 634. And with the indulgence of the committee, I'd like to call the word and approve the minutes in number 20 of 2018. Afterwards, what I'd like to do is for out of respect and kindness to some of those assembled, I'd like to move item 6A. I understand student presentation up to immediately following the minutes. Seeing no objections, so it worked. So the minutes are number 20 of 2018. We have a chance to look at the minutes. I'd entertain a motion to approve. I'll move to accept the minutes of November 20th. I'll move Dan second. Is there any further comments? Yes. Under E, the approval of the designer for the new study. I think what I was trying to convey was that Daphne and Bradley were local and that JCJ had worked here before, but they weren't actually local. So they're not actually local. Thank you. Great. Can you have that? Yes, I do. Great. Are there any further edits? Seeing none, I'd like to move this to a vote. All those in favor of approving the minutes of November 20th, 2018. Signify by raising your hand. I. Okay. Any nays? Any abstentions? One abstention. So that carries one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Seven zero one. Thank you very much. And now would you like any introduction? I'll do a brief introduction. So thanks to the committee for having the MSAN student presentation tonight and thanks also to let the students go first because they've got many other things to do. I imagine when they leave us after their role. And I really just want to introduce Ms. Custard, our interim assistant principal at the high school who for many years has led the students at the MSAN conference. This year was local so we didn't have to get on planes, which was a nice thing. But really just has led not just the students at the conference but really been a fantastic leader for students across the high school more generally. And I think this is just way that this is one way that manifests is the work for the MSAN students. So I'll turn it over to Ms. Custard if you want to do a bit of an introduction for the students. They can introduce themselves. They're all student leaders and scholars, even though they're trying to play shy now. They can introduce themselves. I just want to say that I'm very happy that our district is part of the MSAN network because we continue to do the work on closing the achievement gap. And it is a struggle. It's something that we need to do district-wide and not just at the high school because once they're in high school, there are some lessons that were not learned in lower grades. So these students are all working really hard to achieve at high levels and sometimes they stumble, but they pick themselves back up and they get their work done. And going to MSAN for three days really made them do that because they missed three days at school. But for the benefit of themselves and for our district, so I want to thank them for participating and I'll let you hear from them. Wonderful. And I let Ms. Custard speak without a microphone, but I'm apologizing for everyone else. If you can, please approach the microphone when you speak. Thank you very much. Alright, so my name is Mohamed Abdul Maksud. I'm a sophomore and yeah, I'm part of MSAN and I'm one of the vice presidents of Poku. I'm Tabor Bowman. I'm a 11th grader and I'm also part of MSAN and Poku. I'm Pierre Tillis. I'm a junior, like they said, part of MSAN and Poku. I have a question. What does MSAN stand for? Minority Student Achievement Award. Do you want to know Poku stands for? Yes. Hello, my name is Taylin Pope. I'm a junior at Emerson High School. I'm one of the co-presidents for Poku and I also play basketball for the high school. Could you actually help her out? What is Poku? People of Color United. I'm Aisha Proctor. I'm an 11th grader here at Amherst and I'm a part of MSAN and Poku as well. I'm Yasin Norris-Fall. I'm a senior. I'm part of MSAN and Poku and I was also captain of volleyball team. Hi, my name is Khaleesi and I'm a junior also and I'm also part of Poku and MSAN and I play soccer in lacrosse for high school. I'm Isabella Shepherd. I am also an 11th grader. I'm part of Poku and MSAN and the new restorative justice leaders group. Sure, so I think one thing that, thank you for being here and one thing that I think would be helpful for the committee to hear is I've heard some from the teachers and adults that have been connected to your work about the action plan that you developed at the end of the conference. Some of the goals that you have for your work after the conference for the rest of the school year. So in speaking with other students and having conversations at the conference, something that was brought up was mental health and especially the African-American community. And we talked about how it's often dismissed and there's not a lot of representation for people who work in mental health and who are also people of color. So our main idea here is to kind of bring that to the school and offer representation and people that, children of color in the school who have questions about mental health, who are experiencing issues with them. We want to give them people that they can look up to and models that they can look after, people who know about this thing and experts. And so our idea is to research mental health specialists in our area and we're mainly looking for people of color that we can bring to the school and have a panel so that we can have questions that students have and we can have these specialists offer their insight and their experiences with the work that they do. So we can really just bring this idea forth and present because we feel like it's not out there enough and we need more representation in our community. Thank you. I think I turn it over to the committee to see a few of questions, but I really appreciate hearing it from you. I heard it from a number of the adults and discuss it. I miss Dr. Gramacchi and I just appreciate the lens that you're bringing to both the school but also to the larger community. But I would turn it over to the committee if they have questions. Any questions for the committee? Thank you all for being here tonight. I really appreciate it and I'm sure the committee does too. It's just from the nodding heads we've seen so far. One of you mentioned being part of the Restorative Justice Program at the high school and I was curious given the comment from the young lady who just spoke about bringing a panel of mental health specialists, how if at all you've considered integrating those two aspects of the work that you'd like to do to each other. Do you see them coordinating in any way or is this just sort of like an added event or thing that you would like to do? The Restorative Justice, we are trying to bring people together in a circle to resolve conflicts and build community and we haven't talked about integrating them exactly that way yet so it would be an added portion at this moment but it could be something that we could do in the future. At this moment in time though for the Restorative Justice we were planning on doing something with women's, like women bonding, it's like a sister thing that should be cool. So that's what we have as a plan soon versus something that could happen maybe in the next semester or possibly next year. What accomplishment did you achieve in the past year? These are all new M.S.A.N. scholars. Oh, welcome to New Year. We do have veteran M.S.A.N. scholars and they will be supporting the work that they have planned for. We have actually worked on a schedule for March so we're going to have a mental health. Right. I was just about to ask what your next steps were collectively. So you've already identified a target a whole month of programming? No, just one day but we're hoping there can be follow-up with resource, maybe a resource table during lunch during the day that we have the panel and the whole school will go but we'll have to have two assemblies because we can't all fit in the one auditorium. So I've been looking at organizations that might want to come in and have tables also while the day we have the panel. Were there other hot topics or priorities that you were thinking of that you debated doing when you selected this one? I mean that are worth sharing that you want to share. So we had kind of two main topics that we wanted to discuss and the one that we evidently chose was the mental health but the other one that we did want to bring light to was the fact that there aren't that many teachers of color in the school or teachers of color in powerful positions in the school and I feel like with having more teachers who are of color and people I can relate to most of the experiences I've gone through I feel like that would make my education so much better and I'd have people who I feel very familiar to and just make the school a place where I feel like it's not a burden but more of somewhere like I'd rather like I'd like to be just because of these teachers I see throughout my day and I feel like that'd be something very important to have in the school. Thank you. Thanks for sharing. Any other questions? Can I ask a question that's related but seemingly unrelated but related? All of you or almost all of you mentioned that you were in People of Color United or POKU and I was just curious if there's anything you'd share that you're up to in that organization that would be useful for the community to know? Yeah so POKU has been in the school for a while now. We just try our main goal for POKU is like to make the school a good community for People of Color to have an accepting place where they can come do their work and just be comfortable in a good space. MSN is more of an objective sort of like an action plan as it's called so we're trying to force or implement new stuff into the school whereas POKU is also sort of that but more as a welcoming place for People of Color in our school as well. Well if there's nothing else, there doesn't have to be. Thank you so much. Thanks for being here. Really appreciate you taking the time. So our next agenda item is announcements and public comments. Are there any announcements from the school committee? Seeing none, we're open for public comments as a remit. Sorry, I'm sorry. It's like a bright shiny object or something. It keeps striking me. So it is public comment. If you do have one, come forward to the microphone, identify yourself, an individual of three minutes to speak and as you can see we even have a little timer over there that will count down and hopefully will be unobtrusive in some way. So less unobtrusive when it's that huge. One more subtle before. Any public comments? Also continue with all that work. No, we appreciate it and thanks. So public comments will be closed. We'll move to subcommittee updates. Budget didn't meet today. No, it did not meet. Next time. Forgive me. I got an email reminding me that my services are no longer necessary. Which is cool. But then for that reason, I totally checked out to remember whether it was today or... Because of lack of response. The committee moved me. Anyway, either way. So are there any other committee business? I'll just mention that the policy subcommittee finally met yesterday and we've set forth a future meeting schedule as well. Our next meeting is in one month. It's the first Monday in January. Cool. Which means probably toward the end of January or early February, we're going to have a series of meetings in which we're voting an absolute ton of stuff or reading and discussing a ton of stuff. So that's something for you to look forward to. Yes, Superintendent. Might I mention the update from the collaborative? I was going to mention it. Oh, then I will. No, you don't have to. So the collaborative for educational services has determined that in fact one representative cannot represent both the Amherst committee and the regional school committee. And they are begging our indulgence to have somebody come from the regional committee. At least three meetings a year. They say they're so productive and enjoyable. You'll want to come many more times than that. But that they'd love to have a volunteer. Is anyone interested in volunteering? What day is that? What day are they? I think it's Wednesday, eight days. It's every other month and they offer dinner. And apparently it's Wednesdays. I think it's Wednesdays. It's usually Wednesdays. Going back and forth between Northampton and Greenfield. Okay. Okay. That sounds like a volunteer. Good. Wonderful. Thank you so much. And they also grab. Okay. So, CTF. Yeah. So I just wanted to a couple of items that we had wanted to bring to the committee's attention for discussion. We had a meeting a couple of weeks ago actually with our subcommittee and both co-principals from the middle school were in attendance and I see them in the audience today. And it was a very good conversation. It was basically about thinking through how we might bring restorative justice program to the middle school level, not just the high school. And I believe that they will be speaking about that later on. So we'll hear more about that. The main thing though that I think we wanted to address tonight was really just a discussion for the committee to decide on whether or not the goals that have put forth a bunch of priorities and the superintendent goals should be formally voted on. And I've spoken with Dr. Morris about it and with the chair. And, you know, it sounds like we could probably, you know, it sounds like we could probably go either way. But I think what we're looking for from the subcommittee anyway is just a, you know, formal adoption of the budget priorities and goals. Even though we've already adopted the goals previously and Ms. Cunningham has presented on them and the district has done a lot of work already in moving it forward. We really just want to make sure that the committee is supportive of the goals as they've been presented and that if there's any further conversation or discussion that we can have at this time. Is that a fair representation of, yeah. So I think all of you have had a chance to review it. I know there was a discussion. I wasn't at that meeting in October because I was actually traveling for work. But the, you know, it's really more about fine tuning or refining the goals that have been previously adopted and presented. And I don't know if there's anything else that either the chair or Dr. Morris want to say about that. Yeah. Well, I'm trying to think just process wise, should we hear from the middle school? You'd rather wrap this up and then hear from the middle school. However, you, I mean, you know, you had the conversation before. I am happy to hear from the middle school first out of the same principle that we had earlier, that if somebody's bothered to come here, show up and set themselves up to speak. I'd rather hear from them first. Okay. So I can introduce Joseph Smith and Rebecca Sweetman, who are just going to do a summary of the kind of the dialogue that they had at that meeting and a little follow-up of what's happened since then. Right. Yeah. Thank you so much. We do want to try to run back to our chorus and band and orchestra concert. So it was a pleasure to be invited and to be able to speak with the task force the other evening. Thanks for the couple of weeks ago now. It seems like time is flying. We talked about a lot of things in regards to equity in the school and how we're looking at that, not just in regards to restorative practices but the school as a whole. And so a big piece of that was what was really important to us starting was giving all students a voice in the building and making sure that all students have a place. And so we were able to bring back student council and a student voice group in the school for the first time in a while. And we held elections along the same timeline as the elections that happened in November and those happened then and they were announced around the beginning of November. Our top three officers are students of color, so we're really happy that that is the case. Yeah. So since the beginning of the school year, Rebecca and I, Ms. Webe and I, we have had a focus on social justice at the school. One of our interviewing points was to look at disparities and discipline, our favorite topic. And so with that being said, I know that Dr. Morris had started out the year with all of the staff members, leaders of the district doing implicit bias. Ms. Webe and I then took that back to our school and we introduced that to our staff and we have made that part of our cornerstone, if you will, with all of our staff meetings. So we do a little bit on implicit bias. In addition to that, we look at how we're going to reduce the rates of unsuccessfulness for students of color in terms of academic and social. So we want to bring this new thing that the students were talking about in terms of restorative practices to our school. And so we have decided to bring a position down to our school that's going to support the dean as well as students. We also are working on looking at our equity and access to the courses that we offer and also making sure that we're offering the correct courses. So right now we know that we're lacking in math interventions and if we're going to close gaps, then we need to offer the appropriate courses for our students to help them achieve at high levels and make sure we're providing the supports to do so. And we see that there are gaps in that right now. So we're looking at how we're going to adjust that for the coming year. So in addition to that, we have been doing assemblies on anti-racism and we've been having follow-up groups with our advisory committee. So we're doing a lot right now. Are you open to questions? If there's any questions for the committee? I just want to say again, you know, I know that I'm not going to speak for the SCTF, but the conversation with both of you was really helpful. And I think it was great to hear that you're thinking about a lot of the issues and concerns that we've raised, both at this committee and also subcommittee, but frankly the community around discipline disparity and your commitment to trying to get as much data and information as you possibly can about what's happening in the classrooms and across the school is really helpful and important as well. And I think to hear your discussion about, you know, that you're already thinking about how you might be able to bring restorative practices to the middle school level, which is something that we've heard from the students. We've heard from many others for a while now because that way they can actually carry it through their adolescence into their high school years. It's not just something that they get, you know, the tail end of their public school education. So it's really great to hear that. And I, you know, I think both of you have already received the invitation for the next SCTF meeting in January. We'd, you know, love to have you there. But I think having participation from our principals in this way and from other, you know, educators and administrators is really useful when we're having those kinds of conversations. So thank you for taking the time to do that. I look forward to engaging with you in January. And I guess I have another question that sort of lines up on topic, but it's slightly different. And my assumption is the Alana Cub is district wide, right? So for the middle school, I'm just curious, I mean, so when I think about an environment in which everyone's valued students or an environment where they're appreciated and achieve regardless of their background or even celebrating everyone's background, you know, the sort of the other, the two sides of it are what the student experience is, but then also what the staff experience is around it that both in terms of how they're learning and developing what they're doing, but also literally how they feel when they come every day to work. And I was wondering if, without, I realized I wasn't putting in a spot, because that wasn't what you were coming here for. I was just wondering, since I think if we throw that into the pot too, that ends up being almost the entire agenda. I'm just wondering if you have any observations, you know, half a year in around some things that have gone well or things you're looking to do in that regard. Rebecca and I, since the beginning, have decided that we are really learning about the school culture at arms and we're not making any great changes. What we've noticed is that there seems to be a stratification with what students are experiencing and what some teachers may be experiencing. This is why we know it would be helpful to have this restorative justice program at our school to help us with the school climate culture. Great. Thank you. Is she on them? Yeah, I just wanted to say as you go through this process and you see possibilities of resources that you might need, feel free to come back and talk about it. Obviously budgets are always tight, so it's not like a promise thing, but it's, I think it's really important, particularly at the middle school level. I remember, you know, my kids, I have three kids and they're two years apart, so I was a middle school parent for six years straight, so I got a really good in-depth dive and, you know, the major theme I had with middle school administration was it's so hard for people, like in the thick of it, there's so much churn and activity going on at the middle school level to know exactly what you need and when. So, you know, open-lines communication with the school committee is awesome. We appreciate that. We'll take you up on that. Wonderful. Thank you. Any other questions? Thank you so much. Thank you. Enjoy the concert. Sure, it's wonderful. So we're still mid-item, actually. So back to the last pause. So what I'd love to do is I'd love to hear from, this is superintendent, the superintendent, and hear your thoughts. The two things I would say at sort of the outset are that which is sort of framing at least my thoughts on this anyways are that, one, the committee adopted the top-line goals and so I don't, we could revote them, but I don't think we need to because to me, the commitment is still in place that the top-line goals that we're trying to adopt, we are trying to adopt and we need to do it and build that into all the work we're doing, whether it's policies or budgeting and other activities. The second thing is that we're in the middle of a strategic planning process and to me, I think I said this at a previous meeting, but I also said this to the superintendent before, part of what I'm trying to understand and I want to understand is how these goals, since a number of them also include sort of data and reporting, the data and reporting of the goals and then also how we build it into a culture of continuous improvement in which these goals are aligned with everything else we're doing or integrated with everything else we're doing as a district. How is that going to happen? And how is that going to happen between now and the point where the district employment planner school strategy is developed and put forward? And I'm saying that before both of you talk because to me, part of what I'm looking to understand is whether, A, there's common agreement to do that because to me, whether the committee needs to vote the specifics of the memorandum that we received is partially tied to whether there's any ambiguity or disagreement over the objectives. And I say that because some things could be done this year, some things might need to happen over a year and a half or two years or whatever the judgment is, your professional judgment is, and that's part of why you have a strategy, right? Because you know you can't do everything at once. Some things you have to do over time. You also know if you don't measure it and report it, then you don't know what's happening and no one knows what's happening. I'm sure that's some dumb, but I'm providing a context here because the context I'm getting at is to me, simply voting the goals and the objectives underneath it is sort of a blunt instrument that doesn't really tell me whether anything's actually changing over time and whether things are really being implemented. To me, what matters to me anyways and to me, the culture sort of of change with the school committee if we're doing this right, working collaboratively with the leadership of the district and the community is actually knowing things are changing over time and having it reported and being transparent and getting good data and also being able to align our budget both now and year over year in a way that makes that continuous progress knowing that things are never perfect so that the bumps, and I say this also again because, again, not to belabor sort of the endless history of this district, but if you don't have, to my mind, if you don't have that framework and you don't have that shared agreement for improvement, then every hiccup in the road, whether