 I'm going to call to order this meeting in the Amherst Pellum Regional School Committee at 6.32 or 3, something like that. Just to let people know, it is being recorded, but also broadcast live. So people are now ready to do that. I guess I'll start by welcoming – we only have one new member right now, so I thought we should welcome you. Do you want to say hi, or should we start? Well, I'm Ben Harrington. I don't have a meeting yet, but – okay, why don't we go around the table and have other people introduce themselves? Ron Manino Pellum School Committee and Regional. Margaret Stanser. Pellum. I'll keep Vonch Lever. Kerry Spitzer. Amherst. Ben Harrington. Amherst. Herb Mockajima. Alice McDonald. Amherst. Steve Sullivan. Shooksbury. Peter Devlin. Amherst. We know each other. Dr. Mike Morris. Okay, so I got a call to order. The first item is approval of the minutes of December 10th, 2019, which is in your packet. Yes. Okay, cool. I will take it. So I was in Texas on December 10th, so I would like to be noted as absent. Okay. Yes. On that note, I think Mr. Demling was present. Mr. Demling? Yes, that was my first observation is that I was present. The other minor correction on item 6A, at the very end, Mr. Demling approves policy AAC. You should just read Mr. Demling moves to approve policy AAC. Yeah, yeah, moves to approve policy AAC. So it's on the top of the page following the beginning of the section, 6A. That's the fourth paragraph. Any other corrections? Yes. Under point E, says Mr. McDonald's 2021 possible vote for percentage. I actually, that doesn't make sense, but I don't know what I did say. Well, I guess we could strike it. Yes. I believe what you said was that it was discussed last month. Okay. And it was being brought for a vote that night, but that it was previously discussed. The calendar was previously discussed in November. Yeah. That's what I recall from that line. I didn't catch it when I first went. We changed it to the 2020-2021 calendar was discussed in the previous meeting for this month and is being brought forward for possible vote. Okay. Great. Anything else? I would entertain a motion to approve the minutes as amended. What's to be recognized for that purpose? Is she going? I move to approve the minutes of December 10th, 2019, as amended. Yeah. Is there a second? Second. Second is best answered. Move by Demling. Okay. Anything further? Seeing none, all those in favor of approving the minutes as amended? Let's see if I have a raise in your hand. That's one, two, three, four, five, six. Any nays? Any abstentions? Three abstentions. From Spitzer, Harrington, and McEvoy. So the motion is approved and the minutes are approved. Great. Okay. So item number two, our school committee member announcements and public comment. Are there any announcements from members of the committee? Seeing none, then we will move to public comment. For public comments, if anyone has a public comment, please come forward to the microphone. Don't forget to identify yourself by name and you will have up to three minutes to speak. I don't know if we have a little... Yeah, the computer, it was getting set up for a different purpose. Sorry to put up. We don't have the screen down either. Any public comments? Come forward. You have three minutes to speak. Again, don't forget to identify yourself. My name is Chrissy Ryan. I'm a former member of the school council, formerly Harman for those who are confused. I've worked on an offer over a year addressing the gross mismanagement of school funds by this group here, minus the new members. And, when I began holding this district accountable predominantly over the summer, suddenly, a few weeks ago the union appeared out of nowhere with a grievance that was rooted in fabricated statements out of an email that was read here in this forum, out of context by the chair, and used intentionally to create a false narrative about the substance of the submissions that I had been giving to the school committee over the summer. And then this meeting was turned into a three-ring circus by this union person, the HR director and the superintendent who gave them false information by orchestrating these false and fake attacks on themselves of verbal abuse, harassment and threats, specifically stating it was the Amherst Regional High School staff. So I got public records to figure out what this grievance was about and where these statements were coming from. And the public record came back and said that there were no records to support these statements. There are allegations in this email to the superintendent and the HR director slash equity director slash HR director where sexual characterizations of employees cursing at high school staff, descriptions of sexual activity of high school staff, racism, anti-Semitism, abuse, harassment, homophobia, it went on and on. Every adjective they could possibly find. So I'm here with my statement on the record. But what I find to be so interesting is that the union board members, a couple of them, informed myself and other members of the community that they had nothing to do with that letter that they didn't vote on it and they were objecting to it. So the union was putting out a statement with the HR director slash assistant superintendent slash assistant equity director, whatever. And the superintendent when this email thread with the union director or union president. So I was wondering what was this dramatic attempt, this smoke stream that was being created. It was obviously ridiculous as I'm a parent of biracial LGBTQ children. So being called racist and homophobic is obviously what are you trying to conceal, right? So I did some public records for my website arbsadmin.org and it looked like there was another unlicensed finance director administrator that was hired during this time with a fake hiring process. There was no, there was an email that was sent out in which there was a request for the equity task force to be represented on the hiring committee. They never received it, none of them ever received this email. There was an email that was supposedly sent to the community requesting a very equitable process from people represented from all these different towns. And on the screening committee, there was only four employees of the district, the superintendent, his secretary, curriculum director, former finance person, and one other central office employee, a person of color. So this sounds very familiar. It sounds like the middle school principal hiring process. I got public records from my friend Brian Devine at Desi and it said that the superintendent had made a big attempt to recruit a finance director. Remember this is the $60 million that we're all, as taxpayers, hoping that at some point gonna be invested in our children and not in all the adults that work here for their own privileges. And there was only one applicant was on the application. So we've heard this before. We've heard this with the middle school principal hire who was recently given a non-renewal, the African American principal who has more credentials than all of you people put together is the one person who's not being retained in the district. Even though that's the first school committee meeting that you had this year, before or after you were rambling on about how I was harassing you, leaving out the part about how I was talking about your mismanagement of money, that retaining people of color was gonna be your big goal this year. Retaining, retaining it was this big emphasis. So I would like to know what you're doing to retain the middle school principal, what you're all doing to hold the district accountable for the one goal, because you know I have those goals, the district goals for the equity office. Which are all about hiring and retaining people of color. So what are you doing to retain Dr. Joseph Smith, who has a doctorate in multiple professional licenses. An equity director job would be great. There's discrimination against LGBTQ employees in this district who have not been promoted. And also I would like you to redo the hiring of the finance director. Because the email that he sent to the superintendent was that he needed training from our former finance director in order to get his hours, his waiver. And since as you know, I have all the munis documents, I know that he, what he does, and I know that he has not received very much munis training. So there's two things that I would like to have you address, Mr. Nakajima. One, you can read the entire email that I sent and not just the excerpt where you were claiming I was being anti-semitic. That was cute. And also, redo the hiring process for the finance director. And please work on retaining the most qualified African American principal. Point of order, Mr. Schumann. Yeah, I'm finishing my sentence, sir. Point of order. It's the point of order. The speaker has now used six minutes to present public comment and that's three minutes over the time limit. Are you wrapping up? Please, yeah, just let her wrap up. And so I would like you to retain the African American principal that I worked so hard to show how discriminatory your hiring practices were a year and a half ago. So I'm not going anywhere, even though I've gone dark on the website, there's lots of stuff that's been coming in and it's not going to stop worth you all being held accountable, okay? Have a wonderful night. Right, are there any further public comments? Okay, seeing none, public comment action is closed. Just a reminder to the public again, in addition to welcoming people coming to the meetings and providing their comments, they can also do so in written format either through emails that are available on our website as well as also through traditional postal mail, we welcome them and read them all. Thank you very much. So our next item of business is the superintendent's update. Dr. Morris. Sure, and I'll be brief because I know there's a number of people looking to present very shortly about high school courses. So this is in your packet and I have a couple of things to mention that did not make it into the packet in time last week. So just, first one's for an FYI and it's an important FYI although it's not an actionable step right now is that to make a very long story short we're using old cables to receive our internet and there was an agreement with our vendor that over the next few years we would develop our own cables, we being the