 As the Board of Selectmen we are running the town. It's an old joke but it's going to get very much older because we've heard some nasty elevator news. Superintendent Bode? On the elevator? Yes. We're looking for at least another month out. Okay, we can get comfortable here. At a much more increased price I might add too. What was the complication we hit? The complication is that the code change should we now have to be 12 feet below where we currently are to put this piston in and they started digging and hit rock. So now we have to drill 12 feet through rock. Okay. And that's going to take a little bit longer and it's going to cost more money. Joy, joy, joy. So I guess we'll be here for a while. This further illustrates the need for a new high school. So anybody who's friends with Deb Goldberg, call her up and tell her we need the school. The other announcement I would like to make, Mr. Thielman is en route in traffic. He will be here momentarily. Mr. Pierce has banded up, has hooked up with a band of thespians and he's performing tonight in Burlington. He is playing in a play called Any Given Monday. We went and saw it last Sunday. It was very worth while seeing. It's a lot of fun. So this weekend it closes. So make sure if you can get up to Burlington and go see Judd play a wonderful role that he was meant to play. The role was written for him. In any case, we're now going to public participation. Jane Biondi, you're up first. I'll let the Hanson will be second. Hello. Hello. My name is Jane Biondi. I live at 50 Wyman Street. And I'm here on behalf of the Arlington Education Foundation to invite the school committee and Dr. Bodie and Dr. Chesson to the Arlington Education Foundation's annual fall fundraiser. It's going to take place next Monday, November 23rd from 6 to 8 p.m. at Flora Restaurant. We ask for $100 donation per person or $150 for two people, although that's a suggested donation. So whatever you can give will be appreciated. And this is a very special year for us because we're celebrating 25 years this year of working together with the district and giving grants to the district. So we're very excited about it. And we would love to see you all at our 25th anniversary on November 23rd at Flora. You'll learn a little bit about some new grants that we made this past year. And you'll see some old friends and eat and drink good food at Flora. So we hope to see you there. Thank you. I just want to right away send my regrets. We're out of town on Thanksgiving week. So you had the event last week at Thanksgiving week too, which is why we missed it. So it's a great event. And anybody who's watching this should really get down to Flora. Get to eat their food, hang out with some of the nicest people in town. We'll raise a toast to your memory. Thank you. Linda Hansen will be followed by Tammy McBride. Hi, good evening. My name is Linda Hansen. I'm President of the Arlington Education Association. And I'm here this evening to address the recent decision of the Board of Education to support Commissioner Chester's recommendation to develop a new state test currently being called MCAS 2.0. It's noteworthy that the Board of Education was 8 to 3 with the board members representing parents, teachers, and students all voting against this particular initiative. But I do believe that advocacy on the part of many constituents succeeded in turning away the movement to tie our Massachusetts testing to the multi-state consortium. And I think that was a significant victory. I applaud the fact that we've managed to maintain control of our state test. I feel like Massachusetts educators and administrators will have more success influencing the content of the test with state control. I support an amendment that passed 7 to 4 to continue the Hold Harmless Clause for results based on the new test until 2018. That means that the first year of the hybrid test in 2017 will also be held under a Hold Harmless Clause. This amendment was put forth by former Leslie University President Margaret McKenna, who supports the hybrid test but feels like the rush to offer it in a year and a half does not leave proper time for test development, beta testing, and setting standards. Another statistic I found interesting that I want to mention is when I saw in the globe west section last weekend, there it was reported that at the joint state superintendents and state school committee conference, delegates took a non-binding vote in favor of the statewide moratorium on high stakes standardized testing until a better assessment system can be developed. The vote was 63 to 52 in favor of the ban. This is a conversation I hope to be able to come back to in the future. Tonight the issue that we take up is later in the agenda is what Arlington should do about our spring 2016 test. The choices are to stick with MCAS for a final year, try out the park paper and pencil hold under the Hold Harmless Clause, or try out park computer-based also under the Hold Harmless. As the people who will be responsible for preparing students to take the test, I feel like it's critical for teacher input to be considered in this decision. I commend and appreciate the outreach from assistant superintendent Laura Cheson with whom I've had several long conversations about how to approach this decision. Laura also sponsored a teacher conversation on the topic on Wednesday afternoon that we both attended. After a lengthy conversation with Laura last week and after spending a lot of time on the desi website over the weekend, I put together a document for teachers that explained the decision before us and listed the major factors that I felt were important to weigh in making decision. Teachers were encouraged to review the information and fill out a survey about what they would recommend for the district. In all, 58 teachers participated in the survey and that's roughly half the teachers that are responsible for teaching the test in grades three through eight and those were the targeted teachers that I specifically asked to take the survey. In all, about 66% chose to stick with the MCAS for another year, so 38. 15 teachers of 26% said try park paper and pencil with the hold harmless and only five or nine percent said try park with the computer based with the hold harmless. I thought that the disaggregated data would be very interesting and I do have copies of all this information for you that Karen will be passing out afterwards. But it was interesting, so I looked at it by grade level. Also third grade teachers, 18% said try out the park paper and pencil, 82% said stick with MCAS. No third grade teachers thought trying on the computer was a good idea. In grade four, 8% said park computer based, 46% park paper and pencil and 46% stick with MCAS, so a little more split there in fourth grade. In fifth grade, 9% park computer, 27% park paper and pencil, 55% stick with MCAS. Grade three through five special educators, there were only a few. One said try park paper and pencil and two said stick with MCAS. At the middle school, 12 teachers overall responded, 67% said to stick with MCAS, 25% park computer based and 8% park paper and pencil. So another important thing that I thought- We're on public participation, so we're at the three minute- So wrap it up quickly? Yeah, I mean, we will ask you to come back and talk when we debate the item, so- Do you want me to save the rest of my comments for then? Yeah. Okay. Okay. All right. I'll give you more time when we can interact because it's on the agenda. Great. As our association rep, are you our rep tonight? I am. Then you're certainly a participant in the discussion. I look forward to that. Thank you. Thank you. Tammy McBride, are you here for public participation or are you here for your agenda item? I am. Okay, then you're not on public participation. Okay. So we'll get you in a minute. Rebecca Steinitz. Hi. It's me again. I'm a literacy consultant in urban high schools and an AHS parent. I'm here to talk about tonight's park or MCAS agenda item. I'm glad you will not vote tonight on whether to give park this spring. But I'm disturbed that the only indication that you were considering this question was an agenda posted online late Tuesday afternoon. I hope you give the community a formal well publicized opportunity to weigh in on this matter. Arlington cares deeply about our schools as you do. And we do not respond well when important decisions are kept from us. I also want to speak to the implications of this week's Board of Ed vote in favor of an MCAS 2.0 that will include park items. There is no question among those of us who have been following this compulsively that Desi envisions MCAS 2.0 as park untimed. Knowing he was losing the public opinion battle, Commissioner Chester brokered a deal for states to use park items on their own tests, announced the very morning he made his MCAS 2.0 proposal. And I'm sure he is confident he has pulled a fast one on Massachusetts. Desi's certainty that the new assessment will essentially be park is visible in the comment of a staff member on a conference call Tuesday that Kathy and I were both on. If you have the opportunity to give park in 2016 you are giving your students and staff a leg up on the next generation assessment. But I question that claim which is predicated on Desi's assumption that they will get the park identical assessment they seek. 18 months ago many of you said that park was a done deal which was exactly what Desi wanted you to think. But clearly that deal wasn't done and this one isn't either. The final park MCAS hearing on Monday night where I spoke showed significant determined opposition to park. On Tuesday's conference call Chester was unable to answer questions about the percentage of park questions in the new assessment for the platform that assessment would use. When Kathy asked about the time frame for receiving park data next year, I don't know if you know but this year the data came last week, not so great for instruction. The response was quote roughly the same time frame as MCAS, roughly, which was hardly convincing. So I truly do not see why a district especially a high achieving district like Arlington would shift to park. Every district will be held harmless for the new assessment in 2017 so we don't need to administer unnecessary practice tests to protect district accountability rankings. We don't know what the new test will look like so we might not even be practicing the right thing and we could be setting many of our students up to endure three different testing models in three years for no student centered reason that I can discern. Teachers can still analyze the park items that are finally online and they can prepare their students for the skills the new assessment should address. But why change tests in the middle of an uncertain process? I hope Arlington still cares more, I'm certain Arlington still cares more about educating children than preparing them for tests. If this is the case, we should be teaching our children not giving them unnecessary ill-advised tests. Thank you. Anyone else for public participation? Hearing none. We go now to the coaching of teachers in Arlington public schools. I'm going to ask Dr. Cheson if she would introduce our presenters. Thank you. So this evening, one of our presenters just walked in the door so we're happy to hear that. So tonight we have three people who have been intimately involved in our literacy coaching model. We have Tammy McBride who is one of our literacy coaches, Don Miller who is a teacher at the Dallin School and that Dingman who is the principal at the Dallin School. And I'm not going to steal any of their thunder. I want you to hear the great work that they've been doing. Hi, good evening. My name is Linda Hansen. I'm also a K-5 district literacy coach in the district. And I'm really pleased to introduce, for the first time I think in front of the school committee, Tammy McBride, who took the place. I've stopped calling her the new Evelyn. So she has her own identity in the district now. And she has made quite a splash. She's been just fantastic to work with. Teachers love to work with her. And we really can see already what kind of difference she's making. So it's been really exciting to work with her. Thank you to Linda. I mean, I have a wonderful role model to learn from. So it's been a great partnership. So we have just, so Don, do you want to introduce yourself? Just say hello. I'm Don Miller. I've been teaching in Arlington for the past 28 years. And it's been a great pleasure working with Tammy. Hi, everyone. Fad Dingman. I've been at Don one year. Don has me be principal. And I think they were over at the high school looking for us all. So that's why they're just showing up now. So we put together just a few slides. Very, very short video of the co-teaching model that Tammy and Don have been using. And then just a few slides at the end. So literacy coaching in Arlington. So really our overall, we work on meeting together with teachers, analyzing data, supporting teachers in their professional growth and helping plan curriculum and lessons together with them. The overarching goals are to directly support teachers with reading and writing in these areas. Again, working on new curriculum, working specifically on new instructional practices, differentiating instruction for students, and their own goals and growth and development of their practice under the new evaluation system. One of the most exciting parts of this role is getting to partner with teachers and actually be in the classrooms. This summer I had the pleasure of joining Arlington teachers at the Teachers College Homegrown Institute for Writing Workshop. That's where I met Don. And in that week of learning together towards the end, Don was really interested in learning more about the workshop model and kindly invited me to work with him right away in the fall in the classroom, and the video is of Don and I jigsawing a writing workshop lesson. It's a realistic fiction unit. And you'll notice this is just the first part of the lesson doing the connection and the teaching point. Right, writers, I want to tell you a little story about something that happened to me. When I was on my cruise this summer, I had fallen asleep before being someplace that I don't, that I'm not used to being in. You know, you don't think when I was awake, I was awake in the middle of the night by this banging noise and this movement and the bed was moving and shaking. I'm like, what's going on? Where am I? I looked around the room and I still wasn't sure where I was. Then slowly I began to realize, oh, I'm on my cruise. I don't know what's happening though, and then I did realize what was going on. As today, Mr. Miller and I want to teach you that just like when he woke up in the middle of the night, he was like, where am I? You need to turn the lights on in this cruise cabin. As writers, you need to do the same thing in your story. You need to turn the lights on in your story so your reader knows where is your character? Where is this action happening? As writers, we're going to teach you today how to turn the lights on in your story so that your reader knows exactly where your characters are. Thank you. Thank you for the question. Huge pieces that's missing from the video are the children. For Don and I, it's a joy. We're having fun together. If you could see the joy of writing in the students and them responding to the two of us, we get to confer with that many more students, meet with small groups, give feedback, and all the while just putting the joy into our teaching and the learning for the students. I'm going to go out a little bit looking at the big picture, the coaching role across the district. Linda and I are both charged with creating and maintaining an elementary literacy site for teachers where we have lessons available, assessment information, resources that support the curriculum that we update on a regular basis for teachers. We also plan and present monthly literacy professional development across the district on a lot of different levels. We also plan and present along with grade level teachers across the district. We also plan and present ELA summer professional development and curriculum work so we can dive a little deeper and take the time to think about that. And also across the district we oversee the response to intervention reading program with all the district reading professional teachers and talk about that. We also plan and present and at each of those schools Linda and I travel to provide additional supports and faculty meetings to dive deeper into our new reading and writing units, instructional practices. So it's a great way to, you know, after a grade level professional development to go into buildings and dive deeper and have more time to learn with teachers. The principals have been so great in wanting to know more from Linda and I about what would reading workshop look like, what does writing workshop look like, what are the kind of supports and resources we can provide for our teachers, we get to sort of support principals in their goals and teachers in their goals and we discuss common practices for reading and writing. It's a great partnership. So another thing that we do is bring out how to tie that data back to instructional practices. We also meet with grade level teams to support discussions around setting literacy related student learning and professional practice goals and we support teachers in looking at student work, sitting down with a pile of unit writing assessments and thinking about what is this telling us about what our strengths and the students strengths and weaknesses are and what can we do to change up that? We also meet individually with teachers, this example of co-teaching that's going on at the Dallas school in the fourth grade writing program. We are available to go into classrooms and model whole class and small group lessons, identify resources to more fully support and differentiate the instruction and we also spend a good part of the beginning of the year driving around from building to building pulling our little cart behind us to provide new, brand new elementary sections to get all the materials for and make sure teachers knew what to do with it so on any given day you'll find us zigzagging around the district with our pulling our carts. Literacy coaching by the numbers we work with two content areas both reading and writing. We work at sixth grade levels K-5 in all seven elementary schools and we also collaborate with 12 reading teachers and two title one literacy tutors. There are 128 classroom teachers and all that we work with and we also working with Arlington Public Schools teachers and students is priceless that'll sound familiar. We're going to just we have a little send off and then we're going to invite Don and Thad up to say a few words. You know it just came up when we were practicing before it's loading. Any questions while we're waiting do you guys want to come up and maybe just talk a little bit about your experience. This year meeting Tammy first of all in the writing program that we had attended this summer was just an eye opener for me because she just zeroed right in on what we need in Arlington for writing. So co-teaching with Tammy has really inspired my kid the children in my classroom the biggest thing that I think I encountered was the boys we were getting ready the next class was Fizz Ed and the boys not the girls I said okay it's time to go to Fizz Ed they said can't we just stay here and keep writing now that was the most amazing thing out of my 28 years of teaching that has ever happened the boys wanting to stay and it just I think the co-teaching model with Tammy and I too we're just bouncing back and forth gets them thinking and how can I be the best possible writer the other thing is I have 25 students so trying to meet the needs of the 25 students that I have being able to zero in on small groups with different needs has been great to have Tammy take a group I'll take a group to work with and it just helps them greatly. The co-teaching model just works. I've done it in the past when I taught first grade because I really needed that in first grade to just keep the kids going but the best thing about this is also getting to meet with her once a week and then as a fourth grade team we meet with her once a month to talk about all the writing program that we everything we need and she's providing us with supplies and charts and just something that we just don't have time to make with everything going on in the classroom. So again having Tammy great literacy coach and I enjoy working with her and so does every other teacher that I know that I've talked to about in fourth grade and she runs great workshops too. As we wait for Thad to come up I want to compliment Don because he's a good teacher and he's been teaching for 28 years and he didn't have to do this and he put himself out there and he wanted to know how can I even be a better teacher than I am now and I want to compliment him on that because not every teacher is looking to do that. Thad if you can talk a little bit about what coaching has meant to your building. Sure, the first thing I think about is I'm sure in 28 years Don has seen a lot of iterations of professional development and just seeing a veteran teacher and Don is a happy guy but just seeing you so elated in the classroom has been wonderful and Tammy and Don have invited me in and it's been wonderful to sit and be a part of it and also to be part of the feedback model both have been really open to an extra set of eyes as they're going through this and you know ultimately I think the best thing that we can ever do is prioritize our investments for children and this investment in teaching and in teachers is really paying off for the writers in the classroom and I think that's really what everybody wants to hear we're making an impact on achievement so and the other thing I guess that I like to see is this is an adult learning model at its best because it's iterative all the time we're learning by doing