 games. Most games for basketball will be on Saturdays, holidays, a couple of week nights to get the 10 games in the shortened season and possibly February vacation. Hockey games will be based on rank availability when we can play those games. And they'll play 10 velocity games and eight to 10 sub-velocity games. Chairleading, I mean gymnastics will be on Saturdays and there'll be seven to eight meets depending on how many middle sex league teams have gymnastics teams. We're gonna continue the practice limits. Varsity will practice three days a week and sub-velocity will practice two days a week. Each student is expected to get to their practice in contest on their own. The school department will not be supplying transportation to any games. MIA has made sports specific guidelines. Basketball, mask worn at all times, no jump balls, mask breaks halfway through each quarter, no underneath out of bounds, six feet away from a person inbounding the ball on the sideline, one person at a scores table at a time. Gymnastics, mask must be worn at all times, athletes must sanitize hands prior and after competing on an event. Equipment must be cleaned and sanitized at the completion of the rotation prior to another team using it. Hockey, similar, mask must be worn at all times, no locker rooms, players must come dressed, ready to go, put their skates and pads on at the rink, bench areas, only three coaches and players must be six feet apart. Ski modifications, mask must be worn, social distance at the start and finish line, skiers must leave immediately following their event. You know, we're gonna follow all the EAs, take local guidelines and all the MIA and DESC modifications like we did in the fall. We'll be asking kids before practice in games for COVID questions that they have to answer. If they answer yes to any of them, they won't be allowed to practice. And we're gonna, you know, we're gonna have the same, we're not gonna, we're gonna advise students not to carpool to games or practices, wear a mask at all times, coaches will be responsible for make sure social distance is there, students will come to the rink and court dress ready to play, all athletes will bring their own equipment, it'll be six feet away from everybody else's equipment and bags, they must bring their own water, hand sanitizer, must bring two masks, in case one gets damaged. After games and practices, there's no team meetings, everyone just leaves after practice. There's no one hanging around. And so basically what I'm asking tonight is to get approval for girls basketball, boys basketball, girls hockey, boys hockey, gymnastics and skiing. Mr. Thelman. I'll put the motion on the table. So moved. Second. Can you read it to us or a motion to approve all winter sports? Hang on, I have some language here. Give me a second. As determined by the middle sex league superintendents. Yes. Would you like that motion, Mr. Thelman? Yes, that's the motion. I'm sorry. Second. All right, discussion. Dr. Allison Ampe. Can you clarify again which winter sports we were talking about? I missed the list. I mean, the ones that you want us to approve tonight. Boys and girls basketball, boys and girls hockey, gymnastics and skiing. Okay, thank you. Ms. Exton. I think you mentioned this, but I just want to, what are the expectations for spectators? Spectators, I think that will be determined by the superintendents meeting tomorrow. For the fall, we had one spectator per student athlete. So I think they're going to discuss that tomorrow at their meeting. So I would assume it's going to be similar to that or possibly, you know, being inside, you know, possibly could be no spectators, but I think they'll make that determination tomorrow. Mr. Heiner. Mr. Ball, will there be any videoing of this for the community? Yeah, so for the fall, ACMI, they live streamed all the soccer games. So I talked to them last week, they're going to live stream all the varsity soccer and I mean, basketball and hockey games. And I'm going to try to have them do gymnastics as well. Thank you. Mr. Schupman. What is the absolute deadline for us to have this approved? When will the sports start? December 14th is the first day of a tryout slash practice, the MIA, usually it's the Monday after Thanksgiving, but the MIA on Friday pushed it to December 14th. Yeah, I would have appreciated, instead of having this information being read to us, that the meeting is to have had it in advance and to novice. This makes it much more difficult for us to think about this and vote it. Dr. Bode. The MIA is true. We could put the MIA regulations, they came out at the end of the last week to you and we apologize that that did not happen. Actually, tomorrow, the Middlesex League superintendents are meeting to discuss the regulation for MIA, look at the program, look at the schedule, spectators as Mr. Boller. But ultimately, we have to still have an approval process that's going to go on tomorrow. I expect that they will be approved and maybe some modifications. What I can say is that the Middlesex League superintendents would like the program to go forward. I think our athletic directors and our teams did a great job this fall in adhering to all of the guidelines and we'll just have to play it by ear as this season goes on because now we're moving from outdoor sports to indoor. So this is a motion to approve but still subject to what happens in the meeting tomorrow. The reason why you have to approve this program and you won't have to do it in subsequent semester or subsequent seasons is because the high school is remote and the Department of Education said schools, high schools that are remote had to have school cleaning approval. When we were in talk about the high school this evening, it may not be necessary beyond this particular meeting. Mr. Thielman. Yeah, so first of all, I support anything that can get kids into activities safely and what Mr. Bowler has outlined is I think safe. And secondly, the way the motion is worded, it's as determined by the superintendent. So the superintendents could collectively decide in the Middlesex League that a sport might not be able to be continued because of safety reasons. So we're basically approving it subject to them, subject to the superintendents possibly making a decision at some point in the season to modify their rules. So I'm comfortable. I think it's a safe practical motion to vote for. So I'll come to you in a minute. Dr. Allison Ambio, I'm gonna take my chance to ask a question. So Mr. Bowler or Dr. Bodie, can you speak to the position of the health department on winter sports, especially basketball and hockey? I'm curious because they've recommended the six foot distances in our classrooms, which makes it very challenging to provide a lot of in-person instruction at the high school. I think we all know that even with the changes to basketball and as not a basketball connoisseur, I don't really understand. I know what jump throw jump, jump balls are. I don't understand the under hoop rule, but I think we all know that there will be a lot of kids a lot closer than six feet playing basketball. And I'm just really having a hard time understanding why we're making a recommendation to have kids do that in the gym. And we must have their desks six feet apart down the hall. So if it's a health department thing or an administration thing, but I'm really struggling with the incongruity of these two things. And the fact that they're back to back on the agenda is ironic and unintended, but I need to talk about it. So Dr. Janger. So there are other people in this room who are qualified to talk about some of this than I am, but as you look through all of the different ratings, we are not allowed to have gatherings of 25 or more in the state, but because school is a priority, we can have a hundred kids in the cafeteria if we can keep them six feet apart. So some of these things have been health department and other decisions made based on complicated things, but for the most part, when they've done analyses of these sports, they're much larger volumes of air. And although kids are in contact, they're not in contact for sustained periods of time and they're wearing masks. So it's not when the kids are six feet apart in the classroom, they're gonna walk past each other and sometimes be three feet apart. That's incidental contact, but they're also in a smaller enclosed space than a 12,000 square foot gym. And that's part of what's been, the experience has been the kids playing soccer with masks on, they run past each other, they get close to each other, but they're not allowed to bunch up, they stay spread out and kids playing hockey in the rinks, which was for a period shut down because hockey was presenting an issue and they went to much stricter limits for everything except the game. And so that even at the end of a play, it's pretty typical on a hockey that everybody gathers together and now the kids are all determined to stay apart at the end of each play. And so over the course of the game, kids are really only close to each other kid, any given kid for a couple of minutes over the course of the game. And that's the rationale. But it is, I mean, all of these things are a little bit mind boggling. And I feel like for us, people send me the epidemiology and I sort of have to trust that the epidemiology works and then work within those constraints. I appreciate that. I guess, you know, Charlie Baker is not asking for my opinion on bars and restaurants and indoor dining, best as I can tell. But, you know, we're being asked our opinion about kids playing basketball in the gym when they're not, you know, when they need to sit six feet apart in classrooms down the hall. So, you know, that's, it's very tricky. So I'd be happy to share my opinions on indoor dining and other things as well that deprioritize having kids in school. So, Dr. Bodie, did you have something to add? I think Mr. Bola was also going to do that. I just want to talk a little, just mention that the issue of the six foot was both on the Board of Health and the school department that we felt jointly that this was an important distance which we continue to feel. I understand your concern. And it's certainly something actually when we met a couple of weeks ago, this was an issue for the middle sex superintendents as well. So there's going to be some discussion tomorrow. If there's any evidence as we start the season that there is a, you know, more than a singular case of COVID, I'm not even sure what the threshold will be yet. Unfortunately, that sport may not be able to continue. So we're going to be monitoring this very carefully as we go through the season. But our overall feeling is that this is a wonderful opportunity for kids. You know, one of the things that the committee has talked about with the high school and we've heard from senior parents and other parents is the kids want opportunities to be together. And the sports program offers a wonderful opportunity for that to happen. The number, we had over 300 students in the fall which was great. So we're going to monitor this for sure. But right now with these regulations that all that we're going to put in place, we hope that'll be a safe season. The fall was, we're hoping the winter one will be as well. And yeah, and I also work with like communication with the board of health. And like I send them like a guideline for our practices and games for the fall. And then they would, they looked at them and told me to make some adjustments. And I mean, I'll do the same thing in the winter. We'll put a guideline together how we conduct basketball games, basketball practices, hockey. And I'll get their input on how we can make things better. And save them. Mr. Carden. Thank you. So yes, I agree with Dr. Bodie that we need to get kids involved as much as we can. I'm concerned a bit, however, though, that we tiptoe around the board of health, the Department of Health. We tiptoe around them about wellness day where we couldn't have a kickball game or something. But here, you know, we're going forward with basketball and hockey and in closed spaces. So, you know, I would encourage us to be a little bit more aggressive in our stance because we need to do as many activities as we can. Thank you. Dr. Allison Ampe. Thank you. I don't know hockey as well as basketball. Basketball I played in middle school and I'm concerned as is Ms. Morgan about spacing and how much time kids are really getting up close and in each other's face doing the ball or going after rebound. There's all sorts of situations where you find yourself in a time when you're right next to face-to-face with the other player. And in an enclosed space, this is making me more concerned. So I guess I'm asking, I'm saying this for the superintendent to hear it. As you discuss it, I didn't entirely follow what the consequences of all the no jumps and or whatever would be. I can figure some of them, but just the general sport I'm just wondering about. Yeah, I think we had a successful fall was following all the guidelines. I know we're going indoors. I think if we don't offer sports like basketball hockey, all these kids are gonna be playing on AAU teams and there'll be 15 kids playing on 15 different teams. And I think we can do it safer and we can do it better for our community keeping the kids here rather than going out and playing all over the state with all different players. I think if we're allowed to have sports, I feel very confident that it's safer than what any of these other programs are doing and we're keeping our kids together and keeping our community in Eilings and around the middle sex league. Mr. Haynor. Does the MIA taking into consideration the ventilation and everything else with all the different things that have happened through the pandemic? As Dr. Janga just mentioned, the volume of the room affords the ability to have more people, but the circulation is a major factor. I don't believe that they have made any recommendations on air exchanges, but we know as we've looked at our high school, we have about all of the rooms and that includes gym up to the original design ventilation numbers. So we're feeling very good about our gym as a place to play. But I think all the concerns that you raise as a group are valid concerns. And then it's one of these things where you raise a risk versus the benefit. And at the moment, I think there'll be some strong feelings on the part of the superintendent that while there's risks, the benefits may outweigh those risks at the moment. The fall season was terrific, but I grant you was outside. As I said, we're gonna watch this very closely. Mr. Heiner. I would ask through the chair that the superintendent keeps the committee updated on a regular basis. And you normally do Kathy, but I just want to make it a formal request. Certainly let us know what y'all decide tomorrow. That would be helpful. Seeing his work, we're ostensibly voting on a motion for you guys to make the decision tomorrow. So that's not lost on me. Okay. So motion by Mr. Thielman, seconded by, well, Mr. Thielman and Ms. Eckston, seconded by Mr. Heiner, I believe. Any more comment? Dr. Alice Stampy. I'll vote for this motion given that the superintendent will be making the decision in conjunction with the other superintendents. And I intend to support this motion actually because Mr. Bowler's description of what will happen if we do not offer sports is quite compelling. I feel decidedly conflicted that we are going to have kids right next to each other under a hoop in the gym and really are struggling with how to get them into science class down the hall. But that's our next agenda item. So I suppose we'll learn more at that point. But thank you, Mr. Bowler. I think that was a really important point that I hadn't considered. And so I appreciate that. All right, time to vote. Ms. Eckston. Yes, Mr. Cardin. Yes. Dr. Alice Stampy. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Mr. Schlickman. Yes. Mr. Heiner. Yes. And I am also yes. So the next item on the agenda is the Arlington High School Reopening Plan. Dr. Bode, are you going to speak to that initially or Dr. Janger or? Dr. Janger is going to speak to this, but I'm certainly going to be here in support and answer questions. Great. Dr. Janger, you're on mute, sir. Yeah, thanks. So that's when I say my best stuff. So do you mind if I just share my screen? I made a few slides sort of later in the day to supplement, just to guide this sort of initial part of the conversation. Please do. And switch over to a section. So I'm just going to share right now. Hopefully you are seeing Arlington High School semester two sample models. Is that what you're seeing right now? Yes. Okay. Oops. So the school committee has already heard from me sort of in a long meeting going through the sample models. As I've explained to everyone in the community, in letters and surveys and presentations, it is unfortunately challenging to really get one's head around each of the logistics of each of the models. I thought that today what made sense to do, given where we are with this was an update. We've already had a long conversation. There are surveys out. We're planning on meeting again on December 3rd to look at some of the information that we'll be getting in between now and then. So what I was focusing on today was to outline the master schedule structure for semester two to go over sort of what I understand to be the timeline for the decision to give a little bit of information in answer to a lot of questions that I've been having on other supports and activities related to the second semester. We were asked to take one more look at being able to create a two cohort option. So I will say a few words about that and throw that off to Mr. McCarthy, who has hammered away at the spreadsheets to see if there was any way to make that possible. And then, and you can ask me to do this or not to do this, but I thought it would be helpful to briefly go through an overview of the three reasonable hybrid options that we presented before both. So we have that on tape for the community and updated and hopefully slightly clearer version. And because I've been trying to respond to some of the questions so people could understand that. Does that seem like a reasonable approach for the evening? Ms. Morgan, others? Sounds good. Okay. So first, one of the things I want to just say is this is an unbelievably difficult situation, right? We are all extremely worried about our students, our children, our families. I've been a principal since 2001, but I've never experienced such a sustained period of anxiety before there was at least a shift to some new normal or some understanding of the situation. So now we're seven months into this situation, eight months into the situation, and yet there's still an enormous number of perspectives. And I get those people's letters, they're people worrying on sort of every version of how we do this. And for us, we as educators, I mean, that's what we do, that's why we're here. So we're extremely worried about the impact. Right now we've had the pandemic, we've had the results of the economy, which is affecting many families, we've had the situation with politics, we've had the sort of ongoing issues around this conversation on racial justice, and all of that leaves us all really stretched pretty thin. And so I get letters from people like, have you considered this, have you considered that? I try to answer those, I don't answer all of them, I'm sure I can try to answer them in these presentations, but I want to assure everyone, the school committee and anyone watching, that I read every one of those letters, I look at every single proposal, I go back and try again, every time somebody asks me to try something again, we really are trying to consider those. And right now what we're trying to do, having looked at the logistics of the puzzle, the problem, we're doing our best to listen, to consider and to balance off everyone's opinions. And I don't believe, unfortunately, that there is one clear path, one right answer, it's going to be a balance based on getting feedback. And I also want to assure people that whatever choice we make between now and December 10th, the other concerns that people have, there are some people who are very focused on being remote and very worried about that, there are some people who are very focused on sort of the structure in terms of student support, there are some folks who are very concerned about their students having social interaction, there are some folks who are very concerned about their students having teacher guidance in person around activities, all those things and a wide range of others are concerns and none of those are going to be set aside because we choose one model or another. Whatever model we choose from that model, that overarching schedule, we then build the supports, we then identify the students to put other things in place. So I think that's really important. At this point, I may have preferences, I may think one of the ideas is a better or a worse one, but we really are approaching this with an open mind. That's the task we were given, which was to consider all reasonable models. And I came up with the best versions of each sort of option I could. And we're going to look at the feedback that we get and we're going to get a few different pieces and then we're going to do that. Also, hopefully this presentation will give me a short, the most recent shortest summary. And based on that, I will either take clips from this presentation or make new ones. There are people who are just having a hard time with the chart, so I will put little video clips in each of those charts for folks who haven't answered the survey yet so that folks can hear me sort of explain and talk through it and hopefully that will give people some clarity. So jumping ahead. So through this whole conversation, we've been looking at these primary focus goals. They came out of statements from guiding organizations and then from focus groups. And this is what the survey information is focused on. Issues around safety, academic progress, mental health, social interaction, equity of access students with disability and the ability to pivot and respond to COVID. And some of these presentations are organized around that. So I want to hit some of those things that are going on in addition to or connected to. You've heard me say, and folks have taken exception and I want to be clear on it, that we aren't seeing a spike in serious mental health. That does not mean that people are not worried and it doesn't mean that we're not worried. This is something we're really paying attention to. We're closely monitoring attendance, grades, referrals, our counselors and social workers are reaching out to the students on their caseloads on a much more regular basis and identifying additional students. We're reviewing the students that are in social emotional programs and our nurse case led referrals. As we look at that, we see students who are worried. We don't see spikes in mental health and not as a clinical mental health or like severe mental health, mental illness. We do see people who are worried. We do see people who are isolated. We hear people's concerns. The questions on the survey focused on priorities. I thought very hard about asking a question about just how is your mental health? But one, I'm not sure that an anonymous survey like that was the best way to get that. Two, that question has been asked on the district wide survey to parents. So the questions on the survey focused on priorities in order to get a point of reference. So if mental health is your concern, is it more or less than academics? Is it more or less than social interaction so that we could have a sense of how important it was in the view of the different respondents? We asked parents a question about concerns about mental health on the survey that went out from Dr. McNeil. And we're planning, and this is something I wouldn't say excited about, but I'm very pleased we're able to do this. So I really wanna give a note of appreciation to our social emotional learning, our guidance and counseling programs here at Berge has helped with the grant for this. So we're gonna conduct what's called the COVID-19 mental health screening in December and January. That's a screen of all students. And then using that screen, we can identify students who we feel like need support, either critical support, we would offer support groups who refer them if necessary. And that will really also help us to focus and structure program offerings. I would expect just based on what we've seen at other schools that we will find that around 20% of our students have some need or desire for mental health support. So when I say that we're not seeing a spike, it's not that we don't think that's a serious issue. And so that's one of the things we're looking at. Social interaction is the next. And I want to assure people, although it's not the focus of this presentation, that senior events in particular and other spirit events in general are absolutely on our radar. We're planning, I don't know if Dr. Bodhi and I have even discussed this, but when asked what to do for purchase orders, because we usually put all of our ordering and all of our funding for graduation at the beginning of the year, we have set up the purchase orders planning for a live graduation at Pierce. Now we'll have to see what the social distancing and what the guidelines are about that. It was something allowed in July. So we're hoping that by the time we get to June of this year it's something that we're able to do again. We will develop as we have in the past and then we are already working on with the student council with parent supports, most likely working with the last BLAST committee and running it past the Board of Health for making sure that we have their blessing and questions. And we've been working on streamlining that process so that we can do more activities because I think these activities can be done safely by the school and therefore have some flexibility. Looking at activities that we can run. There's also a lot of other things we've already been doing and I hope folks will take a moment to look at those. There's Club Day had an enormous jump in students participating in clubs and signing up for clubs. If you look at the new club website there's 68 clubs with videos and materials on there. There's presentation there about Club Day and Club Act participation that's now at one fold. Wellness Day is going forward and a lot of students are signing up for that. I hope parents will make sure kids participate. We just talked about athletics and the link to the report of the school committee is just there for folks to be able to find the other things that we've already talked about. So I thought I would take one second just to give you a sense of the creative things people are doing in terms of bringing people in. The chemistry department has actually been bringing students in for outdoor labs after school for 30-minute labs in addition to their class time. I mentioned Club Day and the website. Math classes have come in and paced around the building. What you're seeing there is a picture of Dr. V and his class burning our residual. We had thermite in our lab which is not being transported to the new building because we don't need it and it's not safe. So Dr. V thought it would be particularly fun to burn it with a group of students. Instrumental music has been coming in and out before and after school and it looks like there are some changes and guidelines that will hopefully allow us to do more in-person work in the building. So we're looking at spaces for that. We've had students coming in for the BSU mural project. That's a mural that's being painted. They will be hung up inside or outside or probably move around in the school. The example you see on the right was a history field trip to the Dallas statue which was actually supported by our diversity committee that is working on reinterpreting the Dallas culture and changing the school's approach to Native American symbols. So students went along and led that field trip. We've had therapy dog visits. That's our new therapy dog. She's still in training, but will be a regular feature in the school going forward. GSA and other clubs have taken some activities. There's many more. I just thought these were some fun pictures. In addition, the next on that list of priorities is the equity of access. And I think we need to do a better job of getting the word out about these things. We're building out on them. But the learning center, just want to be clear, which is an in-school service with tutors is available for students to attend on request, in-person or remotely. And so that form has gone out. We'll send it out again in the next week or so. Parents can request and students can request that a student sign up for the learning center if they really want to be in a supervised environment. Study halls are also available on request for students. We need a place to work in-school access to Wi-Fi, a quiet location. So we've been making that available to all students. Special ed at this point has expanded in terms of offering services. They've been reaching out to all students, not just high and moderate needs, to offer them in-person support. We're talking right now about offering that students in the co-taught, whether they're in general ed or special ed would be invited into the building so that those students could be more inclusive. Those classes would be more inclusive. We're also beginning right now as we've just ended the term, we're reviewing the DNF reports in the next few weeks. And we are already looking at putting plans in place for both in-person and remote opportunities for credit recovery for students who've already fallen behind, who have no challenges in terms of participating in their class, which we expect to also bring more kids in. And the expectation, as I said at the beginning, is regardless of which model we do, or depending on which model we do, we'll be looking at targeted programs for next semester. So the timeline for the decision about the big schedule, which is what this presentation is supposed to be about. So on the 24th, that's today, I'm presenting the hybrid options, obviously they've been presented before. We have the surveys due on Monday the 30th, and that's organized around these priority areas. And it collects information on needs and trade-offs and some information as well about how sort of academic progress, levels of work, how much work teachers are doing, how much work students are doing, whether it's too hard or too easy. And with the students and the parents, I asked a question about whether in each of the models and in general, they would choose to be remote or would come in and participate in the hybrid options. And for teachers, it is a concern. So it was a question as to whether or not they might request a leave of absence or if there was a remote academy, whether they would request a remote academy. So that would give us some information for planning. So my expectation is that starting on the 30th, we've got someone set up, we'll create a dashboard, hopefully there'll be a public and then an not public version because some of the questions are more confidential. And that is expected to be presented to this curriculum and instruction committee. If I've got this right on the third, so then we will have a conversation about what those initial findings are and what that looks like they're showing us. And then hopefully on the 10th, we can make the final presentation with a decision about the semester two master schedule. And then, and this is the really important part that I want to get to as quickly as possible from December 11th to February 8th, we're going to develop and implement the semester two plan and all of those other sorts of supports that we've been talking about. Special education, we'll need to reach out to every single student. We'll be looking for students on five and fours figuring out what other programming we might want to do planning all of that out. So, now the first thing we were asked to do was to give one more try to can we do the two cohort model? And so the answer is, as we've said before that at this point, the ventilation is on track to be repaired. There are a few spaces that are not going to be available. There are some that don't even have ventilation so they're not available. We've torn down walls and some of those spaces to create larger rooms to give us more area. But that's on track. The challenge we have is that the rooms are still small in few and the small rooms limit the number of seats per classroom. And then we have very few classes that can hold 12 or more students which is half of the standard class. We only have 32 of those and in order to this is the basic math to seek classes at 25 to 20, which is the range of a full class. We need 56, that's for 25 and 71 for classes of 20. In order to schedule, you really need to be around 85%. So we need between 66 and 84 classes in order to be able to schedule a classes. We need 80 classrooms for high needs programs, that's and these are the classes that currently programs are currently being run in the building for our high needs students, students who most need to be in these sorts of programs. And we only have 32 that can hold 12 and additional 12 that can hold 11 plus. So I think Mr. McCarthy can explain sort of two approaches that he took I think to trying to build the schedule. I will turn over the microphone to him. Thank you, Dr. Janger. So I was asked to talk a little bit about the procedure we used for scheduling. You know, we've looked at the 50-50 cohort multiple times. So we did have a lot of that information available. There's two ways to go about scheduling. The first way, which we typically do is we take our programmatic needs. Those are our programs like Reach, Compass, Summit, Harbor, Shortstop, ELL Services. And those are the students that are currently in the building. And what we do is we designate their room and that room is used for that program for the entirety of the day. Classes are taught in their homeroom, things of that nature. So we usually, the way we typically build is we start off by building that. And then we build the rest of the schedule around those rooms and those schedules. So we tried to do that. We set aside a certain number of rooms, we assign them to the special ed and the high needs programs and we tried to build around them. And as Dr. Django just said in his numbers, we didn't have enough rooms that could accommodate those classes given their sizes in a 50-50 cohort. So the next process we used was to ignore the purpose of a room, basically. We went in, we looked at the square footage of every room. I know people wanted us to be creative on this. So we went in, we looked at the square footage of every room. We didn't look at the intent of the room, the purpose of the room, what the room has traditionally been used for. It was just based on square footage. We ended up filling the rooms. What ends up happening is as we placed them, we ended up at 100% capacity. Now, that means we could fit the classrooms, the classes into the rooms, but here's where we hit the problems that come up. That would mean we would be ignoring the purpose of the room. So for example, chemistry would not be happening in a chemistry lab because of the design. Art would potentially not be happening in the art rooms. Really any science class would have been bumped out of its lab, which has specific requirements as well as facts and really any classroom that had specifics built into the room would not necessarily be in that room. And to be clear, the chemistry teacher would likely be moving from room to room, but none of them chemistry labs. And that was gonna be my next point. Part of making everything fit was if a teacher teaches a class of 30, period A, we would put them in one of the larger rooms to accommodate the 15 students that would be there. But then they would have to move second period because maybe they're teaching a class of 22 and they could fit in the 12 person room. And what you would have is every teacher and every student would be moving for a better part of the day. Not only does that impact the classes we have, but as I said earlier, the high need students that are currently in the building, they would not have their home base, their standard home base. So a prime example is our reach program. Right now, reach is using three classrooms in order to accommodate the needs of their students. If we were to maneuver those around to accommodate the needs of their students, each period that room would move somewhere else. And so they would not have their standard home base, which many of our students who are in high needs often need to take a break, to meet with a teacher, to meet