town of Amherst which these two schools are located in and so the district's working with the town of Amherst who's taking active steps to update the cables to use to bring internet into our schools and while that's a lengthy and detailed process the end result, probably a couple years from now will be much better internet rates and particularly as we have Chromebooks for every student at the secondary level the bandwidth that we need is much higher than it was five years ago and that wasn't the case so this will have a positive end and we'll just keep the committee updated on this on the progress, yes. So I think the town's building its own sort of fiber optic network and ring and then laterals off to different major buildings in town, right? That's exactly it. You know a little more than me. No, no, that's okay. I was just gonna, for anyone watching at home you're not installing television. I'm just used to the word cable. It's like there are literally cables that'll be pulled but I think there'll be fiber optic strands and stuff like that. It won't be visible cables. That's right. Second one is that the Amherst Fire Department has been working with us around fire safety particularly in our school buildings making sure we're following the fire code updated to the highest level and so there's been tremendous amount of work that's been needed. The three areas have been focused on is paper on doors, egress points and having storage of materials within two feet of the ceiling, 18 inches in the schools that have actually neither of these two schools are good examples but are that are sprinkler buildings, fully sprinkler buildings. And there's a couple other things as well so I wanna thank the staff because it's been a tremendous amount of effort. I think the positive news if you're a Marie Kondo fan is that we have a lot fewer things and I was at one of the elementary schools and it's a region meeting but it's the same rules apply across all the schools in the town and looking in a closet and it was just very pleasant going into a closet at Wildwood and seeing what had happened in the kind of 1980, 90s curriculum that hadn't been used in many years going to a better place than in our closet. So it's been a tremendous amount of work for the custodial staff, our facility staff has been tremendous but really for everyone in the schools it's been a tremendous amount of work. A theater department, I mean John's here so I can say one of the conundrums we have is around costumes and flammable materials and non-sprinklered spaces and we thought of a creative solution that come in tomorrow for a kind of non-flammable kind of metal box to put costumes and materials for our drama department. So all that being said it's in the interest of our students and our staff safety and it's really good work to do but it's a lot of work to be doing in the school year and I wanna thank everyone for that. And the fire department will be coming in in the next couple of weeks to give us an audit, an update on from what they saw in their normal audits in the fall, where are we? They gave us to the 16th to have this work done and 14th while I'm speaking and I feel pretty good about where we're sitting. So thank you. High school dance group so we had a performance for elementary students and one of the neat things is for elementary students to get to see their future selves perhaps in any way whether it's athletics, the fine arts, academics but I heard from elementary principals how wonderful it was for their students and how much they looked up to the older students to do that. We also had a middle school performance particularly for Wildwood because the proximity students can walk over and for our elementary principals to see their former students five years later up in front of them that personally was a great experience for them as well so thanks to John and the department for all your work. We have two updated and the copies came out strange but this has been publicized many places and will continue to be. We have two vaping education family events coming up. The size got all wonky in the packet so I apologize but if you got our website it's there it's on our social media and I can send the dates or the dates are after our next meeting but there's one vaping education event for families, for students in elementary and middle school and a separate one for students in high school because we talked about the principals and they felt like they're different issues at the different age levels and one of the presenters is Melissa Melinda who is the kind of regional head of this. She works at the educational collaborative but she's on the statewide board around substance abuse and particularly around nicotine and we'll staff there as well but we wanna, we'll talk about vaping it's in our slide deck at the end of the meeting tonight but I just wanted to publicize those events and we'll continue to do so. Yesterday there was a signs of suicide training we had staff members from all of our schools attend. It was also at the collaborative in Northampton this was really trying to best diagnose and understand when students are in situations where they're making statements or it's reported to us that there's a possibility of self-carm, how do we best understand the warning signs, what are the assessments we use and then what are the action steps we take. We have protocols around that. This mind-wise is sort of evidence-based program so it was really wonderful for our staff members to get to experience that, see what they're doing, currently doing and see how they can enhance their work. The last one that's printed and again I'll try to read through these because I know people are waiting is we've reached out to the Shootsbury and Levered Elementary schools. We've heard back from Shootsbury that date which is not in your packet is March 11th at six o'clock. Appreciate that Shootsbury put us on right before their PTO meeting so that hopefully for caregivers they might be coming anyway to that meeting and Mr. Sullivan I imagine will be there with baked goods in tow as he always is. I appreciate that but it's really important for go up to the Hill towns and help folks understand what the middle school experience offers. So they've been really well attended and well appreciated in the past. We'll continue that and I'll get the Levered date. I'll share it out with the committee. I think the last two item, oh three quick ones I'm sorry. We're continuing seal of biliteracy work so that's something that was talked about more at the elementary side than the secondary side of that because of Mr. Richardson's time it's been sort of talked about in Amherst meetings but the seal of biliteracy was something created by the Look Act and so we're actively working to solicit high school students who might be eligible based on their biliteracy or multiliteracy skills to be able to have support to receive that seal because it's not just like oh I'm multilingual I just get it there's assessments and a process for that. So Mr. Richardson's been working with high school staff members on that project on more on that probably as we get closer to graduation because that's the sort of date that it plays out in at the high school level. Dr. Morris? Yeah. So the point would be then that the goal is to try to have that seal of biliteracy implemented so that graduating students who could benefit from that could receive it and talk to graduation. Yes. And yesterday was the last, last night was the last meeting of the grade level advisory board looking at sixth grade to the middle school which was McDonald's sits on with myself. The timeline is that the subcommittees are supposed to send their reports to me by February 1st which likely means probably a March full report out because I have a significant amount of work to do once they come in in terms of writing executive summary slides sharing that back with the advisory board getting their feedback before it becomes a public document. But I think everyone, the mood of the room was that a tremendous amount of work happened and that there's a lot of work to go including survey students, families, communities. So I think when we get to agenda setting at the end it was originated for February but my sense is March is probably a more realistic timeline to present that. And last week the middle school principal position posted and there was a call for volunteers to be on search committee. We always, the interview committee as well as the screen committee. If school members are interested we would always welcome the opportunity to have school members participate in that process if time allows. You can just let Doreen, myself or Doreen Cunningham know and we'll put you on that list and I don't know if the answer is participated in a recent search as well. It's a great experience I think and we're looking forward to having the best applicants and thorough process that we get to April 1st and have an appointment ready for the community. Is that it? That is it for me. Are there questions for members of the committee? Stella. So I appreciate the science of suicide training item. Those are pretty sobering news articles recently about the requirement for training for suicide prevention in districts and yet it's one of those unfunded mandates and so districts struggle with it so it's great to see that. It would be good too to give some thought to how we can provide this every year. Another one of the take-homes from that analysis was that any level of training even if it's self-directed online is markedly more beneficial than having nothing and so it's one of those things that you certainly wanna be on the preventative side of. The fire safety thing is interesting. So with the audit that you talked about that the fire department's gonna be doing will that just be with regards to our current behavior and activity or will it also include capital recommendations that might have an impact for our current budget year? It often does. I mean it's something that we do every year as this is not the new piece is just the enhanced focus on a couple key areas that the fire department felt like we needed to work on. Most of the capital things are like exit sign, egress kind of things. Not as much, I mean if we said oh we're sprinkling all the buildings tomorrow I think they'd be really pleased but for buildings this age that's not a typical thing that many