they're looking at student work, they're planning together we're talking in the moment the kids are excited so it's wonderful to see this it's hitting the needs of a 28 year veteran educator it's certainly as we continue to hit the needs of a range of different teachers I think our big challenge is right now prioritizing figuring out where can we use this support and we'd like to spread it over 30 different places because we're talking literacy is the big picture of reading and writing and we both Linda and Tammy in this capacity but I've heard wonderful things too you know everybody wants a piece of this of this support because sorry Ramble but you know one more thing to consider is it is a time where a lot of things are changing quickly standards have changed we are putting really high quality curriculum in the hands of our teachers it's curriculum that takes time to learn and practice and so having two people are working directly with our teachers so this is happening the best it can so it's really helpful for the administration also for making this happen for us in our schools so when we get to budget time I can remember this he's behind you you might have to why don't you just act it out you can do it we have to sing put me in coach you know that song put me in coach I'm ready to play and then you see pictures of us just imagine pictures of us working with teachers the selectmen don't have this much fun they don't have this much fun we have this much fun all the time I just want to thank alright well we'll let Adam work on that maybe I don't know if there are any questions for anyone in the group down the list everyone yeah this sounds like a really exciting thing just a clarification question how much time are you in each classroom so that it sounds like you're in great demand so I'm sure you're pulled in many different directions I think I'd love to be in even more right now with Don's room where I'm in three days a week for the writing block across other classrooms it's looking differently if a teacher is asking to come in and see a small group modeled I might just push in and they watch that once we have a conversation about it afterwards so I think it's the time and it's the capacity that Linda and I have that there's two of us across the seven buildings so we're trying to sprinkle it in however and whenever we can but the most amount of time so far has been the co-teaching with the writing unit Dr. Allison Ampe this isn't exactly fair because it's not your area but I'm wondering what do we have this sounds wonderful and I'm wondering what do we have for our middle school students teachers I think I'm going to throw that one over to Dr. Chatham you know as we've said this is a very scarce resource we're applying it right now into the elementary schools ideally it's similar to math coaches we have math coaches at the elementary level we do not have that one of the reasons is because elementary teachers have to be an expert in everything and a lot of the content knowledge is tremendous huge overwhelming at the elementary level so that's where we've focused our resources at the middle school model we have a K through 12 ELA director so Deb Perry would be going in and coaching the teachers and playing a similar role but also as the evaluator it would be really nice to have someone who wasn't the evaluator I think that's one of the nice parts about this model is that these people are not they're about professional growth and development they're not also part of the evaluation process so people are always trying to shut me up I thought you guys were singing yeah thank you sorry okay Mr. Heiner thank you very much it's really exciting to see this my experience with co-teaching was similar we had a person come in the director is there any thought of co-teaching with the other fourth grade teachers and setting up looking to find time in doing that as you grow this program yes I think to that question I would say we have this lab site model that I think you heard about last year where we have district you know teacher leaders that are willing to host other teachers coming into their classroom I think down the road the idea is teachers get more and more comfortable with this model and start to say sure I'll have people in for a couple times just within my own building or within another subject area part of where we hope to be able to go with it thank you so thank you very much great presentation a lot of fun my question is for Dr. Ches and Dr. Boer you know in terms of the budget what do you want us to be thinking about when it comes to this program I think it's the impact that this kind of professional development can have we've talked numerous times about building the capacity of the classroom teacher the best way to do that is by in class coaching we've seen that with the math coaches and we're seeing that with literacy coaches so that if you look at us and look at the priorities that we will have set when you see the elementary principles and the secondary principles come in you will hear that this is one of their top priorities it's one of ours and it's one of theirs so I guess that's what I'd like you to keep in mind and will you be asking us to think about enhancing this in the future if there was if there were sufficient funding expanding it with definitely extending it would be expanding having another person so that these two ladies okay don't have to clone themselves okay that's what I'm trying to get at okay thank you I want to thank you for your presentation a couple of things is that I do accountability for a living for another school system and one of the things that we find universally is with strong leadership and excellent coaching we get really great instruction in the classroom and because the coaching model just inspires reflective practice and that's really the key here and Tom Brady has a coach and we find our best teachers are the ones who are really interested in having great coaching to go with it because there's always something more to learn something new to try another set of eyes is so important which is why this is such a valuable valuable program and just for my colleagues who don't deal with this on a day-to-day basis I can't emphasize enough just how important your work is and how I appreciate this presentation tonight thank you very much thanks guys next item up on the agenda will be the park or MCAS discussion and the superintendent will come back to her chair to join us don't get too far from the mic miss Hanson going anywhere let me just give you a well Dr. Chesson is getting this set up actually we've already had a bit of an introduction already in public participation to the situation that we are currently finding ourselves in this year the the proposal by commissioner Chester to have a different type of assessment that combines park as well as MCAS has been approved by the Board of Education we have we have been given the option to make a decision as to whether we would choose to have the park test in Arlington in 2016 a decision regarding that needs to be made by December 18th so we have some time to think this through as we're considering this decision there are a lot of factors and some of them have already been expressed and Dr. Chesson is going to go through some of the thinking that we have been doing over the last actually few days we had some glimmers that this was probably going to be an opportunity for us all from a meeting that we had attended a couple of weeks ago now one of the we've also heard that we would be held harmless what that means is that if we are a school or a district at a certain level depending upon that performance we are not necessarily going to go we're not going to go down a level it doesn't mean that we couldn't go up a level it's just that you're held harmless however your performance is still available to the district and all of the test questions and the kind of analysis that we have been doing with MCAS has been promised to be available as well as park I think this year of implementation it's been a little bit it has been slow it's not a little bit to it it's been very slow in terms of getting this information out to districts and state assessments the intent is that you get timely results so that you can do implementation of things that you need to work on so that is a real issue it's hard to say the commissioner said that we would have roughly we would have the same kind of timeline as MCAS which means that we get the results in August and even though the information has been embargoed for a while we are able to plan going into the school year and for one thing we are able to set up for example at Otterson are different groups for intervention so hopefully that would be the case as we we make this decision there are different components to it it is possible to stay with MCAS however in this proposal the following year in 17 all towns all districts in the commonwealth are going to have MCAS 2.0 which is going to be a blend of the two tests as they had was the true last year it will be true for the next couple of years you have the option as district to take this either online or in paper form so anyway this is the broad look at this we have a proposal or we have a presentation here to give a little bit more information about it and certainly welcome a lot of questions that we have in time to sort of to weigh the pros and cons of what the decision will be for the district okay I want to start by saying that as Miss Hansen said she and I have worked extraordinarily closely I know that you feel that you don't have a copy of this and I apologize but the decision was not made until Tuesday I also wanted to make sure that I had sufficient time to go and speak to teachers I know that was something the school committee gave us a lot of feedback on last year and so I immediately when it became apparent sort of the direction that things were going in I went immediately to see Miss Hansen and said you know the vote is Tuesday given that we'll know on Tuesday what will happen I'm planned to go and did go to the grade 3, 4 and 5 elementary professional development on Tuesday afternoon shared with them the vote shared with them the opportunity for them to come and meet with me yesterday afternoon with Miss Hansen and I shared with them the opportunity for them to email me encouraged them to take Miss Hansen's survey answered a few brief questions but I didn't want to take away the time for their professional development and I want to use that hopefully as a theme that while we want to hear what teachers have to say we also don't want to derail all the good work that we're doing for this issue and we feel like there's a resolution or there's a proposal for this issue that would kind of meet both masters so as Dr. Bote said in 2017 all of the districts will be taking MCAS 2.0 the DSC is putting out the RFP for right now I was involved in watching the Twitter feed from the board of education meeting on Tuesday afternoon Tuesday morning Commissioner Chester was emphatic that he had done a significant amount of research on how long it would take to bring up the test he spoke as we heard in public participation quite emphatically in the conference call and this morning at EDCO I was told that people who have people that are MCAS leaders those are teachers that go in to help score MCAS have already been who were originally sort of dismissed and told that their services were no longer to be needed have already been asked to come back and look at park items and figure out what if any MCAS items need to be fit in with the park so I think it's a fair statement to say while this test will be under the control messages control given the time period it'll be offered the accommodations that will be allowed the biggest concerns in previous years has been that we had to have offered the same accommodations as all the other park consortium and now we're free from that regulation the length of the test and the information that we're going to release they're all be under Massachusetts control the timeline for this is less than one year and the commissioner was very emphatic that therefore this would fit the description of a test that is substantially based on park and I think that that's going to be based on the information that I've gotten from edco the information we got on the conference call and the twitter feed that I saw on Tuesday and the commissioner has stated actually stated on his conference call in the twitter feed and I think twice in the conference call the schools that did MCAS last year that switched to park for this spring will provide their students with a substantial leg up and preparing for the test to be offered in 2017 so to me based on all the information that we already have it clearly indicates that the likely the largest proportion of the test that we'll see in 2017 will be from park what do we know about accountability doctor body has already touched on this so I won't emphasize that anymore what do we know about the reported results that we would get the results about in the same time frame she's already touched on that I want to assure people that there'll be district school student and item analysis results right now the item analysis results are lagging because they're in the process of completing the report and that's why it hasn't been released but they are in fact expecting to release item analysis and all release items similar to MCAS will be shared just like MCAS all MCAS items are not released all park items will not be released you can't use some they use some items to sort of level set the testing so they can compare from year to year if you release those then everybody knows what the questions are and now you don't have a basis for comparison from year to year it's the basics of the psychometrics that's associated with it this is a communication plan if this was if there are the proposal to go forward was approved we had focus group meeting for elementary teachers on 1118 I'm going to the middle school tomorrow morning we get every teacher the opportunity to provide us feedback if we have a recommendation that's a that we think is in draft format at least enough to share with staff even if it's not approved we could say to staff this is what we're thinking if this is something that we feel that this comfortable going forward we would give out the training plan that we have so the staff could review that as well again even know that this hasn't been voted but if it's voted in this would be the training plan so that staff would have as much information upfront as possible if it was approved we could have lead teacher positions in each of the buildings someone who coordinates that and we had that in the plan last year and we would be able to post those in the beginning of the middle of December I would be also available to go around to building meetings in November December and January similar to lead to what I did when we put in the new teacher evaluation system when we were having people come up with DDMs in terms of parents should we after this discussion feel like this is something that has a possibility of going forward we could make a draft recommendation and communication out to parents Dr. Bode has a email address that specifically for parents to be able to send in information it's APS superintendent parents could even after tonight could email into that email address I've told Dr. Bode I will personally look at all the emails and reply to all the people who submit park suggestions comments or concerns and if that's approved we would put a link on our website for park so that parents could see what was going on teachers could see what was going on teachers also have a separate website called the teaching and learning website and all that information would be up there if this is approved to move forward we would hold parent forums in the month of January and I would also be available to go to PTO meetings similarly to the work I did when we first began to adopt the Common Core this is a little bit about the training plan we base this plan on the idea and we'll keep coming back to this that we are doing this as a trial run we are not going to change our curriculum we are not going to change our scope and sequence we are not asking people to do test prep that the training will be specifically on the mechanics of the test as a matter of fact we want everybody to take if this was to be approved to take a deep breath and step away from the accountability table we really concentrate on getting those initiatives which are focused on the Common Core really deeply grounded in all the classrooms and really say that when we take this test it's kind of like a trial run it's a trial period we don't want to spend a lot of time on the content but just on the mechanics how does it work how would you what are the different question types etc etc we would recommend based on the teacher feedback that we based on teacher feedback while we feel that we would be comfortable with all the schools taking a computer based test I'm sure Ms. Hanson will give you all the details but that was one of the largest concerns of teachers and therefore we would recommend that one or two schools would do computer based testing and we have people in the trenches that would go into all those classrooms and train all those teachers just to get used to again the mechanics we also have an online training video that would be available to review or to cover what students have missed and the trainings would be focused between February and mid-April so it wouldn't be too far before the test but not too close to the test so some of the concerns or the considerations that we have the first one is about stress our goal is to stress people out less not increase their level of stress and the whole harmless clause in 2016 would allow us to gain experience from this test without the accountability stress and I need to tell you that that is a very real thing and that teachers will tell you from the day they walk in the door in September they are thinking that the end of the road is MCAS they don't think about it all the time but it's always in the back of their mind but there's also concerns about that we have students teachers and administrators that will be involved if we do any computer based testing IT will be involved stress will be really higher if we emphasize teachers and students that they have to study that they have to gear up that they have to do additional test prep and so we're not looking to do those things we really want to keep the test stress down there is no long composition for grades 4 and 7 so their format that's one thing that's taken off out of the format the testing is all in one window and it's late in the year it doesn't start until April 25th it allows teachers to really focus on teaching for a longer amount of time and not to have the two breaks in curriculum that currently happen in the testing cycle you'll see the I talked about the timing a little bit technology we would have the opportunity to get the bugs out if we have at least one school that's doing a computer based testing while at the same time being held harmless and we do have an option and Dr. we've verified this again that we have the option to not have it's not all or nothing at all you can have one school do computer based testing everybody else can do paper what you can't do is split a school that's the one thing they won't let you do and this will allow us to find out if our wifi capacity up to the task we think it is, we've had some problems in the fall we've now identified that it's a piece of equipment a wifi controller that has to be replaced and we'll be in the process of replacing it over Christmas break if we have one or two schools which one does it seem to be is a better testing environment again the length of the test it is a time test but students with disabilities and students who are ELL which is different from MCAS can have extra time the results thus far are showing that general education students have sufficient time and the state has collected much data on this it is a longer test in terms of the number of minutes but it is less testing periods test in March and then test again at the end of the year there's only one testing period some general education students may be stressed by the timed environment but at the same time especially students in middle school as they get to high school as they take the PSATs, SATs those tests are all are all timed so it helps them to get used to it accommodations there's still something to be found out about the accommodations that are available in the park and the computerized testing all students can have read aloud whether they are a general education or a special education in the math test they can have it read aloud to them if we had a school that was going computer based but we had a student in that school that was a special education student for whom computer based would be inappropriate paper and pencil for that student isn't an acceptable accommodation there's a statement here that IPs may have to be updated last year schools were allowed to send home a letter to parents just letting them know that their students IP currently did not have anything that called for unlimited time on state tests because that wasn't necessary to put an IP for MCAS but that they were going to allow their students to do that so that you didn't have to have multitudes of IP meetings and as IPs meetings came up that would be updated previous to this graphic organizers checklist and reference sheets were not allowed but again since we're taking this test sort of isolated from the park consortium now we sort of have control of our own destiny that will be one of our questions that we ask there are two additional conference calls next week on Monday and Thursday and training we've already talked about I hope it's not next Thursday Monday and Tuesday it's next week it's all blending together for me again this chart just shows you the number of sessions that happen in the MCAS and the park in some cases there are