with a social worker, and to have those moments of just refocusing their attention. The other problem we would face is by saying, we are taking this 24 person class and putting it in this room and it fits in this room. And at 50%, that's 12 students, we cannot add any students to that class anymore. Traditionally, we would say that class could add a student or two, whether a student transferred in, a student needed to change levels, there was a change in an IAP or 504, we would move students around, but by capping the rooms at these numbers, we're locking those classes in so we can't add students. So physically, could we do it based on square footage? Yes. But ultimately, when we're looking at those numbers, it would eliminate the ability for students to change levels or really, it shouldn't say across the board, but most students, it would eliminate their ability to change levels. I think it would hamper our high-need students and groups and it would cause people to move around the building every period, every teacher, every student would be moving around that building. And so that creates those problems that we've been seeing in terms of how large the building is and how we can accommodate these needs. We have explored other options. Obviously, we've talked about the tents. We have very limited outdoor space, as you all know, because of the construction. The tents have been wonderful. September, October, November. Many of you might remember we had a snowstorm, I think on October 30th. Once snow starts, those tents are not viable. The snow blows in from the sides. We came back from that snowstorm. We had to move reverse field trips because they couldn't be in the tent because of snow and wind. So I think we want students in the building. We want them, I know Dr. Janger is gonna present on three plans that he has created to get students in the building more, but I don't think a 50-50 hybrid is going to function with the limitations of the building that we have. And with that, I'll turn over to Dr. Janger. I know he wants to speak more on the three options that he has developed. And so I just wanna say, we wanna be clear, we want and wanted to be able to do this. And Mr. McCarthy is a wizard at making things fit. And so this is not the first time we've made this effort to really try to figure out if there's any way cutting and slicing and moving and shifting and doing all this to make it work. And each time he gets to this point where it's like, you know, he puts in the last juke's off piece and we're like, wait, does this mean it works? And then you look at it and you're like, no, this actually means it doesn't work. Like it's just, it's not surprising that we can in the end fit the number of classes that we have into the number of rooms we have because it would have been impossible to run the school otherwise. But literally, if a class currently has 15 kids in it, it goes into the room for seven, right? And it's in a room that can fit seven kids. And if one kid failed a class this term, next term they have to retake it. They can't get into a class. They can't make a new schedule. No one can change their schedule when no one can add or shift. And we really am, we've shut down now in order to do this, all of the specialized programs. So all of the special education programs that need program spaces no longer have them. There's a whole sequence of things. And what I fear is, the one thing I fear is that in our effort to get it to be like, and we're being transparent here, I get like we crammed it all in. We could have showed you a spreadsheet where we box the corners out, but we crammed it all in number by number and we're able to like fill in all the pieces and 100% fit it. What that will result in is if we say, let's keep trying to do that, is that in January, at the end of January, we'll be where we were at the end of August, where we will say it's just not gonna work. And we just actually cannot staff run program. Like there's too many moving parts. Right now we're already talking about sections of Spanish one that need to be split in half, sections of Latin language and culture that need to be divided up. None of that would be possible. Adding additional sections, like we wouldn't be able to move a single thing. We would be locked in to one thing and every other piece, which is not in there, wouldn't go in there. So it really is just, I have to just say you're gonna have to take a word for it. We can show you in other ways, but the numbers that we've showed you about why it doesn't work, they hold true even with all the creative problems that we're able to do. So now I'm gonna just jump to hopefully a rapid fire and at the same time remarkably clear explanation of the three models that we were able to come up with. Did I share the right screen? So it should say three sample models, is that there? Yes. So as I've explained in the past, the purpose of these sample models was to try to, in different ways, maximize the amount of time that students were in school while maximizing the amount of teacher-supported instruction that they had and minimizing the amount of independent work. On this chart, in order to keep it short and fit it in the boxes, there are three terms, in-person, remote and independent. In-person means kids are in school in front of the teacher. Remote means that they're at home or somewhere else on the computer in front of the teacher. So that's remote synchronous instruction and independent means what it says, that they're engaged in independent asynchronous instruction with no teacher. And the trade-offs that we run into, unfortunately, are that if you can't divide the school in half in that way, you have to divide them into smaller cohorts. So in a one cohort model, I'm sorry, in a four cohort model, when a kid comes in for one day, three quarters of the class are not there. So the three models, and I'm not gonna go into all of these sort of constraints and explanations at this point because I'm trying to keep it short. So there's three models that really capture the basic options, four cohort model. In that model, we divide the school into four groups by house essentially, Fusco, Downs, Column and Remote, and a student who chooses not to come in. Those are your four cohorts. In that model, every student keeps their current course. We keep the current course offerings, obviously the students can switch courses, but it keeps the current schedule and the current model. All of these models are built on the semesterized schedule so the student has three to four courses a week. And in that model, the student would come in for 40 minutes in person. They would have three afternoons where they'd have 50 minute remote instruction and they'd have the remainder of their mornings independent and then they'd have the other independent work. The 450 number that's in each of these is our targeted number in terms of weekly instruction. So if you look in the current model, students are four by 80 plus 130 minutes expectation of independent work to hit that 450 model. So the next model is the departmental shift. That also keeps all of our offerings that also allows students to keep all of their schedules in both the four cohort and in the departmental shift, students who choose to be remote stay in the same classes with everybody else. So in that model, you would have four, it would look very much like the current model. It's the most like the current model. In many ways, it is built on the current model but instead of reverse field trips, we have a regular rotation of in-school courses. So that each class then every two weeks has a 60 minute class instead of a reverse field trip and otherwise the rest of their instruction is remote. So that means they have four 80 minute remote classes every week and once every two weeks, one of those is replaced with a 16 minute in-person class. So what's the impact in terms of social interaction? In the four cohort model, you would be coming into classes of around six, a quarter of your class. You would do that three 40 minute classes in, or sorry, three 40 minute classes in one day or four. So you would see six kids in that class once a week. In the departmental shift, you would come in for that class every other week and see most likely the entire class. And what we would be using is spreading out in the larger spaces. One of the things we were excited about was when we realized that we were actually going to be able to get the ventilation fully functioning in all of our large spaces. We had this exciting moment when we realized that we could run enough classes at a time that we could run a department through the building in two days. And then the grade shift cohorts combines two different approaches to allow us to actually have 50-50 cohorts, but only every other week. And so that was the closest we could come to the two cohort model, that you could run a two cohort model every other week. And the way that works is you divide the school, ninth and 10th grade is one group, and 11th, 12th is the other group. And then in the week when ninth and 10th graders are coming into the building, those students are split into two cohorts. So then they have an AB cohort. And there's an example of what we think is the best way to do that. But if we moved in that direction, we find we can obviously refine any one of these models a little bit as we went forward. Now the challenge of that is that it is a complete schedule change. So in that situation, what we needed to do is first, all of the classes and it's math, world language, almost all elective arts have great kids across all of the grades. So those would have to be split. We'd need to create a remote academy. So by splitting the school into three groups, you would have to significantly increase staff to cover and most likely significantly decrease course offerings to students. But what those students would get into those is that during the week when they were in the hybrid, the 50-50 cohort, they would have two 80 minutes in person and then they'd have two eight days of independent work, much like what they're doing at the oddison. And during the remote week, they'd be following the schedule much like what we're doing now, which is four 80 minute periods. So I'm gonna quickly go through again how each of these works individually in just a little more detail. So what we're looking at here is the four cohort model. And the way to read this chart is if you look at the light red and the dark red, that's all the same class. So it's A block. The light red, if you'll notice, is numbered A1, A2, A3 and AR. That's your four cohorts. So what we would imagine is if you're in a Spanish class, for example, during block A, and you are in Fusco House, that means you're in the first cohort. So you would come in with your Fusco House classmates on Monday in the morning for your four classes and then you would have travel time to go home. And then in the afternoon, you would have your remote classes. Now, the reason why we have this as the approach is because this means that every student every day has some class and maintains the connection. It also means that the loss of instruction is limited to the three days when you are not in the cohort, which would be Tuesday, Thursday and Friday for students in cohort one. So how does that look? This student, and I use this student in all the examples, they're in Down's House. They are taking four classes just to make sure you can see all the options. Chorus, Chemistry, English and History makes them a junior. So that student in a given week, in their hybrid week, that student would come in on Monday, they would be doing independent work. They'd come in in the, I'm sorry, in the afternoon, they would not come in. In the afternoon, they would have remote classes in Chemistry, English and History. Tuesday again, their morning is independent work. And then in the afternoon, Chorus, English and History. On Wednesday, at this point, we're running like a normal Wednesday and Thursday, that student would come in and have Chorus, Chemistry, English and History in person with a quarter of their class for 40 minutes. Now Chorus would work most likely a little differently, but that's the basic model. They'd then travel home and have Chorus, Chemistry and History at home remotely. And then you can see the same on Friday. So the features of that model is it keeps the current remote course offerings for all. It does not require a remote Academy. Those students are able to stay in because they are in, as you see up here, the fourth cohort is remote. Their academic time is 140 and 350s in front of a teacher, either in person or remote and 260 independent. The trade-off is that for that 40 minutes in person, you've lost 130 minutes of teacher contact time under our current model. Other issues with this is the short period is challenging for labs. It's complicated. Social interaction, as we said, is six students one time per week. And we think that this would still be challenging for the schedule because the plus is we have 70 rooms that can hold eight or more. We need 57 to seven you want to seat. So as you see, we'd be there and we believe we can do it, but it would be tight. So the next model, and this is the one that is most similar to what we're doing now. Many people have written to me after I sent the survey out saying, why didn't you include the current model as one of the options if we would prefer that? The reason I didn't include the current model is because this is very much built on the current model as sort of a better and more robust version. So if people really like the current model, they probably would like this one and should preference this one. So the idea here is that the standard schedule was remote, but what we have found is that because we have six to eight, depending on how you count, large spaces, the gym, old hall, the pit, the cafeteria, the theater and the other gym, and you can divide those in half. That gives us eight spaces. That means that we can run the entire English department through those eight spaces in the course of two days. And so that to us gives us an opportunity with much less loss of structure and much less loss of contact time. That gives us an opportunity to have students come in. Now, by our experience, we find, and by looking at MapQuest, that you can get to a high school from just about every corner of Arlington in about 30 minutes. And there's obviously some complicated issues for students who are the backside of Arlington and we would address those with study halls and other programming. But what that means is that a student can come in for an A block class at the beginning of the day, leave 20 minutes early and have time to transition back to B block. We then have lunch as a transition time. And then the same thing with C and D block. Now, some students may choose not to or some students may find that they're not able to transition during the subsequent period, but that's okay. In fact, I think it's an advantage of the model because we have the learning center, the study halls and other spaces where students can work in the school, get support. And I think also normalize, which is important for a lot of our students who are struggling the most, normalize the experience of being in the building, socially distanced, potentially being on zoom calls from the building with a mask on. So the idea is that if you rotate through English, math, history and world language can rotate through the larger classes spaces. And our plan then is to take science labs, science labs, art, faculty and consumer science labs and to build out essentially double spaces. So that they can run a lab with all or half of their class all at the same time. Right now our labs, for example, can only handle about five or six kids at the same time, but all of the chemistry labs are together and we can rig them and bring some telecommunication in terms of monitors. You can see from one space to the next bring in a paraprofessional to help support and have a specialized double chemistry lab, double physics lab, double bio lab, double foods lab, double art lab. So those would be on a separate rotation that they'd figure out. The result of that is that a student with three or four classes, depending on their rotation will come in on an average of about one and a half to two times a week. So what would that look like? Let's go back to our sample student. Sample students in chorus chemistry, English and history in that order. And so on their two week rotation, and I kind of made this up, it could move around a little, but the basic idea is they come in on Monday, I'm sorry, on Monday, they take their course and chemistry class remotely. They then have 40 minutes to come in over the lunch block for their English class and then have 30 minutes to either transition home or to go to a study hall and take their block D class. And then as you can see, as you go through this, each day a remote class this day, they all come in again for one hour, then they have two remote classes. They're Thursdays all remote. They're Friday, they have chorus chemistry, English. Now, some students only have three classes. So imagine they don't have chorus and then their rotation would be these two days of the first week and these two days of the second week, that would be their rotation. So they'd be coming in a couple of times a week. So the features of that. So again, this keeps the current course offerings for all. It builds the most on the current model in that their maximizes the four times 80 remote classes with 130 independent minutes. The loss of instruction for that 60 minutes of in-person is 20 minutes walking to the school, which may actually be good for kids. It does not require a remote academy. Either the students in the remote academy would get an alternative assignment or a teacher could choose to have them simulcast in. That's not a requirement. Simulcast is a choice on the part of the teacher. It's something that we are not allowed by contract to require or expect, but it may work for some classes depending on how they're organized. So as I explained, we would create these separate labs and the social interaction in that case would be one meeting with an entire class socially distanced once or twice. Well, every one or two weeks for the class and once or twice a week for every student. And now we come to the grade shift to cohort model. So in order to use the spaces that we have that will