communities take on not that we should or shouldn't. But I think most of the focus is on kind of use the word behavior. I think that's an accurate description of what are, what's the capacity of staff within the current confines of our structure to make our buildings as safe as possible. Any further questions of the superintendent? Donal? Just going back to the middle school principle process. I'm not sure if everybody's aware of the timeline you mentioned April but maybe you could give some milestone timeline on that. So what I'll do is I'll send the committee the full, because I don't want to, Miss Cunningham is going to be here today but she's a sick family member she's taken care of so I'll just send that full middle school principle search timeline to the full committee. Great. And then it also has the commitments of if you want to be on the screening committee this is when it would meet roughly for this amount of time. So I'll send that out tomorrow. And I think also just for public awareness then I mean if we're not, we're not going to meet again until the 28th or something and then the 28th just be prepared to give an outline even if some of the milestones have already been hit it's just good to get public awareness. Yep. Absolutely. It's a good idea. Anything further from the committee? Seeing nothing, nothing else. We'll conclude the superintendent's update. There isn't a chair's update. Are there updates from subcommittees? So lovely. We had our CPAC monthly meeting last Friday. It's a pretty packed and well-attended meeting. Just a couple of highlights. Representative Minnie Dome from two of our member towns was there which is awesome to have state representation at that level of the schools. So that was really great to see. Dr. Morris gave us an overview of the sixth grade advisory group. A couple interesting points in that discussion. The need to focus on the transitions of how the specialized specialized programs be affected. You know, we have Ames, Building Blocks, ILC that are in somewhat different forms when you go from elementary to middle school. And so just as we're mapping out the process and what we're paying attention to making sure that we have an unrushed opportunity to be able to focus on each of those programs and say what will the positive negative impact on that be. And another interesting comment that came up there is just because this is such a complex change process, potentially five districts, it's challenging for parents to know when is the opportune time to engage with input and feedback? Yeah. You know, because you wanna do it at a time where it's gonna be listened to and have an impact and yet you don't wanna do it too early. And so it's hard to follow those bouncing balls particularly for special ed parents, when is that focus going to be? So, and I think that our special ed director, Faber-Addy and Dr. Morris heard that, you know, with the communication on this. And like all things, but this one, since it's a particularly complex process, is important. We also talked about the special ed survey. This was like the third iteration, so of the last six years or so. I agree. Yep. And so a couple of take-homes from what, you know, one is that the district still receives across the board very high marks. There was one notable decrease in the centered around communication, particularly at the middle school level and particularly during times of transition from elementary to middle and middle school to high school. So I think Dr. Brady heard that and he's gonna be, you know, updating CPEC and talking about that going forward. So, you know, again, it's this whole idea of communication that affects a lot of different things. So it was good to put another fine point on that. Just answer. Mr. Damling, I have a question. Could you tell me what CPEC stands for? Yeah, special ed parent advisory committee. It's a state mandated body for every public school district and entire school district. Thank you. Any further questions for Mr. Damling? That's an awesome update. It's comprehensive. No, I mean, like it's something like, we had a meeting. I feel like comprehensive. Are there other committees? Actually, I have a question for you, Dr. Morris. We talked about offline, getting a memo or sheet of paper or letter out to all the committee members who are chairs on how they post meetings, who do they contact, or a reminder of how many days ahead they're supposed to contact. We haven't done that, right? So no, we've worked on a draft. It'll be done by the end of the week. Okay, I just, I wanna make sure. The cool thing about having this meeting now is the likelihood there are a lot of other subcommittees that have met is really low. But the point is, now this is the season, everything heats up, so I just wanna make sure we get that reminder out to people about what the process is, who to contact, and email every day. Any other subcommittees? Seeing none, then we will move on from that. New and continuing business, this has gotta be one of the more fun topics. That we have, because it's one of those opportunities to dig into the meat of what we, what our schools are actually doing, which is teaching courses with students, coming up with cool ideas. So please introduce this and remind us again on any actions you're expecting of the committee or any kind of feedback you're expecting. Then the other thing is past practice is any guide. People have a million questions, so let's try to keep the overall presentations and stuff concise, because it'll be the entire meeting otherwise. Although that's kind of fun. It is. Wellness is important too, right? I'm just looking at what was last on the agenda, yeah. It's all fun. No, I agree with you and we chatted before with folks who were here early and just talked about brevity because the committee is not shy about asking questions, so. I think the other thing about brevity tonight is that I want to compliment the staff members for writing really comprehensive course proposals that was shared with the committee and done ahead of time so that people were able to take a look when this was sent out on Friday and get caught up with what's being proposed tonight. So I think the three things I want to say, one is that I want to compliment the high school staff and Principal Jones, Mr. Siddiqui's assistant principal, because what you're looking at tonight is an attempt to expand course offerings without expanding FDEs and budget. So it's trying to look at what are the needs of students? How do we look at our current course offerings? How do we expand the number of the quantity of offerings for our students based on what they're interested in, what their passions are and what they're telling us they want to see. And so you'll hear a lot about that tonight is we're offering these courses, we're suggesting these courses because this is where our students are telling us they want to go and this are really exciting course offerings. I'm sure you've read them around that topic. I think the second thing to say is that we're like all schools but I think the high school does a fantastic job of evolving over time. So for those of you and some of you on the committee who are in the school at some point in the past, we don't have to mention years, what you'll see is that the course catalog looks quite there. The courses that students have opportunities to take are really different. That's not a critique of the years in which other past students were in the high school. It's actually just understanding that the world evolves and the high school does an amazing job of evolving with it in real time which is really hard when you're teaching. It's one thing to offer a lecture or seminar, it's another thing to change your whole course sequence and courses and so I really want to compliment the high school staff. And I think the last thing and probably the most important thing is just how darn exciting it is to be a high school student here. I mean every year when we get to this place and this year will be no different I'm sure. So one of the committee says I wish I was in high school now. This is not, you know, I don't remember these courses being viable or being possible and they're absolutely right and I have the same emotions as well reading it. So just as a reminder, so you're anticipating a potential vote by the committee. I was getting there, I just had to do that. Sorry. I had to do the other piece first. So by policy a new course at high school do require a vote of the committee. I think some of these were we were questioning whether it really required a vote because it's more an adjustment than a full course, a new course with a new name and a new title but we plan to err, we aired on the side of caution. We also thought it was a great opportunity for staff members to be able to share the type of work they're doing but at the end we would ask, I would ask you for a vote and the timeliness of this is we tried on December, we had to push it because other items were time sensitive but because we sort of need the vote tonight because of the timing of registration for the next school year. And can you just do one other thing as just remind us what the, before it gets to us, what's, I'm saying this generically, send us multiple courses, different subject areas, what process has it gone through before it gets to us? Sure, so when there's a top, an idea for a new course, staff members go through the department heads which many of whom are here tonight. They talk about it, at that point it goes to high school administration, Mr. Sadiq, who's here tonight has been the point person for me and we've communicated the most but certainly Mr. Jones, Dr. Grammack here in that loop as well and then it goes to me and for any feedback or approvals that I, or questions that I might have so before it gets to you and sort of there's multiple people, content area specialists who are school leaders, teacher leaders, the high school administration, Mr. Sheehan and myself also take a look before it comes to you. Next Ms. Wiener, do you have a question? Will you point out which courses are new and which courses are merely being adjusted? I think that'll come through in the brief presentations. If not, then please ask folks that question. Any other further sort of framing or preliminary questions for the committee? Seeing none, let's roll. So let's go in order of the course description of the packet