 We're happy to meet in person after such a long time. My name is Laura Fuller, and I am the event coordinator at Arlington Education Foundation. I'm a board member there. And I'd just like to take a minute to thank everybody who helped pull this event together. First, I want to thank the town and Adam Chapter Lane for recognizing that this would be kind of a great way to celebrate in person and to welcome Dr. Holman. And then I'd also like to thank Patsy Kramer, the event coordinator for the town hall and the town gardens. She's been a great help getting everything together here today. Also our friends at ACMI, Jeff Monroe, Katie Chang, and Jeff Barron, who got my last minute request to see if they might be interested in putting this on ACMI and within a day they pulled it all together. So thank you very much for that. And finally, the other board members who have been such a help in putting this event together, specifically Jill Fakete, Judy Geyer, Chris Ellidge, and many others, Courtney Marsh, Siobhan Hanley, Elizabeth Goodsell, and I'm sure there are others I've missed here today, Jess Trueslow. They all have name tags. They can all wave their hands right now. So thank you all for all your help. And then before we get started, I do want to introduce, we have a program of speakers today. I just want to make sure everybody's aware of that. These speakers will include Bill Hayner, who is the chair of the Arlington School Committee. Then we'll have Judy Geyer, who is the president of the Arlington Education Foundation. That will be followed by Julie Dunn. She's the director of communications grants and Title I for the Arlington Public Schools and also has been a long time rep for the school department on the board of AAF. And then finally, we'll welcome Dr. Elizabeth Holman to Arlington, and she will give some remarks as well. So I appreciate your attention, and it's my honor to introduce Bill Hayner. Thank you, Laura. In June of 2019, Arlington Superintendent Kathleen Bodey announced her, thank you. Is that better? Okay. In June of 2019, Arlington Superintendent Kathleen Bodey announced her intention to retire at the end of the 2020-21 school year. The process to find a new superintendent began. The Massachusetts Association of School Committees facilitated 16 community meetings that included administrators, teachers, staff, members of the community at large, recent alumni, parents of English language learners, members of the special education parent advisory council, and parents with interest in children with special needs, and civic leaders from the town meeting, finance and capital planning committees. More than 220 people participated in interviews, while more than 1,000 people took the online survey. The committee selected 20 candidates from the applicants to consider and brought nine of them forward for interviews. From the nine, two candidates were selected to bring to the Arlington School Committee for selection. Dr. Elizabeth Holman was voted by the Arlington School Committee to be our next superintendent, citing on July 1st, 2021. I want to share with you what I've learned about Dr. Holman over the past four months. She is half my age. She's half my size, twice my energy, and I can honestly say that I look up to her. At this time, I would like to introduce Judy Gaya. Thank you, and good evening from the Arlington Education Foundation. The Foundation's mission is to support and advance public education in our town. This foundation was created by donors and sponsors who wanted to invest extra in our schools to ensure that our teachers and students' experience was really enriched and that they could grow in our schools. Our foundation is led by a board of roughly 15 community members who coordinate fundraising activities and vote on grant applications from teachers and from the district administration. We closely collaborate with the district and schools administrations, and this collaboration is key to making sure that we can put our donors' contributions to work. For example, in the summer of 2020, we helped fund any teacher who was interested to attend a Harvard Extension course on strategies for online learning. We've helped over 200 district staff become certified in youth mental health first aid. We recently put a laser cutter in one of the Audison classrooms, and we've also helped two parents posters around all the elementary schools celebrating individuals of color who are leaders in the STEM field. I could name a lot of other grants, but it goes to show that it's really critical that we are able to get into the schools, work with the school's leaders, and also with the superintendent to put our donors' contributions to work. To help explain how AEF works with the superintendent, I'd like to introduce Julie Dunn, who's been a long-time board member, and I think I can call you the AEF historian. She is also our district's director of grants, communication, and Title I. Yes, so I was asked to give some information about Arlington Education Foundation and how it has worked successfully with the district. But AEF was originally formed of the merger of two nonprofits. We had Arlington Education Enrichment Fund to support grants to teachers and Arlington Schools Foundation to support grants for the strategic initiatives of the school department. The merging of those two organizations resulted in the Arlington Education Foundation we have today, and it