slightly more sessions but as we said it's all in one time period any teacher will tell you that if you have any kind of testing session during the day it kind of blows the rest of the day out of the water so by confining it to the very end of the year you have a much more concerted time to offer curriculum you can sort of understand what we're so this is an example of a park math question this is a fifth grade math question one of the things that is interesting about this question and different from MCAS is that there are you have to select two comparisons that are correct there is more than one right answer it is looking for students to have fluency and multiple representations of the MCAS question that would match to it so you can see this is a pretty straightforward question it's just asking you which of the inequalities are true only one of these is a true statement there's only one right answer all of the questions are in the same format did you want to this is much the other one was much more common core as you can see it's asking for students to have a much more deeper understanding and it also helps students to be able to figure out things over time information that we still want to gather is specific accommodations for special education students whether we will have to modify those IEP's or that waiver was just for last year we'd like I'd like to get more feedback from the middle school teachers I am going there tomorrow the final draft of the schedule we have a couple of drafts of schedule but we really can't make a schedule until we make a decision if we're going to go forward and if that's going to be paper and pencil or online or a combination thereof we will still be and whether we will be still using the same technology as we did in the pilot which allowed us to not to not get try to get too technical here but when you take the question it's not like you're sitting at your computer at home and you want to order something online so you put in the information and you hit enter and it sends it up to the internet and then you get a message back from the internet we use what's called a caching server so it says if you put in the information and it sends it to the computer that's on that desk and then we put in the information and it sends it to the computer on that desk and at the very end of the testing cycle when all students are finished it goes from that computer up to the internet so that the only connectivity that you're worried about is that between the individual computer in the classroom and that computer as opposed to going out to the internet so what is our recommendation we have a draft recommendation at this point we are still collecting information but right now our recommendation would be that we would do park in the spring of 2016 that one or two schools would do digital and the remaining would have the option to do digital or paper and pencil we'd like to encourage at least one or two schools and there are schools I have in mind that I think would be a good match based on a whole bunch of things if not at least there are some schools that have hard wired connectivity so then we wouldn't even have to worry about Wi-Fi if that became a problem it would be a backup plan certainly but that's possible but we will also again want teachers to have an option to choose so if a school felt it wasn't one of the schools we were thinking of that would do online but they really felt like that was something that the teachers and the principal decided that they wanted to do we would certainly support that again no changes to the curriculum or scope and sequence we're not asking teachers to change anything they're doing as a matter of fact what we'd like to the only thing we'd like them to change doing is worrying about having the students take this assessment in the spring nose test prep except for familiarized staff and students with the format and question types completely a try on test drive experience which will allow us to find out where we stand in terms of the common core I spoke to most of my counterparts in edco this morning the vast majority of the people in the room I think there was one person that did mcast last year everybody else in the room had done park I talked to them about their experience and they're sort of seeing a trend that their elementary school students are doing as well or better than they expected that middle school and math is doing as well or better than expected and that ELA is the area where everybody sort of agrees that the common core depth of implementation in middle school is not as deep as we need to be in order to be prepared for this test that's what their experience is I think that's what our experience would be but I will not know until we actually would do something okay miss Hanson yes hello again so if you don't mind I'm gonna just kind of recap where I wasn't finished my remarks and then I'd be happy to answer questions or not and I know it's kind of unfair to read statistical things and not give you paper to look at but I'm doing it with a purpose I just want you to be thinking up here so overall again about half of the teachers who are going to administer the test in grades three through eight took the survey of those teachers about 65% said their preference would be to stick with mcast 25% said try park paper and pencil under hold harmless and about 10% said try park computer based hold harmless but what I thought was equally if not more important were the factors that teachers kind of used to come up with their decisions so Laura mentioned some of them there but the ones the main reasons for people choosing whatever they chose and I tried to give them a whole host of pro test park pro stick with mcast just to see what factors were the most salient to them the six top ones three of them had to do with technology the number one thing chosen was the technology they did not feel that our IT support we would be able to pull off a computer based test district wide the stress of one more thing to do came in at number two so again a lot of teachers are going through retail this year still aligning common core a lot of rolling out new units at the elementary level new units in multiple content areas so that one more thing definitely came up technology the current infrastructure was too weak to support computer based the fact that it's a time test concerns teachers and how students are going to react to that again with the concerns around anxiety technology the challenge of coordinating 2600 students to take a computer based test but also in the top tier was the hold harmless clause the interest in trying out a test that we wouldn't that people wouldn't be held accountable for although accountability is fine to say that you're not going to be held accountable but they do publish the results still you can still go online and find them so in some ways having public results that aren't accountable doesn't necessarily feel like hold harmless if you're the one who's being tagged with those results so I do think again that it was significant that technology related issues were three of the top six not at all a knock on our hard working IT staff rather just an acknowledgement of the daily challenges presented by the growing pains of increasing technology options for students and teachers and if we're really going to be ready to fully integrate technology into teaching and learning and prepare for a district wide online assessment we really would have to make a larger investment in our IT department so unlike a year and a half ago I don't come to you with a single decision and trying out park the park format under the hold harmless clause but I do really urge you to read through all the comments that teachers made and the factors that they considered however if the decision is made to try out park this spring I have two very specific requests that I believe will be critical to the success of the endeavor one is that the school committee and the administration publicly embrace a park trial as an opportunity to try out the common core testing platform with the sole focus on learning more about the way that park approaches assessing the common core standards no time should be diverted from the important work the district is going is undergoing aligning curriculum and continuing our efforts to support teachers with professional development on instructional practices and the common core units of study again the elementary level all of the new different units of study still being rolled out in science that work is critical to supporting our efforts to improve the educational experience for students and our alignment to the common core so really putting in a plug for not diverting time to studying the new test and it's an evolving testing system we you know we don't really know what it's going to look like ultimately and if the decision is to go with park I hope all parties make it very clear I really feel like it's going to be a big messaging campaign it's going to be a big challenge for our parents teachers and the community that the accountability system for students teachers and schools and the district will be turned off it would be an experiment that would better inform our work going forward and the goal would be to plan after that first exercise about just thinking about what we learned going through that process so that was one all of those three one second if park is the direction teachers is strong and clear there's a major apprehension around the district's capacity to carry out a full district online administration and I really think this could be a disaster for all involved thoughtful decision should be made about the realistic capacity we have to try out the online version in a limited number of settings and with the current timeline that we have in front of us we have four years to get to 100% online by 2019 so we should consider these three stages over time so many of us have very mixed feelings about some of the features of the current park test but I know we will have the chance to discuss those concerns more fully in the future and now that we have the certainty of a four year plan I urge the school committee and the administration to consider the feedback from teachers and to make a thoughtful decision that clearly articulates the reason for the decision the goals for the future of the park are very large. Thanks. You'll make sure that a copy of your data is transmitted to Ms. Fitzgerald who will distribute it to us. She has them right there actually I just asked her not to do it until after I spoke but yes they're right there it's a lot of paperwork and I don't want you shuffling through it all while I was talking but everything that I just said concerns two questions and a suggestion. Okay so the concern is just to make sure that professional development doesn't get hijacked Absolutely. So that's my big concern I mean I know that you're suggesting that we not spend too much pressure and spend too much time sort of focusing on the test but just but you will have to do some professional development but there's a lot more important things than what we would do. There's no intention that we would cancel any professional development that is currently scheduled and we would do the professional development for the vast majority of teachers during the day but we also already have a contractual requirement to do MCAS preparation in terms of the administration of it and we would use that time. Got it. Two questions. One you probably don't know the answer to yet but would you come forward to the mic please? So I can speak a little bit about what the experience was like. We had a pilot test two years ago for ELA and math and we had a pilot test. So I can talk a little bit about what the experience was like. We had a pilot test two years ago for ELA and math we did we used the computer lab so they were hardwired computers we did not try the wireless at that point. The test that the prep that the teachers did the students did all of very smoothly they each went through a tutorial the teachers and the teachers also had their own training with some of the IT professionals in the district and then I sort of oversaw the teachers and the testing itself and it was very streamlined for those of you who have been involved in MCAS with the prep that goes into it with the labeling and the booklets and the collecting and all this all you do is you just print out a sheet of paper that has the students user ID and that's all they need so that makes things much simpler. Do you think that teachers want to go to the computer based test or do you think without having pulled the faculty yes I would think that there's probably mixed feelings with the sixth grade iPad initiative and how much they're being used now I'm sure they would be interested in trying it and seeing what it's about I think that there's interest in the different levels but we would I think we're working on collecting the data on devices and usage and what it needs to take to put it all together so that's where we are. I have then one more question so this thank you very much the second question is a bigger question that I'm sort of beginning to understand but don't quite fully understand what this held harmless means because I know what it is for a district to sort of be harmed by their scores but we're never in that status we're not going to we're not falling to a level five so I want to sort of just have a better idea of what does it really mean for teachers to be held harmless buildings to be held harmless so forth the answer is very simply our level one schools will not go down from level one our level two schools will not go down from level two yeah but that doesn't I still don't understand what that means parents who might want to move into our district look at our levels and that might be consideration for them but we don't nothing it seems changes if we go from level one to level two for example where we tend to run into trouble on level two schools is not with the population as a whole it's with the high need subgroup so what would happen if you've got a school in that circumstance if the reason why their level two school changes and they move up to level one they will become a level one school however a school that we have that's level one that tries out the test that doesn't do quite as well and trips over one of the trip wires would normally move them down they would not become a level two school during a hold harmless year so that if you've got I mean for example the high school last year was level one so that if they made our level one school this year they would be guaranteed to be level one school through the two years of hold harmless so that's not a bad thing to happen I think I just don't understand what it means for teachers for principals I understand there's less stress and certainly the school committee is very concerned about these levels and our data but for example how does a teacher what would a teacher feel by being told that he or she was not being harmed well teachers take very seriously the level of their school is and in fact the school committee has taken this very seriously over the last few years and having is one of the district goals PPI scores of not below 75 and SGPs so there's a lot of pressure just even from district goals saying that we think this is important as a district if we were to go forward with this we would literally take those goals out of our district goals they would not be I think I want to also emphasize that we don't punish teachers if we have identified that there is some pattern an individual year is no pattern in terms of an SGP score our response is not a punitive response at all what can we do to help and what can we do in the way of extra professional development some coaching and mentoring so that part would not change but I do think that there is a significant amount of internalized stress around the level of the school you're in and to be perfectly frank I think that's been an issue at Audison for many years of a lot of pressure about performing at a better level every single year will teachers and students still want to perform at high levels of course they will but at the same time there's a little bit of a feeling of less stress if you know that we're taking this as an opportunity just to try it out if we wait to 17 on this not only are we going to be dealing with the variable of different types of questions even if we did a paper we'll be dealing with timed now one thing that the State Board of Education did is makes next year as well as hold harmless so I think that the stress would be often 17 but on the other hand one advantage to the district one advantage to teachers and departments is by doing this we get a sort of a chance to see really the work that we have been doing in line in Common Core the strong work we're doing in writing and reading and math and to see you know where we are relative to what the standards how the standards are assessed and I think it would be very educational for us in being able to take that information and then okay well what are we going to do in terms of curriculum adjustments if we but if we don't we don't get the results to the fall so our summer is gone in terms of being able to really do any kind of curriculum work so by getting two years we give ourselves some time in order to do some updating or some adjustments and as Laura was talking about we have a teaching and learning website which is open to teachers which we provide a lot of extra support and information and not to mention all the curriculum maps so I don't know if you want to add anything further on that I guess the last thing I would add is that there are many assessments that we give that we've designed based on where we are in our curriculum and where we are in our teaching and learning within the district and being able to be held harmless from the state assessments and also having that come off the goals and I have to emphasize that by the school committee making a goal we tell teachers there's a through line there's the district goals and those translate into school goals which then translate into teacher goals we would allow them to focus on those assessments that they have developed DRA is the only other there's a little bit of AMC but the vast majority of the other assessments are ones that we have developed based on what we think are the power standards based on where we are in curriculum and to really look at that data and to focus on that data and you heard the good things that they're doing in those coaching cycles and that's the kind of data that they're looking at and then I have a suggestion were we to move in this direction and I would invite you to come to the community relations subcommittee where we are talking about doing something big in January and enrollment and then doing something in March on curriculum and sort of to coordinate those efforts absolutely okay thanks Mr. Hayner first off I'd like to state that MCAS 2.0 is just putting a new cover sheet on park there's no way you can put a quality testing tool together in a year and a half and dramatic changes in it so to me it's just a new cover sheet saying that the issue of anxiety you get used to doing something it does not alleviate anxiety as the child grows older the stakes become higher and that magnifies the anxiety on the thing so knowing how to take the test alleviates that aspect of it the mechanic of it the changes in this I'm a little bit concerned hearing that we're talking about doing some electronic and some paper there's two parts to doing something new the content part is doing a different test I understand that part but the other part is the learning about the electronics until we have a full assessment of everyone taking it electronically I'm also concerned and I'm sure you have something if we're taking the data from the child and putting it over here in a server I hope there's some sort of backup because the moment you press go and it disappears that scares me you mentioned before the state won't allow in a building some paper some electronic but then I heard you say that it has to be by school but you also made you suggested that it might be an exception is that a factor is that one of the questions that you still need to get clarified no that is correct it is an accommodation that's allowed does that require an IEP in place for that accommodation or can if you have a child high anxiety it's not on a IEP but you know it's going to have a direct effect I'm going to have to check that out to make accommodations without an IEP team convening and I need to find out if that's going to be held the same I don't think you cannot do it on the fly I will tell you that but whether it requires an IEP team meeting or not I have to find out at the conference call I absolutely agree because of all the FERPA aspects to that as well all of a sudden we're putting another tag on the special needs one of the selling features we have a new test we're talking about assessing the common core and the state the things there I have a deep respect for our teachers the professionalism on there every teacher is not waiting for a state assessment coming back to assess what he or she is doing in the classroom teachers are doing that on a daily basis moment to moment basis going forward keeping accurate records we'll put a lot of time and effort in training our teachers on dealing with data and I'm sure a lot of them are doing that it's interesting to push us into something because it's going to give us an edge up two years ago everyone was talking that park was going to be a fader comp play well the reality is it's not and I would suggest the possibility it's a gamble it may not be a push two years from now right now we may be looking back and Dr. Ampey and I went to the other day and those people that took it last year are taking it next year and will be assessed on it they will not be held harmless next year all districts are districts they got held there was a revision at the meeting there was a motion made by one of the members to