it's a minor thing or let's say it's like an argument, it's a great recession and things fall, you know what I mean? Or the roof collapses in the middle school or something, right? And there's some big thing that happens and everyone has to focus their attention on it and so you lose traction on the goals you're trying to make and then people point fingers understandably because there's not a shared agreement, there's not a shared trust, there's not a shared plan. People point fingers and say, well, I wasn't sure you were really committed to begin with, right? How do you avoid that? You avoid that by having that plan, having that transparency, having that data, and then really sort of continuously working it and coming back to it over time so that the trust is built but it's also completely transparent. Everyone can kind of see what's happening and where you're going. So that's the context that at least in my mind, I'm sort of laying out for this and I guess the only further thing I'd say is that relative to any specific sort of goals and objectives is what I'd also like to know is if there's a realistic perspective or sort of counter, I want to say counter proposal, but whatever the phrase is, any information that you think would be useful for the committee to have to be able to figure out what would those objectives look like or what should those objectives look like that are realistic for us to be able to say okay, we can have a shared agreement to do this, move it forward and do it within a strategic framework. I think that would be useful for the committee to know so that you don't end up having, again, sort of a blunt conversation of either you're all in or you're not in at all or you're not sure what you've committed to. So I'll start. I feel like I was just on a couch, therapist couch, sharing every view I had on the subject and I apologize, but I was trying to do that because I think it's helpful to... Yeah, absolutely. So I'll just do a little bit of introduction and turn it over to Ms. Cunningham. So I think I'll speak specifically to a point about strategic planning and then Ms. Cunningham can lead us a little bit more detail about the recommendations and goals. So I think you're right and I agree with you that we have this strategic planning effort. The School Equity Task Force has a member that is part of that and I don't say that, to say that that's one out of a large group. But it was important to have that group represented within the planning team, which is 36, 37 people large, including parents, teachers and students. And so what I would say is we have our second meeting coming up in a couple of weeks, but in our first meeting all of the topics that are on the recommendations came up in some way, shape or form. And not just from the one kind of appointed member from SCTF, but from students, from faculty and from other parents' guardians. So I do think that process can take a while to congeal and how the priorities kind of get normed. And so that's an ongoing part of our work. But what I think is important to note that in the first meeting it wasn't absent these, and no one brought these recommendations. No one brought these pieces of paper. It was a futures protocol. So you were envisioning what the future, what you'd want the future to look like in three to five years in the district. And many of these topics, actually all of these at least were touched upon, and many of them were kind of resoundingly touched upon by many, many participants in that effort. So as that work continues and as that sort of crowdsource, members are getting more feedback on the visioning from their networks. And we'll come back together in January. We're going to see a lot of these things in the plan, not because necessarily myself or Ms. Cunningham are saying no, they need to be in the plan, but actually because the group has the level of representative diversity, and by diversity I'm not just talking about identity, it's also diversity of viewpoints. But these are things that there are many in the community who are pushing for and advocating for, and I feel very confident they'll be reflected in the strategic plan to come. And the short term, because right, that process play out over the spring, you know, into perhaps next summer. In the short term, we have a lot of work that we're doing, and that's why I wanted to... Can I ask one thing now, please? With the committee's indulgence? If the memo hasn't been shared with the working group of the planning process, can you do so? Yeah, absolutely. But I think I'll turn to Ms. Cunningham to talk about the specific goals in this particular school year. So I know that we received six goals, and they were presented at the other, the meeting two months ago. And as I look at each one, I have to think many different ways. So the last meeting that we had, we had the Human Resource Department here, which had three members, and an assistant, admin assistant. So our department is very small, right? And Dr. Morris had talked about how the funding to do a lot of the data, collect the data, and do some of the analysis that's needed would be pretty hard for such a small department to try and get done. We started preparing all that information that you saw in our slides last time. We started preparing it from September to get it ready for the November presentation. And it wasn't until about a week before that presentation that we were able to gather everything that we felt you would need to see where we went with the goals, right? So that being said, I'm looking at these six goals, and each of them requires some kind of collection of data, some kind of analysis, some kind of plan to be created, some kind of implementation of the plan, and then again, some kind of evaluation at the end of the plan, right? And what I would ask is that instead of us having six goals for this year that we have to do all of that for, that the committee considers limiting to maybe two or three goals, right? So that we can deepen the analysis, deepen the work, do some more implementation, and possibly even look to institutionalize the things that we're doing so that it's something that's taking place every year. And so, we also, we looked at some of the percentages, and I know one of the slides that we presented last meeting showed that at the regional level, the number of African-American teachers actually outweigh the percentage of African-American students. And so, when I look at some of the percentages that they're asking us to look at and change, I would like to find a way that we can look at the data and see exactly what's needed and maybe adjust those percentages to just be correct. Because if I read some of the goals correctly, it's saying reduce, right, and have the numbers be the same or similar, and we've exceeded the numbers. So, in truth, what are we looking to do, right? So, I would like for the committee to just take some of those things into consideration. As you look at the goals, just one, can we limit the amount from six, maybe to two or three that we deepen? We only have about six more meetings, maybe? Six more months of meetings. Six more months of meetings. So, to have us come and present on six goals every month is going to be pretty tough for our very small department. So, that's, you know, something that I just wanted to chime in on. Yeah, I mean, and so Ms. Cunningham, when I spoke earlier, and I think we're certainly willing to have a discussion of which goals, maybe it says two things, actually. One is that all of these goals are things that the district is actively working on. So, when Ms. Cunningham and I are sharing that we're looking for a couple of deep dives on, it's not saying, oh, yeah, we're just going to disregard the other goal areas. It's about which do we gather data, which do we come and present, and I really like the phrasing that Ms. Cunningham used, which do we make more institutionalized so that next year, we're doing, and at six is just a number that we find challenging. You know, I think number two is something that was already presented on, and it's certainly something that's been a topic of conversation that I think you heard it from students tonight. Number two, I'm sorry, not everyone may have the document in front of you, I apologize. So, number two, I'll just read it aloud. Oh, I'm sorry. Mr. Government? So, I just wanted to say just a micro comment and maybe super tanky thing. I'm a little uncomfortable having this conversation in such depth right now about the goals and all these references and details. Like, we don't have this in our packet. It wasn't part of the, like the agenda says SCTF subcommittee update, and that's it. And so, this is like all sort of coming to us now at this moment. And so, I'm sort of scrambling going back from my past meeting notes about trying to find the goals and what the discussion was, and I want to have the most beneficial conversation to the committee and the district to just finding a little hard to sort of focus in on exactly what we're trying to do tonight, but let's continue. I think we're going to have to make a decision tonight because one thing is not an agenda item to make a decision on. I think we're going to have to have an agenda item on a meeting. What's our next meeting? 15th, maybe? Does that sound about right? January 15th, yeah, I believe. I'm sorry. I'm sorry to be on the agenda on January 15th. So, I think maybe just hearing that feedback if I could slightly turn my comments. Thanks, Mr. Demling. I want to share probably more specifics on thoughts and people could prepare a little more for the conversation as we view the six goal areas and what are things that we're actively digging in on with the data and maybe could make some recommendations. I feel like that's fair. That'd be good. Mr. Gomez? So, I just wanted to point out I think I appreciate the concern that there's not a, you know, we don't have the goals in front of us. However, I think we're having sort of a circular conversation because as both Dr. Morris and Ms. Cunningham and even Mr. Nakajima have mentioned before, these goals have already been adopted and there's not very much that's new in here except for just creating some fine tuning about how we arrive and how we hold ourselves accountable. And I think my comment is that if we don't actually attach numbers like any evaluation, you don't know if you're making progress unless you actually start to attach some numbers to it. And I know you're going through this process internally as it is, but we're looking for, I think at the subcommittee level is an opportunity to figure out what those numbers are. So working in conjunction with you, of course, but finding numbers and holding ourselves accountable to that and then being transparent about what that looks like. And so, I think a lot of these, looking at these goals, we have had numerous conversations around what these goals are. I know that they're actively being worked on. You know, with all due respect, I think when I hear we want to reduce six goals to maybe just a couple of goals, to me, I'm not quite sure what that means because I've heard from others in the district already that you were already working on these. So, I'm not sure how we would reduce these goals, or does that mean we take away the work that you're already doing, or is this, you know, we definitely need to come back and have a longer conversation about that and then decide at a committee level if there's some sort of shift or something that needs to happen. I'm really happy to hear that the strategic planning process is incorporating a lot of aspects of this. I would love to see the memo and be able to, you know, to kind of learn a little bit more about what that is because I haven't been part of those conversations. And I know that we have one member of the SCTF that is currently sitting on the committee. That person has been traveling and hasn't been able to report back on, you know, what's actually, and I don't believe you've actually had any meetings this past month. No, it won't be until the, just based on people's schedules after the new year. So all of that to say that we still, you know, this is just the very beginning stages, which is great because it gives us an opportunity to, you know, incorporate all of this together at the same time that we're also thinking about these. But, you know, I am very conscious of the fact that we've been talking about these specific goals for a while now. And I think for various members of the community, what I keep hearing is frustration because it feels like, you know, we're sort of moving in a certain direction and then we sort of stop ourselves. And so I think the community is looking for, you know, just, again, a process for us to hold ourselves accountable so that it's clear that the work that is actually taking place is, you know, having progress or is making progress for everyone. So. Can I just say that we did report on some of the work that we're doing. And when I talk about reducing the number, it's not that we're not going to work on these things. It's the number that we are diving deeper in our presentation to the community about. So we're still doing the work. We are just saying that it took from September until mid-November to get the data from someone else who's collecting it so that we can put it all together to come here to report. And so if you're looking for us to report on six goals, if it took two months, that's a whole another year, right? If you, two times six, 12 months, right? And then you have the summer. So all of this cannot I feel be reported as quickly as one year, one school year worth of time. So I'm saying if we limit the amount that you're asking us to report on to something that we can say we can do, and I think Mr. Nakajima mentioned you don't want us to say, yeah, we're going to do it and then it falls through the crack or we're just saying it to say it. I don't want to do that. When I say I'm going to be able to do four goals or three goals or two, then we know that we're going to come back and give it justice at this table, right? Before the audience, before the community. So that's what we're talking about. It's not saying that none are important or that we're not going to do it. We are, but the reporting is what we're asking for, the ability to report on two or three. So you're not allowed to do because we also need to close this on some committee topic. I'd love to I'd love to fall. I mean, I think A, this should be on the agenda. And then B, we should, if the chair of the SCTF is willing to do it, I think we should follow up outside of this meeting in preparation of the next meeting and try to continue to talk through what, first off, what's going to be discussed and presented in January too so that that's a productive conversation. Because I agree, I agree we've been at this long, I mean, what I'm, I think we've been at this long enough that it'd be great to have everyone feel like we've turned a corner in terms of the progress we're making, but also I'd sort of say that if that's what can it feel like from our side of the table or from the community's perspective. I'm also regularly hearing from the district staff leadership, professional leadership that they're doing a lot of this work already and maybe not feeling as hurt as they could be on the amount of work that's actually being done so there's a good log jam to break there on both sides, I think. Superintendent's update. Sure. It's a rather lengthy one and I know there's people waiting to present so I'll try to do some highlights especially since it's written out. So I think worth mentioning last week we had our December RIAC meeting RIAC is Racial Unbalanced Advisory Council. The council's gotten much larger this year with broader representation great, I was in Worcester and the agenda included discussion of equity positions at DESI so they've reorganized their leadership at DESI frankly in some ways that we were that aligned with the district's values and district's organization Dr. Rodriguez who is now a senior associate commissioner who now whose title and responsibilities is more connected to oversight of racial imbalance we discussed the Influence 100 project which DESI is putting on to increase the number of high-level district leaders by 100 in the next I believe 10 years with their timeline it's not launched yet but they're actively working on it and also reviewing DESI's superintendent rubric to ensure that equity elements are included in the rubric and we offered feedback to someone from there so it was a very productive meeting I think an important statement that isn't one below it but tomorrow December 12th the USDA plans to roll back some of the nutritional requirements that came out in 2010 so there was a lot of work that was done and particularly attributed to and done by Michelle Obama just to jog people's memory and the press release indicated that the standards for milk, whole grains and sodium content would be reduced and they're framing it as and I'm not trying to be ironic this is literally the wording is flexibility for districts that use how much whole grains sodium content and how much flavored milk they serve and so we've made the decision and Sasha Palmer strongly she made the decision I'm just able to report on it that we're going to hold ourselves to the higher standards we're not going to reduce the standards we have for nutrition because the federal government is planning to allow us to do it and Ms. Palmer feels very strongly on it and she's happy to come and tell you exactly how she feels sometime in the future about this but this is not flexibility we're looking for, it's not flexibility we're going to take advantage of but since it would probably be a big press release tomorrow we wanted to let people know ahead of time that's how we're going to respond to it speaking of the Human Resources presentation last month last week Ms. Ortiz who you met she gave a presentation called Equity in Food Services at the Farm to See School Conference in Lemonster talking about diversity in our hiring process another one of our staff members was in the audience for that and just the number of questions comments and how to do that how can we do that was very significant about diversifying the food service staff so kudos to Ms. Ortiz High School Principal Search so last week we sent a survey to all secondary staff and grade 8 through 7 families should say also 9 through 12 students to gather feedback on the desired qualities of the next permanent high school principal we also asked for volunteers to serve the screening committee to recommend finalists for the position Ms. Cunningham's organizing and facilitating the search so thank you Ms. Cunningham for your work and we've contracted with NezDec they can do a lot of recruitment they call people they send mailers to every principal in the region and they're assisting us with national advertising as well so we'll look to come back and get that really kicked off in a major way in January but we're sort of in the fine tuning that's right now tomorrow on the early release day all faculty and staff from the High School Summit Academy in the middle school and also some transfer office staff who weren't here last year for this will have professional development offered by Ed Mitnick he was the one if you were on the committee last year he led us the district leadership in professional development last February I believe and his work he works with MCAD and it's focused particularly on workplace harassment discrimination and what we know is that proactive training is critical once you've had an incident things are much more complicated for obvious reasons but if we can be ahead of that and what we find and what he finds is that the training itself is an intervention because people then have an ability to talk about things in a really healthy way and it really opens the door to conversations that need to occur and he's done similar work in the Holyoke Public Schools University, the town of Framingham and Boston Scientific we did invite some town of Amherstaff it's a large right, it's going to be 300 people so it's not like an extra couple people is going to make or break the presentation so I know there's some visitors from the town of Amherstaff who are also interested in coming so we invited them so we'll have a little bit of crossover between the town and the schools which is always a nice thing we have a STARS grant for vaping maybe we can come back to that as we talk about well-being a little later so I'm just conscious of time and the number of people here thank you all for those of you who are able to make it including the littlest one at the Fortown Meeting it's distracting it's very cute no, no, no, sorry compared to most, I'm looking for that distraction at most meetings I should be thanking you but it was a very productive I felt like very productive Fortown Meeting and just follow-up already that has started with that a little optimistic about the towns working together to come up with a solution so thanks to the leadership of the school committee on that last year we started we're doing it again visiting Leverett and Shootsbury Elementary Schools so that we talk with students and families I say this just because you're all welcome Shootsbury, Mr. Sullivan on board January 31st and his baking is worth the trip to Shootsbury if you do not live in Shootsbury that I can guarantee you and we'll also go to Leverett if some of you experienced his baking last year at regional school committee meetings and it's top notch that doesn't happen this year, does it? no, I'm not sure I put it on the spot I am those cookies were delicious but they were free of everything they weren't gluten, they didn't have calories Mr. Medina that comment is totally out of order your first comment was that they were delicious which means they weren't free from everything they had delicious taste and I think I'll mention just a couple more and I apologize to the length of this but I'm having a hard time skipping some of these Laramie Projects, Mr. Bechtel is here kudos to you unfortunately my family someone passed away it wasn't at the age of my children and the Laramie Project weren't a great match but I know many people including staff who were raved about their performance so we'll hear from you later I want to acknowledge you and your work for that we had a middle school student speak at a desi conference the video I think we had permission so we put on our district Facebook page it's worth watching she's a Vella student, she was talking about what Vella means to her really exciting that they hadn't included students before and they chose our students to present at this conference Mary Maple's wonderful faculty meetings, I think the last thing I'll say is that we've had a couple incidents at the high school from the last week or two where individuals have felt vulnerable and hurt and I want to acknowledge that I think everyone here has seen the letter that was shared with the community and our approach in all of those challenging situations one is to communicate frequently with those who feel harmed to understand where they're coming from and how they experience the pain to repair and restore relationships which sounds really easy and it's actually quite complex among the most complex work that we do is when someone has experienced harm how do we change that dynamic and how do we support alleged victims and alleged perpetrators or people who may have created harm because at the end of the day the thing we can do best is to create positive relationships out of challenging moments or also from an administrative lens we're looking to analyze what happens so that we can improve our system so that we, this is not code to make things sound happier we try to look at these learning opportunities it's not to minimize the pain that individuals feel but we want to use these opportunities for us to learn about how to do things better and how to prevent these situations from the past and how to improve our response to those situations and perhaps how to use them as an education moment both for everyone in our community and that's how we approach challenging situations that's how we approach the situations that we're experiencing and we continue that work of what's the right education and how do we not look at this as isolated situations, but what does it tell us about ourselves more generally and how do we improve organizationally so that people can feel safe, confident and comfortable going to school, being a staff member in our school and being a school community member so we take this incredibly seriously and I think I really want to compliment Dr. Gramacchi and her team at the high school for juggling many many things over the last couple days and their particular eye on keeping students at the forefront of our focus and everyone's health and well-being