has the strengths of both of those organizations. I'm gonna talk a little bit about some of the larger strategic grants that have been done over the years to demonstrate the strategic level partnership between the foundation and the school district. And these grants arise out of discussions between district leadership and the AEF board. They're very much collaborative processes. An early one was called Enlivening Elementary Education. It integrated social studies with literacy and music, updated the social studies curriculum, provided membership and primary source, and eventually expanded into math and science as well. The next large grant was for improving Arlington High School. We had a planning grant to support the work of the principal at the time, Charlie Skidmore. And a leadership team assessed opportunities and grants, created common understandings of quality student work, brought in critical friends, built up the leadership team there. In 2012, AEF started a series of improving the Otteson Middle School grants, which supported the creation of a collaborative and inclusive school leadership team, which resulted in the development of a mission and vision for the school, identifying norms for professional practice. And the leadership team worked with an AEF-funded facilitator to focus on areas of improvement. Advisory at the Otteson started at this time, came out of that work. From 2014 to 2018, the AEF led a very successful technology initiative. Reached out to local tech entrepreneurs and business leaders in the community, as well as our usual wonderful donors. This provided improvements for the district's educational technology and the district's first technology plan was created in conjunction with this series of grants. Some of the outcomes were a high school science data and simulation project, middle school engineering lab, digital modeling labs at the Otteson and an expansion of the digital visual arts at the high school. Further grants built on this, and as a result, our students have access to expanded computer science education, as well as introductions to the engineering and visual arts. In fiscal year 16, AEF started working with the district on safe and supportive schools. This initiative was actually suggested by the foundation because they'd seen so many grants coming from teachers with requests to support the social emotional growth and wellness of our students. Part of what came out of that was what Judy mentioned in terms of the youth mental health first aid training, the AEF supported district staff to become trainers who could then go on and train over 300 staff. And we also did a district wide assessment of the behavior and mental health supports for districts, sorry, students across the district and created action plans for that. Then we remember when the district had to create a new school, the Gibbs sixth grade school, AEF provided a Gibbs planning grant for teachers and administrators to create the cohesive and strategic plan for the whole educational environment of that school prior to its opening and brought responsive classroom in. Just recently, AEF funded data wise, which is a process of referring to student data to improve instruction and a curriculum equity audit done by Dr. Deena Simmons that will support our deeper equity work going forward. So that's a quick summary, but I think you can see the breadth of what AEF has done, a taste of the partnership that we've had at all school levels and across the district. So now I'm gonna introduce our new superintendent, Dr. Elizabeth Homan, who's known as Liz to us. Anyway, I think to everyone. Dr. Homan comes to us from Waltham where she was assistant superintendent of schools. She's a midwesterner. She grew up in central Illinois. She has educators in her family tree and she began her teaching career in central Indiana in a district that included a lot of Hispanic population in the schools. She took on the work of doing a PhD at the University of Michigan and ended up coming out here to spend a year at the Boston Public Schools. She has a video on the Arlington Public Schools website where she shares a lot more personal information including what her extracurriculars were in high school. I recommend seeing that. So today I just wanna share some of the things I have observed about Liz as she entered the district and started working here. A few adjectives. She's wicked smart. She's very curious. She's focused and she's responsive. She also has a really good sense of humor. She asks really good questions and wants to know what's going on beneath the surface of things. But one characteristic has really stood out to me which is her excitement to be here and do the work of leading the Arlington Public Schools. She actually almost shivers with happiness when thinking of the work to come. And that gets me to another adjective which is she's quite transparent in her words and actions. Her passion shows. But what really stands out to me about the excitement, however, is that she is excited to do this work together as a powerful team. She appreciates and is thrilled that she will not do this alone but rather as a leader of a learning community and a community of students and families together. She's thrilled by the work of helping teams grow in ability and effectiveness. She knows that working well together works happens not by magic but by the work of creating trusting connections and