extend the hold harmless one of the committee memo calls for the state and I'm quoting it commit to computer based state assessments the goal of implementing this statewide by spring of 2019 there is little support for that at the state house on a monetary basis the issue of timing going to computers would get data back to the communities very quick that's not going to happen as long as a big chunk of the state is doing it on paper that's a fact and so to practice it for the sake of finding out where we are on the idea of park or the assessment of the common core I can understand that but as far as the technology part of it unless we're all doing it unless the state is all doing it I don't know where we're going I just want to say one thing because I've heard a number of people say that park we said it was going to be park park park and then that's not true the MCAS 2.0 is park with a different cover sheet so both of those things cannot be true so I agree with you that I think it's park with a different cover sheet and so therefore I do think we know what the test is going to look like but the problem I have with that is that a vast majority of a group of states and a lot of communities in this state have said we don't want park we don't want park we want the concept of saying we're going to create a hybrid of MCAS and park if that is true it's going to take multiple years to do it I think that's true and to just change the name in order to sell a product you couldn't do that in the real world change a product that people don't want by just putting a new label on it to sell it I think that it will be true there's going to be a test that evolves and that was true with MCAS I can tell you that the early MCAS was very different than the MCAS a couple years later so I don't think that that is absolutely going to be the case one of the besides the issue of curriculum you mentioned a number of factors that are different in the test which we acknowledge there's the timing part of it there's a different emphasis and approach to the types of questions and then there's the online one advantage of this year of potentially maybe having paper in some schools and I would allow schools to choose allows to take some of the to separate some of those factors over two years so this year you get the experience of what the types of questions are you get the experience of timing which is a new experience though the when I understand well they give a time for it the vast majority of gen ed students do it in about two thirds of the time allowed but some don't so it's a new paradigm in testing we don't do time testing in our common assessment and then you could integrate the next piece of it which is a technology having both at the same time if you're not in that kind of platform regularly perhaps adds a whole dimension of stress to it that we could decouple by spreading it out and so that's a consideration too just one you mentioned about the test evolving mcast evolved because it was Massachusetts and took direct feedback from Massachusetts this is not going to be just Massachusetts this is going to be dealing with it if it's park it's going to be I understand that but if the feedback as presented in the memo is going to be a consortium of Massachusetts people of educators parents and things like that you're not going to be creating that hybrid within a year that's all I'm saying and if you are creating the hybrid which interested me and it will have this evolving communication with the state and stuff like that then it becomes a unique test to Massachusetts and it won't be this big piece out there that Mr. Chester is selling for his company okay may I have a comment I think that if you were starting from scratch and writing questions I would totally agree but the hybrid is really a mix and match you can take the test the questions from park but we have a bank of thousands of questions from mcast as well and so it's a question of just choosing which ones to say that does not rigor in the mcast would not be correct either there is some rigor and there's some questions that are actually quite rigorous in fact in the Globe article the other day they had a park question and an mcast question the example they gave the mcast question was more rigorous than the park question so it really there's a combination of both I will say that one of the things we do in literacy and have been doing is looking to do much more writing and using evidence and of course at Tammy and we were never talking about how you sort of light up the room a little bit with it too but we also do a lot around writing it's just not a narrative writing and that has not been assessed in the same way an mcast said it is on park so you know we are we have moved forward in the district in terms of much more alignment and some very important things which are kinds of skills that our students need to be successful in our ever changing world and mcast frankly has not kept up with it they had predicted that mcast was going to be more aligned but it turns out that it really hasn't been as well as it so there are a bank of questions and if you get educators together and you say okay let's put this together you can create a hybrid if you're going to start from scratch you're absolutely right let me go on to Ms. Starks first question is math also going to be in April because the slide said only the ELA would be I'm sorry it's all everything the whole testing window is from April 25th to June 6th okay so I also found it interesting that in the survey that Linda Hanson did that even though it was mcast versus park paper so two paper mcast one out handily two to one over two to one so and yet what was interesting is that all of the comments were that were negative were about the technology so that confuses me because if I'm just comparing to paper tests I'm not talking about technology so that was kind of weird like they overwhelmingly want mcast at the number one thing they're worried about is the technology and so that kind of confuses me because one of the choices was just to stick with the park paper and so that that's kind of weird but I feel like that one thing that gives me pause I think is that I feel like that this is being rammed down our throats I don't like the fact that we have you know two weeks to put a plan together for dealing with this over the next three months I really feel like that we need to be I want to slow down the train I want to make us think about it I want if we have to get to all computers by 2019 I would rather see a very detailed plan I want to know when each and every student is going to be trained when each and every teacher is going to be trained and I want to see us ramp up I in no way and for jumping on this bandwagon right now I feel like there's a lot going on there's a huge wave of discontent around all of this standardized testing not just in Massachusetts but across the country and that and I'm sick and tired of listening to Mr. Chester I really am I mean he doesn't know what he's talking about he you know he seems to be running in whatever direction the dollars seem to be falling into his lap and it's just pissing me off I mean I just feel like I know MCAS isn't great but right now we know MCAS and if we take it one more year we have one more year of data that we have and we get nothing from park nothing useful nothing in a timely manner and I don't feel like we've had the time to really sit down and think about it it's not that I question all of the great planning that you've done and that I don't think that we could do something but I feel like everybody would feel so much better if we had a very clear plan about how every single student was when are the first graders all going to have been tested are we really sure we got them all even Johnny who's been out with the flu for three weeks you know like I I don't want to rush into this I feel like you know we're being forced to do it I don't mind that the test is going to change over time MCAS has changed over time but I don't feel like I want to be the one to jump in and so just like I voted against park last year I will vote against it again this year just feeling that you voted for yeah you did I would not vote for park did not vote for park I'm sure that I was one of the dissenting voters I don't remember that but okay I could be wrong I have to check the check the records so my question is this if the school committee voted to stay with the MCAS and we continued with the goal system that we have right now and we said we wanted to have SGP of 50 as our goal and a PPI of 75 for high need students or whatever the what does that do internally in terms of what are people going to think about that inside the schools what's that going to mean to a teacher who's going to know that in a year that test is going to go away and it's going to be meaningless and how's it going to be received internally if that I don't know that I can answer the question about whether it's meaningless or not I go back to the statement that the school committee sets goals teachers are well aware that those goals translate to school goals and those goals translate to teacher goals so if the school committee keeps those goals then teachers will keep those goals the other thing that I want to caution the school committee is that levels while primarily driven by the individual school scores there's also this in the bottom 20 percent unlikely however unlikely but we are being compared against part of our rating is being compared against other schools and as the sample size gets smaller the impact of one school or another school's impact on your rating gets larger so I guess the question I'm asking is I'm trying to understand the academic value of putting all this time and energy into a test to go away so preparing for the MCAS worrying about the scores spending time at school committee meetings looking at the data worrying about whether or not you've met PPI or SGP where does that get us as a district if this test is going to go away I would say that it doesn't move us forward we even though I think there's increasingly a little disconnect between MCAS particularly in ELA I would say we're going to continue the work that we're doing because it makes the most sense for students the kind of emphasis on writing and the type of writing that they're doing the kind of critical thinking that we're asking students to do in math the next generational science standards which are going to eventually become part of our science testing as well we'll continue doing that now are students going to continue to perform well on MCAS? I absolutely think so do I think that they would probably do well on the park test? Yes because our curriculum has been increasingly aligned to the common core I think that there's a lot of misaligned there's been misconception in general and certainly become very political that there's something wrong or not good about the common core and I would have to say that I couldn't disagree more I think the emphasis on the type of reading that we're asking students to do is long overdue while there's it's wonderful to be able to do a lot of fiction reading the reality of our world today is we have to have discerning readers to be able to read sometimes very dense material and make sense of it to use what they've learned to make arguments that are going to be represented in their writing and that is the work we're doing we don't, MCAS no energy has been put into MCAS to continue that effort to align more and more to that so yes well we continue to do well, we will I see this as an opportunity to sort of decouple some of the stresses spread it out but we could also certainly go another year we have common assessments that we use to understand how we're doing and we'll continue to do that as well and those assessments are teacher written they are often reviewed in curriculum committees over the summer so our teachers are very much involved in both the development and the assessment of the work that we do and the state test is just one piece of further data that we use and I'm not saying it's not just one is very important one that we take very seriously and as the committee does as well at some point we are going to be we, I think that it has moved forward for whatever whichever way you agree or disagree with it the state is moving forward to a different type of testing and it's going to be different testing in terms of its content what it's expecting of students and it's also going to be different in terms of the form in which students take tests that's already that's already happening to adults I mean that happens with adults teachers when students take you know GMAT test you don't take those tests test hardly anymore on paper and pencil it's just not how it's done and it's going to increasingly be that way so that is the flow that is where it's going and we can either start moving in that direction or we can just sort of wait until we think that it's in a more perfect state I mean that's the choice before us and that's why we want to I'm glad they're giving us to the 18th of December because I think it's something that we need to have time to reflect on and certainly as we get more information we would provide it to you I know that while there was a big reach out yesterday with Laura and Linda no teachers came to that meeting to talk about this so we're dealing with it was a sample but we the teachers for the first time are really understanding where we're going to I don't know when they reflect on this over the next couple weeks but they're thinking about this is going to evolve as well so we're all at a new place in a new direction and we have to see what our choice will be so a couple of points I want to follow up on is I would love to hear from principals on what they think about this I have a concern about thousands of students in Arlington that's going to be absolutely studying for it or not studying for it but being prepared for it in classroom time taken up getting ready for a test is going to be absolutely I don't think that's good policy I don't think that's responsible policy I interact with elementary school parents because of the age of my kids and there are several parents that have already spoken to me and said you know there are other folks that have some experience in public education in different districts and so their position is boy would it be great to have my son or daughter take a test for a year that doesn't count so that's a feeling that some parents in our district some of the people that send their kids to our schools think about and I think we've got to listen to that I'm going to listen to that and hope other people do as well thank you I have a few questions in the comment my first question is how is park educationally a better choice for students yeah I think it's a I think we showed one question I could show you even more that is requiring students to utilize the skills that we're focusing on the sad part well I've now taught elementary but I will tell you about middle school and high school students is that when you teach something the first thing they want to know is it going to be on the test because we've set a long standing cultural that we assess those things that we think are important so when we emphasize to students that they need to be able to take information from multiple sources and they need to be able to give us multiple forms of the answer or they have to be able to fastly go from one form to another and then we don't assess it and the big assessment that they have at the end of the year doesn't assess it I think it sends a mixed message so I think educationally we're asking students to then utilize those skills that they've been practicing all year in a very real way I also think for those students that think creatively and out of the box just finding the one answer I think doesn't allow it has a very low ceiling and the park test has what we call is got a high ceiling so that we have better information about those students even those students that do exceptionally well MCAS has a very low ceiling and we get to a certain point and we have no information and we find that with some of the other assessments and that's what makes us look at a different assessment and we're currently looking at an additional reading assessment because the DRA score only up to a certain point has a very low ceiling so I would say that that's educationally it sort of validates the kinds of things that we're asking kids to do it also provides us with additional information about students that are on the high end of the ceiling and there are also accommodations when we get into the when we get to the point where we would take a vast majority of students would be taking it if not all students online allows for accommodations for every student so that the test is really about measuring what the students know and are able to do as opposed to what they're not able to do I had voted for MCAS last year because I thought that the district would be better served by a longer ramp up towards doing electronic testing what has been done to better prepare the district for taking part this year versus last year in this intervening time of course the elementary schools have really been ramping up for example Stratton now has nine iPad cards they have something like 18 regular classroom teachers so students are using technology on a regular basis they're very facile and comfortable with it we're now getting students that are coming out of Thompson that also work from the one to one environment that are going into the middle school and then they're coming into sixth grade and they have a one to one environment do I think that we're perfect no do I think that from grades actually from grades K through 8 are we doing a pretty bang up job with exposing kids to technology and getting them comfortable about it yes I absolutely do we have some ways to go we're doing great strides this year I think by stressing the system this year as painful as the first month or so of school was it was being stressed because we I think David Goode told me yesterday a thousand additional devices so we kind of tried to break the system and we succeeded some weeks but we've been able to figure out okay this one was a filter problem so we need to change those filters we know that the controller that we thought we were going to be able to limp along with because it's four years old not happening and not only that we know that even when we put in that controller eventually would like to go to if we were to go to full digital we would want to back up controller so we are learning more and more about the support side of the system as well as the skills that we're giving our students and I think that the I think that when we see what happens at the AEF event that they have in the spring and we have students demonstrating what they know and are able to do with technology the committee has been amazed and I think that that's happening more and more every day so I do think the students are comfortable with that I also think that because we waited I know that that wasn't my choice but because we waited we got more information on what kinds of technology are best for the test originally the makers of the test for example used keyboards with iPads they found out that that actually makes the application less stable and that if you didn't use the keyboards you actually got more stability so we've been able to work with our counterparts in edco to get a lot of information about what it looks like the best platform would be so I think that those are kinds of things that we've done and although I understand people feel like they're being rushed I want the committee to know that after the vote last year we spent significant amounts of time and continue have spent significant amounts of time planning for what we thought was inevitable so while it may feel rushed to you it feels almost like a fate of complete for us because we kind of saw what was coming and I know it's hard and it doesn't feel good and that was one of the reasons why Dr. Bode and I talked about the fact that we would have a first read tonight and you know we have till December 18th and that they have even said if you need a little bit longer than that you can have it I mean the longer that we wait I think the more uncertainty there is but if it waiting another week and having me talk to elementary school teachers again to say why did you say no stay with MCAS but all the concerns that you raised have to do with technology is that because you thought that we definitely were going to go you know I mean I have no problem going and talking to teachers and bringing back the committee more information got more if we participate in park will we have better access to information about the test I'm thinking as the development of MCAS 2.0 takes place will we have better information to better inform counter proposals or does it not matter if you're in park or not I'll think so we'd have student data aligned and we'll have a personal experience that would be able to bring to the table as opposed to sort of standing on the outside I would say last year that was an exceptionally true in the sense that if you were not and people were talking at edco this morning well when I looked at this when I looked at that and I was like what are you talking about because we did not have access to that information so then my concerns are first that park is timed and I am worried well not for everyone but for that chunk of students who are staying in for recess because they're not quite done with their MCAS that those kids are now going to be hit with you know clearly you didn't finish and that's especially when they're little I mean it was bad enough when they were having to stay in for recess they still talked about you know this person didn't and this is going to be even worse it won't necessarily be as visible as the staying in I'm concerned that if we're feeling rushed that when if the decision is made to go to park that parents are going I understand Mr. Thielman has parents