at the forefront has been in my opinion exemplary in responding to particularly challenging situations so I really want to acknowledge Dr. Gramacchi and her team for how this goes and the messaging matters and I don't mean the public messaging does matter but to be honest a great deal of focus has been on individuals who are connected to these things honor the humanity in the moment of all and then how do we successfully move forward in a productive way to improve our community and our work so that's all I think I'll say on that piece but I did want to acknowledge what's been happening at the high school and how we're planning to move forward Are there any questions from the comments from the school committee? Seeing none, thank you superintendent Thank you My only report would be that we have to follow up from the 410 meeting last week and the Mr. Mangano sent out a letter today I guess to this afternoon to we get a copy of the PowerPoint? You will tonight, yeah I was going to say, I realized I was going to say they sent a copy of the PowerPoint out to members of the 410s I was suddenly rousing, we didn't get it and you get home and we'll be there and what it also was doing was inviting a representative of each town to meet with Mr. Mangano, the superintendent and myself to try to talk through next steps on what the shared agreement might be on the regional assessment with obviously deep appreciation that everyone was on the record shooting for a level services budget for the year which is a great start to that process we can, if anyone wants to join the meeting we can't have quorum with the school committee but if anyone wants to join let us know and we'll let you know when the meeting comes up and obviously we'll listen to you on the agenda again and laugh to be and hopefully it'll be good news and progress to that you know the funny thing is I'm actually subdued compared to usual, usually I'm like a radio clown at these meetings telling me I'm actually keeping it together inadvertently, I wasn't even trying to be subdued with that, the radio clown is done for the moment and we're only like 6 minutes behind it like 5 or 6 minutes behind new ARH courses who wants to introduce so I'm going to introduce Dr. Gramacchi perhaps there's a number of staff members here to introduce the there's actually 3 courses can you remind me of something? are you anticipating taking an action tonight? I think if the committee is comfortable voting tonight that'd be great, if not then we can bring it back to the January 15th meeting I always want to start with, so what are we doing? absolutely, no I should have framed it that way so it's just really the 3, the Chinese language and culture course which Dr. Gramacchi will explain that so, thank you and we actually hope that you can vote tonight so that we can move forward with our program of studies and course planning so the 3, and I will say that in light of years of budget cuts I think it's really exciting to continue to come and advance elective courses and continue to constantly revisit our offerings to make sure that we're staying relevant and viable so we had originally had a Chinese language and culture class program for students where the curriculum was in development we've decided that we're going to keep it in that format for another year it seems to be working well and we're not at the place where I think we're ready to propose it as a course offering so we will not be presenting that tonight but know that it will still run next year in the high school as an alternative learning program course that does bear credit so tonight I want to introduce should I just start and have each person come up? of course so I'd like to introduce you to Simon Lutz the department head for social studies as well as Chris Gould one of our social studies teachers and they're going to propose an AP world history course would you have it on a do you have it you could email to well how do you share it yeah yeah Tim did he step away okay because he's logged in I mean the other thing is you could just log in as you that might be the easiest sorry is it distracting that's the one I should do before thank you Simon sorry I wasn't queued in for you yeah they get younger right yeah I don't have any I've got my tea I'm alright there you go thank you and I can if you want to advance the clicker's not working but I'll be your clicker so thank you everybody I'm Simon Lutz I'm the department head for social studies this is Chris Gould for a long time social studies teachers so we're going to propose to AP World History to our curriculum in social studies at the high school so I slide so I just want to you can just click through these I guess so I just want to first give you a quick run down or overview of what our scope and sequence looks like at the high school for those of you might not be familiar with our course offerings and what it looks like so we have three years of required social studies at the high school required social studies courses Global History 1 is our ninth grade course it's a world history course from roughly about 500 to 1700 it's very much sort of global global history but global in its approach and that it looks at sort of major developments in world civilization in the Americas, in Africa the Islamic world Southeast Asia and tries to do so through the lens of multiple perspectives tries to look at diverse voices in the curriculum sort of marginalized voices so our ninth grade course starts off the first of two years that students will take 9th through 11 in world history 10th grade they take a U.S. history course U.S. history course is sort of a U.S. 2 course it picks up where they left off in 8th grade which is roughly late 19th century after the civil war starts with reconstruction and goes through roughly Vietnam 1970s or so and then in 11th grade they do the second year of the two year sequence in world history in our global history 2 course and then finally in 12th grade there's a range of electives we have 8 elective offerings we're going to offer next year you can see the list of them there but we try to offer a range of electives in social sciences students can experience both topics they're interested as well as specific social science fields introduction to specific social science fields like anthropology and economics that they might be interested in as well so why I'll start with when for the AP global history and then we can talk about why quickly the when is going to be junior year so this will be an alternative to our global history 2 course curriculum for AP world history roughly lines up with what we have for global history 2 there's a little bit of overlap with our global history 1 course as well but it content wise provides a nice alternative to global history 2 because it lines up well with the content there so we'll offer this hopefully next year as an alternative for students to take for their third year of social studies credit and global history 2 happy to take questions that we can wait till we're done that makes a history course AP level we'll talk about that in just a moment we're going to get to the AP structure but the college board has a specific set of requirements that they curriculum that they suggest for these AP courses so the why is I think most significantly or most importantly is that we no longer have an AP course in social studies in the social studies department we've had one for a long long time but so much of the European history content was folded into our global history 1 in 2 courses they no longer made a lot of sense to offer a European history as our AP course an AP Europe as well as a number of other history electives that we had in place, African history Latin American history, Asian history were sort of that content was folded into this new 2 year sequence in 9th and 11th grade in global history 2 so we took those off the table so this would replace AP Europe as our AP offering we currently don't have one, I think we're the only department major academic department right now that doesn't have an AP offering this year if you could I think I have one more maybe blow it there it's a thank you so the other reason is I think that this is a good fit unlike Europe to some degree this is a history with AP world as a curriculum that really does sort of fit our real priority as an department of teaching history through multiple perspectives and diverse voices so unlike AP Europe which was a single looking at European history in this one place AP world has the requirement of the course, the course is built around looking at the experience of people around the world so Africa is there, Asia, the Americas and actually there's a specific requirement that no more of the course no more than 20% of the course can be European in content so I think it would really again compliment our global history two courses and alternative but also meet this important objective we have in teaching history through multiple voices and perspectives and stories a couple other reasons these are the top reasons but a few more I'm going to hand it over to Chris to talk a little bit about the course itself for students who are both motivated and interested we want to have that chance in the social in social studies and the social studies department to challenge themselves at the AP level and the AP course does offer a greater challenge and more scholarly approach to the study of the global history content it also, not that our other courses don't do this I think it's something we do really well but it does have this intense focus on the skills of the historian, how do historians work how do they research, how do they ask questions, develop evidence and place responses to those questions support them with the evidence that they found that's thoroughly infused in the AP content again consistent with our objectives as a department and then lastly the AP year of course which Chris talked for a long time has always been a hallmark of it has been the integration of music and art and literature as vehicles to examine the past as evidence art as history and we'd really like to use this as an opportunity in this course to infuse that same conspiracy to the AP course the AP world course but turn over to Chris now to talk a little bit about the AP world course itself okay and you can actually get the next slide yeah I'm going to keep running through thank you there you go so to be fair many of our courses do incorporate elements of music, art literature into the curriculum although the AP curriculum really allows and actually understands that you take those really more deeply into account when you're creating the course curriculum when you're thinking about how culture works and how it expresses itself in those genres so the world history course and its organizing principles is really predicated a lot on what the college board and the AP dictates for what has to be in one of those courses so first it is looking around an investigation of several selected themes which will be on a slide coming up here woven into some concepts that covers just four chronological periods of study at the end of the slide show I did a sort of an example of what that might look like over the course of the curriculum it's not a deep intellectual dive into the seas of history but should give you an idea of sort of how we hope to construct this thing between now and then as we sort of riff on the global history two course is now and adjust it for an AP curriculum and again the threads that are supposed to unify this are really designed to try to tap into the various unique aspects of the various global cultures that come into contact with each other how they interact and how they create a bigger picture of history next one, thanks Mike so these five themes were not something we developed but they are the AP directives for the five themes so first one is interactions between humans and the environment, second is development and interaction of cultures third, state building expansion and conflict that's actually the one I picked for my example coming up fourth is creation, expansion and interaction of economic systems and the fifth is development and transformation of social structures so those are really pretty representative of the cultural patterns that we preach and investigate in all of our history courses, we have I know I use a memory device that looks at Persia with a G at the end which is politics, economics, religion social structure, intellect which we look at in terms of education and the creation of new technologies arts, architecture, even athletics sometimes and then geography and how those things interact to form cultural identity next one please we have four time periods that the AP dictates for us so unit one they're calling regional and inter-regional interactions between 1200 and 1450 so depending on where you are it's going to have different names in Europe we're going to hit a renaissance in that period but in different continents it's going to have a different identity and a different personality unit two is global interactions 1450 to 1750 and again those first two units are time periods that are covered in the global one course in 9th grade and so Simon and I were talking a little bit more today we are proposing probably that those first two units would take up the minority of the course given that we try to look at some new approaches to the material that had already been there try to use some materials and sources that we hadn't before to give both a reminder of what had been encountered in 9th grade to deepen the study of what's there and then units three and four become sort of the flesh of what is the global two course and we feel like we really be able to do some profound study there industrialization and global integration how those two concepts interact and how they spread into all the continents and finally accelerating global change and realignments which brings us from the beginning of the 20th century to today so the course development of the current global two course and for this course also really looks at where we are how we got here and how to effect change so I'm anticipating that in this course particularly whenever a piece of writing is coming to me or a presentation is given that there will be some attention paid to how is this historical idea relevant to what's happening today we can kind of trace one of those five themes that we just looked at through time that's kind of what I tried to do on these next few slides which has some image because we're always trying to get the kids to do more image than text so here's an example I took the theme of state building expansion and conflict across the curriculum so if we started at the first time period that we're given we might be talking about something like Aztec supremacy in Central America the tribute they collect the threats of war to defeat their neighbors under control and so that would in Latin America at least we'd be able to see that theme even before Europeans arrived we often sort of think of those things wrongly I would say from a European perspective and how do those things matter to western cultures but I think in this way we'd be able to look at it in a much broader view next one and so then the arrival of the Europeans we could use a source like the accounts of the Spanish arrival by Spanish missionaries you could also use what's called the Codex Florentino which is a whole manuscript of particularly images that were primary sources from the time of the arrival of the Europeans there's some great artwork there of some of the indigenous culture that went on and some of the tragedies that occurred when those cultures interacted with each other so that might be a source we could use or a couple of them next one and then we could look at in the next century the Latin American revolutions and independence movements documented by Simone Boulevard who seems to be everywhere in Latin America in the early 19th century an example might be his address at the Congress of Angostura and I just happened to find this image of him and again I just wanted to sort of give some examples of primary source approaches, art approaches manuscript approaches that we could use in addition to some standard texts in looking at this stuff I think I've got one more maybe? No I've got two more so you know getting a little closer to the present we've got the nationalization of oil in Mexico in 1938 which becomes kind of a hallmark of Mexican identity and their sort of ability to thrust themselves forward and then the last one comes right up to today as Andres Obrador the president of Mexico celebrates the 80th anniversary of the expropriation of oil and so I really want us to be able to connect what's happening right now in the paper so that we can go to various current news sources put up somebody taking a selfie with the president of Mexico and ask questions like how did we get here do you have any questions? Mr. Obrador yeah so let's take this course I really love the idea of that global perspective the max 20% European history so it makes me think I don't think we do this anymore but it was either 5th or 6th grade in the Amherst school district we used to some teachers were using guns and steel so theories of history which really and when you look at history from this kind of perspective those sorts of ideas of why certain cultures came to why one was culturally and militarily dominant over the other those questions are begged and so does this course sort of probe any of those questions those theories of history and how do you think about guiding students through that kind of conversation? you're reminding me of a bunch of activities and thrusts of the APU of course that used to exist and there's a lot of historiography and historical theory that went on there that will lend themselves perfectly to this course the global two course already is looking at some of that material so we've brought in materials that look at if I go to the APURO course for a second so if we look at issues of moving from sort of social history issues so the APURO kids did a social history paper I'm inclined to think that we'll probably have some form of that in the global two course where they're really forced to look at what happens when you try to tell the stories of people who are not very well documented who tells that story how well do they tell it how much chance and risk are you willing to take which was a very difficult but very worthwhile paper for the APURO students of many years in a row so historical theory will be a very big part of it I think it's really important guns, germs and steel the stuff we've used in history courses and still use little excerpts of it today in both the global classes we use these in our we use historical, we use historians in their work in the classes that we teach but the AP curriculum requires that you integrate those kinds of sources and have students looking at interpretations of history and often competing interpretations of history and I think that would be a hallmark of what the course would be about A question I guess for the superintendent how do you arrange that a student really wants to take this interest in course to the course conflicts or once, twice, sometimes a year what do you do? I'm fortunate to be able to turn this question to Dr. Gramacchi who is much more knowledgeable about course schedules, I mean this has been part of her work in all seriousness this is part of her work historically at the high school has been trying and I'm using the word intentional, the verb intentionally, trying to resolve conflicts that emerge when students want to take courses that don't necessarily align perfectly in schedule so do you mind Dr. Gramacchi coming up to just be able to respond to that it's a very real question for our students in fact How do you decide how to make it available to a student who has a number of choices? I mean are there two avoid conflicts what do you do? Right so the most important thing we do is that we take those course requests early and we try to staff the appropriate number of sections so the big bad word in scheduling is singleton when there's only one at one time it's very difficult so as many students as we can get to request the courses the more sections and then it provides some relief in the scheduling that's the quick answer we actually anticipate two sections of this that's not for sure a thing two sections of somewhere between 20 and 25 students ballparking, something like that so that at least allows some flexibility depending on what schedules look like and then students if they've got a double conflict they have to make a decision depends on what it's conflicting with they have to decide what they want to do yes one thing I noticed was that and this is maybe just background information but I noticed that the AP College Board had revised the spectrum so deleting almost like a millennium history yeah so Google was a year and a half ago or so College Board did announce that they were taking the AP World History course which again in like history and went to the present so it was again several millennia of world history which to me seems overwhelming and I was when I saw partly I was gravitated towards more towards AP World as a choice when they chopped a whole bunch off there was some pushback by AP World History teachers who didn't like the revisions and their main objection which I do hear their main objection was that it eliminated this plenty of time where students got to understand and appreciate the development of civilizations, cultures around the world prior to European contact so they could start to see the sort of unique, rich achievements of world peoples before the Europeans start reaching out and the tragedy as Chris mentioned often of the contact between Europeans and the rest of the world so the AP the College Board heard that right and then sort of pushed it back a little bit further, sort of brought a little bit more of that history back in so I think it was going to start in like 50, I don't know their original proposal was to start in like 1500 or maybe later 1700 or something like that and they pushed it back to 1200 so that you could see the emergence of civilizations in the Americas like the Aztec, the Inca, the Maya you could look at the African civilizations, you could look at the achievements of the Islamic world again prior to the sort of Europeans make contact with these other civilizations so that's part of the context I think another important thing about this that we should that we're aware of and that you should be aware of is that the College Board says that they are going to publish some some more curricular information in January so especially some models of lots of models online we're going to have to put together if you approve the course is an AP syllabus they have lots of models online of the the syllabus for the old AP world history course that started way back when but they don't have any of that kind of information yet available for this revised version so to some degree I'm sort of guessing what those units are based on what I know the time period that they're suggesting we should have a little bit more information about exactly what this is going to look like exactly the the sort of units I don't anticipate they would change the themes and all they might break those units down a little bit more finally instead of four I anticipate there's probably five or six I don't know if that helps a little bit more of the context there what's going on the question was to what yet to what extent is it on you to develop the syllabus or how much you know how much guidance do you get from the AP call you know how much freedom or whatever do you have right when you're trying to the AP does give a lot of guidance but it is a very difficult thing to do to create this I mean we did a we did an AP on it three or four years ago and even just updating what was already there was quite a bit of work and probably it's really profitable work and that they want to keep the course current updated according to the newest educational thinking and that you're addressing you know historical ideas and themes in ways that are you know that seem authentic and things that were done 20 years ago may not seem authentic anymore so it's it's a fair bit of work I think the benefits we have are a global history two course that exists so we can certainly draw elements from that an AP zero course that has existed for a long time we can take some things from that but we'll certainly need to create some you know some different approaches to hit all the bases that the AP demands that we get on the way through so they they are pretty specific sort of checklist that they're looking for in the syllabus that ensures that you're integrating where appropriate scholarly sources that you're integrating primary sources that you're integrating when and where