hold half a class, we could divide the school into ninth and 10th and 11th and 12th, eight shifts and then alternate. One would be a remote week and one would be a hybrid week. And so in that case, looking at your sample student again, so our sample student is a junior. They're in cohort one because they're in, in this case, so I put them in the wrong house. In this case, well, they're in the first half of the alphabet. So they're a junior, they're in cohort one. They've got chorus, chemistry, English and history. So this looks more like the standard two cohort model. In the hybrid week, they would come in for a full day, two days, they'd have their Wednesday and then they'd be independent for two days, Thursday and Friday. In their remote week, they would have all remote classes just like we have now. So the nice thing about that is you get the advantages of the hybrid model. You've only done it every other week. The disadvantage is it requires us to completely change the schedule. It would reduce course offerings and it would require us to have a remote academy. Students in the remote academy, we would estimate, although, you know, we will see what the results are in terms of what the numbers are that would request the remote academy under this model. But based on our experience over the summer, we would think it's somewhere between 13, 20% of students requesting remote it may go up under the current situation. And so the numbers of students in the remote academy determine in part what offerings. If it's 15 or 20%, it'll be more narrow. If it's 70% of the school chooses the remote academy, then they would get the bulk of offerings, but then the 30% on the other side would get a reduced options. Basically we have to look at staffing, the choices of the students who are actually in that cohort. And then just like we build the schedule every year, we staff as many sections as we were able. But the result of this, because we're dividing the school both 9, 10, 11, 12 and remote academy would be a significant reduction in course offerings unless we had a significant increase in staffing. So the academic time, as you'll see here, on a hybrid week is two times 80 in person with 310 minutes of independent work. And the remote week is four times 80, which is 320 minutes of face-to-face online instruction and 130 minutes of independent work. The social interaction would be for each class, 12 students, two days every other week. And we're able to do that because we have 32 to 44 classes. We need 37 to 44. So again, it'll be tight, but we believe we could do that. So returning to those three models, as you can see the issues are four cohort model keeps all the course offerings does not require a remote academy. Three to four classes per week. The trade-off is you have 40 minutes in person in exchange for three mornings without teacher led of independent work and 350 minute remote instructions, 260 independent. And what you get from that in terms of social interaction on teacher contact is six students in each class for 40 minutes each week. In the departmental shift, that keeps all the course offerings again does not require a remote academy, three to four classes per week. In that case, you have a schedule that looks like our current schedule, which is four times 80 remote classes a week for each course. And once every other week, you come in for a 60 minute in-person class. What that gets you in each class is 25 students in a larger space for 60 minutes every other week, which is over three classes, about one and a half times. And then the grade shift cohort model is a complete schedule change where it's needing for remote academy resulting in reduced course offerings and increased staffing needs. Three to four times a week during the hybrid week, you get to 80 minute in-person, 310 independent during the remote week, you get 480 minutes of remote synchronous instruction and 130 independent. And the social interaction you get for that is that you get 12 students for those two days for 80 minutes every other week. So that is essentially where we are. I think that is the end of my presentation. It's funny when you're looking at the screen because I think I'm gonna come back and you guys will all be asleep. No, I think we're all paying good attention. Okay, so questions and comments. We can go in our usual order or we can take them as they come. Let's see if we can do it without our usual order just for this one, see how it goes. Gonna go wild. Mr. Schlickman, I saw your hand up. Mr. Schlickman, you're still on mute. Trying to do 17 things at once here. The three sample models chart, Dr. Janger. If we could get the status quo or what we did on the first semester in that chart just as a baseline of comparison, I think that would be helpful. Done. Okay. Secondly, and I think- Can I just say, look at the departmental shifts and cross out the 60 minutes and add reverse field trip. Okay, just to have that calm. So- No, I'll do that, make sense. It's a foundation. Cause I know, I heard what you were saying to the parents when they were asking, well, what if we like what we're doing now? What do we pick? Or how come there's no response for, can we stay with what we've got? So people are complaining that that's a flaw of the survey. And at least in terms of making a decision on our side, as to where to go, that would be helpful. The second thing is, I guess, is more of a technical question for Mr. McCarthy. Having scheduled a school and seeing the terminology of satisfaction rates, when I hear about the 100% room utilization and a total inflexibility in terms of the scheduling process, that makes me very, very nervous. And I've always looked at the success of the schedule in terms of the satisfaction rates for the students. So the question really is, have we modeled this out with current student requests as to what the satisfaction rates would be on any of these models? And if not, do you have an estimate? So I don't have an estimate, but I can say in terms of part of the reason that we went all remote for a semester was to make sure that the students received the requests that they made in last year. Didn't have to eliminate courses. And so what I did was when I looked at this schedule, trying to build a 50-50 cohort, I based it on the courses the students are currently in. Assuming that because we didn't have class caps and we didn't set those up, we had the standard class cap. We didn't shrink the classes that students were placed into the courses that they had requested last year. And our guidance department has worked with them to place them in the correct courses. Now, so I would assume that's 100% satisfaction because the students have the courses they're requesting and the students, the courses they need to graduate. When we're looking at these other pieces, I know that the two examples Dr. Janger just laid out, two of them use the current enrollments of the courses that we have. The third one, which I know I'm gonna forget on the name, Shift to Cohort, I believe is the title, that would cause a rearranging of the students' requests and potentially moving courses around. So we do try to base it on what the students have already requested. Part of that is because we went with a block schedule. So in order to make it a full year, we didn't want to offer certain courses the first semester, not offer those the second semester and say to students, well, we're not gonna be able to offer enough English classes second semester or enough math classes first semester. We tried to spread it out to make sure we could accommodate all of those requests. Yeah, I mean, you know, English classes, generic 10th grade English classes are easy to schedule. So singletons and when they overlap. Yeah. So when you have, when you scheduled for the fall, did you build the master schedule with the requests that were set so that if we didn't change anything, we have a schedule set for the spring? I think I'm understanding your question. I wanna try and explain it, but if I have it wrong, let me know. What we do is we have to build the schedule for the full year. And so all the requests, the schedule is already built for the spring. And so we are taking what already exists and we're trying to maneuver it to get as many students into the building on a regular basis. Does that, I guess I'm not really understanding. That's exactly the question I asked. So there is a schedule sitting into the computer saying for any given student that you're going to have course A, course B, course C and course D in the spring. And it's gonna meet in these time blocks and it all works. Yes. Okay. And the department shift preserves the schedule? Yes. Okay, so the only thing that would, so the first two models we saw preserves the current schedule. It's just a rearranging of time. So the courses that kids were scheduled into are preserved for the spring. Yes. And the third one, which is the reshift chaos model requires a total reschedule for the spring. It would require maneuvering around, yes. And eliminating courses. And so the first two schedules, if we are forced to go remote due to COVID issues, we can do that. Or if Anthony Fauci is correct and all of a sudden in the spring, we can have all our teachers vaccinated and in some time in April or May bring everybody back. We can do that equally, easily within the first two models. Yes, that's just a, it would just be a question of changing a bell schedule. It wouldn't have to change any courses. Great. I mean, I would, I actually think that the departmental shift would be easier because it would be a very odd schedule to come in in person and go to class for 40 minutes in the morning and then the same class for 50 minutes in the afternoon. No, we could rearrange the bell schedules to run block A, block B, block C, block D. That's not a problem. But it would mean that teachers who had now planned ahead for 40 and 50 minutes splits and then work would now be shifting over to a completely different format. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I understand that, but I'm concerned about the flexibility if we go to some sort of a hybrid model that we can very quickly lean back into a full remote and then get into full everybody in the building when the vaccinations and the spread rates allow us to. Thanks. This has been enlightening. Mr. Thieman. Thank you, Ms. Morgan. Thank you, Dr. Jenga, Mr. McCarthy for the work you put into this. I realize there's, and I appreciate Mr. McCarthy's explanation of the challenge of the 50-50 hybrid model. I think that answered a lot of parents' questions. So my questions are in all of these models, there is a remote academy option. So if a family says, great, thanks very much for your work, Dr. Jenga. Thanks for your work, Mr. McCarthy. I still want my students to study remotely. They can study remotely. Just as a point of clarification because the language has come back to haunt me. In the first two models, there is a remote option. That remote option is you're in classes with everybody else remotely. In the third option, there is a remote academy. Okay. So, okay, fine. The reason why is because I have parents who then are confused and they'd say, I thought my kid was in the remote academy and you're like, your kid's remote in the same class. But it can, in either option, there's always a remote option. There's always a remote option. So the question that some parents have asked me to ask you is that if they, how would the remote option under the remote option and either one or the three options compare to the semesterized schedule they're experiencing now? Largely indistinguishable. So no, I take that back. That's not true. In the first model, they would have three independent 40 minutes and they'd have three independent mornings and then they'd have a day where their kid was getting remote instruction in a small group, right? And then in the afternoons, they'd have remote classes. In the second model, it would be largely the same, but one class out of every 10 classes. The rest of the class would be going into the school and they would either get an independent piece of work for that one class or they would simulcast into the class depending on how the teacher wanted to do that. And then in the third model, they would be in a completely separate remote academy where the offerings would be determined by the numbers of students and the staffing available and the requests that they had. Okay, all right, all right, thank you. The other thing I asked you, Dr. Jankin, on the email, if you can just, several people have asked why Arlington can't adopt a model like Lexington, given that Lexington is an older building as well. Did you do any research on that at all? Sure, I mean, the simple version, I mean, I talked to Andy Stevens who describes that schedule as the schedule calculus. He's in my group. We've been talking every two weeks for the last six months, but the simple answer is it's two cohort model, the simulcast. Yeah. So, and the simulcast isn't the big thing. The real issue is it's a two cohort model. The reason why their schedule looks so complicated is because they have eight classes. So, we don't need that complexity. If we had Lexington's building and Lexington's students, we could do a two cohort model. We would do sort of very simple two model because we wouldn't need the eight slots. Okay, the next question is can you explain the why, you know, the Wednesday schedule? So, several people have said, well, you know, if the Wednesday schedule were not so sacred, the Wednesday day were not so sacred, students would actually, teachers would actually have more time with students and they would have less of a reason to use those Wednesdays for conferences, meetings, et cetera. Can you explain the Wednesday situation to people? Yeah, so I thought, I won't even look, I was gonna look to see, I had a slide about that thing. But, so first of all, we have to put PE somewhere, right? So, PE was sort of taken out of the schedule to give us more room in the rotation as a remote class. So, if we took PE out and put it 40 minutes on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, I could give you three 40 minute remote classes on Wednesday, four 40 minute remote classes on Wednesday. The trade-off would be that instead of 480s, you'd have 470s and 140, same amount of time and you'd lose time in transition. So, that's one piece. The second piece is it doesn't buy you very much, right? We could decide to throw out PE and not have PE at all and you get one more 40 minute remote lesson. But again, it doesn't solve the problem of the schedule. And then let's flip around. The Wednesdays are saving us, right? The teachers are back-to-back with kids, not meetings. They're with kids, they're planning and you'll see in the survey, one of the questions they asked the teachers was how much time are you spending per week outside of class on grading, prepping, following up with kids? There's a bunch of other pieces of things they're doing. The X block is the place where we are going to have those activities. It's where club days fall and it's where, if we're going to bring students in a regular basis, the clubs are meeting during those times, teachers are supervising those meetings, we're running activities. And the reason why our attendance is not, I mean, every other school I talk to, they're like, oh, we're having terrible attendance problems. And we're like, we're up a little, I'm not bragging that we're like, we were already at 96% but we're up, we should be down. It's not, that's, even would have been thrilling. Going down 1%, I would have been pretty happy. So the fact that we're actually up, that's because teachers are on top of it, they're falling up with kids, we're falling up with kids. These and that are because teachers are, teachers are double time. If you've got the three classes, don't tell anyone this, Julie, but if you've got three classes, you're in a heavy load because you're teaching six, not five, because each of those classes is running double time. And so if you've got two classes, you're teaching four, because you're a little light, but either way, it's a heavy load and everything you're doing is much more grading, much more falling up and staying on top of kids. That's why kids are supporters there. So I mean, I think once we decide, I will sit down with teachers and see if there's anything clever we can do with Wednesdays, but I think we are making incredibly efficient use of that time. And in many ways, it is the salvation of the schedule because it allows us to have some flexibility to bring kids in. Field trips are coming in on Wednesdays, activities are coming in on Wednesdays, or, you know, band and chorus use the spaces on Wednesdays, a lot of things happening at that time. All right, thank you. The last thing is that, you know, we agreed that you would collate the results of the family survey by Thursday the third with the curriculum committees, but I also, you know, I think we're all gonna be interested in knowing what the faculty thinks about these options too. So I'm assuming you're gonna- There are three surveys. There's a faculty survey, the student survey and the staff survey. Okay, so all that will be- I will present all those on the table. Okay, just want to be clear. Thank you very much. Thank you. Dr. Alcinambi. Thank you. First, I wanted to make a comment on the two cohort model just for our public. I think, yes, we can get everyone into the building, but because of the effects on our more fragile populations and students, we're not able to educate all of our students when we do that. And I think that's a real take home and it's a reason why I will vote against anything that suggests that we should try and pursue that. Second, when we had the CIA, I mentioned, I asked the question about the possibility of simulcast and I was asked or I was told, what benefit would simulcast bring? And I just want to point out that the benefit simulcast would bring would look pretty different when you look at these different options. Being able to do simulcast in the four cohort model means that instead of 260 minutes of independent work, they'd have 260 minutes more of teacher contact time, however you put that. In the departmental shift, it's not as much different. In the grade shift to cohort, it also gives benefits with 310 independent. I haven't gone back and tried to make sure that there is teacher working when there's independent