saying you're ready to jump on the bandwagon but I think a lot of parents are going to feel like they're not sure their children are ready for an electronic test I understand you're saying we're only going to do it in one or two schools but but actually I'm with Mr. Haynor that that's the part that I'm the most concerned about testing and making sure that it works is the electronic I think I'm with the teachers I feel like I just don't see this working and I'd rather shake out the issues and I understand that there seems to be a whole lot of push towards park but I'm just concerned even with all of this push that at the heart of it it's a flawed test and I understand that we're going to be forced to do something and it looks like it's going to be this but I still think it's a flawed test and I don't like putting our students through something that is a flawed test and I just I don't see a good answer I hear what you're saying that well MCAS looks like it's a dead end so I just I wish we could just vote for none of the above well I think those are certainly very valid concerns I think the issue of concern about the technology at some point that's going to happen at some point if it's going to be this year one school we're on unless the Board of Education changes the vote over the next four years we are on a trajectory that that's going to happen and having it be in a smaller scale at a time when there's sort of held harmless is not a bad time to do it to see what my kinks might be we did not have that experience with the pilot but the pilot is a different test we are going to be having time tests that is going to be the reality that we're going to be having down going forward but there they may find that they might make the periods longer which they didn't do as far as we know for this year based on the results of last year they found that the amount of time that was given was very adequate and the kids that needed more time were able to get more time through their IEP and this year they'll extend it to students that are English language learners there is always going to be a time when you're going to have an adjustment issues and a little bit of that but you take those you know that you're going to go through that and you learn from it so that you're going for the next time it's you correct so one advantage is that you don't have too many variables at one time and that is something to consider next year could be that we just you know that could be what you decide and next year there's still the option of doing paper but at some point we're going to have to do some testing to see how our own beta testing to see how that's going to work in our district we have what we've made big leaps this last year in terms of usage part because we now have teachers who are doing more with it we have the devices to do it and they'll even be more next year that's true but we're not saying to do the whole district that way right now so those are those are concerns and the issue of students being anxious about a test that's not going to change it's just not and one of the things you always hope you can do for your children and other children is that you give them enough experience with it that with practice anxiety does go down the longer you put off something without having that experience you can increase anxiety I know we're talking about the length of the time of the test and whether that would create anxiety I'm not concerned I think it will create anxiety beforehand my concern is it will create a sense of failure for the children who are unable to complete the test afterwards and I'm talking about general ed students I'm not talking about people who have IAPs that can have extended time or something I'm talking about kids who are unable to complete the test in the time that's allocated and I just I think we will see what happens but I am concerned that there will be students like that and that that is a very defeating kind of feeling and that I just I don't see how that's helping them right but I'm not concerned about the data about whether students there was that was a pervasive thing that happened the data shows that in fact not only did that not be the case that there were many students that did not finish there was in fact the students were only taking about two thirds of the time and can I just say that as a person who's proctored SATs and not being able to finish but when you proctor SATs now kids are not not finishing the test they're sitting there doodling or staring at the ceiling so I'm not sure if that also has had a change in the testing length but they have a significant amount of data from two years that talks about how many kids didn't pass the test and finish the test and it's extraordinarily minimal and those students generally are students who are special education students Dr. Seuss I just have a question about writing so you mentioned that we're to adopt park that we wouldn't be testing writing does that know it just doesn't have a long composition has plenty of writing in the test okay right okay so there's not a separate writing component because there's not a long composition would that be added to your understanding later on or the right the kind of writing that it measures is the kind of writing that's consistent with the common core and writing a narrative about you know snow day is not consistent with the common core okay thanks I would just ask you folks to push very strongly it's almost like an unfunded mandate we will get the technology part and we will get it in place under this mandate but the issue that that provides the concept of immediate feedback if they were giving Ellington back its results right away or the communities that had the technology that would be fine the reality is it's a statewide assessment and we're going to be compared in the in the whole thing I would ask you to push forward that and I would ask all of us to push our legislators and stuff to help the western part of the state they are still struggling to get into the 20th century and to make this again the two components the measurement of the new curriculum itself that possibly we will be there whether I like the test or not the other aspect of it the technology we'll get there but right now we're seeing our test results come back later than MCAS this time yeah and whether it's just the shakedown of the full testing or whether it's the component of all the paper aspect of it how much of that is I don't know and they haven't advertised people have asked right a lot of what had to happen was the Edwin reports Edwin analytics is a statewide system that allows us to analyze data from MCAS they wanted to get the sixth most popular Edwin reports set up so you could also analyze data from park and that was one of the reasons why there was a delay in getting the responses out and they also had to do a crosswalk in order to do accountability ratings which will come out in the first week in December between the two tests and that also held out a lot of the results from coming out just real quick you mentioned that if the pool of MCAS comes down I would question if all of a sudden there's 500 communities the only ones doing MCAS and all of a sudden related to that we could drop we could challenge that very quickly I'm not saying that that wouldn't be the case that we could challenge it I got an implication of that and that's not a reason to go for it that's all I want to thank you Mr. Thielman so I'm just trying to get the timeline December 18th we have to let them know they said that we could have an extension if we you know a couple they're not looking for an extension of two months but if we had a question what would the chair answer this part of the question we have a meeting on December 3rd we have a meeting on December 17th scheduled I think December 10th rather 10th and 17th so we can talk on the 10th and we can decide on the 17th or as the state is giving us the option if we're really deadlocked on this pushed to the first meeting in January because the state on that conference call said that we would be allowed to delay our decision if necessary go ahead Mr. Thielman thank you the principles have open what don't they have parent nitrous what's going on in the 10th elementary have conferences we're flipping the principles when can the principles come and talk to us about this elementary principles are coming on the 17th that evening on the 17th we could also ask the principles about what their recommendation is on this matter so that's what I'd like to if that's okay with everyone here I'd like if it's possible like I'm here on the 17th and just ask them what they think we've already talked to them but you can certainly but I want to hear from them absolutely I want you to hear it from them so we can also hear from the middle school the high school principle it's not going to impact the high school but the middle school principle if we can get them all here ask them questions the curriculum directors will also be here and those would be good folks to ask as well that's good when I ask them questions okay thank you okay my turn okay when I got my principal license and this was in the early 2000s they made me go and take the state teacher test the literacy portion and one of the things in that literacy portion was a writing sample and it was very MCAS-ish I did this in 2000 I was working in Madison Park at the time and I took the test at English High School and I'm sitting there and I'm looking at this and this thing looks so much like in MCAS long comp question the thing that teachers were asked to write and I was handicapped in this in that the way I normally write is on a keyboard electronically the way I edit is I move words around and play with it I do not write a first draft I do not then transcribe an edited first draft into a test booklet I don't do that that's not the way I write it hasn't been the way I've written for 15, 20 years and that's what we're asking kids to do right now with this long comp it is ridiculous it is not the way people write it does not reflect the way people write doing writing on a paper and pencil test in this paradigm is I think it's just an obsolete instrument in its pure foolishness to expect people to write in a manner that they don't normally write in so I see this paper and pencil testing thing is totally obsolete it's just done it's 1950s technology the biggest beneficiary of the MCAS right now is UPS who's making a ton of money tracking paper taking big cartons of paper delivering them to schools having test coordinators and I've done this job and I hate it unpacking these boxes counting test booklets putting test booklets aside being responsible for tracking these and this poor person in the back of the room from the middle school you have to do that God God bless you for 1200 students 1200 student school twice during the year not counting the access which is the third one tracking every last booklet and then the MCAS police knocking on your door if the person who's receiving the package counts one less test booklet than they think that you had so this is a huge honking administrative nightmare to ship a lot of paper around it's not very green a lot of carbon being wasted a lot of UPS drivers employed and it makes no sense it's obsolete it's not the way to go obviously as we're moving towards an electronic test computer based test we're not there yet and one of the things that the park consortium found was Massachusetts was woefully unprepared for the technology compared to the other park states because the state is inadequately funding or taking seriously the deployment of technology into the schools and that's a real problem that everybody's all anxious about but our biggest school with the biggest test burden 1200 kids and the person who handles the testing is saying electronic went pretty well but the paper in pencil was an absolute buddy nightmare and you're nodding would you come up to the mic please stop nodding and help me out here as the test coordinator theodicin would you care to weigh in on the on your opinion versus doing a paper MCAS or an electronic park it's not as simple as a yes or no but I feel that with preparation the park would probably most beneficial for the adults and the students I find the man hours that go into the administration of the test materials which you just so eloquently described is time consuming for the guidance counselors the administrators all the others that are taken away from the students and other things that they really should be doing but it does it takes a village to get these tests ready to be distributed to the different grades I think in watching the students taking the actual test and when you're the test administrator you actually you have a control computer and we see each student how they're progressing and going through the questions you kind of have an oversight on that in case someone accidentally exits too quickly as Dr. Cheson said they're not done forever you can go back and restart them so administratively that's nice too and I think for what I saw the students there were special education students that were tested they didn't I didn't hear of any real issue with the time constraints on them as far as the students who actually took the test in the rooms that I was in I think maybe we had one out of six different classes I think we had one student who struggled with the time constraint but that was something that he struggled with all the time it wasn't something new because of the test and if at times out electronically you're not looking at five pages that have unanswered questions the thing just stops giving you questions right yes so you know the students I think liked for the written portions they liked the first of those students who write and then have to go back in a race and rewrite the editing portions were nice for them there are hoverovers there's a lot of technical features that are really nice and same for the math a lot of the math tools while they will need some explanation in the tutorial the students seem to use them with ease the rulers and all the other things that are provided for them for the math portion so like anything I think there's a little even adult anxiety about this about you know pulling it all off together but I think that you know with preparation that it's something that we could do successfully thank you you know first of all the issue of accountability yeah we do look at the accountability because we viewed as a lever to move things that we're concerned about we were concerned earlier on about the persistent lag and growth scores at the middle school and that has gone away because we've paid attention to it that is not the desired outcome it's merely an indicator we've aligned our curriculum we've done coaching we've done all the things to make teaching and learning better and the test scores follow so if you teach children well if you have high performing classrooms the test scores will follow I've got a district full of results where if I've got a strong principal good coaching good teaching we do well where that falls apart is where we're falling and that sort of the signal it's sending to us we're not looking at individual teachers as being a challenge in this district we have a district full of excellent teachers when we look at this we're looking for alignment in systems so that the teachers should never feel pressured from the school committee about testing results we're using this as an indicator of how the systems are aligning how our curriculum is aligning we need programmatically need to make changes in the way we're doing business allocating resources putting in new curriculum that's sort of an indicator for us in terms of policy and from every indication we've seen we'll get the accountability scores before the December 10th meeting I believe from every indication just looking at the scores that we've gotten in the past we've done very very well this year and we're going to be very pleased with the results but I do want I is a researcher and somebody who works in this I want to see for myself the accountability numbers how they align to schools that were park, park paper park electronic and MCAS and I have a host of job-alike folks who I ended up talking to and now I have that opportunity to have that conversation made up but I want it made clear what my inclinations are is that the key decision in my mind is that we need to move as quickly as possible into the 21st century so that our testing is more authentic kids are better at computers than the adults the adult anxiety over the computers and computerized testing I understand from what I have also seen in the data that we've getting in talking to testing coordinators assessment directors and accountability people throughout the state is that while somewhat more challenging in some of the urban districts the kids have really taken to the electronic version the middle school had a positive experience in terms of administering it electronically the electronic version that's going to be coming down the line is going to be more park-like than MCAS-like the consortium and I will also say that the problem that we've had with the consortium is that the consortium has withheld data and has not done things in a Massachusetts manner we have a very competent group of psychometricians and testing folks who work in Malden who do a very good job of presenting results to us Massachusetts has more disclosure than other states I've talked to my colleagues in New York where they're not used to getting this quality of data we have and that one of the reasons why we want to break out of park and do it on our own is the quality of the reporting and the flexibility in the administration we have and I think that going to MCAS 2.0 with parkish questions and using the consortium as a source of a question bank will allow Massachusetts people to go and have a conversation about the test to look at the results to look at the question to see where it's working and where it's not and make decisions without having to get a dozen states to line up and agree with us I think that it's a reasonable approach we are not a district in trouble in any way in fashion so I'm not particularly worried about hold harmless though we're doing well we've got two more years of doing well and I think we're doing well so sight unseed I take this year's results and hold on to them for another two years and let everybody have two years I'm not really looking at the results in an accountability way that we're looking at results tracking the major change of transitioning to computer based testing that's how I'm looking at it right now if I see reasonable results and valid accountability measures coming out of park districts and I haven't seen that yet I'm inclined to go toward park and the reason why is that I want us to do as much electronic computer based testing as possible as early as possible I don't if the decision were to go MCAS paper to park paper I'd stay put because I don't see any future in park paper either I want us to do this electronically I want us to do an electronic based test which is more authentic to the things that we are doing in the classroom and what we're aspiring to we're aspiring to more electronic based curriculum we're aspiring to one-on-one situations we're aspiring to do the technology and I want our assessment to align to our aspirations not to what we were doing in 1999 so that's my consideration in this I want us going electronic in as many schools as possible and if I have to do it using park versus MCAS I'll do the park questions to do it electronically and that's my bias now now obviously there's data that's out I haven't seen our accountability data I haven't seen anybody else's accountability data that's a really big validity measure for me if the accountability data in other districts is coming in screwy and a lot of districts are holding on to the hold harmless to avoid a big drop we've got to think about it a little differently if the park schools that have done it electronically are reflecting where they really are and folks who are working with that and the buildings think it's going well that's going to influence my decision a lot of data a lot of evidence that I need to make an informed decision simply isn't on the table yet but make no mistake about it out of the shipping paper business to get out of the long comp business with the pre-draft and the writing and paper and handwriting to getting to something more authentic getting something more that is a 21st century instrument and being able to use the computer as a tool with the manipulatives of the computer to get a better sense of how children are doing let's see what happens over the next month but if I had to vote tonight I'd be pushing us to go as electronic as possible any other questions or comments Mr. Haynes? I'd just like if we could get a report back a state of readiness currently on our technology to implement this test and if we're not a hundred percent there how much it will cost and a timeline for acquiring that absolutely I can have that for the next meeting and if there's anything else that the committee would like ahead of time I'll make sure that you get it before the next meeting we've got two meetings to hash this out and I'm sure we're going to have a lot of people talking about this it's a big deal electronic signatures for vendor warrants on the agenda what's come across our electronic table we're doing this electronically email right email list from the MASC we are now legally able to do vendor warrants electronically rather than having to go to Karen's office and sign them or rather than having the paper in front of us at a meeting that would be a tremendous advantage particularly in the summer months when we need to get warrants approved the reason why I put this on the agenda is I'd like somebody to move to refer this topic to the appropriate subcommittee which would be policies and procedures so motion by Mr. Seelman second by Mr. Hayner any discussion on the topic hearing none all in favor opposed