you're going to touch on those themes that we talked about within the content areas they I mean they also insist that you have excerpts from or a textbook that's published within the last I don't know what it is now five or six or ten years but you know so that's one reason that AP Euro course had to be updated because we had an older book and so we needed to update and make sure that we were really bringing our teaching of the history right up until the present time so that that relevant piece became a you know a really genuine part of what we were trying to do Mr. Ardonias, Mr. Spitzer and then Mr. Molina we probably need to move on unless somebody has a burning question so I also just want to second Mr. Demling's comment about wishing that I hadn't been able to take this class this is wonderful thank you for I'm glad to hear especially that there's all the different perspectives that are being brought into into this material I noticed that at the very end of the section that describes this course that the price of the suggested text is running from 111 to 199 per book I'm assuming why the big variation and where do we get the pricing for the total cost for the course so I the College Board publishes a list of acceptable AP texts requested copies of all of them so that we can start reviewing them and see which ones we like the price could very well be a factor also in which one we select I'm not exactly sure why there's such a wide range they do charge you more it seems the publishers charge you more for AP textbooks than they do for non AP textbooks and I think to some degree that's because these are college texts and they tend to charge more for college texts so what they have are sort of college world history textbooks that they call, that they stamp AP on and then charge high schools a lot more money for I haven't had a lot of time yet to sift through all of those materials and to see which ones really we think are the ones that are most feasible but obviously we'll be budget conscious in making a choice but I was just pricing them online and going to the publishers websites and seeing what their charge was it very well might be the case if you're ordering because the sales people will give you a bit of discount on the volume involved but I haven't quite gone that far in my research yet very briefly that we'd be looking to use this year's budget we've already looked in school committee votes that we would not you likely won't see this next month as a budget add for the FY20 for two reasons one is we've been conscious and we knew these courses were coming and we budgeted accordingly within this year's budget the second reason is the staff are going to need to have the textbooks before July 1st turns and rolls around to plan and then implement in the fall so I just it's not to take away from the conversation you just had but it might be a relevant next step question is is this something we're going to see in the budget and it may answer that Thank you so much so I took your history honors here I graduated in 1999 so it was a long time ago and I guess the reason I'm prefacing with that is that I just want to understand how we're using and this is a broader question not just for the social studies department but when I was a student here we had AP in the sciences and world languages but we didn't have it in social studies or English and instead we had an honors option and have we gotten rid of that honors track completely or why I guess and if not why do an AP course rather than create a kind of our own in-house honors well we haven't gotten rid of we haven't got rid of an honors option so and the AP has existed for a number of years yeah no I'm just saying like that's why I prefaced with 1999 but only that one course I mean it's been around since probably the mid 90s at least the AP Europe yeah okay well I opted because of the instructor because there are so many awesome options that we have but I'm not under the AP rubric those are trying to understand like what's the motivation for having AP versus kind of our in-house that's a good question so we do have we will have an honors option still for global history 2 so you'll be able to take if you choose to take for those who take global history 2 there will be an honors option within the classroom to get to take global history 2 for honors credit but for those students who are seeking a separate highly motivated seeking a separate option for the sort of global history 2 curriculum we did want to have this AP course available to people, to students I think you know to me I do think that AP and the way we will build it will represent an even greater level of challenge than our honors courses do they tend to ask students to deal in even greater depth of content and to some degree a faster pace than our honors options will ask of students so I think this is going to be a course that is for very motivated students who want to take a study of history at Amherst High School that represents the greatest sort of level of challenge I'd also say and this is the sort of, I'll be honest this is the practical piece of me speaking here too that I think that there are students in families in our community that are looking for AP courses to build their resumes for when they apply to college and that should be the only reason we do this this should be authentically an important course that really challenges students with a level of rigor and scholarship that they wouldn't necessarily get even in one of our honors courses but I do think that there's a practical element of this too I'd like to keep our program at the high school to allow a wide variety of families in our community and for some I think AP is part of that package and this is again all anecdotal from 20 years ago now but one of the nice things about having the honors in the same classroom is that I was there when they transitioned from having the honors be in a separate classroom where you take an honors course where the honors students may have separate tucks and write separate papers but they were all in the same classroom and they really diversified the classroom for me and so I'm wondering have we reached a point where now where our AP courses are as diverse as our student body or are we still seeing the same kind of lack of diversity for lack of a better word in the AP courses that would be the only thing that I could see is for not wanting to pursue and I'm just curious I'm not trying to be critical so when it was only AP Euro we saw some diversity but not as much as we wanted I'll be honest with that I think probably some of it was what the name of the course was and the material that was in there did not appeal even in terms of its topic to a more diverse population there were plenty of exceptions to that but in terms of mirroring what was going on the population of our school did not typically do that so the school, the world history element will have a much better chance of doing that as you I'm sure you know that our courses are not there's no prerequisites for these courses in terms of what grade you've gotten much to the dismay of my nephew who goes to school in New Jersey he can't believe you can just sign up for a course and take it and I will say that my experience in the last four or five years with the AP Euro course has been it's not a horror show it's not this thing that people see as this huge monster and they have to survive it like Marine boot camp or something once upon a time it had shades of that although most of the kids who came through came through with great feelings and affection for it but it's really trying to stay within the bounds of how much homework do we give how much reading do we give what can really be done in a student life that's reasonable and yet we are going to demand you know, some deep thinking some careful writing some advanced sources that we're looking at so it's a complicated answer to that I think the world history will give us a broader spectrum I think we really want to sell it to a diverse population of students and after that we'll have to get back to but I certainly see an Amherst Regional High School population that is much more diverse at all of its levels of achievement than I did ten years ago that's my take on it two points, the college board has to approve your family syllabus and then the cost of textbooks you have a smaller population large fixed cost higher fixed cost per book higher price thank you very much I assume we're taking it as a group not an individual that'd be my preference but at the will of the board thank you thank you there's any guidance you have superintendent I don't know based on what else we have going on I just want to make sure we're we're running late but I'm cool with it as long as everyone else is cool with it so I can introduce this is John Bechtold director of performing arts and theater and successful director of the show as I mentioned last week so thanks for being here Mr. Bechtold thanks thanks so much and thanks for the support I think it's wonderful the timing of the show just happened to coincide with a course proposal called new theater workshop which is devoted to making new works of theater for students of all stripes I don't know how much time has been spent looking over the proposal I tried to keep it brief so we could cut to objectives and several key points of rationale and then hopefully we'll dig out the rest so I'll try to front load this as best I can the core idea here is that while the high school continues to change and you've heard that already tonight that we want to create a curriculum that is reflective of our students' interests that is also preparing them for their future and is also reflecting the ideals of the school that we want and one of the things that we know in the performing arts department we hear deeply about is putting students through a rigorous experience in the creative process to become makers of things of experiences of collaborative efforts of ensemble work we believe these skill sets really matter beyond high school but also have this wonderful bonus I mean deeply personal endeavors that also bring out these skills so the commitment that you see students make is always a big part of this work we also in our department want to continue to foster experiences that are more project based and put students in the position of making work that they can call their own and a recent example of this the last time I was here for a course proposal was to talk about music production class that's now several years in and is turning out students that are making incredible things that then they put their name on and we want more work in our department that reflects that in addition we also want to make theater specifically something that feels more accessible to our students I think the common depictions of theater are pretty narrow and certainly so for our students so to offer them exposure to the really wide ranging and exciting world of theater making that's out there that is reflective of so much other work that's happening today feels incredibly rewarding so that's kind of the warm up lap to this as far as the skill sets and things that we hope for in the course we want a course where students 9 through 12 so they could take it walking in as a first year student or in their last semester of high school class where their job is to make original work in a variety of formats using a variety of conceptual branches and lenses to get there and create works that also have a large amount of their own value structures and interest intact doing work like the Laramie project is a great case in point we just saw approximately 60 students take this deep dive into some very difficult issues and some very challenging questions and that isn't even to talk about the theater making part of that yet and the sophistication and the dedication with which they're able to do that is a pretty good full example of the work that we'd like to take on the problem is that we don't get to offer that kind of experience to all of our students certainly it is limited to those that can make a commitment in the extracurricular day one of our hopes with this course is that we can bring students in in the curricular day that does a few things one doesn't make a different demand to meet outside of school secondly it gives them the opportunity to explore something safely there is something about having a class in this and I see this with my acting and stagecraft classes the students that venture in there they're not quite ready to walk out on a stage or into an audition room but want to see what it's all about want to see if something might be here for them and this course emphasizes that last but not least I think the other thing that's really exciting about this work is that theater can often feel like theater to that you need a huge budget to make this thing you need to buy the rights to so and so and so there's this very limited sense of what is possible in theater making this course is going to intentionally emphasize not big tech extravagances but a DIY kind of way of thinking and methodology that allows students to take a situation and a set of materials that they might never have thought of using outside of school and suddenly they're building some sort of exhibit in college or starting a protest that creates the work and uses theater making in street theater as a source for that or finding a way to convert as I've seen I've gone to two different colleges to see our alums take over their school libraries and convert those big labyrinthine spaces into an immersive theater piece and this is of their own creation and making I want to see more of that and I want to get more students into that and that's why this course proposal is here tonight great anything that you're done with so I really liked the history course that was presented I can't tell you how much I love this course I think I'm going to demand that there is school committee representation and to be allowed to be enrolled in this course so last spring the theater department put on this immersive I would call this like surreal improv which was amazing all student driven immersive audience member and then this past weekend I had the opportunity to see the Laramie project without exaggeration the Laramie project was the most powerful student performance I've ever had the opportunity to experience it was it was unbelievable how these students adopted these roles the members of Laramie who were being interviewed a couple of years after the killing of Matthew Shepard adopting these roles in these small spaces with the audience and you'd move from space to space and then you'd be there in the emergency room when he arrived there you'd be there at the press conference and then at the funeral and the trial and then it was this build and all throughout the images of the fence and the evocative media coverage it was so powerful I'm getting a little choked up about it and then to I was talking to Mr. Sullivan about it a little later it was only sort of after this intense experience that you wanted everybody on the planet to feel it's like when you I remember the first time that I saw a documentary on the Holocaust and I was very young I walked out of it thinking every human being needs to experience this it was like that and then to realize that these are high school kids these are high school kids that were delivering that experience it was incredible so take that and then have Bing Bong just shows me the incredible dynamic range of what has already been able to be accomplished so to take that potential of the students that are already creating this and the staff that are already so dedicated supporting that to be able to broaden that accessibility to empower students with that level of creative expression is just such an amazing idea so thank you for bringing this idea forward and your continued initiative to bring that to more students well there's a counter thank you here of course too a lot of this work and research that went into this proposal is a result of my spatical last year so thank you in turn Mr. Mayor just a clarification the students didn't write the layer of the project did they no they did not what they did is took a play that was designed for 10 actors on a bare stage and converted into a play for 40 actors so they did somewhat right absolutely the adaptation was a critical part of that work how does I'm curious by the way of course the students work is impressive I was blowing past that of course it's very impressive so how does this fit with sort of like a program of study or what's the concept how this fits with what a student might experience either through after schools activity but also within the regular coursework that's a great question because it brings to bear the weird place that theater exists in the school which is in this model that is kind of a hybrid is both curricular and extracurricular and those two dovetail with each other so all the major productions that we do in six or seven a year are all extracurricular productions that is the time and resources spent are all out of school and a course like this is curricular during the day the overlap is a few different things one it is sometimes these courses and I would speak to any of the theater courses because I could see evidence there which is why I feel like I can be supportive in what I would speak to here that it serves as a bridge into those productions for students that would never otherwise find their way there so that's an important first factor because those are also meant to be ends to themselves especially a course like this they're meant to leave with a discrete set of skills so this could very much be for the student that really has no fundamental interest in theater as an art form but understands that the tools that they're being given can be used to really build something that might vaguely be called theater but has so much practical application beyond so I want to draw students that don't see themselves as theater kids and that's much easier in a curricular format that isn't an extracurricular format where you get to preach the choir a little bit more, or at least roping kids that you only get to a certain level with so I think those are two key things and I think the third key thing is that we get to make a statement as a school about the kind of work that we value when we put a course like this into our curriculum and that is heard by students and it's heard by our community that there is a way of taking something that could otherwise sound like just art for art's sake and realize that we are sending out students that are prepared to go to a process not just to analyze the world but to synthesize things and respond to it and a course like this can offer that and is there another question of these when I think it's wonderful to have students generating their own material, their own experiences it then naturally raises the question for me about how that changes their experience and relates to written material that's out there makes like source work that would be within typically within an English department or something where they're reading it almost as literature but in fact it really isn't, it's actually theater I mean Shakespeare is the obvious one there's lots of it absolutely and it is exciting because when you get involved as a creator in something your research or your investment in those kinds of materials has both a very practical application you need to understand it so you can use it formally but you also develop this personal attachment to it and I can point to the Laramie project we received a raft of materials from the Matthew Shepard Foundation primary sources of all shapes and sizes from transcripts to letters to news reports to videos to audio recordings to letters to the family and we got to pick and sort through those and if anyone was just standing back and looking with an educator's lens they would have loved to have called that their classroom here we were just trying to get some work done anything else there is something you know that was for about 10 students 15 how many would be in this class well the average class size for acting or stage craft is in the low 20 so I would suspect to be around there there's certainly no limit in terms of tech or physical materials to hold them back to something like computer keyboards or something yeah just a quick question I mean I find all this absolutely fascinating and I have to ask if there does this become an additive course or is this something that pushes something else out of the way and if so what might that be no that's a great question to ask my suspicion is that it's not an additive course the most likely scenario is that I teach multiple sections of acting one for instance I'd say the most like end of stage craft probably one of those sections is pushed aside while we make room for this question thank you last but not least math department chair AP statistics this is one of the most important subjects like anywhere one of the most important skills to have I totally agree so Jane you can take it away so we have been planning this for a really long time sorry this is like the math department I should say years ago we implemented statistics 2 which made our statistics course a full year course because we in our old curriculum we didn't have any statistics so we knew how important it was and we wanted to make sure students had access to it it wasn't a perfect model but it at least gave students an avenue to get some statistics education before they went to college so when we were doing that we were looking forward to after we integrated statistics and probability into our curriculum to move to the AP stats course so we're ready so this is not an add on it is taking our honors statistics one and two and changing it into an AP course the students are ready for it they're right now almost doing everything in the AP course so I think it's important that we give it that label and it's up to them whether they want to take the exam or not at the end and skip over a course in college so we also have we want to keep our college prep course in statistics because those students also should have access to it but they don't always move as quickly through the curriculum they're 11th and 12th graders so math education at that juncture has kind of students are at many many different levels so that's why we want to offer two different courses so there would be slight adjustments to our current course that we have now I looked at the syllabus that is on the college board that I know Mr. Lutz referred to and we saw that we'd have to make some minor changes I'm working also with someone who's currently on our staff who taught AP statistics elsewhere and she's currently teaching the honors and college prep statistics course right now so she's like they're ready so we wouldn't be pulling kids from necessarily other courses because they're already taking honors so I don't feel like that's an issue access it increases access for a student to have a math AP course because right now we currently offer AP BC calculus and AP AB calculus but not every student in high school gets prepared to take a calculus course in high school so what this would allow students who are in our college prep track after their junior year if they reached integrated for then their senior year they could have access to the AP statistics course so it would open that up for our students just kind of stop here for a sec are there questions it's not as fascinating I'm really sorry the word drama I should have brought graphs for you I have to say I actually this is another class that I wish I had been able to take when I was in high school because when I found myself in college casting about trying to figure out as a liberal arts major what math could speak to me and provide both the requirements and help me with my work statistics was where I ended up and I had no basis for it and so it's just a shortcoming of my education but I do really appreciate all the work that's gone into this I think it's absolutely spectacular that's why I have no questions about this because I think it makes perfect sense and fully support this idea I fell in love with the statistics in college myself and carried it forward to grad school when I was little so it was sincerely meant although I was trying to counterbalance the excitement around academic theater thank you for doing that so I have a similar reaction to Sir Johnny's which is this is straightforward and I think it really actually hits a need right now in careers in the workplace not to get too analytical about what jobs require these days but this is a very hot skill it's a very hot topic there's a lot of data in the world and human beings are trying to figure out what to do with it and how to collect it and analyze it in a professional rigorous way is good and I like how you're phrasing