to the first one, music production two. So I think Mr. Futh is probably gonna be our key speaker. I should comment as he walks up that I got to see something I meant to say in the ups and didn't but Mr. Futh works both at the high school as well as at Summit Academy and had the wonderful pleasure of seeing the Summit Academy band that Mr. Futh works with from a concert including an original, what would you call that? A musical opera, something. Yeah, written by a Summit Academy student. Was that last week? I believe it was last week. Just fabulous, so many, many talents and as a lead into music production too. Cool. So I stood before this committee about three years ago. I was in the midst of teaching this course called Music in the Americas, which I didn't have any sort of curriculum that for. There were six students signed up for it. And I thought, I think this could be a really cool opportunity if we kind of shifted the focus more towards project-based music creation and call the course music production one. Intentionally put the one in there. And within a year or two, it became an incredibly popular elective. At the time I was teaching at Summit Academy for both semesters and enough people were signing up for music production but I ended up teaching it twice at the high school. So it's a frequently requested class. And students in the class often, several of them at the end, asks their next step, is there music production too? I always say not yet, but perhaps one day. And so this is the day that I'm asking you if we can make music production to a reality. The sheer fact is in a semester we can only delve so deep. A lot of the students who come into music production one are interested in music but maybe don't have much of a music theory background. They don't know much except they like to listen to a variety of music and want to learn how to maybe start creating their own. So there's a fair amount of preliminary work that just goes into familiarizing them with the keyboard, just basic musical terminology. And so just in terms of what we can accomplish on the production side, not so much. It's more of a broad overview. Music production two would be designed to delve a little bit deeper and students entering that class would either have been in music production one so they'd have that base of knowledge or be pretty, have a lot of experience on their own and can talk to me and perhaps get in. But we would really delve into production almost exclusively. So there's a list of projects that I created that I included in the proposal but they all deal specifically with production things. EQ, learning how to use that, the ins and outs of compressors, learning how to create certain vocal effects that they might hear in songs on the radio, taking song stems. So these are kind of raw recordings that some generous musicians have posted on this website designed for people to use and to remix and then taking them, doing little adjustments for one project and then for another project making something entirely different. I'm fortunate this semester to have two students taking it as an help. We couldn't get enough students together to have a group out. So I'm meeting with a few students. Can you just share what ALP is because that everyone may be clear on that, sorry. ALP is basically, it's an independent study designed for students to work on something that's not officially in the program of studies. So I have two students meeting at separate class periods during, perhaps in one meeting during another class working on stuff. And it's been a great chance to try out some of these projects to create kind of a body of work and yeah, to see them really go. I have, in order to, I think the class would be really enhanced through updating the software. Right now we're using GarageBand which is a free digital audio workstation on every Mac which is fine. It's perfectly fine for music production one but to delve in a little bit deeper it would benefit if we upgraded to Logic Pro X which is used by a lot of professional producers. So, and incidentally I just saw today the notification go out for the AEF grants. I'm hoping that that could potentially come through for next year. If not, we could do it with GarageBand. That's what the ALP students are doing now but it would be at a disadvantage. I think they'd really benefit from using software that professionals use. So that's my pitch. Any questions that you have? What does this new software cost? It's $200 a machine. So it's pretty reasonable. We have 15 machines in the lab. Is that a pre-ear or is it a permanent license? It's just one and done. Yeah. What's the difference between if it's done as an independent study and as a regular offered class if it still only has a handful of students? It would benefit tremendously I think from a workshop setting. So the students that are working independently right now don't really get a chance to interact with each other but I think there'd be value in, especially for the final few projects of the class, I'm envisioning it as students getting a chance to pursue their own projects in a workshop setting, getting regular feedback from others in the class. Yeah, so that's the main thing. I can add to Mr. Fruth maybe too modest to say this is also these students are working with their instructor when he has free moments as opposed to a structured curriculum which is during a typical course sequence and I think it's important to note that you're making it work for these couple students but that's not a sustainable model. Yes. In my opinion. Is it conceivable that students could record their own voices or music and then use that as opposed to the samples that they're able to get or recording stems are able to get? So I think I included this in the proposal but the long-term vision is potentially to set up some sort of recording studio in the high school. Our space in the wing is a little bit tight. We do have a couple of practice rooms that maybe we could convert one of those. I'd hate to take away that space from practicing students but yeah, that would be really nice. I'd also love to, I'm pretty sure I included this as well, take a trip to North Fire Recording Studios. I don't know if any of you know that. It's within walking distance from the high school. I think it's run by an alum or is associated with it. I'm not totally sure but yeah, just having a chance to go and work with, in an actual recording studio I think would be incredible and I've been in contact with them. They're totally open to that. Do you have any idea, do you have any idea if, I know like Berkeley College of Music has integrated this kind of production concept into their curriculum very thoroughly. Do you know, have you thought about to what extent this advantages students who might be interested in pursuing music academically to be exposed and have practical experience, apart from sitting in their bedroom with their computer, but like in an organized academic setting? Yeah, I mean the fact is there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of information on YouTube. They can, you know, do a lot on their own and some do, but having a chance I think, again, to work with others in the class while creating their portfolio of stuff that they could actually use to apply to places like Berkeley, I think would be really valuable. I'm just giving them that base of knowledge so they could go in, you know, and with, you know, hit the ground running rather than having to be like, oh, okay, I'm learning this now, so. All right, are there further questions in the committee? Yes, so much. Good luck with this program, it sounds really good. But I do have a question about funding. The last page of your proposal, you say you're seeking an AEF grant. What happens if you don't get that? So as I said, we can get by with Rajband. It's not ideal, but it's what we have now and, you know, I think, you know, it has worked. It's just not, there's less available feature-wise in it, but it's functional. I think I already know the answer to this question, but I'm gonna ask it anyway. What is your reluctance to including it in your budget? My goal, I guess, was to not, to keep it budget-neutral. So I wasn't, yeah, I don't know. I didn't request any money, I didn't think that was part of the deal. It sounds so, such a wonderful course and a continuation of one. I'm not speaking for the committee, so. I'd put it in the budget. Okay. Well, don't really know how to do that. Your budget. My budget, okay. Yes, Mr. Stone. Well, if we can just get advanced cut of the student royalties from their proposal. There you go. So you know there's, you wanted to introduce students to the music industry early on. Yes, yes, all of them. In the awful, crusel-crusel business contract. To see the senior availability. Your first million goes to us. But this is awesome. I'm sure we'll be able to say this with the other two, the other offerings here, but this is why our high school is still so amazing is that we, not just that we have this breadth of opportunity, but that we have educators, like Dr. Morris said, are willing to give up their own time to seed these ideas, to get them off the ground, to a point where this kind of support can happen. It's fantastic, it's unlike anything else that's available in our community, in our region. It's really special. On that note, if there are any other questions or comments, thank you. Great, thanks. Excellent. And I think the next, Mr. Bechtel, is there anything you wanted to add? I'm sorry, I just wanted to recognize you before we transition. Yeah, just a quick note. I want to say that as a department feature, Music Production 2 also continues a kind of line that I think Todd, Mr. Fruth, began really well, which was a sort of exploratory model of what would be possible with students' bite and the evidence has been in the registration numbers. And I think the same hesitation about jumping into the budget is to take a sense of responsibility to make sure that we are loading this thing up well and could provide something that students truly wanted. And the last thing I would just say is that this continues a trend from when we were last in front of this committee to talk about new courses, to put an emphasis on student creation on the work and Music Production is one of the best vehicles we have for students that might not have been traditionally trained or have gone through elementary and middle school with the musical background to make themselves full-fledged musicians. And that's a really exciting thing. Mr. Munch? Is it possible that this might lead to some kind of certificate for students? There are some vehicles for that out there. It might be a little early to explore it, but I think it is a really beautiful marriage of the artistic and the practical field of technical work. And there are things that reflect that as far as certifications go. Could they do that after part two? Potentially, I think it'd be too early to say, I think tonight, but that there is a door that opens for that. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. It'd be totally cool to look into that. Yeah. So next two courses, even though they're separate courses, it's the same department. So our environmental studies and then engineering materials and manufacturing processes. So I will, if you want to introduce it, Matt? Sure. Yeah. And I can pull off the slides, like. So we have two exciting courses to introduce today by two kind of leaders in our department in science and technology. And I think it gets to Mike's point about kind of evolving with the times. I think that both of the courses are true to that. And I think that you'll see that it is trying to kind of update our courses to address the current needs in our world. And with that, I'm going to pass off to Nick Shaw. And I will man the PowerPoint. Oh, we got this. So whoever would like to, let's make it work. You should operate that. You want me to? Okay. I don't know if I really need to use my phone. You do. I do. Because it's for your big broadcast. Oh, okay. Well, I mean then. I think the title kind of, I'm Nick Shaw. I've been in the science department for about 20 years, I guess at this point. Was there for the new ninth grade program about 12 years ago. And this is kind of sort of an extension of that, I would say. So I think the title kind of says it all. Environmental studies, multidisciplinary, heterogeneous, team-driven course. So I'm looking for something that brings students from a broad spectrum of high school together to look at the biggest questions that we have to face in the world today for our survival. Essentially the survival of intact human civilization. I don't think that's overstating it, frankly. We go on to the next slide. So I think it's useful to do a quick comparison to kind of see where it fits in the taxonomy of things. So we have an environmental science AP program which is different from our ninth grade environmental science program. The ninth grade program is sort of an opening platform bringing students to the high school. It gives them basic skills, quantitative and qualitative in science with a focus. They can later take AP, environmental science, to take the test in the spring, the standard college board test. And so you might ask, well then, why do we need something that's different from that? Well, environmental studies, as you can see, has a different focus. You are trying to interweave the social sciences and the physical sciences, which is sort of long overdue at this point. We've done all the basic measurements. We understand what's happening with water shortages on the planet. We understand what's happening with the climate shifts and so forth. The science is done by and large in terms of what's causing it and how we have to fix it. But so we want us to look at what are the social mechanisms that keep us doing things that don't make sense when we can clearly see that it needs to change. And that's not to give short shrift to environmental science. You still need to do primary research, but in terms of making some movement on how we deal with these problems, we need to start looking at the social sciences and how they connect to the physical sciences. So that's the primary difference right there. Then there's some pedagogical differences. I want to focus more group work with students, having them work in teams, as opposed to some of the more traditional modalities that we use when you're gearing students up to take a test in the spring. Particularly, I want to have heterogeneous class and a lot of emphasis on working in groups, on researching particular problems and then having them do presentations on these solutions to these problems. And then finally, there is a strong component of the social justice lens because many of these environmental problems involve people being exploited as well as resources. And it's actually necessary to exploit people to exploit resources. These things work hand in hand. So those are some traditional kind of differences between the two different disciplines. So the objectives. What I want students individually to come away with is a chance to develop more of their technical understanding of these chosen topics, global warming, water shortages, food delivery systems, ethical challenges associated with the environment, but also to understand the social dynamics that exist around those. Furthermore, I want them to be able to develop some independent and group research skills. So I don't really want to sort of work more with, here you are as an individual, you need to learn this material, you need to show me that you've mastered it, so on, so forth. But you're going to be working in a team, sometime if you're choosing, sometimes not, and coming together to find information and synthesize information. You need to present that in a way that's coherent, compelling, I find, it's interesting, I go to buy my lunch sometimes and I walk down to the cafeteria. And I know that as the students sit in the hallways, it's all this, nobody's looking at each other, nobody's talking to each other, nobody's interacting with each other, eye to eye, voice to voice, there isn't that old fashioned, I say something, you listen, you evaluate what I said, you add something, and we kind of do this and find some kind of common understanding in the middle. And I think that's actually really, really important. It's not, in fact, it's not just important, it's fundamental to our evolution and existence as beings. It's how we build trust, it's how we build communications, how we build teams. So you can do that when you research together and you present together. To develop your analytical perspectives, to be able to look at your own biases that you bring to a situation, to understand your own hidden agendas that you might have, to be open to having somebody else call you out on that kind of thing, that's more likely to happen in a team. And then to develop multiple lenses through which you can view environmental issues. So you just don't pick a position like, well, I'm really into animal rights and it's all about that. Or I'm really into sustainable agriculture and it's all about that. Or it's all about global warming or it's all about the water or it's all about social justice and toxic waste. These are things that they're all ways of looking at issues but we have to make space for other perspectives as well. Some of the content that we'll be developing these skills and the population and scarcity, I thought about putting quotations around scarcity because scarcity is a funny word. Things become less scarce as you start to pay attention to them and take better care of them and often things becoming scarce can cause that to happen. So that's an interesting thing to look at and as our rising population puts more demands on the world and I think it's a nice sort of healthy way to counteract some of the scary language that we often give our kids and we're running out of everything and it's all a disaster. Well, that means we're entering a zone of tension and we have to reassess. And you can enter that zone of tension and think about how you're gonna change things. It's not an apocalypse. I feel like there's a lot of apocalyptic thinking and feeling in the world today. Markets and commodities, obviously, everything is commodifiable. You can put a price tag on anything. And so to bring that kind of perspective to water, to bring that kind of perspective to air, there's a certain healthy fundamental way of looking at things I think that comes from looking at that. Environmental ethics in the commons, Garrett Hardin's tragedy of the commons, it's been a huge powerful influence and environmental thought, but also ethics, our whole system of devising right and wrong and how we have to pick that apart and look at it. And then on the flip side of the content, some of the more sort of nuts and bolts stuff, carbon dioxide, world forests, wolves and tuna, you might say, what do these things have in common? But wolves are a lot of people sort of quintessential example of the untarnished wilderness. Whereas on the other side of it, people don't look at tuna fish that way. It's just meat in a can. And that's kind of- Could you evaporate the tuna? I just don't want to stick that. Tuna's food, and it's the only time people ever talk about tunas when dolphins get killed catching tuna. But yet there's this fundamental dependency we have upon protein, and yet here this other charismatic animal that we all think is this wonderful symbol of the wild. And yet living things form this continuum, this spectrum of interactions for us that we have to look at and why do we attach certain meanings to certain things and how do those meanings attach how we treat those things? Uranium and energy reserves, obviously. Having power gives you power. Having the power to change the face of the earth gives you more power. Who has that power? Who doesn't have that power? And uranium's a great way of looking at that. There's a lot of social issues wrapped up in that as well as, of course, fossil fuels. All right, so here, this is where I want to take a moment to kind of look at what might a course in the life of this class look like. So I'd like to start a unit, say, on global warming and global forest by having students just do some journaling and reflecting. Who are you as you come to this issue? What do you know? How do you interact with these resources? What do you believe? And then we can kind of share some of that and get into the next piece, which is, well, this is what I know as an instructor. This is some basic pieces I can give you. And I think there should be a moment of good old-fashioned quantitative accountability at the end of that. You should get some kind of quiz so that you know the nuts and bolts of how these things