it is now dispatched to policies and procedures Mr. Hayner would it be appropriate to table the next item on for the next meeting because of the time no because our next meeting is going to be even more packed the only reason I said that is because the report has been done I mean yeah we have we have people with stuff to sign she's left oh okay she's doing it first I mean I'd like to get this discussion out front I think we're gonna we don't meet again until December 10 and we've got principals coming in we're doing budget we've got we can get this done let's go foundation budget review commission final report Dr. Allison Ampe Ms. Hanson including so we brought this to you because we had written the letter back in whenever April June whatever it was to the foundation budget review commission which was studying a revision of the chapter 70 formula and all the costs of education in Massachusetts and they have now put forth their report and we had thought it would be nice to just do a quick review of what the report says and then some issues that we found with the report and Ms. Hanson's gonna walk us through the report and then I'll bring up the issues that we can expect for money because I like money except that it's not actually funded yet so it's only wishful money yes hypothetical money but so just real quickly you can work on that you know what this happened before was the other presentation you can sing I know see the thing is is the school department is far more advanced in technology than just select that's pretty obvious that is an alarm machine I set up in interviews I always set up I'm gonna start talking through this yes electronic electronic we have an electronic one we have a problem The Foundation Budget Review Commission was established in that Y15 state budget and the purpose was to determine the educational programs and services necessary to achieve the commonwealth educational goals. It was the 20-year- Microphone. Oh speaking to the microphone. At the same time. Yeah. So the 20-year update since the 1993 EDVERFORM Act to review the way foundation budgets are calculated and make recommendations for potential changes, determine the educational programs and services necessary to prepare students to achieve passing scores on the MCAS or whatever assessment the state deems appropriate, and determine the recommended measures to promote the adoption of ways in which resources can be most effectively utilized and consider the most effective and efficient resource allocation. So the new considerations that have really come up in the last 20 years had to do with field and research community that suggests that we need to reconsider the adequacy of the budget that was, the foundation budget that was passed in 1993 to better meet the needs of the 21st century. And then there was the whole question of the achievement gap and the fact that what we've done really well is quantify the achievement gap over the last 20 years and rethink the foundation budget in terms of what does it really take to get all students up to the proficiency level that we're looking for. And then the moral and fiscal focus, again, just about getting everybody up to meeting those same standards. These were the four major factors that were considered. Health insurance, the cost of health insurance, special education related costs, ELL related costs and outcomes and low income related costs and incomes. So I just have one slide in each area for health insurance. The findings were that the district spending on employee benefits and fixed charges exceeded the budget allotment by more than 140%, and the budget did not include retiree health insurance. So the recommendations were to adjust to the average GIC rate, add retiree health insurance and have a separate health insurance inflation adjustment factor. In the area of special education, the findings were that the percentage of students receiving special education was not the 15% predicted in the original report, but it was closer to 16% on average, and that out of district special education costs exceeded foundation budget 59% by 59% using the FY13 figures. So the recommendation, and there's some special calculations going on there, but was to assume that the in-district special education enrollment should increase from 3.75% to 4.0% for non-vocational students and increase from 4.75% to 5% for vocational students, and to increase the out of district special education costs rate to capture the total costs that districts bear before the circuit breaker is triggered. So, again, to increase costs to make up for the fact that the actual costs were exceeding what was predicted by the original foundation budget. In the area of English language learners, the finding was that national literature shows that the weights for states with funding formulas varied greatly, but in general, Massachusetts was within the range. At the high school level, students with interrupted education, the CIFE and limited and interrupted formal education, the SLIFE, which we're all learning about now through our retail classes, that these students had huge deficits, especially at the high school level, and very short amount of time to make them up. So the recommendation was to convert the ELL increase from a base rate to an increment on the base rate. Apply the increment to vocational school students as well, which did not happen in the past, and to increase the increment for all grade levels to the middle school level, which was kind of in the middle there. For low income students, again, what the literature said was that weightings are all over the place, but in general, Massachusetts was within the range. But this is an area where I think they did additional research and really looked at the best practices for moving these populations forward in terms of student achievement, with the thinking that some additional funds in this area might be tied to specific research-based practices that show improvements. So the recommendations here was that to increase the increments for districts with high concentrations of low income students and ensure any new definition of economically disadvantaged student counts properly and accurately reflect the actual population, leave the exact calculation up to legislative action, and require districts to post online how they would use those funds. And these were some of the successful practices that were identified, particularly with low income students and students with English as a second language extending the school day or year, focusing on wraparound services, social and emotional needs, instructional improvements for teachers in particular, increased professional development time, increased common planning time, and the use of instructional teams and coaches, targeted class size reductions for the highest need populations, and early education, so full day kindergarten and pre-kindergarten. So I'm going to turn it over to Dr. Allison Ampe now who dug in right there. To some of the issues with it. Yeah, so I took a look at the actual numbers that were in the report and the numbers that were in the documents that they used to build the report. And so the first one, and I just want to point them out because I think we should all know this, it's not talked about at all. So the first one was a problem with the calculation of how they reached in-district special education numbers. They claim 4% total FTE in the recommended increasing the assumption from 15 to 16% of students receiving 25% services 25% of the time. However, the actual numbers that they showed showed 5.7 total FTEs. They never discussed the discrepancy. That's a big gap. So in my opinion, the numbers suggest that they're going to be underestimating the in-district special education. The second was looking at the calculation of out-of-district special education. The report reads out-of-district special education enrollment is assumed at 1% of foundation enrollment which mirrors the rate of out-of-district special education placements statewide. However, the numbers in the presentation cited in the former in-district special education presentation showed that out-of-district enrollment is actually 1.33% of foundation budget, foundation enrollment survey that's in this type, which is 33% higher than the assumption, which again, that's a really big number when you're multiplying that by really big numbers. And that leads to problems with the numbers. When they calculated this out-of-district special education spending, the report says districts spend far more on special education tuition for out-of-district placements than what's allocated in FY 13. Actual costs were 59% higher than foundation budget rate of 25,454. What they were talking there is the actual per-pupil costs were 59% higher. However, if you look at the whole lump of spending that people did, that was 155% higher than what foundation budget estimated. So I think, again, they kind of slipped some stuff under the wool and so it's going to lead to continued under calculations of what the actual needs are. Linda and I looked at the report with an eye of did they actually hear our concerns? A lot of the things were mentioned. What was not mentioned was the special education having higher than average, so higher than the 1% statewide distribution of out-of-district students and also the wage adjustment factor. Then we looked at how much money Arlington could hope to get if these things were actually funded. The projections, if the new formula was used, using a desi spreadsheet from June or so that had estimates on special education and healthcare changes and not knowing how they did this exactly, because all we have is numbers. We don't have the formula. It suggests that additional Chapter 70 money required to meet new foundation budgets for Arlington would be 3 million, almost 3.5 million dollars. It's great. I made estimates of additional funding for ELL by subtracting the extra that we get now and adding in the extra. They're suggesting I came up with a total ahead of 110,000. It's unclear whether the low-income increment would apply to us because we're not a high concentration district, so I didn't add anything else. The total addition, I just left it all as Chapter 70. It ends up being 3.6 million dollars a year. There would be an increase in the towns required spending to meet the new foundation budget number of almost 800,000. However, we already spend greatly in excess of what our requirement is, so we wouldn't see any actual need to spend more money. What wasn't funded was having higher than average special education out of district placements, and that is unknown, but that could be a number that runs into the millions. Again, I don't know how they did their numbers, so I'm not sure if anything was counted. The wage adjustment factor inequities that we see here in Arlington is greater than 1.3 million dollars. Again, that's unfortunate that that was not counted. This was just the thoughts and next steps. We wondered if people wanted to talk about where to go from here. You can go back to your own seat. You have a mic. Or we can talk about it in another meeting. We can talk about it in another meeting. I ran my own set of numbers on this, and I'm coming a little closer to 4 million in terms of an increase in the foundation budget, but there were things that were vague in the report that you couldn't actually plug into the current foundation budget formula. The other thing is that they talked about how the foundation budget formula has been underinflated over the past few years and in fact skipped a cycle so that there'd be an overall adjustment for the entire state based on the deficiencies in inflating the existing budget. I think that you're right. It is a report and a shelf, and I think that one of the things we need to do is to work with other school committees in MASC in order to pressure the legislature in terms of fully funding the foundation budget as it would entail providing an adequate education. Now, the other factor in here is that for districts who are spending at foundation, this isn't a hypothetical exercise, the required local contribution going up is substantive on top of the Chapter 78, so what I think you might have here is not just a report on the shelf, but you've got evidence that could be brought forward to resuscitate the school funding case, Hancock v. Driscoll being the most recent, which hasn't been closed out, as additional evidence to prompt the Supreme Judicial Court to intervene and mandate that the legislature go and act. In 93 when we got into ED reform, the legislature acted to set up this foundation budget system because they were being pressured by the McDuffie case so perhaps encouraging those at foundation for pressing the legal initiative, maybe even helping in some way, as well as pressuring our legislators to fully and adequately fund what a true foundation budget is should probably be our action steps. Any discussion on this matter? So how do we do that? Well, we can talk about that later if we want, but that's sort of the action plan and maybe we go to community relations or somehow carve out some time, we'll call Mr. Garvely, Mr. Rogers, and Mr. Donnelly in and we can have a conversation about this report with our legislators. That might be a way to do it. That's what I was going to say. I was going to suggest that just the chair see when they're free and have them come in to talk about this because the report came out, the legislative session ended the FY17, they meet again in 2017, so what is the plan? And to fund this is going to take an increase in revenue. So what's going to be the conversation about that? Mr. Hayner, there's been some talk that phased in 25%, 25%. But as I shared that with one of my colleagues here, by the time you get to the fourth year, we're behind the ball again. I know, so in 2016 or 2017, I'm thinking of my fiscal year. So I mean, I think we should have a conversation with them here. I think it'd be good for the community to know because this report has been out there. A lot of people have talked about it. If the legislative delegation came, which they always like to come, we could just see where they're at and what the reality is. I think we need to get a reality check. What's going to happen and what can the school committee do? Because I'm not sure how to advocate and what to advocate for. So in a sense of this committee that we'd like to invite our legislators into one of our meetings, okay. And we will do that. Any other discussion on this? In the new year. In the new year, in January. Maybe try for our first meeting in January. Providing that's not a legislative. That's not a date. Many thanks to Linda. Yes, yes. Excellent presentation. Miss Hansen. I just really wanted to briefly say that was really the whole purpose of bringing it back before you. The committee reported out, but then it just seemed to like there was a little splash and then it fizzled. And we were like, no, wait a minute, this is really huge. We really need to get on this. It took years to actually get this foundation budget review commission passed as part of an effort to go forward. So I think the idea is to really run with it now and meet with legislators. And I do want to say though, Dr. Allison Ampe really was the main motivator behind this originally. So she's done a lot of the heavy lifting on the numbers. And it's great that she did that. Thank you. Excellent, excellent work. Thank you. If we can turn off the projector and either get the superintendent a pair of sunglasses. Actually, just clean, you just close the light there because I need the computer later. Okay. Yeah. We just don't want the superintendent to be in the. Does anyone need the projector? Yes, I do. Yes. Are we projecting again later tonight? Yes. Yes. Oh, okay. I want to see me work. Oh, sorry. I'll wait. I'll put it on my chair for you. It's a chair and get it open. Well, we don't need to move to 10 o'clock. We've got time. No, we are going to move. We're going to be done by 10 o'clock. No moving. Unless Mr. Heiner issue starts a filibuster. Not an open session. I would add that was a great work. I had started to prepare something, but I would have to say that you did it just a superb job of summarizing some of these important issues with respect to the foundation budget, which haven't been looked at in a long time. Just a couple of quick things while we get this set up. You already heard about the elevator. Get comfortable in these seats. They will have to get some other people a little bit softer seats or bring some chair pads in. No problem. No problem. Looks like the next two meetings will probably still be here. I can't put my legs anywhere, but it's just great. Just great. Good. You're the male ute. There's a reason I'm being treated like this. I don't know why, but I'm going to think that's true. I think it was whoever got here last got the wood chair. You had an update on the hearty, but just to reiterate it, I'm going to send a note out to hearty parents. It takes about eight to 12 weeks to get the parts once ordered. So our understanding is they're going to be here mid December. So this will eventually get fixed as will the elevator get fixed. All right. My superintendents report this evening is really actually on the budget because we've been working on some very important analysis and thinking about the FY17 budget. We have begun the process with administrators, as I mentioned before, of looking at what is important that we need to be doing next year in the way of materials, personnel. And of course, there's the issue of enrollment growth. And that has become an enormous factor in terms of our budgeting. And now that we are beginning this next phase of looking at what Arlington is going to do about enrollment growth, I don't think that we can have the two being the look at space decoupled from what's going on with our operating budget in the outline years. And as you know, we have presented to you a multi-year look at our budget with all the assumptions that we've had in the past. And we're doing the same thing here with a lens looking at the enrollment growth and the effect on our budget. Because it is going to have a significant effect and it's something that we need to be talking about at long range planning and in the months ahead because the two very much are related to each other. You're all set on that? All right. So one of the things that we've been looking at is what has the school district actually been spending related to enrollment growth? And I'm going to turn this over to Diane Johnson who you all know. And we're going to take a look at it through a couple of different lenses. Good evening. This first document that is up is one of our attempts to try to capture the instructional uptick in spending related to enrollment growth. So what you see are FY 13 through 16. You see on the far left here, there's a pointer, yeah? Okay. Okay. Over here. And then the total teacher FTE. So I take the total salary divided by FTE to come up with an average teacher salary. And as you see the teacher salary has increased over time. This is the change in FTE from the prior year. And so what I've done is I've taken that change FTE, multiplied it by the average teacher salary for that year to come up with an additional salary cost by FTE. We've also included these three factors to try to capture some of the typical costs of increasing our teaching staff. $15,000 for curriculum supplies, $1,000 for a new computer, and $500 for professional development. And these are just rounded numbers to try to get us in the ballpark. All in that creates the cost all the way out here to the right. If you bring it down here, these are the same numbers carried down here for 14, 15, and 16. FY 15 was the first year we realized any impact from the enrollment growth factor, additional funding given to us by the town. And that actually represents two years of enrollment growth. So we look at an overall, and this is just teachers. You know, there's no administrators. There's nothing like that. This is pure teachers. You can see that we've increased our spending on teachers about $4.6 million, of which we've received $1.4 million in additional funding, thus eating the differential. And this doesn't set us up for great stuff, as you will see. I think I'm going to start with this model because it's really shocking. This is pretending there will not be a single more student after this year. That's 17, 18, 19, 20, and 21. We have no more children. We don't lose any. We don't gain any, which we obviously know is false. It does show the enrollment growth factor using the current formula as agreed with the town, because it always lags a year behind. So this represents the students we added in FY 16 being paid out in 17. But from that point onward, there are no increases. The revenue numbers all for 17 are adjusted. I've removed the kindergarten grant. I've rolled Title I back to FY 15 levels because we saw a really significant uptick in 16 that I don't think we could trust. So I want to take it back to 15 to be prudent. And I've also put in the differential about $130,000 decrease in our circuit breaker funding because of our better cost containment of special ed expenditures. We do realize less reimbursement in circuit breaker. So that's our total revenue picture for 17. This is our total expense picture for 17, assuming all contract obligations met and 2% growth in every other area, which may or may not be sufficient, but at least it's a starting point. And that brings us out with the tiniest of stuff to handle everything. But in this magical world where we have no more students, maybe. So now we have to go look at something a little more realistic. This document here shows a ratio between our existing student population and our existing teacher population at each of the three levels, elementary, middle, and high. Once this ratio is created, it's multiplied by the enrollment in the out years to create an FTE needed. Now, I hasten to say that this should in no way be taken to be believed as completely adequate to our