elevating this work that students are already doing at this level of rigor with the honors stats one and two to the AP level this isn't just if you can't handle calculus do stats it's an AP level course that's as valuable going forward with as many career paths in preparation as calculus I really like the framing of it thank you for saying that I appreciate it as somebody at some level statistics myself I know calculus is the basis for a lot of this but this would be something that you'd either take calculus calculus is one of your prerequisites no this is a non-calculus this is sort of an introductory course so that when engineers go to college they have some basis in probability and statistics so they can access calculus could students take calculus and potentially take statistics or would they have to choose between one or the other it's all about schedules potentially absolutely we have some students right now who since we have a semester course who take a semester of statistics and then calculus or something like that you can't have the AP but I haven't run this by my boss yet so what we were thinking since we only making small tweaks what we'd like to keep is the option of the stats one or just for half for the first half of the year so that if a student did want to do that they could access it so I just want to thank you and I just want to say the thing that sort of binds the three courses together because they're in different disciplines is that all three of the departments have been talking about these courses for quite some time and that process to think through and write course proposals really starts in the spring of last year that people are at and beyond and what I appreciate is that it's providing rigorous instruction with the focus on access and diversity and that's true in all three of the courses so when I think of common threads despite the distinct areas or disciplines I think that's offering new and exciting choices for our high school students for me the common thread that's the most important that we want to give our students broad access that it's diversifying our course catalog we know these seats will be filled and we know the students will do high quality learning that's going to advance them and whatever they choose to do beyond so really thank all three of them and it's not crowding out other courses as we've described and you have the money to pay for it without looking for additional budget ads for this year I thought I'd just finish the clincher that's right the clincher is for you there there are questions from the committee if there is an appetite for an motion to approve the three courses as presented or any subset thereof I would entertain the motion Mr. Nant? move that we approve three courses as presented is there a second for that? second any further debate or discussion on the motion? seeing none all those in favor of the motion please signify by raising your hand it carries unanimously with one absent today so it's 8-0 thank you very much appreciate it welcome, thank you see those were worth the wait would I be personally my luck to ask for a four-minute break? I don't know what do you guys think? we're okay? then you get it it's a motion to approve the enemies if I can sign let's lay it out open meeting law, right? the potato chip piece wasn't there a federal court that declared that secret recordings are now legal both police as well as public I voted you an email about that this afternoon but it's not quite it's implications for K-12 are a little bigger than it is for police just assuming for school committees though well, given that it's more about the venue actually all right, we're here there's another way of staying for back back in our regularly appointed meeting next on the agenda is the math and curriculum update welcome welcome to the table thank you so I'll just do a brief introduction the topic is that we talked at previous meetings we wanted to share a curriculum update as well as an update on the math review process and how that was going knowing that we'll come back and they'll share a timeline that this will be, we're coming back again, this will still be cold and wintery when that happens but we didn't want to wait until we had the math review because it was a topic of interest and we wanted to share the work that started some of the history where we are now and where we hope to move to so I'll turn it over to Tim to start us off all right, thank you and thank you for having us tonight as Dr. Morris said the idea is to give you sort of an update bring everybody up to speed on specifically the high school math program and the plan right now is for the consultant who's reviewing grades 6 through 12 to come to your meeting in February, I think it's February 12 so no snow day on February 12, please and and that'll be a much more in-depth discussion so so the Mr. Sheen, would you mind reminding just for people that may be watching what this consultant is actually supposed to do I actually have that in here a little bit later so I'll come back around to that if that's okay as long as we have some sort of summary all right so the sort of agenda for the next few minutes is to go back over the timeline because many if not all of you have joined the school committee since the time that the high school adopted the IMP math program Dr. Gromacki will go over some of the data Ms. Moody will talk about some student math survey that was done by the district in June and the result of that and then I'll circle back around with some information about the math program review and the consultant's work and our next steps so in terms of timeline the high school math department began looking at the curriculum back around 2013 and prior to that time the math standards had some change had come about both from the national professional organizations as well as the state and there was a greater emphasis on math practices and so the department used as their core question which math curriculum best captures and supports the math practice and content standards and you can see up there on the timeline there was professional development around the revised standards and there was a pretty intensive textbook selection process that the department designed and then went through and the faculty in the math department worked with professional development staff and textbook sales people engaged in a review process in which they rated several textbooks and also made them available to the public for review and comment and so this was quite a lengthy process certainly before my time in this role I've been told since then and I just included on the next slide some data it's a little bit hard to see because of the blue background I apologize for that around the analysis of the four main textbooks that the department looked at and so the table on the left was rating them as far as their rigor and the table on the right was rating them as far as their responsiveness standards for mathematical practice and the four programs in the blue bars were the core plus program that lime green was college prep math the red orange was the center for math education project and purple was the interactive math program or IMP which you can see came out the highest ratings on both of those measures and the department was considering what both changes to the SATs so in terms of college preparation and also what employers are looking at as far as work place preparation and so things that were newer to math than when most of us were in school things like critical thinking and problem solving communication both written and oral collaboration and teamwork modeling looking for and making use of structures and making sense of complex problem solving and perseverance so it probably sounds very different than what all of you did in high school math and then the timeline subsequent to that was the sort of a structured implementation of the IMP math program and so this is a reminder of the current math courses at Amherst regional high school and AP statistics and we erased the word proposed thanks to you it's now an approved course the ones where you see slashes like integrated 2H3H4H it's the integrated 2 and the honors version of that course we forgot to put one course on there I apologize it's integrated 5 and it's CP so it sort of extends what the integrated 4 would do into the 5th year quite alright and of course the high school program of studies which is on the high school's website you can read in-depth descriptions of each of those courses and then in terms of ongoing work there's a math working group that was formed almost 2 years ago now and that's actually a K-12 group along with parent representation and that group was tasked specifically with looking at access to mathematics courses and again that's K-12 so are all students able to access mathematics courses including higher level ones and what kinds of supports are in place what kind of intervention is in place to support student learning vertical alignment so do we have a clear path from kindergarten to high school graduation in terms of learning math and the answer to that one is we have work to do on that and that's one of the things that we're hoping the consultant will give us some guidance on we have some ideas but it will also be helpful to get an outside set of eyes and professional development for teachers and so the math working group considered all of those things and we've been implementing a good deal of professional development on the elementary side but a few of our middle and high school teachers have also participated in that it's known as AVMR which is a trademark name advantage math recovery and it's something that we've invested a lot of time in over the last couple years and interestingly enough a lot of neighboring school districts have now jumped on to that so which has really been the teachers who've gone through that training have raved about how it's changed their thinking about how children learn math, how students learn math how they assess math how they make determinations about how to proceed from where students are just very briefly for those of you who are in the Amherst school committee about a year and a half ago, maybe a year ago there was a presentation by the three elementary math coaches around AVMR and that has started at the elementary level but it's certainly become a more K-12 professional development and focused just to jog some people's memories I thought it was wicked cool it is so we actually have three new cohorts of teachers that have just started the training and the other one will start next week and I'm joining in on the third cohort to take that training because it's something that's becoming more universal so I decided that I'd like to jump in and get the training as well so at this point I'm going to hand it over to Dr. Gromacki to talk about some recent trends in high school math achievement yeah so there's been some data that has been out there around MCAS and SATs and PSATs so we thought it was important for us to really make sure that we looked at the data and felt like we could present that so the first graph here is the MCAS data from 2013 to 2018 you will see that there's a dip in MCAS in 2017 and just because of all these years so the first cohort of all IMP students would have taken MCAS in 2017 and then you see in 2018 it actually goes up to 88 so 86, 83, 88 and then the number of needs improvement and failing is at 13 which actually again went down as you would expect so we've received a lot of questions about SAT scores and kind of how things are trending so what we did is we put the data up here but it's really important to note and I worked closely with the college counselor around this data is that the test changed in 2016 and so it's very hard to compare the two scores but nonetheless we do have the three years of data and so you'll see that the ARHS average compared to the state average there is a smaller gap in some places but what we're not seeing is some kind of plummeting scores or scores that are dramatically decreasing and at the same time I don't think we're comfortable saying that this is the best metric to use to evaluate our math program but the fact that people are talking about this data we thought that we would bring it to you because we had some clarity well there was a letter to the committee so the next set is with the concordance table so this is an attempt to try to convert the scores from the new test and the old test to try and have some kind of consistency so that you can see the change we just cautioned that this shouldn't be used for longitudinal data or research but this is an effort to try and show the trend in the pattern because the test is different and the scores are different I know Myra Ross the college counselor reminded us that in 2015 the top score was 760 it was an 800 and so this is an attempt to see what it would look like if you had the same scores across all six years so the ACT I actually would have thought more students took the ACT today I feel like we get a lot of requests for ACT and in 2013 we had 112 students take the ACT and in 2018 we only had 68 so that's just not I wouldn't have predicted that we also know that a lot of colleges are going test optional and so Myra's been talking to students a lot the college counselor Miss Ross she's been talking a lot about the fact that a lot of colleges aren't using that we don't still encourage our students to take them and so forth but more and more colleges each year are going test optional so for the ACT again we tried to look over the past six years to determine if we're seeing huge variances and the last one there's also been some talk about the PSAT there's something about the cloud and how they're managing their data so we did not have access to state data for the PSAT but our scores just came in for 2018 so we actually took the 178 students who took it and then we just averaged that and got the mean so that's the 561 so again if you're only looking at years 2016 and 17 there definitely was a decline I don't know that we can say exactly what why or what Myra also because she's been here for many many years said that it's not uncommon that if you actually look over the past 15 years there are definitely places where you see dips some classes are stronger than others there's just a lot of variables so if you're only looking at 16, 17 you could start to be concerned that there is a dip but again this is PSAT these are the 11th grade scores and and then we also have our 10th grade PSAT scores too where we're not yet seeing any kind of large it's looking very similar to this but for 10th grade we have to remember that they actually don't have access to a lot of the math yet that they will have by 11th grade so these are the scores as reported and Tim who did these slides sourced each data point just back so that we know where those scores came from Mr. Renato are you looking for metrics to measure the success of any program what would those metrics be? that's why we had an outside consultant come in so what we wanted to is we really wanted the student feedback piece because what we heard in January when we had the coffee with the families was talk to the students listen to their experience and that's that qualitative data piece that we can't ignore and I know that Ms. Moodiel speak to that so we had over 550 responses where students some of them wrote pages about their experience so I think that's important and we have the scores how the students are doing in the courses and again I don't think we're putting this up here to advocate one way or the other we're just trying to say this is the data that we have Mr. Donis? so thank you for this I think it's really helpful and informative one comment that I think you just made before we were looking at the SAT 2013 to 2018 chart you mentioned the gap is decreasing between the high school and the state level and I just looking at the numbers a little more closely it looks like the state numbers are going up which is great right shows some sort of upward movement on that but our numbers are also increasing so I guess there's been the state appears to be improving at least from this book this chart is showing I don't know if that's accurate and perhaps accelerating I don't know what's happening across the state again I think it's fantastic but our numbers are still increasing is that correct because it looks here like they're still steady growth from 2013 to 2018 we started at 585 and now we're at 620 in the SAT the SAT adds page 5 of this handout and SAT is really hard because it's not a required test and so I thought you might ask about participation so for example the PSAT we started offering in the high school during the school day which is different than the way it used to be offered which was on Saturday you had to get here early in the morning on a Saturday so we now have 77% last year it was 78% of the students actually taking it where in 2013 and we were a much larger school but we only had 67% of the students taking it so we actually increased participation which again one could say is another variable so yeah thank you for this just because like you mentioned there is some data out there with people drawing different conclusions so when you've poured over this data all the different ways to look at and present MCAS and PSATs and SATs there's different ways that you can say present a data or a trend if you want to show a line going up or down you're only going to show the advanced you're only going to show advanced and proficient or you're only going to show for these three years so all that being said knowing that this is a only one and not the biggest and most important part of the math evaluation picture is there anything at all in any of those data sets where you looked at and said that is maybe something that is concerning to you I just kind of want to get your sense of time with the data that we have if there's anything that concerned you from that kind of standpoint we did actually look at the MCAS scores we put up there we grouped in the way that they're typically looked at by school districts and so we grouped the advanced and the proficient together and the needs improvement and failing together because that's typically how school districts look at it but I did break them down in four separate groups and we did in fact find that the advanced group has declined a little bit and I can show you all this up just in case that question came up so you can get it on the screen now I was not a plant I'll show you I can try to go about it so you can speak to it and so you can see the table on the left side you can see what happens there with the advanced and it does decline and the proficient starts to go up which does bring about some questions and it makes we want to drill down a little bit further so how many students are going from advanced to proficient but with that provision going up how many students are going from needs improvement to proficient what are the sort of questions there and there could be a lot of other questions are we at this point serving our students who sort of represent that middle range better than we did in the past at the expense of some of the students who are at the advanced range I think that's an important question and there's certainly others and to sort of get down that far you have to sort of go to the student level of the data and work with the high school faculty who know the students better to say which students are falling into these categories just because part of my job is I do a lot of data analysis so one thing I think is also important when trying to interpret the story here is that a data trend when you're looking at two data points and you're trying to interpolate a trend the human mind has such a need to draw a meaning in conclusion we want to classify especially a line it's none I can talk about data as fit theory all day but it wants to draw a conclusion and so I think in this case particularly when we're dealing with small number of variances and we're talking about less than 20 students going not that that's not important is the difference between a decline and a flat line over two data points so they can be good because it can draw your attention into things that you might want to drill down with further like what's the story or what that is but in terms of drawing a broad conclusion I think the most challenging part about interpreting data is not prematurely drawing the conclusion and yet honoring that signal and then using that signal for further analysis you know one of the interesting things is you go back to 2011 and it looks very similar can I have something for you here just to go to your point apparently your conclusions are a little I just want to say how this a little bit more because when we get back the MCAS data they specifically tell us which questions that the students struggled on so that's interesting data for us because we can look at that and then we can make adjustments if we feel like it's necessary or emphasize something to that so that I feel like that helps us a lot let's move it along I was also looking at doesn't find that really interesting this improvement line appears to have gone down a little bit as well you didn't mention that one as a concern and so I'm wondering is it because you I don't know what that tells you I think it's one of those questions that going back to the student level is it did those students move to the proficient level or did some of them move to the failing level which would be a great concern if they're moving from needs improvement up to proficient and we're doing what we're supposed to be doing so I think it raises more questions than answers at this point to consider it's a very brief point but it's relevant to that question which is that one of the things that I also looked at was the student growth index so it looks at like the 8th grade students who took the math and MCAS in 8th grade how they do in their 10th grade and did they make above average progress in the middle range and so for the most recent year there were slightly above the mean for growth from 8th grade to 10th grade because I think the nice thing and I know there's a lot of critiques of that data source but it looks at the individual student level and what happened in those two years so it sort of tries to be a proxy for that question of well these lines change but when there's actually individual kids behind them and what was that growth trajectory from 8th to 10th grade so it's just another factor and there's more charts you could do that you could ever want but it's just that's one that I use because I think it answers that that's actually really critical because when you're talking about this the challenges the language you use can obscure the fact of are you talking about the same students progress over time and what's the impact trajectory versus are there different cohorts moving through time and then what happens to those different cohorts and if they do I mean just there are a lot of things that could happen of students that could problematize their experience when you start talking about different cohorts of students I think it even gets more complex just trying to explain what's really going on why is this occurring that's a good question and I assume that it is but I know you did the student survey and as part of this review process is teacher feedback being taken into like how was that so maybe it makes sense if Ms. Moody talks about the student survey that the high school did and then I can sort of bring in the teacher piece with what the consultant is doing too if that's alright just one more thing about the MCAS this year they're taking the new test so there'll be differences in the data there I'm sure I'm not sure if there was differences in the middle school data but one thing that is not helpful is when all of the testing organizations decide to change all of their tests on us and it like puts an axe right through the longitudinal data and we've encountered that already below the high school level and now it's coming for high school as the state changes over to the next generation MCAS so it's a conundrum it's one that everyone in Massachusetts is going to share though that's right Mr. Minino and then Ms. Vagal will the scoring change or just the context? both so my question is sort of retching back a little bit back to the courses I'm not very familiar at all with the math curriculum at the high school so can you help me understand how somebody progresses through the IMP how do they get to take calculus for 40 years of IMP sure so the state standards pushed a lot of the algebra one down into 8th grade so when students enter most students from the 8th grade enter the 9th grade in year two not year one we have a small cohort of students that enter in year one which is using the same concepts but looking at them in a different ways