relationships. One thing she believes and lays the foundation for is deep listening. Following an organized and clear examination of key elements that impact our district. She knows that teams need to do the hard work of hearing each other and believing each other so they can build shared commitments. And she's intentionally building her relationships with individuals and teams and providing fertile ground for district teams to become strong, supportive, flexible and safe working environments where people can dig deep and bring their best selves forward. So Dr. Holman gets to work with us and we get to work with her. I'm thrilled that AEF is holding this event so she gets to meet this wider AEF community and the wider AEF community gets to meet her and that we're all on the same team in support of APS students. Your turn. I feel like maybe I shouldn't say anything. I should just go home now. Also, whatever I'm about to say is way less fun than whatever play is going on over here. Thank you, Julie, so much. I'm gonna lower this or I'm just gonna move it. Or I'm just gonna move. How about this? Okay. I shared with our teachers on opening day on the very first day that our teachers came back and we were all together. We were on Pierce Field outside that I love to sew and also that I love to cook and that I love to run. And I shared this with them as a way of saying that I really hope that they found things in their lives that gave them balance and that helped them restore and reset because the work we do as educators is exceptionally complex. It's also sometimes very heavy and over the past 18 months, it's been very heavy because we're tasked with the very important work of imagining a new community, a new society, the future, right? And that's really important. And parents give us their little people every day and they trust us to care for them and to help them grow and become better humans. And that calling is one that we all feel very passionately is exceptionally important. And so we come into this complex work and we have all of these things that we look at to help us know if we're doing a good job. Lots of data, lots of stories, lots of interactions with students, lots of interactions with families that tell us and give us an indice of whether or not we're doing okay but educators often don't really understand deeply what their impact is or don't have a way of knowing because those students move on and they go out into the world and sometimes we hear from them, often we don't. And so our impact is deferred, right? It's off in some future world that we're hoping to imagine through the work we do with kids. And so I told them that I hope they do things that give them an opportunity to reset and feel restored. And teachers need that, just like I do. And they also need opportunities like that within their work. They need to have license to take risks, to try new things, to be creative because we're working with little people who are immensely creative. And organizations like AEF give us the ability to do that. They give us the resources we need to try on something new to say, here's a new method that I think might be really powerful in my classroom or for the district to say, here's a strategy we wanna try across multiple schools or that we did in this little innovation grant but now we wanna grow it. And so we know we can't do this work alone and that we need organizations like AEF and that we need community partners because those partnerships are the things that let us try on new things and be creative and that sustains teachers in their work every day as well. The permission to do something that they've never tried before so that they can make the world better for the kids that they teach, for the kids that they maybe go home to and for the future adults that will be part of our community and our society. So I say all of that as a way of saying thank you to AEF. We're already engaging in some planning for the district, some thinking about what the next district strategic planning grant might look like. I'm very excited to see what our teachers come up with for this year in their innovation applications and we're really just very grateful to be able to partner with all of you, with AEF, with other community organizations and commissions to do the work that needs to happen for our kids. We're entering into a really great moment for education, I believe, an opportunity to reimagine what we do as educators and to learn from what we've been through. And so I'm grateful to all of you for being here. I hope we'll get a chance to say hi to you before you leave. We'll all stop talking now so that people can go socialize and talk to one another and I'm gonna hand it off to Judy though before we do that. So don't move. Thank you. Thank you so much, Dr. Holman. We're thrilled to have you here in Arlington. Everyone here is thrilled that you're here and leaving our schools. Because you are all excited about Arlington Public Schools, please grab one of these postcards. On one side, it'll take you to a website. If you know a teacher, please tell them about our grant opportunities, our board members and our school representatives are there to help teachers with our grant opportunities. And please of course donate so that we can invest in the future of Arlington. But really three cheers for Dr. Holman and for the beginning of a really close collaboration with the whole town. Thank you.