work going on. So it might not work for those reasons, but my point is just that maybe simulcast doesn't help us. Well, for right now, it doesn't help us at all, right? Because no one's going into the building, but it could help in the field trips and it definitely could help in some of these models. So, and I understand that we have made agreements and stuff by just pointing out that there are, when it was brought up, the sense was that it really didn't help anything. And I'm just pointing out that to me, it feels like it could help some stuff for our students. So that's all. Dr. Dinger? Just to clarify though, I do want to give some credit where credit is due. Simulcast is happening in varying forms in the co-taught classes, depending on how one defines it. And it's happening in many of the small group and academic support classes voluntarily on the part of those teachers. So people are putting it into place when they can make it work. Great, thank you. Ms. Eksten? Thank you, Dr. Dinger and Mr. McCarthy for all of your work. I'm particularly interested in the teacher's perspective and I agree with Mr. Thielman that it would be important to see the results of their survey next Thursday. All of these models require teachers to make yet another shift in their delivery of instruction. They've already shifted to a semester. They've shifted to remote teaching and now we're asking them to revise their teaching. Again, into a hybrid semester, one of the models is 40 minutes and then 50 minutes. And so I think we're asking a lot of them and I think that we need to be mindful to have how we're supporting them in successfully delivering their content and whatever model we choose. So I think we need to be really mindful about the results that we see from the survey for them because it's going to impact the successful implementation and the learning that students are going to get in the spring semester depending on what we decide. So along those lines, I guess one question that I have is, do you have, from the survey, will we have a sense of teachers that are willing to simulcast? I'm not suggesting that we open it up to make them do that but I have heard in other districts where it's an option that it's been successful, it's been easier. So just figuring out if that's something that teachers are open to. And then my other concern about teachers is do you have a sense of how many might decide to take a leave when they're asked to come back in person? Dr. Jager, you're on mute. So no, I did not ask the question about simulcast. I did ask the question about leaves of absence for each model. I'm a little loath to start, you know, admittedly, I'm like a poll watcher, I'm checking the thing every two hours but I feel like we should let it ride. I will say that the numbers differ depending on the model in terms of how many said they would or would ask would consider a leave. And we can certainly talk about that as one of the issues. And I don't, I mean, I don't even know if teachers would want to offer up that they'd be willing to simulcast but it just, it would be interesting to get perspective on where they are with that but I really think so. And I think the willingness of teachers to do it as part of a context in a class where they've been trained, where the class is set up for the time where the program is set up, you know, is a very different thing and, you know, so, but again, I actually trust that our teachers will do it in the ways that are the most effective but we're not in a position at this point to set up a program with the assumption. And I guess I would just start there. I mean, we're just, you know, and I'm not, again, I'm not sure like, is it a big game, I don't know but it's not an option that I have available to see. So it's not a question I ask. And then I just, one concern about the shift, departmental shift model is just thinking about kids like knowing when to come to class. Like Monday, it's at one o'clock. Tuesday, it's at 10 o'clock to, you know, the one in person. So just something that people will keep in mind is there sort of how you're supporting students and remembering to come into the building. Thank you. Ms. Keyes and then Mr. Cardin. Yeah, I just want to comment on the simulcast because we do have it in the MOA that that is by volunteer only. And what ended up happening was special ed is they were all scheduled into it and then told, well, if you don't volunteer, it's going to be a nightmare. And I get more concerns from my members about that particular issue at the high school right now than any other issue in the district. People don't like it. They don't like doing it. They don't want to do it. They're kind of stuck doing it because that's the way it was scheduled. And they're willing to do it because it's good for the kids, but it's killing them. So this idea that there's going to be a whole bunch of volunteers for this in the spring, I think is really, really unfounded. And I can tell you my phone's blowing up right now with people being like, I don't want to do this. Why do they say I'm going to do this? Why do they think we want to do this? So we have an agreement that like, this would be volunteer only. And Mr. Jankers, right. Like we can't build a schedule assuming there's going to be a lot of volunteers on this. Mr. Cardin. Thank you. So a couple of points. One is that, you know, we're still under the reason for our motion to require the administration, administrative team to present a hybrid option to us is because we're required by DESI to maximize in-person learning except for extenuating circumstances. So when our building wasn't ready, we had extenuating circumstances, but our building is now is ready. So we have to find a way to maximize in-person learning. And so, you know, what I had hoped from this process, and I still hope that it can happen, is that we go to the teachers. We go to the staff. We go to the parents. We talk about what our needs are. There are a group of students, more than a hundred, less than all of them, that are not doing well right now. And maybe it's just socially, but it's also academically because they can't fully pay attention to an 80-minute class remotely. So I really would like a more collaborative approach, you know, and maybe that's been built into these options, but it's hard to tell, to try to solve, everybody to try to solve the problems that we're having and maximize and fulfill the requirement for DESI that we maximize in-person learning. So as we continue to have these conversations, you know, I do hope it's in the spirit of collaboration going forward and that everybody contributes to the solution because the status quo is not an option in my opinion. And I don't think it's allowed by DESI. So I do thank you, Dr. Jinger and Mr. McCarthy for the work on the 50-50 hybrid. What I heard, and I know you have a slightly different twist, Dr. Jinger, but I heard that it is possible, but it's just very undesirable for a lot of reasons. Some of the reasons you presented as Dr. Allison Ampe noted, if it truly would require disrupting those special ed programs, if that's the only way to do it, then obviously that's a very high negative. But you know what, the grade shift, the grade shift to cohort plan also has some extremely high negatives. Redoing everybody's schedule, when, I mean, Mr. Shilkman, that schedule is not only in the computer, it's been given to all of the students. So they're expecting to have certain classes in the spring. So that model as well has some very serious negatives. So I mean, I see the two cohort option as well as that option in the sort of the same category, they're both possible but undesirable. And some of the things that you mentioned, to me aren't that big of a deal. We're not doing chemistry labs now. We're not doing art in person now. That wouldn't be a change from now. So I'm not ready to take that completely off the table at this point. And we'll see going forward what happens. Thank you. Mr. Heiner. My limited experience as a teacher, as a person who's negotiated contracts for 30 years, and as a school committee member for the past several years, DESI is the last group that I'm really gonna worry about. The safety of these kids are the number one priority. I think that is the number one priority of this committee. Dr. Janga and Mr. McCarthy have put an awful lot of effort into this. I wanna see every kid back. I wanna see every kid's emotional state, at least back to where it was a year ago. The biggest thing that I am concerned with is that we don't look at the entire picture that we react. As far as the idea of simulcasting and teaching a class and watching everything, I'll be honest, as a former teacher, I'd like to have at least one aide watching the camera, watching who's focusing and where it's going. I cannot imagine doing that and delivering quality education. Those teachers that do it, I have the deepest respect for them. But to even put that kind of pressure going forward on the teachers just adds one more thing. I'm gonna support what Dr. Ampe said. Safety of the kids is number one. Thank you. I had a question for you. I don't actually know who to address it to, but it seems to be to move toward what Mr. Cardin is asking for of a sort of a very collaborative approach. What we're hearing from the community is just sort of a lot of confusion, which is understandable because here we are, I feel like I'm reliving August to some extent in like a four grade situation. Because we're back here with a situation where we're hearing for families in remote academy concerned about reallocation of resources away from their kids, right? So they're worried and we're hearing from people who want their kids to be in person and they're worried because they don't know what that's gonna look like. And so, I think what we're struggling with is, all of these, there are all these people who didn't know what simulcast was like three weeks ago. And now like all these emails talk about simulcast. So there were a couple of things that I just, I sort of wanted to level set if we could at this point. So this idea that we could somehow use town hall and churches and other buildings to schedule classes, is this something that we've looked into? I've tried to sort of respond to people. I think it's reasonable to say, you can just nod with me, Dr. Janger, maybe that sort of citing modular classrooms on the AHS site at this point in the middle of a construction project is probably not reasonable, right? But if you could speak to- I think Dr. Rode actually has a great answer if I recall. Right, if somebody could just speak to so that we have some sort of like statement about using alternate spaces and what has been considered and why we're not doing that, I feel like that would be helpful. So I mean, the simple version is to make the schedule that Bill was talking about, we really need 10 or 12 full-size spaces. 10 or 12 modules is $250,000 a piece. It's $3 million if you could find one and get one delivered. And Dr. Bodie can speak to that. I know that Dr. Bodie looked around at spaces, churches, and everything around to find additional spaces. But again, I would need 10 of those within a few minutes of the high school in order for kids to be able to meaningfully move back and forth and run courses. There was some discussion and I looked into this idea of sort of finding larger spaces to do more things. But once we had our large spaces open, we really had enough of those to have flexibility. I don't know, Kathy, did you wanna speak to that? Santa, remember you were talking about doing that homework. I can. First of all, Town Hall is being used by Park and Rec for a program to support families in town. I have looked at churches. And first of all, in churches, the spaces are very small. And I looked at possible commercial spaces. And I actually looked quite a lot in not this year but in past. And the thing is about commercial spaces, you still have to meet certain requirements, code requirements that can be very expensive in terms of ADA. So it is not a just go find a space in town and we can put a class there. It really doesn't work like that. I suppose that some churches, if you could use the big space, the actual place of worship or the gymnasium, that might be one possible space. But the usual, the CCD rooms that they would have are actually fairly small and would only have a few, we have very limited number of students that could be in there. But the bottom line is that when we've reached out to do that, those spaces are not available. So it's important, I'm glad you brought this up because I have heard the same thing. Why don't you find this, do this, do this? And I can tell you that we have looked into these spaces. And there's just not viable options. Thank you. So I think, if reading my email over the last three, couple of days is an indication, Dr. Janger, I think parents are eager for information. I think they're trying to distill things. I see we have a number of people on the call tonight, which is good. I do feel like we're in a situation where we're using meetings to sort of reiterate things. And I'll be honest, I'm the first to admit I needed the second explanation tonight to actually be able to participate. I went to the CIA meeting. I listened to it the first time. I needed to come here tonight after looking at the slides again that I could actually participate in the thought process. But it sounds like you're gonna provide some videos for people. And I think that that's great because I think to the extent possible, we do want to move forward on figuring these out and not continue to sort of restart every time, right? But we definitely needed it tonight. So I'm grateful for that. But it would be great if there was a resource that you could share with us too that we could point people to when they reach out with questions that maybe already have been answered. So Dr. Allison Ampe. I guess the other thing is, what do you recommend we tell people when they say, I'm happy with the current option. I don't know how to answer the survey. So I think if they're happy with the current option, I would assume that they would be happy with the departmental shift. That the departmental shift is the current option with a more robust, systematic and easily implemented version of reverse field trips. So the reverse field trips are replaced with an every 10 day programmed visit, which I think will make that easier on everybody. But the thing that people generally like about the other one is this sort of regular 80 minutes. If they don't like the reverse field trips, they should do the departmental shift and opt to be remote. Okay, so that's what we tell them is, if you like the current model, you vote for departmental shift and then you decide whether the in-person class time works for your family or not, right? Okay. All right, any more comments on this? So where we're moving, Dr. Jinger is a CIA meeting on the third. Is that correct, Mr. Cardin? Yes, it is, yeah. Okay. All right, so that's our next. Our next. Right. And because I wanna be respectful of the comment that Dr. Schlingman said before about getting things in advance, the survey closes on the 30th. As soon as we have the dashboard available, I will share that with the committee. I have a consultant lined up and ready to go. So hopefully it won't be very fast, but I'm not sure how long it will take. So I hope that you're not getting sort of it on the morning of the third, but if it is, I apologize in advance because we're gonna to do it as quickly as possible. And I'm trying to, I am pre-gaming it in terms of guessing at my analysis. So hopefully I can, I will be prepared to talk that through. Great. All right, anybody else on this item? Super. So the next item on our agenda is a discussion about the superintendent search in candidates. For those listening tonight at home, most of you know by now that in June of 2019, Dr. Bodie notified the committee that it was her intention to retire at the end of this school year. We have benefited tremendously from stability and leadership over the last 13 years with Dr. Bodie at the head. And I'm looking forward to being able to fully and collectively express our collective gratitude for her work and stewardship. And I am confident that she will approach transition and leadership with her characteristic commitment to collaboration and loyalty that has served us well in Arlington for over a decade. So after Dr. Bodie's announcement, a search process committee was formed chaired by Mr. Schlickman and that subcommittee evolved into a search screening committee that included teachers, administrators, parents, students and members of the community as well as three members of the school committee. That screening committee brought us two finalist candidates for the position of superintendent in early November. Last week and this week, the candidates have had an opportunity to meet with stakeholders in our community here in Arlington all via Zoom. Members received stakeholder feedback through a feedback form. Many of us were contacted directly. We have also had the opportunity to connect with references, both provided and sought out. We've benefited from the support of our search consultant, Mr. Kutcher. And I can say that I have not spent as much time on the phone in the last 10 days since I was like 13 and my parents cut off my phone time at nine o'clock. So I wanna share a little bit how I'd like to structure this conversation tonight on this item. When we met 12 days ago, we decided that we were not going to commit to making a decision tonight necessarily but we left that option open. In framing the decisions that we need to make, I think it's critical we remember that we are not answering a question of are we choosing Dr. Greer or Dr. Holman as our next superintendent? We're mostly, we are really fundamentally asking ourselves, are we seeking to hire Dr. Greer? Are we seeking to hire Dr. Holman? They're separate questions. We could also elect to engage in a new search. So the way I see it tonight, we have five choices. We can select Dr. Greer to pursue as our superintendent. We can select Dr. Holman to pursue as our superintendent. We can decide we need to obtain additional information. We can decide we need to search for additional candidates and we can not come to any decision and we can schedule our next meeting. So I couldn't find any more choices than that. So I came up with five. So what I'd like to