to strengthen those students so if you're an integrated two honors in your 9th grade, 10th grade 3 honors, 4 honors is your junior and then your senior year would be calculus or statistics the CP goes out through year 5 which by the end of year 5 you've completed essentially through precalculus and so then you'd be ready to take that oh college prep so we have two tracks that go through our school we also have accelerated students which happens at different levels so there is a course that's offered halfway through the 7th grade year through the 8th grade year which is compatible to our integrated two honors so we do have some students who come in in the 9th grade and they take integrated 3 honors, then 10th grade 4 honors junior year calculus, AP calculus and then they usually go to Amherst college to take multivariable calculus and then we have acceleration here also at the high school when they do a summer portfolio of work to advance to the next level course so a lot of stuff going on what meeting management is no I just very brief comment, it's worth noting how rare that is that our seniors have the opportunity to take multivariables not just that they have the opportunity but to take it at Amherst college obviously nationally right now so that's quite the opportunity for a public school to make that thank you so sorry so last year there was a parent meeting here and parents really wanted us to ask how they were feeling and so we wanted to collect data around their experience and we wanted to use that data to improve our implementation so with any good implementation you really try to bring in as much of the community as possible so teachers administrators math educators math instructors in a lot of cases and then the families who want to bring in and get their ideas so Mr. Jackson worked with a UMass researcher and together they collaborated and put together the survey we didn't get the survey results until the beginning of this year just because the lateness of when the survey happened so we were we're really looking to inform our work moving forward we have done a lot of work, pre-work before our implementation we had a lot of professional development throughout the implementation but we knew we needed our next steps happening so we wanted it to inform our curriculum and instructional practices so the following next slides are excerpts from Mr. Jackson's letter home and I don't know if that's available does everybody remember does everybody okay okay good okay so there are some themes that emerge from them and so one of them was students felt like there wasn't enough support in the inquiry process so we've been working in our department meetings around this issue we haven't had that much time so in January we are planning a large professional development during our early release time in our department to work on this specifically and we will continue to do that throughout the year yep that's what I'm saying about that another theme that came up are these problems of the week so in middle school they have problems of the week they're a little bit more prescriptive than ours so what we're trying to do is longitudinally develop problem solving skills so our problems of the week are a little bit more open-ended which is uncomfortable right you got to figure out a way to get in it and um students didn't really see the importance of them so what we're trying to do is emphasize the importance talk about because there are pieces of mathematics, mathematical content that are taught in those problems of the week so that's another piece of it and then how we're developing their problem solving skills throughout how to make sense of the problem how to get into it, look for patterns make some sort of generalization and then finally the ultimate is proving that your solution is the correct solution within the situation so they work a lot on proof and justification in the problems of the week how do these problem solving skills assessed in standardized exams so the new SATs and MCAS have incorporated the practice standards and one of them is the problem solving skills so we've always done this but I think we've made more of an effort to really start them in class students get traction on them they support, they get support on them so I walked by a classroom today and there must have been 40 kids in that one classroom after school today having a pow party we call them pow parties and we bring in snacks and kids work together they collaborate, they use the board, they talk about them so trying to create a little more excitement around them and so another piece that came up was students wanted more practice so and also they weren't, they were hearing oh we might not be ready for the standardized test so we wanted to alleviate that stress but we also know that mixed practice is a great idea for learning so keep bringing back past topics and not saying oh today we're going to revisit Pythagorean Theorem it's like here's three problems see if you can remember and we'll support you through them because that's how standardized tests happen just like here's a problem remember your stuff and you gotta apply it so we decided to make sure that we did this through SAT questions PSAT questions and MCAS questions so sometimes we pick MCAS questions directly related to the topic so they can clearly see oh the curriculum is matching the state standard and it makes sense and other times we mix it up so they are getting the past practice in them so we'll continue that and we'll get better at it and that's not the only thing we use for additional practice problems you know teaching is very organic so when something comes up in your class oh those kids need some more practice on that you know we do make sure that we adhere to that and do something for that so the other pieces were kind of around the textbook like oh they didn't you know the objectives aren't right there there aren't a lot of example problems so we've always had note templates so we've just made more of them and we keep getting better at them and that's for students to have a set of notes in their notebook they're colored the color is the color of the book so they stand out in their notebook we also we've done it for a while but we again we keep referring back to them the learning target so at the beginning of each unit we give them a sheet with the learning targets on it and then we keep referring to them throughout their unit so if we've done a section of inquiry learning we've done the notes we can say now how do you feel about that learning target and they can kind of self assess on that we've also test they felt like they wanted some more review before our end of unit tests so we've made sure that we've developed more thorough end of unit reviews and practice problems for them and then make sure that these people have access to these so we try to make sure they're on our google classroom sites so I think I have one more yep they kind of look the same yep that's fine so just how we're implementing the PSAT SAT MCAS questions we either do it as class worker homework we make sure that we highlight the content in the IMP so students can see the relationship between what they're learning and what's on the standardized tests we analyze and talk about them in class so it's not like just doing for homework here's the answers good luck we go over them in class to make sure they understand them it may vary from teacher to teacher but that's generally our construct for those types of things and yep student I have a general question about how we help kids transition once they're done with IMP 4 and then they either go to XOB calculus or assistance making that transition one of the themes we're hearing from some of this feedback is anxiety or concern about preparedness for the next step and so I really like the approach overall about the long term approach to continuous improvement so I'm curious about what we might be doing to help students this year because when I think about the spring 18 survey one thing it doesn't catch is that cohort that had just finished up IMP 4 and that is right now in whatever course I find this an interesting problem that we conjure a lot of this type on school committee where we get anecdotal feedback and evidence from email or from talking with parents and I have two kids who have gone through the high school two kids are currently in the high school they wish they had gone through that who interface with IMP at different points I remember working with Ian Stith six years ago at the very beginning of math flex and we were talking about this cohort that's now arrived at senior year and so as we're doing this long term planning we're sort of wondering about those kind of supports so I'm teaching calculus this year so I have some of those students and a lot of it is around anxiety so I've taught calculus before IMP so those students also had anxiety some of it is just a different type of anxiety so we used to give a summer assignment where it was like jam packed go back learn all these skills be ready for calculus and they'd come in and they'd be given a quiz and then they would completely bomb it and it would not be a good situation so that's happened before so we're well aware of that what we've done is made adjustments to our year four for the next cohort so when they come it's not so much that we need to teach new stuff it's just making sure it's fresh in their mind for when they transition into calculus so the cohort that we're working with right now we're just making sure that we teachers are after school we are the AP college board always suggests that instead of reviewing everything up front even though every calculus textbook or a lot of them have the review up front the first chapter what they really recommend is review as things come up so we're really trying to make sure that we're doing that and I know we can get better at that so that's sort of where we're at right now with the transition for those students so I've just said a lot to that so I appreciate you asking the hard questions with this I think what I'm hearing is a willingness to understand where things might be going wrong and not just assuming that it's all going to be hunky dory and flowers and unicorns I do wonder if maybe you already have access to this or maybe we do it together is just to reach out to other communities and other districts that have already done IMP maybe for longer and to see if there is you know if anyone has been tracking progress for students who are going into college and what that looks like coming back not that I think that is a perfect translation to what would happen here in Amherst or at our region but I do think that might be some more information or more context anyway because you know I think that all of that can also help our learning right and just to understand if there are when this consultant comes back in the early spring or late winter and provides us with more you know a point of input I guess for us to use and corrections that we can make it'd be great to be able to compare that to other places that have also been doing similar kinds of work right and to understand you know are we sort of an outlier are we kind of in the middle or are we falling behind right and I think that this is just a practice generally speaking right for all sorts of educational practice but especially with something like this where there is maybe a crisis of confidence potentially or you know people are feeling really insecure students families and the community it might be helpful to hear other you know sort of where we are to attack on a related question would be what was what is or what was the peer learning that went into adopting this curriculum what was it in other words we're not alone and there's got to be and also particularly unless I'm wrong the materials we were given earlier identified this is also an outgrowth of changing national common core standards and approaches the 21st century skills which sets a context particularly with the increased emphasis on critical thinking and problem solving things like that this absolutely isn't happening in isolation it's happening in a much broader context in districts and so it raises the question of what we can learn from that what have we learned from that that would be relevant obviously for our district, for our families, for our practice a related question is the adoption of the IMP program a current trend are we a leader, a follower so the original curriculum materials were put out in the late 80s and they were funded by the National Science Foundation so they there were started sort of in California and so they had pockets of places that really used the materials and then some people got rid of it, some people stayed with it it was used around here in a couple different schools so it's kind of been around for a while this one is the updated one that matches more the common core the only place I know around here that's using it is I think Mohawk just started to adopt it so my first question is the survey was done in June that sounds like the seniors missed it they did I think so so that's kind of a bummer because the seniors in 2015-16 sorry they were thrown into IMP as sophomores they didn't have his freshman but they had him as sophomores and yeah sorry we're having side commerce so we did have a cohort that had Algebra I in 9th grade and then we had phased out geometry so they went to integrate it too so can I ask you to say that perhaps differently so of the graduating seniors was it the majority of them who had that experience of entering IMP as sophomores or was that I just want to make sure I'm understanding things though okay thank you that wasn't my design well that's what I want to be crazy it was just it was the students that were Algebra I so we had students that were in geometry that finished the traditional track out of that same group students that came in in 9th grade in Algebra II just finished the traditional track so there were so it was a mixed cohort yes okay thank you that's what my recollection was and I'm just making sure I wasn't way off I'm sorry Mr. Silver you're right and I would like to say there's a parent of a student on IEP who has both math and writing issues and anxieties that IMP is not if the problem of the week is an excellent name for that because that's what it was in my house there's a problem every week I also the professional development do you allow the IMP teachers to meet just as a group and like discuss strategies between themselves as they figure you know as we get further and further to IMP are you allowing that group to just discuss among themselves the strategies that they have for teaching so we've worked closely with the special ed department apparently we need to do more work with them but yeah we're always talking about it, struggling at trying to figure things out to improve yeah so it's not just the IMP I mean we're all IMP and we had a math coach also it was teaching the course facilitating that communication but as with any cooperation in school we could do more no I was just curious as the teachers were doing a lot of the IMP were they meeting just like in a room by themselves and able to discuss among themselves strategies to help absolutely and then the last question I have is are you ensuring that the math teachers if they do get homework actually look at it and check it give it back so we do homework in different ways so sometimes the homework comes in we don't always collect it and grade it if that's what you're asking we do a random sample of that and what we're looking for is not perfection we're looking for how well done the homework is but there's always class discussion always asking students questions about the homework as a check for understanding so I guess I'm asking that as a parent who has a child who has spent three hours doing a math homework that someone else can do in 20 minutes on the bus and then it's not being looked at and it's not being there's no feedback from that amount of time that it spends so I'm asking that as a math department all the way through not just my student right I mean we do look at the homework we do walk around we do give students feedback do we collect every paper and grade it we just don't have time to do that 120 students every night we give homework yes in class we give feedback but do we write on their paper individual feedback only on the ones that we randomly sample alright so to circle back to the math program review and the consultants work this began as a discussion that Dr. Morrison I actually had going back to late winter last year and looking at the concerns and looking at the questions and looking at other things anecdotally that we had picked up on and it raised some broader questions for us and so we had several meetings over the course of late winter and early spring where it was Dr. Morrison I Mr. Jackson Dr. Bode Ms. Moody and Ms. Tibido who's the math curriculum leader at the middle school and also Mr. Blatner who's the math coach of the high school to brainstorm questions that we had about our math program and they actually were very interesting discussions and we came up with an extensive list of questions a lot of the things that you were asking tonight as well as many others and a decision was made to bring in somebody from outside who could look at our math program look at the questions that we had and give us some advice as far as what we're doing and really to hear about what we're doing well what we're not doing well what are some changes that would make sense that could improve what we're doing for our students and the school districts including here in Amherst routinely evaluate their own programs internally but something that is so complex as this and where there are so many opinions and things like that we thought it best to bring in somebody else who would have the ability to really take a critical view of things and then not to be flipped but leave town afterwards so what we did is I worked to compile all of these questions got some advice from other people in the field as far as putting together a request for written proposals from consultants and also got some advice as far as how to get it out there so consultants would take a look at this and so we followed the legal process around that and what we ended up doing was hired Looney Math Consulting that's Looney it's a memorable name and they're out of Eastern Massachusetts and it was much like a hiring process for a staff person we received proposals we had some telephone so almost interviews with them I was checking references with other school districts with the two different consulting groups that kind of met all of our needs had some really good conversations with curriculum directors assistant superintendents and so forth as far as moving forward from that point and so Looney Math Consulting what they've done is they've done three days of classroom observations meetings with teachers meetings with administrators meetings with families they designed their own student survey which was given in all of the high school math classes in late November I believe a parent guardian survey that went out normal communication channels and they're undertaking a data review whatever data they wanted to see from us and you'll hear more in depth from them when they come back to do their presentation one thing that I found interesting was that the consultant who did the site visits she made it clear in talking to us she said I have not looked at any of the data and I will not look at any data until I've seen what's going on in the schools and her counterpart was reviewing data at the same time so she wasn't going to be sort of blinded by any of the numbers she saw and it was amazing to me I sort of put together the schedule of classrooms to visit and she managed to see I think virtually everybody who teaches math from grade 6 through 12 over a three day period which is nothing short of impressive including Pelham school and the reason for including grade 6 I should clarify this is because grade 6 is typically a middle school grade in our community it resides in the elementary schools but math textbooks math curriculum is almost always when you look at it 6 to 8 and 9 through 12 so it was important to include that and in fact our six grades would use a middle school math curriculum and so they're looking at vertical alignment they're looking at inclusion practices student access options for intervention and support they, the classroom observations were to take a look at our instructional practices questions of in terms of individual teacher practices because of course that's always a question of looking at a curriculum how much fidelity do you have to that curriculum because that can affect what the outcomes are and so we're anticipating your February 12th meeting to have a presentation from the consultants and they'll be able to be here and present and take questions from you at that time Did the consultant have clients who have also adopted the IMP program? That's a good question I don't think I asked them directly but it's a good question, I can ask them that and I should mention this actually came up, I thought of it as we were talking that IMP is one program of these integrated math programs there are other names for them it's sort of like we use IMP that's like the Kleenex is to tissues so it's important to note that Northampton doesn't use IMP but they do use an integrated math program Have they ever worked with a different brand of tissue? The consultant? Yes That I know is that this I figured that was the next logical question and so then is the anticipated the report is our district going to be in any way benchmarked against other districts and forgive me, I don't mean this I just want to say this is the way you started out that if your MCAS scores or whatever better or worse than others and that's the be all and end all I'm almost not even really talking about that I'd almost actually say what are we in year 3? 