work. There'll be some kind of physical lab activity, whether it's out in our RF, here at our forest in the back of the school, or it might be something that's done with data from online. And then there'll be some in our groups to look at some of these, the broader issues that surround the particular unit that we're in. So for example, what are some of the lenses you can examine global warming through? You can look at it through an anthropocentric lens. Do you wanna look at it through an eco-centric lens? Do you wanna look at it through a social justice lens? Giving students practice at using tools for looking at the world in ways that they might not otherwise have come to the class with. And then give them some kind of large, culminating project that they'll work on in teams. So an example might be something like rewrite a climate treaty that will actually work, okay? I wanna know who do you think is gonna benefit this, who is not gonna benefit from this? Are you going to allow trading, cap and trade? Are you going to monitor things? How will that be done? Who does the monitoring? How do you check up on it? What are the hidden assumptions and all this kind of stuff? How do you make it work? How do you get buy-in, that kind of stuff? And then the presentations of their solutions and then critiques. So again, being driven by group work but focused on large global problems that is always forcing students to come back to examining the assumptions that they bring to the table with them. And oh gee, I just realized that Brandeis has misspelled brandies. I apologize if that's not alumni. Fun that way. It was late at night and I was getting to the end of the slideshow. In any case, so the thing I also wanna kinda end with here is that this is not like a little boutique idea that I kinda cooked up. This is something that's really bubbling up in a lot of universities. Those are just in Massachusetts alone and that's not the complete list. And you can see it spans the gamut of well-established schools, community colleges, inexpensive schools, expensive schools. And in the United States in general, you have 508 listings for this as a major across the country in 46 states except for the four that are mentioned there at the bottom. So you can pretty much take this and travel with it anywhere and do this kind of work. So it's not like we're giving kids something that's like a little taste and they're not gonna find a way to pursue it further on. Next slide. I guess I'll just finish these up and then be happy to answer any questions. There's an economic future in it. You can see right there, I just thought this was an interesting fact I dug up from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that you can get a job as an environmental ecologist or a conservation scientist, quote, hard science, right? And at least these folks are projecting that you'll earn less money than somebody with a degree that does this kind of synthesizing work between science and social science because there's a huge need to articulate the science and to get people to start talking about it and acting upon it. Okay, final slide. And this is just another sort of extension of that idea that you can see this sort of marries some of the larger bars, if you will, in these different graphs here, of the social sciences and the life sciences. All at a bachelor's degree, you wanna be able to go out there and participate in some important dialogues in the world. And then at the risk of being heavy handed, I guess I'll just show the last slide. I won't even read it, just read it yourself. So, with that, I'll open up to any questions that people might have. I think I'm gonna start at the end and run around the table once for questions. How many environmental related courses are there in the curriculum? Is this two? There is the ninth grade course and there is, which is a required course. It's our platform. And then there is an elective AP class. So this would make three. This would make three. Yeah. Stancer? If you don't have that question, I'm just going around the table. No question. A lot of good information, thank you. Yeah, I have one on the text for environmental studies. You mentioned that it's a reading level of 12.5, which is gonna exclude a fairly high number of students. What are your plans for presenting the concepts that you're going to be covering in environmental studies? Studies. Youngsters who may have a significant interest but may not meet the reading level standard. Sure, I'm gonna break that down into two sections. One is I looked at that too and I subjected the text to about six different analyses for the reading level. And the choice of words is, the structure of the language is a little bit more advanced but the choice of words is not particularly complicated. There's not a lot of large multi-syllabic words imported from other Latin roots and things like that. So I think it's more digestible than the raw numbers might suggest. But the other piece is that I'm not gonna be assigning huge quantities of reading from here. This serves as a fundamental resource for me which I selected primarily because it came as the top voted, lack of a better word, from the American Ecological Environmental Science Society. So and it was the most widely used text in the country and then after reading it and comparing it to others I felt it was the most engaging. So while the language can be a little bit higher level it's very readable. You used to find yourself just turning pages and the author kind of grabs you. So I felt it wasn't too much of a problem in that respect but the other, the more direct answer to your question is that as a veteran educator here who's been teaching ninth graders for a long time at all different levels, I know how to bring language to a basis that they can appreciate and understand. And then from there, once that the basic content has been delivered they are free to work in their groups on the stated problems and that's where most of the language they're gonna encounter is gonna be digested. And in those smaller groups I'll be able to work with them individually or in those groups and be able to help them with any other language they encounter. Okay. Yeah. Excuse me, I just wanna say I think this is a great course. My only question is thinking about the fact that it's sitting kind of in, correct me if I'm wrong, kind of the hard sciences or the... Yeah. So correct, what's your department? That's a great question. We've gone back and forth on that. And just how we're gonna bring in as a social science person. I'm wondering how you'll be bringing in or maybe looking to others to bring in folks who might have more of a background in that social science, social justice, public policy. I mean I was looking through the topics that it's like econ, political science, political economy and the hard sciences. And I think that's really hard for one person to do it all. So I'm just curious if there's an opportunity for collaboration. Thank you for asking, it's a great question. And so I have had conversations with some people in the Social Studies Department about this and who've expressed interest in collaborating with me. Not necessarily as having to sign on as the principal teacher, but certainly as people who I'm gonna sort of walk up to their door. Oh yeah, come on in and we can have that conversation. And we've done some of this in the past too. I've worked with some other students who did this kind of stuff in ethics and economics and kind of acted as an advisor along with a Social Studies teacher in the past. So I actually, I'm hoping to kind of be the camel's nose getting underneath the tent here with this, because I think some more interdepartmental conversations will be really healthy for us. And I plan on being maybe a bit of a pest about that and getting that kind of participation from people. But I think it's gonna be welcome from the people I've already talked to about it. I think it's wonderful and your presentation is very comprehensive and I think it's of great value. What he said? No. Yes, thank you, I agree. And having a son who's in ninth grade ecology and very impressed with the rigor within that class as ninth grader is just hearing the plans for this course. I'm excited by the opportunity. And from my line of work I also know that this is also very important. And topics that are being addressed at the post-secondary level as well, the interdisciplinary nature of science and social science and using that intersection to solve world problems. So it's great to hear that we'll start doing things like that here in the high school too. So thank you. Thank you. So what they said about this is great and right in the wheelhouse of what I think community focus and interest is. And it's so great to be in a community where we're talking about this kind of focus and not let's have a course that debates like whether the climate crisis is real or not. It's so great to be past that level, right? So kudos for doing this. My one thought as right through the description is does social science include or do you see it leading to also a focus on the political science slash civic activism aspect of this? Because yes, of course, part of it is trying to explain a big science problem to people. But the other problem is actually getting things to change and we live in a world of governments. And I mean, I talked to a lot of adults who understand the science, understand how to talk to people and give a presentation. And yet they're like, they're desperate to try and organize effectively political change. So I don't know if, you know, and people are awesome for that, right? So I don't know if that goes with the focus. That's a great point and it's a tricky point for me as a teacher because it's easy for a teacher to step up to the bully pulpit and have your opinions dictate what can happen. I mean, for the record, I'm an ardent environmentalist. My house is freezing, my wife will tell you. I have solar panel, the whole thing. But I can't, and I totally, and I'm the advisor for the Environmental Action Club and things like that, but I do feel like I have to make this their journey. And if they wanna go out there and be activists, I wholeheartedly support that. As I tell them, I will be dead and buried in the RF when you're running this place. And you have to make things happen and change is gonna, you're gonna see change in your