educational needs. This is a mathematical way to tread water with our FTEs. It doesn't mean that the people are in the right place or where the student growth is or meet the needs or all of that. This is just, I really think of it as treading water. This keeps our nose just above the waves. But it is a way to convert the enrollment growth into money to fold it into a long range plan. This is what I used last year. And these numbers are based on my mathematical projection. And that down here when we see the FTE growth, it's multiplied both by the average teacher salary for FY16 and also by the other elements we discussed, curriculum, materials, computer, and professional development to give us money. And then we fold that in to the multi-year plan. I have restored the enrollment growth factor from the town based on the numbers and the 25% reimbursement rate. All the other revenue things remain the same. And we've added in the expense for teacher salary and the additional supplies for new classrooms. And that puts us $613,000 in potential deficit for FY17, which is pretty much the cost of the teachers. Now it was requested that we look at Dr. McKibbin's numbers. So I redid the teacher calculation, the student teacher ratio calculation using Dr. McKibbin's numbers. I did not overwrite FY16. His numbers differed from our actuals. I simply took our actuals and then took his numbers as were in 17, 18, 19, and 20. And then I folded that into the same analysis. And as you see, that is an even less attractive picture with a deficit of about $1 million in FY17. So can I answer any questions so far? Dr. Seuss. So when I look at McKibbin's numbers, the thing that jumps out at me is that at the high school, we're projecting a slight decrease in student population. So to be consistent, we say, OK, we should decrease the staff. But of course we're not going to do that given that that's a one-year drop, right? I mean, we want those teachers. We're not firing them and then rehiring them the next year. So in that way it's... This is the choice above the way it is. Yeah, I know that we're just doing... This is just math. This is not best practice. This is not what we need. This is just math. But that just struck me. Go ahead. One of the things that we can think about is approaching the long-range planning committee meeting, which coincidentally meets on Monday, to discuss the amount of enrollment growth factor and the formula for calculating that. When we originally proposed this a few years ago, I believe our initial ask was for 50% of poor people. And they gave us 25, which is certainly better than zero. But when we look at... The only year for which we have actual per pupil numbers from the state, it's 13085 right now for FY14. Per pupil publications always lag several years behind. And we look at the total number of students added in that year. I took it out of this analysis. I apologize, I shouldn't have. It works out that the 1.19 increase is actually 68% of our per pupil cost. So even the 50% that we initially asked for is a little conservative. Unfortunately, we don't have the per pupils for 15 and 16. But I think there is, based on that alone, I think there's some grounding on the idea that adding these new students is running as well in excess of 25% of per pupil costs. Now I think we should reasonably expect that in FY15 our per pupil will go up. And so that whatever percentage we agree to this year will be based on the FY14 number of 13085. And then I think our number will be higher in 15. But that's another whole year away. So I haven't, in any of these analyses, calculated a different percentage yet. But all of these are predicated. All of these views are predicated on the 25% reimbursement. But even at 50, we would double these numbers and it would certainly help. So let me ask a question here. When the enrollment goes up, the foundation budget goes up. When the foundation budget goes up, Chapter 70 goes up. When the foundation budget goes up, the minimum local contribution goes up. So by not taking into consideration at all, the enrollment growth, if that were at zero, all the additional Chapter 70 money that was generated by the increased number of students, and all the increased required spending generated by that would fall into a townside pot be held in reserve and not go for the education of the additional children. Is that your understanding? The way the long-range plan works is that all revenue from the state goes into the town and then it's reallocated out to all the departments according to the formula that's agreed upon. So the additional money that's generated above and beyond the plan, because that was based on a fixed number of students, which would have had a fixed trajectory of Chapter 70 money, the increase in the Chapter 70 above and beyond the normal increase, the one that's generated by the additional students with the intent of the state that that money would be going for the purpose of educating additional students. Instead of finding its way to students, if it was at a zero, it would be falling into the town reserves instead. I agree with that. So how much in here have we calculated out would be increased required spending locally in increased Chapter 70 based on the enrollment? I haven't addressed that at all. Okay. Not at all. That certainly is an interesting question going forward. I understand that we just started doing these calculations in the past couple of days, but we certainly don't want the increased money that's coming from the state because we have additional students not to be spent on the additional students. I think what plays against us in this, and I agree with everything you said, but what plays against us is that we're a comparatively wealthy district. And so the amount of our per pupil that's directly funded by Chapter 70 is relatively small. And I'm not at all sure that they're not already making good with the 25% per pupil that they're giving us. In fact, I believe they are. Because the Chapter 70 is less than 25%. Correct. But then there's the additional 75% of the required spending that the town would be required to contribute in light of the increased enrollment. Correct. But there's no danger there. They're already well in excess of what's required. But what it does is the net impact is reducing our per pupil spending because the town is above the zero level, the minimum level required that now that they'd be in a position to... It's really pulling back funding on a per pupil basis because instead of the money, the additional money coming from the town needs the additional students being held by the town. The long-range plan, Giveth and the long-range plan take it away. Do we have any new streets in town that the town has to maintain? No, I'd like some. Well, this is definitely part of the conversation that we have to have with the long-range planning committee. And that's the purpose of looking at this. This is coming up. We have the task force that's going to be starting their discussions on the 30th. And we really needed to take a good look at this. This is the first go at it, but it's important that everyone see this. I've had numerous conversations with our town manager over the last couple of days as we've been talking about this. And I've asked him if he would be willing for the long-range planning meeting to do a couple of versions of the plan if we change the percent of contribution for enrollment growth, say to 40%, 50%, 60%. We know that in 14, we were actually at 68%. And while there's some money, there's some in the, to be perfectly candid about this, there are some positions that are not directly related to enrollment. But I have to say, when we were actually going through them, there are very, very few. They are all related to some form of enrollment growth because even when you increase a classroom at an elementary school, it's not just that teacher, there's other costs as well, whether they're in extra liaison support, OT, PT, art, music, phys ed. So it's not, it's simplistic to think about it, it's just one classroom. So anyway, he said that he would do that. In our FY 14, we looked at this number, and it's the only one that really can be accurate, which was 147 students, by the way. The only one that could be accurate because that's the only year we have, the per pupil cost. Mr. Thielman. So the projection you had up on the screen before, with the... With my projected growth. Yeah, with the projected growth. That allows for an increase in staffing to enrollment. It knows above the waves. It's mathematically generated. Right, correct, correct. But it doesn't... Okay, so that's what I meant. It mathematically generates staffing to enrollment and knows above the waves, I got it. It doesn't account for any additional things we'd like to do, like the additional coaches that we had talked about earlier, it means we can't do any of that stuff. And even when we do additional staffing above the waves, we have a deficit. Well, yes, and I would also suspect that we will see class sizes go up. Students never allocate themselves evenly. I know that, yeah, right. There's crazy kids here. It's apparently formula. It is, it's our fault. But, you know, my numbers here, and again, just to reiterate, my projection merely takes the past and pushes it forward. Dr. McKibbin's numbers are a little more dire looking. A lot more dire. Well, yes. But his start to tail back, whereas mine never will. Mine are always going to follow the line until there's been several years in a different direction and then they'll follow a new line. So, you know, whether you're looking at his or mine, you know, there's definitely work we need to do with town to figure out how we're going to manage FY17. Dr. Seuss. So first, can you remind the committee how much per people spending we're talking about 25% of or 50% of? It's the FY14 published number, which is 13085. 13085, okay. And then the document before that, this one? No, actually, sorry. Just this one, the total increased cost of direct educational staffing. So those numbers, so say like FY16, which is just a single year rather than a double year. The 1161, is that based on, that is based on 169 additional students? Is that right or? We had 85, 84, 85 this year. It's based on last year's, right? So that's what I want to get clear on. This number is based on FY15 growth. It always lags a year behind. Right. Which is, I think, 169. 169. So the before. So the 80, the 80 some odd that we have for this year translates into the 274 here. Right, much lower. Okay. And then, so then last, just a clarification. So the 1161, 981 is the amount that if we applied the formula that you're applying in the future, how do we apply that in the past? So, sorry. So that number is, how many teachers did we need to maintain the ratio times the average cost of the teacher? Is that right? No, that is incorrect. What this is, is the number of teachers we added times the average teacher cost. Okay, that's what the 1161. Plus those other expenses. It is not related to maintaining the ratios. The ratios are just away from the convert students to dollars. Got it. So the number of teachers we added then with these formulas that are our estimates. Okay. Our, you know, means or something. Okay. Great. Thanks. Dr. Allison Ampe. Looking at the same sheet. The teacher total salaries. Are those actuals or those calculated? Nope. Those are actuals. That is, that is the real deal. These are the real, even the FY 16. Does the numbers match up like amazingly. If you add up the FY, if you go to the, this sheet and add up the numbers of teachers for FY 16, it's exactly, oh, I guess that's because that's what you should be doing. Sorry. No, no, no. But do we have, don't we have another, in our budget, we should have a count of how many teachers we have. Yes. How does that differ from the teacher FTE here? Because that's a calculated teacher FTE, right? No. That is our actual, that is, this is the actual count of the teachers. The actual number of judges. This is what we did. The salary is, but. No, no. The FTEs are what we did as well. But that's not the number of teachers, FTEs. Right. But the, so the teacher FTE column is also the same. It is, it is what it is. It is actuals. Okay. And it is not the budgeted actuals. It is the actual actuals. No, I'm just, because your calculated actuals is exactly the same, even to the point nine. Yeah. Which, I'm just surprised. Modeling doesn't usually work as nicely as that. It's not on this sheet. It's on the other sheet. Or, yeah. Yeah, it's on that one. Well, it should. I mean, FY16 should line up perfectly across all these formats, if I've done my work, right? Those are our models, those are actuals. Yes. They're not models. They're not models. They're actuals. 16 is the real deal. Oh, okay. So those aren't the numbers for the multiplication of, no. Okay. So even though it's in that column, it's not those. No. These are, these are our actual numbers this year. And I use them to create the ratio. I didn't understand that. That's okay. You're scaring me, though, for your life. They match. Well, yeah. No, it does. That's great. Okay. And obviously this, these are the teachers we're actually able to hire and put in place. We've got places where you've got class size issues where we didn't hire a teacher for whatever reason, and we should have. So these numbers are lower than what we really intend to do. And we are losing level of service to the children over the past couple of years because class sizes are increasing. In certain places. In certain places. Yeah. I mean, the thing is, my understanding when we sat down and did a fiscal stability plan, the underlying basis of this was that maintaining level of service and that we're going to maintain library hours are going to maintain police officers are going to maintain the fire department and current staffing levels. We're going to provide the same level of services through the fiscal stability plan that we had when we entered into it and did the override. And that was one of the selling points. We went to the town. If you vote for this, we will maintain the level of services that we're providing. And if we're not adjusting to the increased student enrollment, we're not keeping our commitment to the taxpayers to maintain a level of service. So the adjustment is really necessary in order to fulfill the commitment to the taxpayers that we would maintain services at the level that existed when we voted the last override. I agree. Just to bring to your attention, as was discussed in the last long range planning, FY17 assumes a three and a quarter increase and a three in every subsequent year. Though the initial phase of the override vote, it was a three and a half. So that's just another point to bear in mind. Yeah. Mr. Heiner. Is there any thought from the committee and the administration that numbers coming down that the increase in enrollment fact go up? It won't equate. But I mean, if we're going to lose money on coming back going down to three, down to three over a period of time, and we have having, I think we all agree, we're going to have an increase. The numbers may not be exact. And the formula that we're getting from this, the town to deal with that additional enrollment, maybe that should go up a little bit too. The offset a little, just something, I don't know, I'm asking consensus from the committee and asking to go forward with that. We may not get it. That's the point. That's the point. Yeah. That's the whole point. Dr. Allison Ampe. I'd actually ask, first, is there any way we can make guesstimates on the per people cost for FY15 or 16? Can't we just use 13,000 or something? No, I think it's going to be higher. Okay. But I'm saying can we do something to come up with some idea of what fraction those numbers are. It seems like we should be able to come up with a even if we're lowballing it. But where I'm trying to go with this is I think we need to suggest that the town manager model is something higher than 60%. If our first and only number that we have a handle on is at 68%, we need to have something that's at least in that ballpark. I would like us to try and get the ballparks for the other two numbers. It's not possible. But the per people cost hasn't changed that much per year. It's gone up. It's varied by, it changes a little bit, but it doesn't change by magnitudes of thousands and thousands. Right. I mean, not long ago it was just below 13,000 dollars. Five years ago it was just 12,850. It doesn't seem to go up rapidly. But if we're not keeping up with the increase in enrollment, those numbers are going to go down relative to, you know. Yeah. I just, I feel uncomfortable trying to make a per people number. Okay. I'm hearing. Any other? I'm not saying it's for project four saying that this is the factor that needs to be used, but if we are suggesting a range of factors, it will, you know, if it's coming out at 90%, I'd like to know, you know, even if it's an estimate and it's not total confidence, I would like to know that and that would affect whether I would tell the manager, you know, model 70 and 80% or something. So I just, I can't do it off the top of my head looking at it now, but it seems like it's possible. So that's all. Miss Starks. So I feel like one of the things that I, you know, it's kind of funny because in some ways this is all a shell game. It doesn't really matter whether the money is the schools need 8% a year or 3% plus this weird enrollment factor. I feel like what we really need to do is say, can we just reopen the conversation about the real needs of the schools? And, you know, I just feel like it's kind of weird is like, you know, they keep, you know, there's this kindergarten factor and there's the enrollment growth and there's your 3% and there's this and I'm just like, okay, can we just come up with a true, not to say, and I apologize, I don't have like a way to fix it or, sorry. Let's talk into the mic. But, you know, I just feel like when we, when we talk to them, what we really need to do is say, listen, you know, now that we've really got a handle on this, can we sit down and really come up with a and build some of this in. I mean, I think that we're all willing to say that it's okay if it goes up and down with enrollment or costs or whatever, but I mean that, you know, that there really is obviously, you know, because I feel like we have this little percent that we get which they slowly chip away at and so then we constantly like, you know, like the duct tape at the high school just holding it together by, you know, and I just feel like, you know, come on guys, you know, it's, I mean, costs are going up and, you know, especially now with all the technology stuff, which was never part of the budget, you know, so. I do have to say that the Capital Planning Committee has been fairly generous with us the last two years in supporting, you know, our computer rollout. So I don't want to appeal ungrateful to the significant sums of money they've given us on that event. Is it enough? No. Right. But they've given us some real good lack of money and I don't want to know. I mean, we have to say thank you, but at the same time explain that it's not enough to live on. I think we need to have some sort of percentage just in terms of normal growth of the expenses plus an enrollment factor because that's really what's driving all the conversation. If we were steady at three, three and a half percent with the SPED factor, everything to be fine would be able to maintain services, but the dramatic increase in enrollment we're experiencing is is is going to take a toll on what we're able to do if that's not factored into the formula. And I think it's reasonable. I don't think if our enrollment was going down and our need was less, I'm sure that the Finance Committee come and say, you know, you've got a couple hundred less kids, you should type in your belt to reflect that. Actually, that's part of it. So I think we have we have an enrollment challenge which is causing us to have this whole discussion about a space plan or facilities plan. And we also have kind of shown tonight that we have an operating budget challenge because of the increase in enrollment. So we also have to have a conversation about a multi-year plan to have enough revenue to meet our needs over the next several years. So two conversations need to be taking place in terms of long-term planning. Facilities and operational needs, two things. And simultaneously, it would be the heartbreak of the world to bond classroom additions and have them stand empty because we can't stop them. So this is a cumulative deficit and your number is four million dollars. So that's requires a plan. Thank you. Kathy. Well, if it's the committee's wish, I can talk to the time manager about doing perhaps another increasing those percentage models. But I just wanted to add another comment and I've also been, I have met with parents and I know you have heard from parents that the class size numbers certainly in some schools and in some grade levels are reaching what Arlington would consider unacceptable levels. So it's, we are educating our children well but I think people are having a vision of what we could even do better. And so it's, this is a perfect time to have all of this basically talked about. And that's the purpose of moving forward with this is to get the full picture of what we're looking at going forward and not just simply the space issues. Dr. Allison. As we talk about trying to connect the conversations about increasing enrollment, increasing facilities it brings up that this model as I understand it is only talking about teachers. And when we, especially when we start talking about opening facilities we have a whole bunch of other people that we're going to need to be adding in if we're opening something. I, again, can't tell you how to model that now but I'm concerned that right now if, that we need to be aware of that and thinking about it and that that's going to end up being a big up chuckin in, uptickin in um, yeah, um, in spending a need and that we