4? Yeah, we're in year 4 I would love to know of every other district that implemented whatever form of Kleenex this is I have found out that in year 3 and 4 parents got upset basically and they did some sort of I'm not making fun of this I'm actually very serious are there in fact a predictable set of implementation challenges that are consistent across the number of districts and there are in fact responses to that and better or worse ways of doing it it's not an issue of an excuse it's about actually contextualizing what continuous improvement would be not for the students but for the staff on the district and figuring that out I think you probably stated it in a much better way than I did before but that's exactly what I was getting at previously so I think that the context of what other districts are doing is just important information for all of us to have in order to be able to better assess how successful this program maybe is or could be because if there's area for improvement which I hear all of you saying that it probably is I would expect that there would be given how young this program is and how we're still learning a lot from it that hearing what other communities have been doing through this process and what challenges they've come up against and all that is just really helpful for us and it's also got to be a way within the context of a shared objective to optimize the program as best possible and improve outcomes across the board all the different grades it's also a way of being able to communicate that well I guess I'd say two different ways analytically you'd find out whether there is something unique about our district and if we were now I'm saying it seriously I'm just saying it objectively and I'm saying it in February and said there's certain elements of the program that are people that are far worse than other districts even though that's not great news I'd love to know it and I would love to know how we're going to improve it if alternately the answer is we're sort of in the middle of the pack maybe even doing better than some districts in the learning and challenges that go on but here are the kinds of things districts have to deal with here are the kinds of things we see you just dealing with and here's what the response is the challenge is if it happens in a vacuum and the only thing you have to do is compare yourself is yourself then people are left to sit back and say well basically they're going to leave with the impression they walked in with if they came in feeling like things were in the right track they're going to say awesome and if they came in feeling like it's settled to say that only makes me feel a little bit better anyways I'll leave it at that I would anticipate that some of what they talked to us about will be from some comparison of districts and I think you made a good point that's it's a problem in this profession in general sort of isolation by where you're located so I would anticipate because they do have this sort of broader view that that's going to come into it but it's something I made a note of it that I can check in with the consultants about as well so then in terms of next steps we'll have the results of the math program review which will then lead us to say alright what do we do now and this is something I met with the math department faculty about a month ago as this was getting underway and that was we sort of had that discussion and teachers rightfully were very direct they said alright what's going to happen with this report and are we going to be included and my feeling is absolutely because it will be the math department faculty grade 6 through 12 that are going to be crucial to where we go with that and how we implement recommendations and how we choose which recommendations to implement now and which ones to sort of look at over time to develop a plan for I mean things that might be minor adjustments, things that might be bigger changes and just because we're looking at half of our school district, grade 6 through 12 I imagine there'll be a combination of the two and then a continued on journal evaluation continuing to ask these questions because as we implement any kind of adjustments we're going to need to circle back and see if they've had a positive result and is there more training that we need there are other components of the curriculum that need adjusting over time let's go to the next question I'm so used to someone else asking first is this something that likely whatever you learn is close enough to budget neutral that you don't need to plan in any resources for support next year? So I know the way our budget process works it'll take 90 seconds but it's worth I think the 90 seconds is that our building administrators share with Mr. Magano and myself and Ms. Cunningham we requested ads and cuts and I'll be honest we don't get many administrators recommending cuts before there's any numbers we always have like we'd bake for if that happened just put it out there at 9.30 and so there is a request I'm going to answer directly even though it's an internal quest of having a placeholder for whatever results from the math review then it feeds into our larger budget process but Dr. Gramacchi did include a placeholder for that because we want to keep an eye on it not that we know actually how much money would be needed or what would be needed but she was thoughtful I wasn't looking for the big reveal but I would be upset if you didn't put a placeholder in because I mean if everything ends up being free meaning no revenue neutral but no budgetary impact that's an awesome problem to have but when does that ever happen, right? I mean at least there's like a workshop that needs to happen or something across a couple thousand bucks so I'm glad you hear that Yes, I didn't want to leave this discussion without saying that I actually talked to a number of kids who are thriving and enjoy IMP and I think one of the issues we struggle with at school committees is that there's a natural selection bias of anecdotes that come to us that skews to the negative and we don't get a lot of people saying hey, I really like what's going on I have nothing to tell you but that's okay because we embrace the process of continuous improvement so I wanted to say that and just that I think it's important to be responsive as much as we can to the resources that we have to support the kids that are currently in the pipeline and be supportive of teachers I can imagine from the perspective of a teacher who's gone through this level of change and then being told at the end of last spring hey, do these five or six things because parents are complaining and you need to make IMP work that could be a little overwhelming and I can imagine there being maybe a range of comfort level from teacher to teacher depending on how the implementation went about managing that whether in the IMP pipeline but being able to be responsive to that this year I think would also be important just on that note and Mr. Sheen talked about this a little earlier Mr. Sheen was very intentional and I think we were very intentional collectively, the people were sitting up here of trying to make sure that their view process felt authentic, it was honest but teachers were an active part of that process there's lots of bad examples of view processes where the people who are closest to the work are the subject to the review they're not actually a part of the review and I think that the firm that was chosen had a very holistic viewpoint that not that everyone's going to love what they say but that everyone's input was really authentically seek and gathered as part of the review because I think the process part really matters however you feel about the outcome if you weren't part of that process or don't perceive that you were part of that process or classrooms weren't visited in the way that has a really different how people will feel about the outcome I think is markedly different Can I just say one thing I would be negligent if I didn't say how dedicated the math department is to A plus math education here at the high school and they've been working since the 2013 working on this to make it better for everybody and they continue to come in every day and go at it so they're an impressive group of people that are really working hard to give everybody access to a high quality math education so appreciate your time Thank you You weren't even first on the agenda Stamina Stamina Persistence Persistence, that's right I thought that was great This is an incredibly productive meeting I think it is awesome though that out of one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine ten items we've now completed three of them I'm going to blame you Mr. Nakajima you said we were three minutes ahead of schedule on the other hand you yourself apologized at one point and said I know you want to move the agenda along So there you go I will split the blame Okay, master building use committee composition no less important, a little dry Yes, hello everybody so we hired architects you all hired architects to conduct the high school study the architects have asked that we have some sort of committee form to provide them feedback as they form their the options and they're going to need just sort of information address back to them on their questions that they wouldn't know so we put together sort of a sample committee what it could look like I'm sure you'll have thoughts on maybe expanding it or changing the roles it is a regional committee one of the ones we've seen at the elementary level so we'll probably want to have some sort of representation from all four towns in one of these roles but this is what we put out there and welcome your feedback or thoughts I could add to what Mr. Mangano said just to for some committee members who may have been involved in the selection process something that seems analogous I just want to cut a distinction that this is a building use study it's not a feasibility study it's not a building committee and so it's not looking at huge educational implications that might happen after this this is very much more it is focused on how do we use the buildings we have, what grade levels where do kids fit, what would those models look like so as opposed to some other processes that either have went on or are currently going on in our member communities this is a little more narrowly this is more narrowly focused than some of those other efforts yeah it's not looking at renovating the entire building for example now there may be some parts that are actually more creative in terms of alternative uses and things like that but in terms of sort of the scope it's a little more refined kind of a commitment do you anticipate meeting from folks I would say probably at least once a month and I think it's going to be a four or five month process by the time it's all said and done maybe more as they get closer to the end so a couple hours probably yeah so is this a it's funny there aren't at least some analogies absolutely we're thinking of composition and stuff I assume any meeting group we do is a public meeting for the purposes of the public meetings yeah I think we'd want that but is this like a working group or is it a appointed committee where there are I guess I'm trying to think through quorum issues because like for example most people would say oh but wouldn't I mean I shouldn't say most people a reasonable person might say the more representation the better let's have four parents from each four towns and let's have four commuters from all four towns and then all of a sudden you realize you're never having quorum ever like not even for the first meeting so do you have any I'm not trying to tell you a joke about this do you have any guidance on that I'm not sure I mean my first impression would be we would treat it like a full committee so you would want to have quorum of the committee we'll keep minutes we'll post the meetings and things like that I think that's a safe way to go I don't know from a legal perspective we technically have to do that because this isn't a full building committee like for the MSPA I think to be safe and transparent we probably want to treat it like that we will treat it like that yes by the way I'm entirely in favor of that just with the admonition that the committee is probably under some sort of normative bias against adding too many slots that make it really hard to get quorum I'm still a little unclear as to the actual purpose of the committee so you have the consultant that's doing the building you study decidedly not an educational study although there might be a little bit that has to come up and so like what is the committee doing is it like an advisory board is it voting on a set of recommendations is it just there to give like feedback in case the consultant needs some information what I heard from the architect is it's more of a sounding board feedback type of role much like the elementary feasibility study this isn't going to result in one option it's going to result in multiple options and cost ranges and things like that so what I heard from them is they need more of a sounding board like is this even possible what are the logistics around this much on education but there will be some piece of it that we set up that we'll meet with staff Mike so one is on the quorum issue we spoke already and when we do advertising to gather these roles we want to talk to the architects beforehand and set the meeting schedule so that people know on the front end so this group is going to meet Thursday afternoons from 4.15 to 5.45 I'm making up that's not actually the real time but I think that would go on being able to do it because Thursday afternoons is the day that they're off doing whatever but I think one of the challenges that all these groups face is if they don't know Mr. Doniz's question how much time commitment is being asked but also logically when this group can meet and architects are working on multiple projects all the time we know that the hope is what we're planning to do is ask them what's a reasonable meeting time that you can keep consistent and then as we're communicating to all these groups for membership we're being honest about this is when this group plans to meet on the topic that talking about in terms of Mr. Doniz's question about what they do I think that is most of it but I think they'd be interested for instance if 7th or 12th was being looked at how do different stakeholders feel about how quote unquote sequestered middle school students need to be from high school students that's not a large scale academic educational question but that's something where it's an example of where they would want community input even at this master plan level because some schools, some 7th or 12th schools for instance are very integrated some are like literally geographically as separate as possible so that not that they're making decisions but they want to have some level of feedback and they're not independently making decisions with no community input as a framework so a couple of thoughts I mean I'm wondering if we've listed one parent representative I know you're looking for feedback on your composition so I'm wondering if it would be beneficial to have both a middle school and a high school parent represented here and then the other thing is I am particularly sensitive to the environment of which we are asking a lot from our community and teachers and others and a lot of building committees regionalization questions and all sorts of different things and I'm wondering if it's possible for us to maybe approach this slightly differently so that we create maybe two or three opportunities and maybe we ask that it's the same people that show up but we say right off the bat it's three meetings a commitment is three meetings and they come to those three meetings and there are a set of questions that the architects are proposing and that allows for input that you just described but it's much more controlled and it's not just this open-ended big commitment because it does feel more manageable in some ways like we've had you think about bringing in focus groups or people that you bring in for very specific points in time to get their input but it's not an extended protracted process so I'm wondering if maybe we could do something like that and if we articulated that way I could see a lot more people being willing to participate in something like that it's easier for us to promote too I have a thing too is that unless there's a particular reason why it must be and I haven't heard one yet I think I might even call it like a building use advisory panel or something like that and to be honest with you I would go by open meeting law I'd have it be totally transparent I'd have all the results I'd do a video if we want to do video but also dispense with this need to have votes I think once you because there are two reasons for this one reason is this is the very very very beginning discussions of getting good information around what we might hypothetically but don't even have any idea we might do in the future once you call out a committee and by that I don't mean like we wouldn't follow open meeting law what I'm saying is once it looks like a duck and walks like a duck there are going to be a lot of people who look at this thing and say oh so this is the initial group that's making decisions or how I'm unmerging the middle school and the high school right? and so if the actual driving impetus behind this is that the architects say boy we really loved how a panel to get feedback from on this that as a composition in some way reflects the different stakeholders who are involved in this so we can ask them questions and let's create that for them instead of the other thing along with what she said complementary I think so I like that idea and this isn't me playing devil's advocate it's just trying to think through what I think is a really promising idea which is the other thing they need from and this is more district staff than it is enrollment projection there's some functional logistical things they need they need to have facilities director walk them around so I think the only downside that I can see of having it more as an advisory more open advisory like I'm imagining because I like the ideas and the way we're thinking about it wouldn't necessarily have to be a set group of people it could be here's three opportunities and maybe there's some people who gather who are in charge of facilitating that we wouldn't close access for people who want to offer feedback but there is some functional logistical things they will need from district staff and you know is the committee comfortable with us doing that without having other people around the table so I want to put it out there as so we can at least have that level I actually I'm happy for these meetings to be open for broader public stakeholders to be involved but I wasn't actually saying that what I was actually saying is I was taking where they would show up and they would provide feedback to this group of designers but the scope of what they were being asked to do would be more limited which also might make it both in terms of time commitment but also in terms of what they're actually being asked to provide and it's still super meaningful and in fact it's not only more meaningful but it's super bound in the idea that if somebody said hold on a second wait a minute at the end of something I have to make a vote to decide I don't know see look it's not even a committee it's a panel just a quick comment I mean I think that your point Dr. Morris about having district staff I mean I would honestly expect that anyway I don't know how the rest of the committee feels but I think you know there's multiple projects for you guys who are advising consultants and professionals so there's certain areas where I actually expect that that would be the role that the district staff plays your facilities director who ends up coming in right you know there's going to be roles that we can't fill or that the community frankly can't probably fill very easily you know so I think from my perspective anyway I think that makes a lot of sense that's helpful, thank you yeah absolutely I mean if the committee and the community can't trust the school administration to provide basic information like enrollment data and walking through the facilities without it being suspected of something else or voted on by a committee yeah right so the main comment I want to make is I'm 110% with Mr. Nakajima's comment about let's not dress it up like a duck if it actually isn't meant to be a duck right so plus one I'm not combining the words building and committee in another thing in town try to be creative if you look at the name of the committee it's very so I think you can building advisory panel or whatever it is and again you can make it as open as possible because it's meant to be as open as possible you can have people sign up to be the seven people that sit at the front of the room even though the microphone's going to be open for two hours to anybody who wants the same thing they want I think is great and that way you avoid you know the worst case scenario of people feeling closed off or nobody showing up at all and not having a sounding board what does everyone else think does that look good to me because you realize the three of us can just keep talking it's not going to help the rest of the committee at all I crack myself up so I got the feedback on the composition though again not calling it a committee but a panel does the committee want to vote on it or do you just want us to form it send you who we pick I mean or do you want to vote on the composition of the panel because we'd like to get informed soon so the architects can get going on it so one I actually really do want you to take the word building I I like the name you can call it panel advisory high school middle school planning study I got the gist of it yeah anyways so you're okay without a vote just proceed with the feedback need a little bit more affirmative conversation from the committee before we do that actually people say something no vote no vote okay you're okay with that thank you that sounds great I think the one thing we'll follow up and it doesn't need to be decided tonight is that I think having a school committee representative on that is critically important am I happy to volunteer for that if nobody else wants to I really I really enjoyed those interviews with the architects for myself I'm so happy to see that through that's awesome thank you honestly we've made progress on two things not just one thing okay in that case we're going to move on capital process partopical yes so I think this agenda item was just to go over the capital process so we have a separate item on the I was going to say this is a euphemism for the roof and no it's not so I think it was more that when we come back in January I think this is going to be very brief not just because of the hour just because it's intended to be brief that what was a little echinistic was that we presented some capital information at the 410 meeting that we hadn't shared at the regional school committee and it just made sense based on timing so I think this was an opportunity if the committee had any questions about what was presented at the 410 meeting which was around the middle school roof you'd have the opportunity to ask us any questions about where we're going from here or offer any feedback that was a different setting than the committee you mean on the capital not on the operational 4 towns or even on the middle school roof because that's the next item on the agenda exactly so two questions on the roof one can you talk a little bit about how that 3 million was arrived at like what estimate it was based on if there's any fudge factor folded into that and then also so this kind of came up at 4 towns and I tried to address it but I don't think I really did that well so say we put a new roof on the middle school and then at some future date the region does not need the building any longer I would imagine that the transfer value or the resale value for lack of a better term is higher with a new roof in other words there's this idea that we don't want to waste money by putting a 3 million dollar roof on that the school isn't going to use and yet there is some sort of asset value too Mr. McDonough, before you say anything I literally meant what I said any questions on the the item we're on is capital process is there any question on the capital process before we move on to middle school roof awesome there isn't the answer is question so we have an architect an architectural report analysis that pegs the cost of the roof right now at about 2.5 million Mr. McPherson used a different method to estimate the cost of the roof and he came to about 3 million so I think the actual amount is going to be somewhere between 2.5 and 3 million what I said at the four time meeting I think is that ultimately what the towns pay for is what the actual cost will be when we get quotes and we hope it comes in or when we get bids and we hope it's much lower than both of those numbers but I would say 3 millions if you're saying where does that fall in terms of on the conservative side for the roof and your second question so just two additional pieces on that one is that I know he shared that the work would likely, we'd want it to happen while students weren't in the building and sometimes there can be a surcharge because it will take a larger group of workers to do it in the relatively small amount of time we have in the summer it can be done, some communities do it but it has smells, it has noise it can be not to have it happen while students are in the building and the second part was also that oftentimes with capital projects because of when they get approved they happen the summer not the summer that happens after the vote but the following summer so he included some escalation clause that in case we're not able to get the funds in time to get a contract and bid and the work to happen in the summer of 2019 that work actually happens in the summer of 2020 that could increase the cost but I wanted to add those two specifics and the other thing that I actually got a really good presentation from students at school I think it was last spring there may be a push also to put solar on the roof which is not explicitly included in this cost but it's just something for the committee to be aware of and that we'll probably have to go to the towns as well there could be a push for solar if we put a brand new roof on that's sort of the ideal opportunity to do it again we come back to the building use and would you want to put solar on with a 20 year commitment if you don't know you're going to be there for 20 years and then your second question you put $3 million into the building you don't use it anymore in that situation it's only a complete waste if we knock the building down which I don't think is really on the table but I think that's something we can ask the architects when they do the building use study because one of the things they're tasked with is looking at alternative uses in the middle school we can try to have them fold that into their analysis of is there a return on this investment and what kind of return is that if we actually sell the building completely to another entity like the town or somebody else so we can try to get that information from the study Mr. Angana I thought when we did an analysis of the middle school roof the consultant said that we couldn't put solar on the roof without providing some structural support that's actually in the architects report is that to put solar on this sure if there would be an upcharge in terms of what they estimated at the 2.5 number we have to do structural