ask the committee to do in our usual order is to speak to where you are at in your decision-making process. Each member will indicate if they have a candidate, they favor if so, whom and why, if they like both equally or neither. If they feel they need further information to make a decision. I think it's important to note to the community that in my mind anyway, this isn't a zero sum game, a positive statement about one candidate does not mean the opposite is true of another. If I speak positively about the communication style of one, it does not mean necessarily that I'm of the opinion that the other candidate does not possess that skill at all. It is my belief that the screening committee gave us the two strongest and most viable candidates. I have great trust in this process and in the people leading and participating in it. Both candidates we received are impressive and very skilled. So after each member has a chance to speak, we can do a second round where members can share their thoughts on why they favor one over another or respond to other comments. And then at that time we can see where the will of the committee lies and I can entertain motions if anybody would like to do so. I will share with our audience that this is due to the nature of public meetings and open meeting laws, this is the first time this committee has come together to deliberate after the whole committee has had a chance to meet with both candidates. So we are here tonight to start having that conversation. So I'm gonna start by calling on Ms. Exon. Thank you. At this point, I think I have enough information and I have a candidate that I prefer. I think that we should pursue Dr. Elizabeth Holman as our next superintendent. We were fortunate to have two strong candidates as finalists for this position. We are lucky that our town was able to attract such strong candidates and we have had a very involved community in the search process. I believe that Dr. Holman is the right person for this job because she is a strategic planner who will set a clear vision for Arlington schools and inspire others to achieve the vision. She is an effective collaborator who works with educators and families to effect change. Reference after reference shared examples of how she responds to the needs of classroom teachers, parents, students and administrators. She's both humble and reflective. In every interview, she shared experiences that went well by giving credit to her team and took more independent responsibility for the challenges. She places equity and inclusion at the center of her work, placing high expectations on all students and recognizing that all students can be engaged to achieve more. Based on the choices before us, I believe that she is the right person to leave the Arlington public schools and I am happy to support her. So that is where I am right now and I look forward to hearing the thoughts and perspectives of my fellow committee members. Mr. Carden. Thank you. So I am also ready to state my favorite candidate. I think had we not been in quarantine, had there been different circumstances with the candidates in their current districts, I would have preferred a more formal site visit like has been done in the past by other districts but we've all had a lot of conversations and to the extent we could. And that is sort of, we'll have to substitute for what we can do right now. You know, an unintended consequences, an unintended consequence that in my mind of having only two finalists is that there is a sharper focus on the contrast between these two candidates. But I agree with Ms. Morgan that we should try to focus on the positives of the candidate that we think we would like to select. They're both excellent candidates. It seems likely that the person who does not get our position will become a superintendent elsewhere very soon and we're very fortunate to have them. And I thank them both for their participation in the process, which is very difficult over Zoom and very rigorous. With that background, I'm excited about the possibility of having Dr. Homan become our superintendent. In my mind, she emerged as a strong contender with her detailed application where she presented three detailed examples of her leadership in Waltham that are highly relevant to Arlington. These demonstrated her deep experience despite her short tenure in her position. I was also greatly impressed by the recommendation from George Frost and Waltham, one of the three acting superintendents or actual superintendents that Dr. Homan worked with there who specifically detailed why Dr. Homan should be our superintendent despite not being a traditional choice. He suggested focusing on the characteristics of successful superintendents and noted how Dr. Homan excelled in each of the five areas he identified. In her interview with the screening committee and in the following interviews, she impressively answered the questions with a great deal of detail and thought. I'll let the words of others express the thoughts that I and many others had following those interviews. As a parent noted, as an educator myself, I was truly impressed by Dr. Homan's responses in the public interview. I've been a part of many other interviews for district leadership positions and I have never been so impressed by the answers I heard. An APS administrator noted, she entered the questions with solid examples and painted a picture for us of what she can do and her vision moving forward. At a more detailed level, another APS administrator noted that she articulated the kind of structure needed to create change, active engagement of all stakeholders, sharing data with the community to make informed decisions that may not be popular at first but are educationally sound. This is strongly backed up by those who have worked with Dr. Homan, such as one Arlene Tenparent who wrote, Dr. Homan is brilliant. She listens to staff and parents, find problems to solutions and knows how to get things accomplished. Many APS administrators and teachers reacted favorably as well, noting that she was impressive across multiple rounds of interviews and has the skill set needed for the next few years. I understand the concerns that some have expressed about Dr. Homan's limited experience but I would point out that our town manager had a similar number of years as an assistant when he made a very successful transition to our town manager. I'm confident that Dr. Homan would do the same. As one APS administrator noted, she would rely on the strong professional team we have here in Arlington to support her growth as superintendent. Dr. Homan will bring a strong vision built around a focus on equity along with empathetic and smart leadership. She's the kind of leader I want for Arlington schools. Thank you. Dr. Allison Ampe. Thank you. First, I do think both of our candidates, especially given the difficulties over Zoom and undertaking an application in these unusual and restricted conditions. And you're going to find out as I read that there's some duplicates and this is what happens when you don't have a chance to discuss beforehand what you're going to say. I too am ready to make a choice at this time or make a decision. I too am in favor of choosing Dr. Elizabeth Homan. I was impressed with Dr. Homan's knowledge, specificity and reflectiveness. She has a database approach that also acknowledges the softer areas of empathy and emotions and lived experience. I appreciate her idea of developing a strategic plan, something we've needed for quite a while. I feel she has the ability to move the district forward from the place where we are now, which is a much better place than we were 10 years ago in that she would be able to connect to administration, educators, students and families as she did it. I feel she would hear concerns, seek out answers and then work to implement them. I also feel she will be able to quickly come up to speed in areas which are less familiar to her such as town meeting and that helping her do this is part of our task as school committee. And I hope that we all should she, should whoever become superintendent that we all help them do this. And I thought I would read a few highlights from the surveys, which I'm going to have to skip the ones that Mr. Cardin's already read. From students we heard she's very, I think she's very committed to the important social justice work that Arlington is doing and I appreciate her answering questions directly and meeting them head on with the plan. She was also very friendly. She's definitely aware of current issues and justices surrounding race, racism, equity, diversity, inclusion and gender identity. She's open to our ideas and will make sure to listen to our opinions. She has a great ability to connect, communicate and interact with students. She seems very interested in using student feedback and taking students seriously. From teachers we heard that she answers questions succinctly, professionally, insightfully and thoroughly. Purely listened and took advantage of opportunities to connect. She was a forward thinker, planful as opposed to reactive. She had clear, very clear answers and positive visions for everything she was asked about. She helped develop some amazing programs in Walton and that we would be lucky to get her. One teacher wrote, my initial concern was that was doctors short experience as assistant superintendent. After listening, I was impressed with her breadth and knowledge as a district administrator. Our administrators found her, Dr. Holman was impressive across multiple rounds of interviews and presented stronger and stronger each success of interview. She was able to answer questions on all topics with intelligence, knowledge and examples. She was honest and reflective about what she has learned and where she has to grow. She did not have to be pushed to provide examples of what she might do differently. She provided this upfront and didn't hesitate to own areas of growth. And then parents wrote, she's thoughtful about the good use of quantitative data in combination with qualitative data. They liked her 50 year plan and thought it was sincere and thoughtful. They liked the idea that she presented yesterday as of equity as a North Star. She's shown legitimate and documented prioritization of hiring educators of color and has a strategy for it. She also liked what she, the parent also liked what she had said about barriers to parent engagement and how she's worked on them. Another parent wrote that she's extremely intelligent, articulate and confident. She has a very developed idea about equity and inclusion. She seems very strong in her thinking about curriculum development and her involvement in the school, high school building project and capital planning is of great value. And finally from town officials in our community, they've said she's extremely articulate and thorough, extremely articulate and thorough answers to complex questions provided context with each answer showed humanity and compassion demonstrated intellectual humility and impressive depth of knowledge on contemporary issues in education and society. I was, and someone writes, I was particularly impressed by her comments on how she likes to engage with the community directly. I think this would be of particular value in Arlington. I'm pleased to support her to pursue a superintendent. Mr. Thielman. Thank you. First, I want to thank Mr. Schlickman, Dr. Allison Ampe, Mr. Cardin for the hours they put in on the superintendent search process. And I think they did a terrific job and made our jobs a lot easier. We had a goal of getting a superintendent by December of 2020 so that we would have enough time for a transition. And so we would be ahead of the curve and the rest of the state. And I think we're on our way to do that. I also want to thank the 15 person screening committee which met for many hours and sent us two candidates that they unanimously supported. And I want to thank Glenn Kutcher and the Master's Association of School Committees for guiding us through this process. And Jane Morgan for leading us and encouraging us a few weeks ago to do our own due diligence on each of the candidates, call the references and learn what we can about them. So tonight, I want to urge my colleagues to join me in supporting the selection of Dr. Elizabeth Holman to be the next superintendent of Arlington's public schools. In my hiring at both locally and professionally, I consider multiple factors including demonstrated knowledge, experience and exposure to all aspects of the posted position, the candidates worldview, perspective and life experiences and the candidates potential to excel at this moment in time in the job at hand. With that in mind, I carefully listened to the interviews of the candidates, watched their screening community interviews and spoke to several individuals who know them and have worked with them, both people on the reference list and others. I am choosing Dr. Holman because she has a demonstrated ability to connect with and work collaboratively with principals, department heads, teachers, union leadership, parents and other stakeholders to get things done. I spoke with eight different individuals in WALFAM, including your current supervisor, Dr. Regan, the superintendent, two members of the school committee, two principals and three teachers. They universally praised her for designing and leading an inclusive and transparent process that engaged a committee of 85 people, including parents, students, teachers, administrators, school committee members and other stakeholders in planning how to open WALFAM schools this fall. Committee members and those involved in the planning meetings felt good about the solutions they developed together for their community. The people I spoke with, and I think we saw this in the interview, praised Dr. Holman's attention to detail, her organizational skills, her follow-through and the research she did to prepare and does to prepare for all of her work. Everyone I talked to confirmed, I think what we saw on Liz Holman in our interviews, she digs deeply into data, listens to parents, students and teachers and finds challenges to the daily challenges of running a school district. WALFAM has a high percentage of English language learners, people of color and immigrant families. Dr. Holman has paid particular attention to diversity, equity and inclusion in her role as superintendent and she reflected on that in her own personal growth. Over the past three years, working under three superintendents, this has been alluded earlier, she, according to many, many people, was the go-to person for many teachers, principals and other administrators. I find it reassuring that Dr. Holman has experience with and grew up with much more diversity, I think, and adversity than many of us. She told us about reading books by authors of color in high school and those books changed her worldview. She shared with us that she was raised by a single mother, worked her way through school and understood that the way to a better life is through education, equal education, accessible to every learner, regardless of background. Everyone confirmed, that I spoke with, confirmed what Dr. Holman told us. She does her homework and you have to do yours to keep up with her. She connects very well with principals and department heads and has learned to study data, listen to stakeholders, work with faculty and staff and make change. She has detailed experience of educational technology and she knows curriculum and pedagogy. As someone who has worked with three different superintendents in WALFAM, according to many people, she has learned how to lead, she has observed different leadership styles at the superintendent level and she is developing her own unique style. Not only did I appreciate the substance of her answers, which were very detailed, I found her responses in our interviews refreshingly honest. Dr. Holman identified her areas of growth and they were identical to what people in WALFAM said, both those on a reference list and those not on a list. She admitted she had never been a building principal and has to take a step back to hear what a building principal needs and experiences before diving into a solution. Her references and non-references said the same. She has dealt with a few human resources issues, not as many as an experienced superintendent, but like anyone new to senior leadership, she freely admits that she has a lot to learn about human resources and I think that's a good thing. We have a lot of talent in our district now, talented principals, talented teachers, talented people picked by Dr. Bodie, who will and can collaborate with Dr. Holman to make our district even better. Some things have been said about her knowledge of municipal government, my take from talking to many people and from observing her in action is that she'll learn municipal government and just as her colleagues have learned in WALFAM, Liz Holman will do her homework, she'll come prepared and those who are engaged with her on municipal issues and the not too distant future will need to come prepared as well. Dr. Holman has studied our schools and our community and it's clear she wants to be in Arlington. She wants the very best for our students, she has the experience, the drive, the intellect to join our school system, connect with our school leaders and take it to the next level that beyond the level that was developed by Dr. Bodie and her team excellently over the past 13 years. We have an opportunity to hire a rare talent who will leave impact on education in our community and maybe one day in a broader community. I'm excited to support her candidacy and later in the meeting, hopefully to support a motion to direct the chair, to enter into negotiations with Dr. Elizabeth Holman to be the next superintendent of the Arlington Public Schools. Mr. Schuchman. Thank you. I wanna reflect back to the mission statement that was brought before us as the search committee went to search for a superintendent. We had a very detailed and instructive report from the focus groups. And there were a couple of unifying themes that were coming up. One, experience as a teacher and educator. There was broad consensus that the next Arlington superintendent should have experience in the classroom more directly with students such as a counselor therapist or specialist and they urged the school committee to avoid non-traditional candidates. The candidate in the