lifetime that I wouldn't have dreamed of in my lifetime because, you know, the period of consequences is upon us. But I also at the same time have to make this about providing support for them to come to their decisions and for them to advocate in the ways that they want is irrespective of how strongly I might agree. It's just sort of a piece of discipline I feel I have to maintain. Appreciate that, thank you. Just if I could add to that, because it's well said, but I think that extends across departments. You know, I think our high school does in a very politically active community with no shortage of topics that students feel strongly about and rightfully so. I've been incredibly impressed across the cross departments with the faculty and staff in the high school of maintaining support for students that take their own actions instead of finding soapboxes to stand on. It just doesn't happen and it easily could given the alignment of our community and political action, political causes. So thank you for saying that. Yeah, I think ultimately in the end too, you robbed them of some learning opportunities if you do too much of that for them. Thank you very much. Yeah, my pleasure, thank you. So we have four very different course areas we're talking about tonight. We do? We do. What? Pray Tell is number three. Well, we're gonna stay in the sciences. So I don't know if you wanna do more of an introduction to that or... Okay, so I'll bring up the slides for you. Nick Harrison is our engineering department and he is a force who has brought a lot of different initiatives in these courses here and he's always kind of thinking and again, like Nick, always working with kids after school on different projects and I don't think he doesn't have a prep period. There's always somebody who's from doing something. And so this has kind of come out of that. Yeah, if you have a new course that he thinks could benefit our students. So... I'm gonna speak to the microphone. Yeah, sorry. So I've been involved in teaching computer-aided design and the actual hardware and software since around the mid-90s and just like we don't really drive cars around from the mid-90s anymore, it's moved ahead so far. It's like, it is literally trying to compare Nissan from 1992 to a Nissan from 2020. They're very different animals. So it's a moving target and staying current and staying up with it is difficult. As I age, it's harder and the technology used is thankfully getting cheaper and more widespread. I have a student now who's just bought his own 3D printer and he's now advertising on the school announcements, his own 3D printing service. I'm not really sure how much he's gonna get. I'm not concerned I'm being undercut. But you know, he's one of my guys, he is an Alp student, we've discussed those before. And he's been with me in mechanical engineering class and he has, I said, look, these machines need somebody to control them and to operate them. So he took that on himself and that's what he's done for the past semester. And he now considers himself somewhat of an expert, which he is and I'm pleased he is because I need enthusiastic young people to take this on. So he's right there right now. He's, you know, I'd like, I need him to do more. He needs to take an actual CAD class because right now he's just printing things off the internet, which is okay. There is a thing called Thingiverse where you can download a thing and you can feed it into your printer and it will spit out the thing, which is great, but he's not designing his own thing. So the CAD class, computer-aided design, is about designing these things using a computer. You look around the room when this is going on and it's like you've given them all the best computer game on the planet. There is nobody out of the seat, nobody's fooling around, everybody's just completely focused. They are fully in control most of the time. And it's, you can see it's totally captivating. The visuals are absolutely stunning. The programs are very user-friendly now, considering what I started with and they're able to create the most fantastic things. So we have CAD, computer-aided design, and we also have, it's kind of close relative to computer-aided manufacture, which is the taking of the designs and actually making them into something real, which used to involve massive, multi-hundred thousand dollar machines, which you can see in kind of the lower image there. When I worked in the UK, my school was tied to a gas turbine manufacturing company, we're called Rushton Buchsiras, which I think is actually an American company. And we would go and visit them a couple of times a year and look at their production facilities, massive machines, little itty-bitty computers mounted on the top, little glowing green lines on a screen, but they'd be churning out turbine blades for a jet engine. So it was pretty impressive to see, but that's kind of, we can't offer that in school. It can't be done. So luckily, well, actually I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit. There's been a bit of a revolution which I'm gonna get to. So our current software is called AutoCAD 2020. It's industry standard. There is one competing software we don't use called SolidWorks and we don't use it because it's expensive. It would be thousands of dollars to get a site license. Autodesk provides AutoCAD 2020 for free. They give us a student version and it's got everything. The only thing you can't do it is use it to design anything to make money from. So if we were to design a key chain and print it and then try and sell it, we'd actually be breaking the rules of the deal there. We're not allowed to monetize it at all. But it's great because they update the program every couple of years and every year in September, the IS staff load on the new version and we are current. We've got what everybody else has. Students can also go to Autodesk, create their own account and download their own version for their own computers. Quite a few do that. And I've got quite a lot of people out there working independently on this stuff. So the visuals are not great but you can see the different ways in which this is all the same program showing everything from a wireframe design to a traditional kind of engineering drawing view down to what's called a semi-rendered view, the golden sort of bronzy piece there to a fully rendered view which is photorealistic, the blues, the greens, the blacks, the shadows have all been applied. And the students have to become their own movie director a little bit there because they can position things and compose things and create lighting effects. They can actually create animations with it but I don't go there because I'm not really up to speed on that myself. But some of them have thought about it and I'm like, well you go for it because it's the programs that's also used to design video games and things like that which again is out of my reach really. So this is the current revolution of small what are called desktop digital manufacturing devices. You can't go far without hearing about 3D printing right now. It's one of the big fashion things. People are talking about it. They've got them on the International Space Station. They're printing meat, they're printing organs, they're printing shoes, clothes, everything. So they're a very cool thing to talk about and I get all excited about them but the students are generally like, yeah, yeah, it's like, they just expect them to be their kind of thing now. So we have the top line. We have all of those. We have two fifth gen maker bots that's top left. We have the X-Carve which is a robotic carving device that's right in the middle and then we have a replicated two again by maker bot on the right. All of them purchase for us by our federal grant so the school didn't have to buy any of these things. In the middle is my, on the lower level is my next one on the list. That's a laser engraver by Full Spectrum Laser and that runs to about $6,000 for a good one. It's a 35 watt laser so it will cut wood, plastic. It will engrave metal, won't cut metal but we can load materials into there and the students could then let it run with their design and we would have whatever it was apart for a robot or a nameplate for something or who knows what. The device on the bottom right is not something that comes built. You have to kind of buy that and assemble it. So that's like a small milling machine. It's like a modern shrunk down version of the old style like Bridgeport Millers that we may have seen in our younger days. They have a couple of, or did have them at the middle school but they're kind of stripped of all the good bits. Those can be bought very cheap. Our Gen 5 MakerBot runs to about $3,500 a pop but the student who's just bought his own probably paid no more than $200, $300 for his version which he had to build up at home with all the nuts and bolts and things. On the bottom left there is a four-axis milling machine that I had a close call with at a dentist last year because I needed a crown. And he said, just come in. It's gonna be two and a half hours. I'm like, that's not how it works. He goes, that's how it works now. So I sat there and he 3D scanned my jaw and my tooth while he was grinding away the tooth and let his little stub, he went off and they also started to generate a 3D tooth which he then popped on top of my tooth. It was a perfect replica. So I was in and out in two and a half hours. It wasn't cheap but it wasn't as bad as waiting for it forever. So we don't have one of those. We're not gonna buy one but that's an example of how these small manufacturing devices are revolutionizing what's going on in manufacturing. They can make all kinds of like joints for limbs and in fact, this was on the radio last week on NPR. There's Limitless Solutions, which is a company that specialized in 3D printing limbs for either amputees or people who were born without limbs. And they were talking about how they do a lot of work for children. And the children were complaining about the prosthetic limbs were very, very expensive. You know, tens of thousands of dollars were these kind of like crunchy looking weird things that were like fake limbs but not really fake enough to be invisible. They were just people saying, well, you've got some kind of weird thing going on there. The kids went, yeah. So Limitless Solutions said, why not make a limb that is so obviously something