work to the roof to make it support it so you know what that number is? I don't offhand but I think there was a percentage or some sort of estimate in the study so I'll try to get it for you I think if we know there's a conversation that's going to happen we're better to get in front of it in terms of what the budgetary impact should look like regardless of what the committee I think personally we could find a way to do it and particularly if it reduced operating costs over the long term it'd be great to consider it sure it's one thing to consider it if that means our bottom number is 3 million dollars instead of 2.5 and then it might be a little higher it's another thing you could tell us it's going to be 5 million and then that may result in a different conversation I find it difficult to imagine putting 3 million dollars into a building and then selling it off as scrap I mean it's almost I mean it's just hard to imagine an alternative to the middle school it's built as a school imagine it twice in the same town right? we've got two of these things we have no choice just maybe a maintenance expenditure rather than a capital expenditure yeah and I'll just quick update we did do funds in the budget for patching higher professional level patching and we did that last month and so so far so good I think the time we really want to check it is in the spring when things start warming up and expanding but we're going to keep an eye on that too I mean if that stuff works really well maybe that gives us some more time and also is something we want to look at for Fort River as well so we'll keep you at the price of that too spend the 3 million dollars and it has a short term life and the school agenda item is about the MSBA and yeah we need to take a vote if we want to sit down I don't think this vote will be on the actual submission but it'll be just do you want us to it could also just be like a confirmation go like yes you want us to look into the MSBA for this the vote would be once we come back with a statement of interest I just don't want to be presumptuous no it's not going to be but I wanted to I don't really think it's helpful for our dialogue around the middle school publicly to be getting radically out in front of all the planning that we'd actually should be doing or need to be doing it's a theoretical construct or exercise that we think while paying down the bond on a roof improvement that the middle school will never be will not cease at some point in that life in that period of paying off the note will cease to be used as an educational building there's actually no basis right now for making that statement there are a number of hypotheticals that would suggest that it could happen but then there are counter hypotheticals that say oh well maybe we'll move this class in or this would change enrollment in this way or have this other use I don't think it does this any good the roof needs to be fixed if we start playing around with decisions that aren't even posed right now I consider that to be a dangerous place for us to be and I'm sorry to throw that out I'm just throwing it out I forget who brought it up to you today your acknowledgement or someone else's acknowledgement that this would be a potential risk is an incredibly useful thing to raise because as an issue of towns paying off bonds and all the rest they need to know that risk sort of like fiduciary responsibility to have the taxpayers in the towns so I get mentioning it but I think if we as a group get caught up and caught away with that conversation we're doing everyone in our community as a service because also it feeds in to the note we just had this conversation about a panel versus a committee versus the middle school and the high school and the entire message you're trying to send is there's absolutely we even talked about the possibility that the outcome of the planning study might be that you need to build an addition on to this building to house additional upgrades not that that's definite but it's possible okay so if that's true you're talking about an entire another funding planning and decision making process to actually go about building an addition on there right so it's way hypothetical if you lay out all the risk but it's a risk from a financial perspective but I'm sorry to belabor this I'm only doing this because rumors begin and then start just like spreading like wildfire on the basis of well you know the school committee was really concerned the other night about whether or not you know the middle school stop using as an educational use right I mean it's sorry to worry about what statistics you have in your desk drawer that you're sharing with the DLS because then it moves anyway sorry to go off but please I hear that concern I do however feel like there's a complimentary responsibility that we have on the committee but we're talking about spending a lot of people's money and so it's not in a total vacuum that we're just throwing out the possibility that at some future date we might not use the middle school building as an educational building and we're doing a use study potentially moving the middle school to high school so it's out there and we have towns the biggest town in our region has serious capital stress so I think the challenge is in correctly framing that discussion and that you know the decisions haven't been made and but I think that's the more open messier way to do it when you sort of parse open all the things we're considering and you watch how the sausage is made then there's an increased possibility of misinterpretation but I think that's just something we have to manage is it honest? I was going to say I think I'm very concerned about rumors and I actually don't I don't agree with us going down too far with hypotheticals because I do think that's how the community starts to get signals from us but I guess for me personally I'm more interested in the potential resale value as Mr. Demling had previously stated or the value just generally that making those kinds of inherent improvements to a building bring right because for whatever purpose this building will serve either now or in the near term it'll need a roof and so unless again as you said if we're going to playing a demolishing which we're not building like this this size would be used in many different ways if it were not to be used in school which we're not saying but in any case I do think that something like a roof is something that can show immediate need and if we can find a short term solution perhaps for the next year great from my perspective I think we're delaying the inevitable and I think it's actually better use of our time to raise money and resources to think about the long term about how we make those improvements now so that we don't end up with a bigger problem for the down road Ms. Victon? Just two things so even if we do the roof we still have to do the short term repairs because it would be a year and a half basically. Yeah we'll have to monitor this year but are we discussing whether to look at the roof and include that in the capital plan to apply for MSBA to bring that cost down? The second piece I mean this specific agenda I mean obviously we'd only apply if we thought we would do the roof but In January or March actually we'll vote on the capital plan so at some point you will vote yes we want to put this project on but tonight it's more do you want us to apply to the MSBA to see if we can get that cost hopefully in half and our roof is a really good candidate it's 25 years old 24 years old so I think we have a strong chance from that perspective but so yeah. I think one of the things that would be useful I wasn't sure you know to me the number of scenarios which result in not being used for any educational purpose that the MSBA would deem approvable is I think really limited I think if you come out with one of those scenarios then the entire point about transferring an asset that's held by four towns in common to an alienated either to a third party entirely or to one of the subsidiary towns means you've got to include in the sale price the transaction cost the cost of the roof that becomes part of the purchase price which means effectively if one wants to push this analysis and figure out what's the underlying risk what you've really got to figure out is what's the value of the asset what's the likely it is going to be transferable or saleable at a price that would allow you to recoup the cost of the debt service on the roof and any other outstanding debt service you have and that's the point the risk to the district the risk to the school district I don't actually think is super high because there's for two reasons one, I think the number of scenarios you reduce it down to in which it's not actually going to be used for an educational purpose that would be subject to reimbursement is the likelihood of that outcome is there's no reason right now to think it's particularly high it's certainly possible but it only is pretty high the number of other inputs that would go into that decision are substantial including possibly making other substantial capital improvements elsewhere to do that and then the third point is the district would always, in the member towns would always seek to recoup the cost of the debt in order to recover it in the transaction so the question for me would then be if we're going to bother kicking the tires on this more before we look at an MSBI application is we got to kick the tires on what will be the process of alienating this asset the cost of any outstanding debt that would be acceptable to the towns and I suppose the issue would be if we think the delta is significantly high enough between what we could essentially charge for the transfer of this asset and the increase in the cost of the debt if that makes an appreciable difference in the value of the asset then that becomes a dubious decision to make because you're then essentially saying that the district itself would have to make good including potentially towns that are no longer enjoying the benefit of the building on the remaining debt and what that debt looks like so if we want to go through that exercise then we can I think I'd like to just submit the statement about but I think that exercise is the one that again I think we're going to ask the architects to do to sign up where it's before so the window for the statement of interest I believe is it's going to be released in January and we'll probably have to submit in February or March I think on some level we probably on some level it would be helpful if they did do that exercise simply because this is the the can we keep picking around of what does that building end up being if it's not what it is we've got good numbers on the insured value obviously that's not going to translate to what we can sell it for it's going to probably be much much less well I mean it's what you can sell it for and then the question is I don't know how it's governed by law that if one of the underlying member towns wanted to take essentially possession of the use of the building how do you resolve that joint ownership outstanding debt and for the member towns are is there is there a value to the asset that's appreciable that's bound by law to be compensated want it I think what I heard from all of you is maybe wait to answer those types of questions until after the study in terms of getting out in front of this too much all good questions but I think we'll keep track of them and try to address them once we have the data from the study are people okay with them preparing your paperwork thank you interlocal agreement tips good so this is my last item tonight so tips is it stands for the interlocal purchasing system it's sort of like a big collaborative that started from basically a collaborative in Texas but it's grown to be national and it's sort of it's like a state contract it gives us another place we can look to for pricing so right now we can look to our state contract we can look to the mass higher ed consortium and this would give us a third option for pricing and so what they do is they do a bid process they bid out services for their members and then they get prices on those services and goods and so to access them though we would have to vote to join them we're already a member at the elementary level we joined three or four years ago when we bought cameras for all the school buses that was a big purchase and they had a high quality vendor that was on their state contract that wasn't on the that was on their contract that was on our state contract and so the things that we probably buy from them in the future would be things primarily computers but we could also look for other things that we typically would buy from a state contract here we can at least compare it and see what the cost difference is if we join these are automatically approved contractors from as far as the state is concerned I mean we still have to confirm that they haven't been disbarred in our state but in terms of the procurement process they've followed the procurement process that's needed Chairman I move to authorize the district to execute an interlocal agreement with the Region 8 Education Service Center it's been moved this is your second any further discussion seeing none all those in favor the motion has read please signify with your hand carries 7 to 0 thank you the calendar so we talked about this last month and since that month the APEA surveyed their members and at every school they preferred the pre-labor day start which is on your back page which we sort of suspected last time the change that Mr. Doniz suggested in the month of April you could see has changed I got confirmation from the APA they were comfortable with that change otherwise nothing else has changed from what you looked at last month and there was a broad endorsement at every school in the district all the schools in the district around the pre-labor day calendar that looked like this as opposed to the post-labor day start is there any questions or discussion we need to vote on this one any questions or discussions Shelma sorry I don't recall what was the change that Mr. Doniz suggested for April isn't it the 10th was the 17th so the half day I think was the week prior the week of the 8th just in moving it to the following week because it can be incredibly disruptive for parents when they have a half day and then day off that they're content with in the same week any anyone have a motion on the one offer oh I'm sorry I was looking this direction I withdrawn my hand I moved to approve the 2019-2020 school year calendar second any comments to date seeing I was in fear of proving the calendar carries against 7-0 this is awesome now that I needed my editorial approval on top of the vote location of meetings do you want to introduce the topic so a topic of conversation between Amherst media and district has been there the town hall building in Amherst which has been outfitted with new technology would be a venue to have our meetings in I'll finish by Mr. Doniz and I spoke today and she had some feedback from Amherst media that she could share but so the other part of that is that we haven't been able to do live meetings because the cameras our IS staff has been in touch with Amherst media it's about $8,500 or so to replace the cameras which we can do but we wanted to at least have the conversation before we just felt like fiduciary it was good to have this conversation before we expended funds on technology for this space are there other meetings that use this room the that are taped I just wanted to be able to use the cameras the Amherst school committee meetings are the only other ones that I'm aware of that are taped in this space are you suggesting that the Amherst school committee meeting as well as this I'm suggesting it's a conversation that the committees might want to have I'm not making a recommendation are you including them in the conversation not in this conversation because that would be a violation of our meeting this is awesome follow the law be clear about it sorry anyone have any thoughts on this topic so basically the gist of it would be that the regional school committee would be meeting in Amherst town hall on the other hand if it would be more accessible to more people is that the issue through the live streaming is that what the I guess I'm not quite understanding the camera so we could place these cameras there's a cost to it but I think the advantage of the new space my understanding is that it has the technology is better it allows multiple people to be projecting and see things there's more individual screens I know Mr. Demling and Mr. Adonis may have more information specifically on that and the other piece which Mr. Adonis can speak more than I can is just the feedback I've ever heard from at least one employee of Amherst media is just since they're already set up there there's an auto record feature there's some other pieces that might be different in that setting with the technology even if we replace these cameras yeah so I you know from in my capacity as a chair for the Amherst school committee have a conversation with the executive director of Amherst media at the direction of the committee to find out what their thinking was and you know they have made it very clear that this was not a request it came from Amherst media this is actually from the town of Amherst has suggested it and it was specifically around technology and I think the benefit to Amherst media is both the technology is new technology that will be in the town hall that we don't have here we've had continuing problems even predating when the cameras failed completely there's been technological problems I think even just accessibility of communication between Amherst media staff you know the interns often that are here working the cameras but also the staff that are back in the Amherst media headquarters and there's just been a lot of problems that they've had for several years now so they see this as an opportunity to actually you know fix all of that and have better accessibility and also I think that the big consideration is there's a lot more people that are definitely watching these videos stream live on you know online as opposed to watching through the television you know through public access but there is still a subset of the community that is watching through public access TV and so all of that would be benefited by the move to the new that was my question without incurring additional expense okay it's 6.30 on a Tuesday one of those nights you can't possibly find a parking place in downtown Amherst I don't know who's qualified to answer my questions that's wrong here I think midnight to midnight is what you're well it's dinner time all the restaurants are at full speed it's Tuesday so I said so a couple other issues just to consider at the regional level so we don't have all four towns represented here but so the biggest issue I think for the non Amherst members is that it's the town of Amherst town hall right and the region is supposed to fairly represent all four towns and so to have what is essentially a separate legal entity the regional schools at the seat of town government for one of the member towns presents at least the appearance of not a conflict of interest but it looks odd perhaps to some I think that would be one one of the concerns that I think mostly the members from the non Amherst towns would want to weigh in on Susala? As a member of a non Amherst town as long as the 13 member town council was not sitting there with us on the line the other thing I would add is so we had a similar discussion at the Amherst school committee and not to speak about so I was expressing a similar sentiment to you that I feel like being in the school gives it a schooly vibe it's cozy and we do sort of think about accessibility in terms of uncomfortable people feel going to certain spaces being said I had a meeting with another board a couple weeks ago and I had a chance to walk in and see the room and I was surprised how the space looked I was expecting it to feel a lot more austere and disconnected and it didn't so we haven't yet finished the discussion at the Amherst school committee level but there was the idea of possibly having a test meeting there to see how it went or holding some meetings there and some meetings here but we haven't had those conversations which is a quick a quick observation as a Pellum person I'm with Mr. Sullivan it doesn't really matter it's a space and if it's a more congenial and a better equipped space I'd be fine with that but yeah just in talking about having the school the only thing that came to mind tonight is certainly often student groups come in and to the extent that it just feels comforting or welcoming to them to be in their own space that would be the only consideration in terms of having it at school or not it's an interesting thing to meet it I haven't been in the finished space over a town hall so I don't know how it looks I do know that I just can't think of the number of people who've mentioned to me how intimidated they feel coming to these meetings and and that's in this setting where if they're a parent they may already be familiar with this setting certainly I'm sure they're familiar with the cafeteria the auditorium and stuff like that and so this is a setting that already feels should feel hopefully more accepting and opening and comforting to them and yet when they're coming to this space before us they often feel really intimidated really uncomfortable really stressed out and nervous and I don't like the idea of creating another space where people may feel even more that way but I'm open-minded on it I really think are the members of so we're others of us some of us a subset of us are members of the Amherst committee are you all members of your town committees okay that's how it works right I mean I sound dumb I'm just sort of processing this through Audra's not here she's obviously a member of Leveritz committee I would really love and I could send the email out where you could but I'd be happy to to all of you to go talk to your town regular your town committees go back to your towns talk to the other members so like a member who might say what will happen this coming spring but if any of you left there might be a member who's already sitting on a committee there who'd be joining us you know this coming spring and I really I'm sort of echoing something Mr. Deming said for me personally I'm saying this is the role of chair I feel massively uncomfortable picking and also because I'm from Amherst I guess I feel massively uncomfortable moving the venue of our meetings to our town hall for you guys to schlep to and come visit unless and it has not to be a vote but I'm saying if you come back in January and say no no no we've talked about it and our committees don't we don't care the technology is better we can either do it or we can do it on a trial run then I think that's great but I would feel much more comfortable knowing that you've talked it through with some of your neighbors there's a symbolism of having a school committee meeting in a school there are books here there were students in this room five hours ago it's a school committee it's not a town government five hours in increasing as we talk I feel comfortable coming to the building would you remove your high school course load if the presentation had been done I feel comfortable here Mr. Minino you have your hand raised you're just moving in your chair okay so let's just talk about this in January also I'd like Odger to be here or at least be aware of the conversation all our towns have to buy in on this if we do it we have a gift for at least one gift I don't know does anyone like to be is it on this move to accept the following gifts anonymous number 142 to support family center gift drive for homeless students in the amount of $500 Amherst tritons tritons tritons association incorporated number 5034 to support lean lines for swim team $500 and that's for a grand total of $1,000 is there a second any discussion seeing none all those in favor of the motion is read see if I have your hand it carries 7 to 10 probably there's any comments I want to make upcoming topics before we adjourn this meeting yes I was reminded recently that because of Amherst change in town government actually a required wording change to our regional agreement and therefore requires the approval of all four towns that will have to work through some sort of process so at some point should be on the agenda anything else school choice hearing OPEB trust documents and law adoption budget guidance we'll get back to that in January clearly we didn't have time tonight editorial choice we'll come back to SCTF fee review location of meetings is there a motion to adjourn and to adjourn is there a second vote carries 7 to 0 thank you Amherst media