search who aligns to that criteria is Dr. Greer. Dr. Greer has extensive experience both as a teacher and as an administrator. Another thing that we came out of the... Oh, I want to mention that the reason why this came out so strong and so consistently in our discussions in the focus groups was the experience that we had back in 2004 when we hired a non-traditional superintendent who had some public governance experience as a member of the Boxford School Committee and had a couple of years of unpaid experiences as an assistant superintendent but didn't have the depth of knowledge, understanding and experience that a place like Arlington requires. This is not a community to put on training wheels and be a training ground for somebody who does not have the requisite experience and the focus groups cried out for this all through the summer. Responses and broad consensus of those participated in focus groups were clear that issues of special education need to be addressed as a highest priority for the next superintendent. Parents and community members were consistent and specific about what they believe are systemic and structural problems that have festered for a number of years. Again, that's from the focus group report. When Mr. Thielman took over as chair of this committee in 2004, he was faced with the worst coordinated program review in the history of the State Department of Education. They summons him to Maldon to give him the report in person in his hands because it was such a critical problem. We have improved from that point. Culturally, there are still remnants of the days back in 2004 when we had issues in this district. As noted above and explained in detail, the superintendent will need to take on a significant improvement in special education services, including building a relationship with parents to work on concerns. This will occupy a considerable amount of time in a superintendent transition and will not be allowed to go unaddressed. Again, from the focus group report, only one candidate fits this bill and Dr. Greer has successfully renovated the program in Cambridge. Teachers and parents called for more training and cultural competency as many examples were cited in both groups and direct discreetly of how students may feel excluded, disrespected or ignored. Students believe their teachers are well intended but not always well suited to understand minority students or children at social and economic risk. Several parents note the absence of role models for minority students and there were frequent examples if inappropriate, however, unintentional remarks or actions that undermine the morale of these children. Again, the candidate who was best able to meet the demonstrated needs from the focus group report unquestionably is Dr. Greer. I would first like to propose that seeing that at this point it's obvious that the committee is not in unanimous agreement that we have some work to do in order to bring us to a point where we might come closer to agreement and that I think that we could do some sort of site visits virtually in order to gather more information and I think more information is called for. The people who participated in last night's meeting with Dr. Greer, the people who were on the town side, the diversity groups, the FINCOM, the Capital Planning Committee were all very disappointed that the technical difficulties of the video conference last night and there was considerable requests from them to be able to have another chance to ask conversations free of technical difficulties. I think that we owe that to them. And also if we take a look at the responses that were coming in from the surveys and reactions that that group, even within the course of the technical difficulties, had a very positive image. Also, I think it's important for the community to be brought on board to understand and have a conversation with us about the choice we were able to make. The interview with Dr. Holman wasn't posted on ACMI until late yesterday afternoon. So a lot of people who want to see it and comment on it and think about it have not had that opportunity. Our goal for finishing the search has been to complete it by December. We are on target with our search. We have time to think about it a little more. We have time to get more community feedback. We have time to do site visits. We have time to align to a position where the misgivings about either candidate can be resolved. I was in conversation with a member of the Sharon School Committee. And she said this, that Bill Belichick did not do very well in Cleveland because he was in Cleveland. When he was removed from a source of dysfunction and brought to New England, he became the best coach in the history of the NFL. This is the choice we have here, ladies and gentlemen. We have Dr. Greer who was in Sharon in a school committee that was utterly dysfunctional and openly racist. And I have members of the Sharon School Committee or former members who will document in detail what has happened over there. Who endorse her fully, who are cheering for us because they look upon us as the New England Patriots having the opportunity to get an all star that they couldn't keep because of the dysfunction of their committee. I don't want us to be the New York Jets. I don't want us to pass the extraordinary superintendent because of the dysfunction of Sharon. This is an extraordinary candidate. This is a candidate who understands municipal finance, who understands public governance, who understands what needs to be done and matches the criteria we wrote in that focus group report to a T and then go back and read the references. There is no finer and more difficult reference to come by than Dr. Carla Bear who's the former superintendent in law and was a senior deputy commissioner of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. That reference alone is probably the most spectacular reference I've seen from either her or another person. We have an opportunity to hire a highly qualified candidate who has some controversy but that's because she's been a superintendent who's encountered racism because well, she's the candidate who's going to encounter racism. She is the stellar educator we need in this district. She will move us forward. We thought, or actually many of the members of this committee, I was not one of them thought we were going to move forward in 2004 when we picked the inexperienced alternative candidate and look where that got us. I think we're on the precipice right now of choosing an exceptional leader or going with somebody who is inexperienced and lacks the basic core knowledge of municipal finance and governance. And ladies and gentlemen, the core function of the superintendent is not to be an assistant superintendent. You can interview well on questions regarding what it is to be an assistant superintendent. The job is to be the facing front of this community dealing with municipal finance, dealing with public governance, dealing with crisis issues, having the experience in a complex, difficult district with a bunch of intelligent people who there's always a dozen people out there who know more than you do in this district and are willing to express that. One candidate I think is qualified, that's Dr. Greer. Thank you very much. Mr. Heiner. Tough act to follow. Deciding how I was support for superintendent was difficult. I believe each of the finalists would be a credit to the Allington school system. Allington is in a unique situation in seeking a new superintendent. We are at the beginning of a multi-year construction program that requires experience, not on the job training. We are recovering from a pandemic with all the problems emotional and educational that will need an innovative leader who will make tough decisions in the best interest of all the children of Allington, especially those who have special needs. I believe Dr. Greer is the best choice for the following reasons. She has been recently involved in a school district constructing a brand new high school. Dr. Greer knows how to deal with the oversight and all the issues in a project of this nature. She knows how to deal with the reports out of the state. It's not a learning time for her. Dr. Greer's background in special education will only strengthen our existing programs and provide for whatever adaptations that this community will need as these students come back full-time. Dr. Greer has daily experience in running an entire school district, both the educational and physical components. Any person who comes into the system will have a learning curve. Dr. Greer's learning curve will be learning about Allington. She will hit the ground running on day one. For these and many other reasons, I will support Dr. Greer for the position of superintendent. Thank you. So for me, I also support Dr. Elizabeth Holman as our next superintendent. I believe her communication style is direct and specific. And when I listen to her talk, I understand what she's trying to tell me. She demonstrated self-awareness during multiple rounds of meetings. Her humility around and obvious pride in accomplishments that were achieved when she was leading a team came up repeatedly. Her facility with discussing issues around diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as her work with curriculum development and implementation will be significant assets and will contribute to making progress on our district goals. What she may lack in direct superintendent experience she makes up for in potential. Her collaborative data-driven leadership style was mentioned repeatedly by people familiar with her work. I believe that she will be able to communicate to us a vision for Arlington that is developed to leverage the considerable strengths of our existing administration, faculty and staff and move us forward. I ran for election to the school committee to be a part of making this decision when the time was right and the time is now. When I asked myself the question of whether or not we should pursue Dr. Holman as our next superintendent, my answer is yes. So I appreciate the work of the committee in going through this. It is very challenging to do this work in public. But I think that, but I'm grateful for people sharing their thoughts and sharing where they are. So I do want to offer members who so choose an option to provide additional comments or responses. So Ms. Ekston, do you have anything to add? It's not required. Not at this time. Mr. Cardin. Thank you. So in the flyer or whatever the document we put out searching for the superintendent, there were seven items that we highlighted as wanting in our new superintendent. And for me, across the board with one exception, Dr. Holman was the stronger candidate. So I'll just run through them quickly. Number one, relate their teaching experience to their work as a leader, building a foundation of support of Arlington's professional staff. Now they both have teaching experience, which was not true of, I believe of the prior superintendent that Mr. Schlickman referred to. So that's certainly both meet the requirement, but clearly Dr. Greer has more time in the classroom and probably is the stronger candidate there. Build on the strengths of Arlington public schools and support members of the school committee in the work of continuous improvement. Build Arlington's special education to English learner programs to become programs recognized for its excellence. Build a commitment to social justice to lead an anti-racist culture and curriculum as well as create a climate and strategies conducive of recruiting and retaining a diverse staff. Articulate a vision for the direction of Arlington public schools and build community support for that vision. Effectively communicate through various platforms with the district stakeholders, engage in the governing partnership with the Arlington school committee. Thank you. Dr. Allison Ampe. Thanks, I have two things for the first one is one I forgot to say earlier. So I should have mentioned this before this morning I received an email from one of our curriculum directors giving his opinion on the two candidates. I forwarded this email without additional commentary in an effort to provide my colleagues with the information in a timely manner. In retrospect, I probably should have forwarded sent it to Mr. Kutcher to forward on. But I wanted to be sure that you all got it in time and I didn't receive any others that I didn't forward. In terms of responding, when I thought about I felt an important to be able to discuss my decision. But when I thought about how to do this, I realized I didn't wanna get into discussing any perceived negatives about the candidate. I didn't favor because they are both strong candidates and I just think it's wrong if you're not gonna hire someone to be going into a whole bunch of stuff. But I also know that our committee's decision will be scrutinized through many different lenses. During our public interviews with the candidates, I tried to tackle the really difficult topics in the best way I could. And that's what I'm trying to do here again tonight. So I wanna say publicly that as I made my decision, I did take into account our special education needs. I did take into account our desire to increase diversity and representation in our staff. I did not disregard Dr. Brewer on the basis of her lawsuit, which alleges racial discrimination in ways that I as a white person cannot fully phantom. I also did the best job I could to examine my own internal biases and work to allow adjustments for them. But I also looked at a lot of other information. After reviewing all of this information at the end of the day, I felt Dr. Holman is my preferred candidate and that she is well-equipped to address all the issues we face in the Arlington Public Schools. I'm comfortable casting my vote for her when we ever vote. If we vote, in no ways do I mean to imply that my colleagues did not follow a similar thought process but I can only represent my own thoughts. Thank you. Mr. Gellman. Hi, thank you, Ms. Morgan. I think Dr. Allison Ampe actually summarize a lot of the things that I've been thinking. I gave equal consideration to both candidates. Both candidates have many strengths. I think Dr. Holman, as I said earlier, answered questions more precisely with more substance, more detail, more depth. I believe that a thing that I was looking for was an ability to connect with the staff that we have in the district and lead that staff. And I found that in my reference checking. This candidate, Dr. Holman has five years of experience in the central office in Waltham. Our previous superintendent prior to Dr. Bodie did the Broad Institute and was a nontraditional candidate. I think Dr. Holman is far from a nontraditional candidate. She is steeped in, based on everything that I've heard and everyone I've talked to, she's steeped in the logistics and the details of how a central office works, how a central office interfaces with principals and department heads. And she understands that well. And she also understands how change can take place and the limitations on change without getting, unless you get principals and department heads to buy into what you wanna do. So I admire both candidates. I think both candidates have many, many wonderful attributes. I think I'm very comfortable with the selection of Dr. Holman. And I don't think it's a good idea for this committee to drag this out. I don't think it's good for the candidates, actually. And I think tonight, if there are five people in favor, the smartest thing to do is to put a motion on the table, directing the chair to enter negotiations with Dr. Holman with advice from our council. And then we can vote on that as a way to determine whether to take another step. Thank you. Mr. Schuchman. I would remind Mr. Thielman that we had five votes for Mr. Levinson. And we did site visits for the two top candidates we had. I would say that my concerns about Mr. Levinson were decreased somewhat through the site visits and the further research. They weren't completely eased. I thought that in many ways, Mr. Levinson exceeded my expectations. He did have a background through the Broad Institute in the superintendency. And I think the strengths and weaknesses of that were that he understood a lot about how to run a school district, but that left him without the key knowledge of public governance in a critical town. And his inability to both be forthright with the community and to build support within the community led to his downfall. And we took much more time with that process. The community had much more of a chance to see the candidates. We had an interview with these two candidates on Thursday and Friday. And one of the interviews wasn't posted till last night. The community hasn't had a chance to digest. So the people who have had an opinion going in or a reason to boost a candidate have been the loudest in our feedback. And I've seen far too many people posting comments in the feedback here that were, well, I know my second cousin knows somebody who worked with this candidate and I love her or I hate her because of this. The evidence that are firsthand directly from first people who have interacted with this candidate or these candidates are still in our minds limited. And in fact, because we were off doing our own individual reference checks, there's no commonality in our experience in terms of looking at them. We are doing this too quickly. If this is the will of the committee, then it will be the will of the committee in December 10th and we can vote or 12th or whatever the next meeting is and we can vote it. But there are people who are just starting to pay attention to what we are doing, who haven't had a chance to see these interviews, who deserves a chance after hearing our discussion to come back at us as members of the public to voice their opinions on this decision because the ratings that we're seeing in the feedback loops are divergent. We need to bring the community together in this. We are not in a position to unify the committee if we don't have a unanimous vote out of the committee. If we don't have some element of consensus and we don't have that right now. If there's a motion to support the hiring of Dr. Holman, I will vote against it. If there's a notice to reconsider it for the purposes of unanimity, I will vote against it. I feel very strongly that if we go down that road, we're making the wrong decision. In advancing her