can't forget about that in looking at just the teachers. Yes, this is a narrow, narrow lens to look at just teachers because obviously school needs far more than just teachers. The teachers are core. They're right in front of the kids. They're the most visible piece. They're the most important piece without a doubt but they can't function in the absence of all the other supports that are part of a district. And, you know, I needed to start there. And, you know, certainly as we expand space as certainly as we expand all of this as we continue to grow, you know, it would be extremely naive to assume that our existing administrative infrastructure could absorb all of this. Right. Yeah, across the board. Yeah, excellent. Okay. Very quickly, let's uh, Mr. Heiner. Question for the superintendent unrelated to this, so I'll give this one. Unrelated. Let's finish this. And we'll resume the superintendent's report. Any other questions or comments on this? Excellent presentation. Thank you. Thank you very much. Dr. Boat. I have nothing else to bring up. Mr. Heiner. The other night it just struck me at Permanent Town Building Committee when we were talking about Stratton and everything. Way back when we talked about you or somebody coming to talk to us about the type of modular units that we're going to get for our input and so where are we on the time? I know we're coming up to a potential town meeting. So we we're going to be putting the bids out fairly soon for the modular for the modular piece. I think that part of it is pretty much ready to go and we can in terms of what I'm saying ready to go in terms of the specs of them. Okay. I need that computer. You want to have somebody from a modular company? No. Well, that was way back when we were talking. I thought we were going to have some discussion potential input before the specs were done. Well, they're not really completely done. Okay. Let me put it up. I know how many rooms we're going to have. I saw an outline of a configuration. I'm talking about heating. I'm talking about air conditioning. I'm talking about the actual physical plant. It's more than just four walls for each classroom. I didn't know questions like are there going to be bookcases? Are there going to be closets? Where are the kids coats going to go and things of that nature? Okay. There's not going to be closets. There might be some bookcases in the kids clothing will go in the classroom. The heating are there individual controls for heating in AC? Yes. We are going to do AC. That is an option, but we are going to have AC. There is going to be AC. Can we get a report on this at some point? Yes, we can. That's what I was asking for. No, you're right. If we had a report or if we need to refer to facilities we can have a complete report for the December 10th meeting. Okay, fine. Excellent. Okay. It's not really a consent agenda because there's one item. So a motion to approve the warrant 16059 dated 1112 2015 in the amount of $80,942 and 64 cents moved by Dr. Seuss presented by Ms. Stark's own favor. Opposed. That's approved. Policies and procedures. Okay. Speaking for Mr. Pierce, we bring to you from the policy and procedure committee the first reading of BEDB which is agenda format and preparation and dissemination. It's been revised. The committees will, the committee will have to look at it and to determine if when we thought that committee members should be receiving materials. Just a second to pull it up. This was brought as a first read to get input from the rest of you and then we'll go back and revise it. We've already heard from Ms. Fitzgerald who had some suggestions which we will incorporate. I think that the administrative assistant would need to receive materials by 10 a.m. on Friday so that she would have time to upload them into Novus. But if anyone has any comments on what we're thinking they can get it to us before we meet again. Do we have another meeting scheduled yet? I don't remember. No, we don't. One other thing I'd like you to look at is the time that we release the supplementary materials because the select men do it ahead of time and I think that we should adopt that so that no later than that Tuesday where we've got that second wave of presentation materials we should be opening everything up. And if we can incorporate that into the policy because right now the policy states that we open the supplemental materials at the time the meeting starts and if we expect to open it in public because if we have access to it and nobody else does they're sitting there guessing what this agenda item is about and I don't think it's really reasonable. Yes. I actually I think we need to have more conversation with Ms. Fitzgerald as to can things be can you have essentially a draft agenda open in Novus and then it can become finalized but not now we'll come to find out what the options are because I think that's part of what we're trying to suggest and I I'm wondering if that's possible in Novus so I should. I think if Ms. Fitzgerald could come to a meeting that would be helpful or just have a quick conversation that would be great. Any other comments on this policy before it goes back to policies and procedures Mr. Sprague is smiling thank you budget. Okay budget sorry I'm juggling too many things. It's doing updates. I guess I will bring my budget. What happened? Budget met this week and we discussed at the request of the administration the new rental fee structure for the Pierce field at our meeting on the third we had heard a preliminary discussion comments we also heard comments questions about legality and the cost to use sports we sought advice in between our meetings from town council and also had some further discussions with Ms. Neville about how to reconfigure the rates and Dr. Buddy did you want to present the final sheet I mean what was done? I'm going to go back to your packet there and know this. Okay sorry. Reference material agenda format prep no that's the only thing it's in there. It's not in there? No. I don't know if it's in novice I didn't look in novice. What? Not online. I apologize if it's not in there because we had it there ready to go. Let me just give a little bit of a contextual piece on this. As you all know the town has invested about half a million dollars in a new turf field which was desperately needed and now that we have that turf field we want to make sure that that is maintained. There were things that probably should have been done that we got a long life out of the last one no doubt about it but there were probably things we could have done along the way to have made it even hold up a little maybe not longer but certainly been better conditioned during that period of time for the users of it. Approximately slightly over 50% of the time people athletic teams use Pierce field. So we've been looking at what are we going to do in terms of maintaining that field what will be the essential costs that are necessary to have it be something that we're going to have for a long time particularly with all the other costs that this town is facing it's really absolutely important that we spend this effort to do that. So this summer we did some preliminary look at what all of the different budget items would be that would be necessary there one of them has to do with just the maintenance of the field it's a $7,000 a year contract to fluff up the field I know it's actually a special machine that comes in to do it then every year there's a cost for lines of $6,500 one of the things that there's a huge consensus on is that we need somebody there when we have users non-high school users to be monitoring the field in just terms of usage and taking care of it there's also ancillary things with the field such as the press box and different equipment that is used and used by users concession stand bathrooms and so forth so what we're proposing to do is to have field monitors in place when we have users that are not high school when we have high school users we have coaches that are watching over everything equipment maintenance there's a lot of things such as the scoreboard we've had to replace the scoreboard in the past which is not inexpensive and then the controls for the scoreboard there's a number of things that are required and we figured the annual maintenance on that would be around $2,500 and then there's also equipment replacement that needs to be built in also custodial detail how we're thinking about custodial detail is to have it staggered over events so that it's not concurrent but might be halfway through the event and then after so we can have the cleanup we now have DPW picking up the trash but that's not a free service it's something that we compensate DPW for there's also going to be the need for some administrative costs for coordinating the schedules with the monitors and just making sure all the maintenance is maintained on the field and then there's supplies there's custodial supplies in terms of toilet paper paper towels and cleaning materials and that has been costed out so that has been costed out I'm sorry you don't have this in front of you but it's been costed out around $51,000 of which we're taking away the money the things that the high school would be responsible for it because of their usage and through this process of looking at our costs seeing how we can keep them as reduced as much as possible we've been before the budget subcommittee and they gave us some great suggestions we also this summer met with users and continue to involve users in this process so that they can give us feedback and in fact the feedback they gave us this summer resulted in the numbers that we eventually went to budget with but now have been more refined so at the end of this process what we're proposing and this is considered a first read tonight I'm not expecting any kind of decision we're not reading it alright so it'll be a zero read we'll get those documents there we have a zero X machine we don't think use the deserve machine okay we would be looking at changing some of the fees currently none of our none of our youth would pay anything and haven't been paying anything over the years and really after doing some sharp pencils sharp sharpening our pencils on this the proposal would be that youth groups would now be paying $35 an hour and if you added lights which would be we've cost it out to be approximately $50 an hour their per hour with lights would be $85 we've increased some of the other costs for other groups to meet the cost our intention in this is not to make any money this is not in any way shape or form a revenue enhancer this is really simply to maintain the field so what we were hoping to be able to do is to get approval down the road and as I said this is probably obviously now just the first introduction to this in some ways for the whole committee so that we can put on a trial basis these fees in place for the spring and youth groups and other groups need to have some notification which I think probably by January would be the end of the season and we'll track very closely what our costs are and are very happy to adjust these costs so that next year in the fall we have perhaps they can come down even more and maybe even as we go through it there could be some adjustments at the end of the season because again our intention is not to make money on this but to make sure that we have everything in place well-maintained field so I'm sorry you don't have materials we'll get them to you and we'll come back to this on December 10th but you'll have those tomorrow the budget subcommittee was ready to approve the new rental fees as you will see for use during a trial we were suggesting a trial period of approximately six months and then the numbers can be revisited it shakes out okay we'll do that next meeting we'll present it next time facilities alright so we met right before this meeting and my goal was just to buy the funds there's one over there our goal was really to make sure that we have all the documentation and that we are prepared for the meeting of the school enrollment task force and so what so we made a list of documents like you know we think that everyone should get these documents that we had which are the numbers basically of where everything is what the classrooms are but the next microphone felt that the problem with those numbers is that they don't really show where the impact is it's really hard you have to put it all together and I wanted there to be some kind of document that kind of showed you visually so this is what we did now I also have to preface this with the fact that these the colors are mine they are not Dr. Bodys they do not reflect what we know is going to happen so what I did was I entered in the spreadsheet the current classroom sizes so those are just numbers of students in the classroom so if you start at Bishop and then what I did my own personal thing here is that it's red if I feel like those are unacceptable class sizes and they should be broken up into fewer classes they are yellow if I feel like they should be on a watch like that they're getting dangerously close to being broken up and they are blank if in fact the class sizes are okay and they actually have some grow room there for a couple of kids my goal was to make sure that when we go into the meeting the larger meeting that we can tell them these are the schools that are level one they are on fire they need help this year and we have a list also of what our level two schools are like they're getting dangerously close they don't need anything this year but they are going to need it the year after and then probably level three schools which are pretty okay so and this is just the elementary schools obviously as you can see Pierce and Stratton are the only two in the green green means they're good they're go they got more than enough class sizes adequate class sizes and adequate classes in the school to hold the classes that we need in the yellow so kind of in the next level up is bracket but you can see that it's actually by my estimation Bishop and Thompson are really the two that are going to are exploding Bishop because it has just horrendous class sizes right now which I feel like we should fix Thompson which we know not only because we have this problem where kindergarten's are growing at four classes a year and we're popping them off only at two a year so it's kind of got a double-edged sword and that really bracket Dalin and Hardy are up next they're really close depending on how many incoming kindergarteners they might be okay they might be in the yellow at least for the next year but I feel like one of the things that we need to make sure when we go into this kind of town-wide meeting is to really make it clear where the stressors are and I felt like I wanted to have some kind of a visual on that now whether or not we all agree with kind of which classes would be broken up or not I feel like is you know I can I'm going to leave that in there for colors and for the sake of the discussion but I feel like one of the things that I am hearing a lot from parents currently and not just at Dalin or any particular school but kind of across the board is that our elementary class sizes are too big that they think 25 is too big you know and anything over that is absolutely too big and so I considered that when I went through read to me meant you know that the classes were just way too big in those schools so I don't know this is just I was just trying to make sure that we could have some way that we went in there I think that so not only do they need the background material which is what I use to create this but some understanding from us as to which schools are clearly level one like we absolutely have to do them just so that we know where we're headed with this discussion so I just wanted to share that and take any feedback on that. Great job. Comments hearing them Dr. Seuss. Just a question do you have different numbers for what you think is read for kindergarten level than you do for fifth grade because it seems to me that that feels different right class of I didn't touch the fifth grades because they're leaving so knowing that there's no fixing them because all these fixes will happen next year so in my mind where I could I thought we should mitigate now none of all of the red here is not currently in the budget so that's right right right so right right right so this is just a you know if I'm also going to start while we're thinking about budget and the enrollment problem we also need to think about the fact that we have to stop just continuously shoving more students into the same number of classes so we have the big trifecta going on but I feel like this I noticed when we were looking at the you know when we last got these numbers that I started to like circle where class sizes were too big and everything 25 and above and I feel like some of this is what I felt like was missing in the McKibben report like he he did raw numbers in his own way but he wasn't looking at then also what we think the class size should be and I know that that's a discussion that I am continuing to push and trying to figure out what the right class size is and how we define that but this is kind of it is 10 o'clock I don't know the will of the committee move the 10 o'clock rule to 1030 motion by Ms. Starks second by Dr. Seuss to move the 10 o'clock rule to 1030 all in favor I opposed the unanimous but unhappy vote I just like to take note that the prior chair never had to do that that's because the prior chair didn't have to worry about the prior chairs filibuster oh my goodness after you talk tonight please but we are tonight so but I do want to make sure if anybody has any input or feedback let me know I just feel like we certainly as we head into that meeting which it looks like is now going to be what November 30 which is a Monday I don't think we have a place yet did they say where I mentioned it tonight I think we're going to be in the conference room they didn't tell us that but it is at 7 o'clock on Monday November 30 we'll be the first meeting of the school enrollment task force Dr. Allison Ampe I'm just looking at this with an eye to paying for it and while I really wish we could achieve everything you're suggesting we need to achieve I'm concerned that the funds are not currently in our budget as it is so created and I am worried that we'll be setting up unrealistic you know just going in and saying oh we're going to do this is going to set up expectations with parents and I'm just I'm concerned about this I didn't mean it as any way shape or form that it's mostly to show where the enrollment growth is pushing the edges of the schools so in this way even without the numbers I think what I did was just try to say okay it's Thompson and Bishop that are under the most pressure and then we can see where it goes from there whether we do this or not like you need to see it's hard to see just from looking at numbers why we the school committee think that if you look at this well Bishop is okay they've got an extra classroom they're using 18 classrooms why is that a problem because there's way too many kids in each one of those classrooms so I just wanted to it doesn't make any promises or any kind of it's what I'd love to have happen but I know that it's not in the budget we're making two separate arguments here and this is the other half of it Mr. Haynes I was with I was at Bishop PTO last night and I think what I got very clearly from them is that they felt a little left out because when you looked at McKibbins they don't look like they're getting worse but they're not getting better and their numbers are already unacceptably high so I'm glad that you're drawing attention to that as we also draw attention to all of our other needs in the district okay district accountability curriculum instruction assessment community relations we met on the 16th we did a second read of the survey summary it's going to go for a third read at our next meeting we also discussed two public meetings one on the enrollment challenges tentatively for January 7th with a snow date of the 13th this will be a town hall meeting that may or may not perfectly be called a charrette but this kind of like big community-wide meeting visioning meeting we also discussed starting a process of having public conversations about issues that are important to the district first one tentatively to happen end of March, early April on curriculum assessments common core we think these are things that people want to have a conversation about and we want to help facilitate that thank you executive session minute review I am attending a meeting with town council I want to share with him what we'd like him to do as soon as I've done that I will contact our secretary and set up that review everybody get paid again school enrollment task force is going to meet on the 30th of November we've now come to the end of the regular agenda we now approach quick announcements yes thank you Dr. Ampey and I attended the edco meeting the other day for school committee topics one would heavily discuss was Mark and the second one was starting time for schools high schools the other announcements I'd like to share with the last meeting I talked about the Thompson third grade doing the town meeting they did it they had four articles presented three failed and one passed that's awesome thank you okay executive session motion to go into executive session to conduct strategy sessions preparation for negotiations with union personnel or contract negotiations with union and or nonunion in which held in an open meeting a detrimental effect or to conduct strategy with respect to collective bargaining or litigation in which this doesn't apply so for the first item is the executive session motion by Dr. Seuss second by Mr. Heiner we're all called Dr. Allison Ampey Mr. Thielman Dr. Seuss Mr. Thielman Mr. Seuss it's the unanimous vote six nothing thank you for everyone for coming out tonight and watching us in this beautiful room we're not returning to a public session for anybody who is concerned with that