forward, I was looking at the fact that other people saw things in her that I didn't see with the hope that she would show them and that didn't happen. I'm very concerned about the path we can put ourselves on because while we may be confident in the good people we have in the district who are working for us today and are doing the works in curriculum and the principles, if we hire the wrong leader or they feel slighted in any way, we may have a group of vacancies that we will be needing to fill and we will become a less strong district as a result. We cannot afford to do this so quickly because it is not obvious that one candidate is superior to the other. We can argue about this back and forth between all of us for a while and the community is going to be arguing it back and forth because there's no universal consensus in the community or on this committee that, oh yeah, we have one candidate who is a superior candidate, we don't have that. I'll make a motion to take up the decision of hiring a superintendent at our next meeting and request the search process committee to set up virtual site visits for the two candidates, that's my motion. I'll second it only for the purpose of discussion. All right, Mr. Heiner, go ahead. Although you and I lost our second round commentary options but you can come together. Thank you. Through the chair, I would ask Mr. Schlickman that if this motion prevails, would he be open to a reconsideration at that time for a consensus vote? Mr. Schlickman? I would be much more inclined if I'm able to go in. Look, we haven't even met the candidates in person and so that- Excuse me, Paul. The answer is I'd be more inclined if we were to go for the next step and do some site visits, yes. Mr. Heiner. Mr. Hager. May I continue? Yep, please do. I seconded the motion for the purpose of discussion. It looks like I will not be on a prevailing side either tonight or going forward but I also shared with the chair the idea of the importance of having unanimity in supporting whomever becomes our superintendent. I guess, Mr. Schlickman, I need a commitment from you that I'm willing to support it going forward. I don't know about the other five members but I do feel so strongly about the idea of having unanimity going forward with whomever becomes our new superintendent. Thank you. All right, more discussion on the motion by Mr. Schlickman. Dr. Allison Ampe and then Mr. Cardiff. I appreciate that Mr. Schlickman is concerned. I do, I'm still thinking but right now I'm tending towards not supporting a motion, not supporting his motion. I am unclear what additional information I will under that I will uncover in a virtual site visit that will change my mind. I am also unclear how opening to additional community feedback is helpful. In fact, I see this as a divisive move because you're essentially trying to rile up the community to kind of vote for your candidate. And that does not feel good to me. I note that when I look at the feedback forms right now both candidates actually had exactly the same number of responses. So although there was a delay in posting Ms. Holman's or Dr. Holman's interview it does not seem to have stumps substantively altered how many people were able to provide feedback. And I really, I don't think we're the ones who are elected to make this decision. That's what school committee does. We don't punt it to our community. We don't punt it asking them for more feedback. We are there. We have followed the best process that we could under these extraordinarily difficult circumstances that we've been under. And I appreciate that Mr. Schluckman has strongly held reasons why he does not favor a particular candidate. But I am disappointed with the way that he is going about trying to persuade or impose the rest of us to change our minds. It's not part of our norms. And I am concerned that if he had specific questions that could be answered that would be one thing, but I haven't heard specific questions. In fact, what I'm hearing is kind of a poisoning of the well and that also is not in alliance with our norms. So right now I think I'm voting against this motion. I'm sorry, I've processed it while I'm talking to you. I'm voting against this motion. I think it's the wrong step for us to take. I'm sorry that we are not able to come to a point where I think we will be able to have unanimity. But I also feel that what is there's a difference between getting in a boat and going somewhere and getting to your destination and jumping into the water and just making it all muddy. And I think that's kind of what we'd be doing if we do this motion. So sorry, I've been talking a lot. Again, I'm done. Mr. Cardin, I lost Mr. Cardin. Let's wait. Go ahead, Mr. Dillman. Can you hold just a second so that we can just see if he comes back just so that you don't have to repeat? He's gone, right? Okay. I'll off the grid. All right, go ahead, Mr. Dillman. Do you wanna wait until Mr. Cardin comes back or we just kind of do? Yeah, let's give him just a minute. Yeah, maybe text him and see if he's okay. We'll find out. Ms. Morgan may make an observation. How much to check the law in districts? I just wanna make a public observation that Mr. Thelman and Ms. Ekston dressed just for this meeting tonight. I saw them earlier. Oh, Mr. Cardin will be back with us momentarily. He gave me a way. But you're very observant, Mr. Ener. Nothing got by the fourth grade teacher. Does this mean they were not dressed for any preceding meetings? This has not opened us up to too much here. Three of us were in a relaxed mode for our subcommittee meeting. Your subcommittee meetings sound much more interesting than most of mine. All right, Mr. Thelman, he said to go ahead. Okay, so look, my friends, I'm not gonna support Mr. Schlickman's motion. I have a deep respect for Mr. Schlickman and his position. I also have deep respect for the desire to get unanimity. But I think we will get unanimity over the coming months as the new superintendent and the superintendent of B begins to meet us and work with us. I actually think if we keep this up, we could lose both candidates. So I would urge the committee to vote no. And I would urge the committee to support a motion after we address this motion to direct the chair to begin negotiations with Dr. Holman. Thank you. Mr. Cardin. Thank you, sorry about that. It was, this was such a riveting meeting that I didn't notice my battery was dying. So thank you. So I had expressed concern last meeting about coming into this meeting without any structure. And this is precisely the reason why I had those concerns because now I had asked if we were going to do site visits let's figure out a way to organize them or come up with a plan for a plan. But now it looks like we're wanting to delay because one member's favorite candidate is not the favorite candidate of a majority. So maybe that's not the intent. Maybe even if there was a split decision on going the other way, there would still be a proposal for more process. But I think now that we have a split decision, it's going to be widely known. That's okay. That happens all the time in searches. You know, I appreciate Mr. Hayner's move for a symbolic unanimous vote. But we've already had our, we've already spilled the tea as the kids say. So I think, you know, we are where we are. I'm open if other people want more information to getting more information. I was always open to the idea of site visits. But I think that at this point, now that we have all expressed our opinions, as Dr. Allison Ampey said, there isn't anything I want to know to make my decision. I can't imagine anything, you know, short of some negative revelation on one of the candidates that I believe already would have come out through our background checks that we've done. There really isn't anything else that I think would change my decision. So I find I'm going to have a hard time supporting this as well. Ms. Eksten. So from earlier in the process, I was very much in favor of some kind of in-person meeting with the candidates because they do feel like it gives us or would give me, you know, a sense of the candidates at this point. I'm not sure that something in-person or a virtual site visit would give me enough new information for me to change my mind than my preferred candidate for superintendent. And then I have to agree with some of the other members of the committee that I worry about what delaying the decision would do to the two finalists that we have right now and also to the community conversations that could come from that. So I'm not going to be supporting this motion. Anybody else? Mr. Schuchman. Thank you. I just want to point out that persuasion is an important part of being a part of a deliberative body and to trying to be persuasive in discourse or debate within the context of this committee is not a violation of our norms. It's what we're supposed to be doing because we cannot deliberate outside this meeting. So if we can't be persuasive here, we can't be persuasive anywhere. So I have spent a lot of time thinking about this decision as I alluded in my earlier remarks. When I decided to run for school committee, this was something that I imagined might come up at some point. And it was something I was very interested in participating in. It was something I was deeply reflective about during, I have been very appreciative for the process and the care that has been given. And I've spent a lot of time, frankly, personally, turning over rocks over the last few weeks since we found out who the two finalists were and going back to the same rocks and turning them over again to see if there was something different underneath them and walking around and looking at them from a different perspective and talking to myself about it in my kitchen all the time. And I really felt this weekend that I really landed on a decision. And it was a decision that was challenging to come to. It was extraordinarily time-consuming. And I know enough about myself to know that when I find myself someplace then I feel that sense of decision that I don't move from that place. So I feel comfortable with what I know right now. I didn't know 10 days ago or 12 days ago what I would need. I had not seen either candidate, but I really felt like I got what I needed, what I've needed over the last two weeks. So for that reason and because I questioned what I would learn in a virtual site visit and because I'm looking forward to moving this product. I'm looking forward to moving to a time when we can plan and figure out where we're going as a district. I don't support doing site visits and I don't, so that's where I'm at. So I don't intend to support a motion to do site visits at this time. So any more discussion about on the motion from Mr. Schickman, seconded by Mr. Heiner. Any more discussion? Seeing none. Ms. Ecksten. No. Mr. Cardin. No. Dr. Allison Ampey. No. Mr. Thielman. No. Mr. Schickman. Yes. Mr. Heiner. Oh. And I'm also no. Good morning. Yes, Mr. Thielman. I move to direct the chair to enter into negotiations with Dr. Elizabeth Holman to be the next superintendent of the Arlington Public Schools. Second. Discussion. Mr. Cardin. Thank you. So I just want to say that I appreciate Mr. Schickman's views about the candidates, Mr. Heiner's views, everybody's views. Certainly we all had done our research and as Ms. Morgan stated, has been many hours and lots of time viewing videos and coming to a conclusion. And certainly the discussion about who we prefer is one we should have had and we did have and it revealed that there were differences and that's fine. I don't think that's what happens in these searches. And it's awkward because we have to do this in public and we can't have a back room conversation about the candidates as you would in a normal employment search. So it's an awkward situation. I appreciate everybody's views but I think we're ready to take a vote. Thank you. Mr. Heiner. Thank you, Mr. Cardin for saying that. In the spirit of going forward in a positive way, I will be voting to support the majority of you. Mr. Schlickman. As I stated before, I can't support this motion. I would prefer tossing the search and doing a do over as opposed to this outcome. I think it is the wrong outcome for the community. I cannot support it. More discussion, Mr. Thielman, I see you. No. Well, I would just like to say that, you know, look, this has been a spirit of discussion. I think we'll go home tonight and reflect on it. And I hope that we, I know our committee will come together and support the new superintendent. I hope and think that we should be excited about this moment and we should be excited about the talent that we can bring into this position. And I am confident that all of us can work together to support the new superintendent. Dr. Bode has seven months left and a lot of work to do. So there's a lot of work ahead of us as a committee and as a community. And I think this is an exciting moment for the community. And I think we have an excellent choice and I want to commend everyone who worked on it and thank them for it. Dr. Allison Ampe. I want to point out that the search committee brought forward these two candidates and unanimously and we're very happy with both of them. And I am disappointed that my colleague now feels that because we have chosen one of the candidates that it is a failed search, I want to, I'm trying to represent the rest of the search committee. I can't, it's everything we did was an executive session, so I can't speak to it, but just that there was good feelings in the search committee about both candidates and that they, that's all. Mr. Schickman. Yeah, we can't violate the terms of the executive session of the search committee. We had 15 members and two alternates. We had a rating system where we ranked candidates. Two candidates came up top. We voted to advance those two. That vote to advance was unanimous. I did not offer any points or scoring for Dr. Holman and the preliminary round for much the same reasons that I'm talking about now. It was, other people saw things in her that frankly I didn't see. And I was hoping through this process that I'd see something more because we are questioning was, and I'll talk about this in terms of the public questioning. The public questioning up to this point was all in terms of internal district and curriculum operations. There's a definite lack of any kind of questionings about issues of governance, of public policy, about much of anything that involves front facing part of district operations. And that I think is the most important part of the job, which is why as the chair of the committee and supporting the structure and process of the search committee, we came together unanimously to advance two candidates. But I think that it was clear in my rankings then. And in terms of what I observed from that point going forward, having lived with these two candidates for an extended period of time since the beginning of the process, I kept looking for what I saw with the gaps to be filled in her candidacy in terms of the public governance and the outwardly facing stuff of this district. And I never saw that. And it was extraordinarily disappointing when on the first page of our focus group report, we talked about how a 252 town meeting member town meeting is the appropriating authority for the schools. And that Dr. Holman couldn't answer the question as to who's our appropriating authority. I was hoping to go for the depth in terms of public governance from experience from caring about public governance and understanding how school districts operate as a political structure. That's what I was looking for. And I never got there. And that is such a critical part of the job. I've worked in central office for 19 years. I've seen about five superintendents come and go. I've seen superintendents come and go for Marlington. I know where superintendents fail because they can't master the emergencies or the externals. And I don't care how well you are able to go and do things internally in the district and master curriculum. This is an outside political front facing job. That is a concern of mine. I think it's a legitimate concern. We haven't had this discussion on this legitimate concern that's facing us. And I know I'm trying to be persuasive again in a committee that isn't buying my persuasion. But I need you to understand that this is a very heartfelt viewpoint from somebody who's worked in education all his life and observed many superintendents that I'm not being arbitrary, but I can't support this. Mr. Carden. So just one response on that. There is one Waltham School Committee meeting where Dr. Homan was the only administrator present. The current superintendent was not available for some reason. And she definitely handled the somewhat bizarre questions from the Waltham mayor who chairs the school committee in her own unique manner. And some of the school committee members who, every school committee has their own personalities and they have a bunch there as well. It was an amazing performance. And I have no question that she can step into this role and be the public facing governing relations person that we need. Thank you. All right, anybody else on this motion? Seeing none. So motion by Mr. Thielman. Second by Ms. Exton. Ms. Exton. Yes. Mr. Carden. Yes. Dr. Allison Ampey. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Mr. Schluckman. No. Mr. Heiner. Yes. And I am also yes. So I believe your motion, Mr. Thielman directed me to, so what I will do is begin thinking about a contract for Dr. Holman. And I will come back to the committee at some point to assume to discuss the contents there so that we can begin those negotiations. Mr. Heiner. Just a thought. You might want to connect with Mr. Kuchner. He has got a little experience in this and may be able to help guide you. I have no doubt that he will. Hi, Mr. Kuchner. One of the minor observation, it's after nine o'clock, so your record's shot. It is indeed, but I intend to end this meeting before I need to seek a motion to extend it. So we all know when our time is up. All right, that has, we have reached the end of our agenda for tonight. Thank you all for being here. And I am looking for a motion to adjourn. So move. Second. Ms. Eckston. Yes. Mr. Cardin. Yes. Dr. Allison Ampey. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Mr. Schlickman. Yes. Mr. Heiner. Yes. And I am also yes. Have a good night. Thank you for your service. Happy holiday. Be safe.