else? It works but it could be Iron Man's arm. It could be Spider Man's arm. It could be anybody you want. You choose the design, we will print it for you. And Autodesk partners with this company. So our software provider works with these people to provide these limbs. They're super cheap. They're totally customizable. Obviously, the children grow out of them in a couple of years. So because it's cheaply made, it can be discarded in a new one built very, very quickly. So customization is really high on the agenda here. You can design something and 3D print it in a couple of hours. Whereas when I was at college, if we designed something, we then had to go to the workshop to make it. It would be days before we actually had that thing in our hands. So our students have access to this now. And they're very excited. I had a student this past week. He was designing the mouthpiece for a tin whistle. And he said, can I print it? I'm like, okay, we'll print it. And we printed it, took it home, popped it on the end of the whistle, it worked. So he got that within an hour or two of the design actually being done. It was a very simple print, took about 25 minutes. But we couldn't have made that any other way. We can't injection mold, we can't cast in metal. But we can 3D print. There's lots of careers. It's an area of growth right now locally and nationally. Anything to do with manufacturing, many fields of engineering specifically like aerospace, electronics, auto, and product design, which is my background. I'm very interested in this because of the speed of turnaround and the ease of which it can be done. It's very low waste. It's fast. You can set these things up in offices. You don't need to build a workshop. I did an internship with FTL labs in Amist a couple of years ago. And they have a room full of these things. It's just like a normal room with a rug and nice tables. There's no roaring extraction system. There's no dirt, there's no dust, no smoke. It was just a very friendly, kind of almost too quiet environment for a manufacturing facility. So this area of study is very useful for people going into any engineering field, designing as well as I tell the students of the day is that they now have a bankable skill just by sitting at AutoCAD for a few hours every week. They have something that they can turn into a job. It's the only thing I teach currently that what they're actually doing while I'm teaching them is a job. They would need certification through AutoCAD or through other CAD program providers. We can't provide certification here right now. You have to become a certified training center which requires a lot of levels to go through and there's only a couple in the state. And in fact, Watertown is about the only one local closest to us and then there's some down in Hartford, Connecticut. It's really hard to get the certifications without traveling a good long distance for it. Starting salaries for drafters. You can see there all architectural, mechanical, electrical and electronics get a little bit more. The commercial industrial designers, the designer tag means it's a degree level course, maybe three or four years, not four years. And then you get the engineering managers, senior designers and architects as well involved in this kind of stuff. So yeah, the future is bright here for these folks. And we've got examples of student work there on the right. We have a table, a little kid's plywood balance bike and one student did an interior with a lamp, floor, walls, table, chessboard, drink bottle, chess pieces, the whole thing. Didn't take him long because they're all part of the projects we do and he put them all together. And my expertise comes in making these things look nice. So I show them how to arrange the lighting and the composition and the shadows. And you can see we've got CAD-1 very introductory, how to operate the program. And we also still draw on paper, which is kind of a rarity now, but I did some research and people are still saying do it. Nobody's telling me to just dump that because it's such an important learning tool to understand how 2D and 3D forms can be expressed. So I'm not dumping paper yet. CAD-2 was just a continuation of CAD-1 and then we had an architecture class, CAD-3, for students interested in maybe going further with building design, that would only attract like four or five students a year. And we've just had one student go through this first semester, he's now got accepted into about three or four colleges for architecture. He doesn't know which one to go to yet, hasn't made his mind up, so he's very, very happy. The proposed sequence, again student work there on the right, is to make a fundamentals course where we, again we focus on the newest version of AutoCAD, whatever we have, still work on paper. And then the main thing I wanna do is change CAD-2 to this engineering and manufacturing class where we take what they design and actually produce it, we make it. So I don't wanna frighten my semester two students about this yet, they didn't sign up for that. So what I'm gonna do is use them to try out some of my ideas and some of my projects, but I'm still gonna leave it pretty much like CAD-2 was previously, because that's what they thought they were signing up for, and I don't wanna frighten them too much, but linking to 3D printers to X-Carve and other devices that we have got that we can hook up to the computers and create things with, and also using some traditional tools as well, so they could maybe draw up a plan, print the plan and then go make it with hand tools and table saws and drill presses and stuff. And then maybe we'll have a CAD portfolio class. This will be mostly, I think, for students who take the Alps, the additional learning program classes, purely for those who want to pursue post-high school options. And because the software is free, we don't have to worry about that. And if we did, if Autodesk changed the rules, then we would find a open source version. There's a thing called ProgeCAD, which my brother-in-law works at a custom packaging firm in West Springfield, and that's what they use. They dumped Autocad for that, because it's free. Cam Devices, the Federal Perkins Grant covers all the costs, roughly 10,000 a year to spend on capital equipment. We can't, unfortunately, buy the plastic that goes in it. So those interesting-looking spools of colored stuff, that's what feeds a 3D printer. They're about $50 a roll. They last a long time, but Perkins won't buy that. And then Non-Cam Devices, the same thing, Perkins Grant covers band saws, table saws, milling machines, routers, lathes, hammers, saws. But for screws, nails, glue, string, that has to come out of the school. And that, I think, yes, that's it. Wonderful. So I want to do the exact same thing before I go around the table. If you don't have a question, don't ask one. If you don't feel like you need to add anything, please don't. But if you do, absolutely ask the question, I'll make a comment. The high school has an engineering department, and how labored is it, in terms of courses? So I'm it, mostly. I teach robotics, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and computer-aided design. I also used to teach the auto program when we had a garage. There was a time when I just didn't know which classroom I was going to next. So things are better now. But yeah, I think we do OK. We send a lot of students off to what I consider like real engineering courses. And I mean, I always advise the students to math and physics. My skills are more, let's say, I was trained as a designer, not an engineer. So my skills are really more art and design than hard-edged science, engineering kind of things. I do have enough knowledge and skills to do robotics, electronics, and some engineering. So yeah. And if you can make me 16 again, so I can take the course. Oh, well, yeah. I'd be right there with you as well. Yes. I don't have any questions, but I'm very excited about this. And I'm particularly coming out of information technology background. I'm so impressed with your willingness and ability to keep up to date, because that is such a difficult thing to do when you're working. So I think the school is very lucky. Thank you. Thankfully, online stuff really helps. Tutorials, there's a great. It doesn't give you time. No. Well, even I've actually committed to a couple of training sessions this year through the Perkins grant funding, which pays for PD. The problem is finding a slot, which takes me out of school to go and do those. And they're very limited, like we only do this in April. And of course, I've got to go to Hartford, or I've got to go to Watertown again to get the training, which is really hard. So I'm trying to get something in school or at home I can sit and do. But staying current in this field, I'm already out of date. Even just saying what I'm saying now, you know, it's already, we've already moved on. I do. So kudos to you and the school is very lucky. Thank you. Congratulations on designing a program that kids must be chomping at the bit to take. My question sort of goes along with this, being ahead of the curve or behind the curve. Are you confident that Perkins will last long enough so that you'll be in a position to buy upgraded hardware with Perkins rather than digital science? I'm hopeful. We're just about to, there's a meeting coming up in February for a thing called Perkins Five, which is a new way of distributing the funds. I'm going to go to the meeting. I'm going to get some training on how to stay current and stay in compliance with what Perkins requires us to do to keep the money flowing in. If we fall out of compliance, then we could lose money. It's like since our enrollment dropped, we've lost a significant amount of money. Maybe a decade ago, we would be getting $35,000, $40,000 a year into the TechEd department. But since we've lost students and we've lost classes, there's only myself and Mr. Lashavet, the audio visual teacher, who we're in receipt of Perkins funds. So it's probably gone down to around $15,000 to $17,000 a year. But it's still, it's great. He buys microphones, cameras. Last year, I bought a milling machine, a lathe, a new sander. So I get all these toys coming in. It's like the 3D printers. They arrive and I'm like, what am I going to do with this? How do I set it up? I've got to learn how to use this thing. And they're great. But sometimes, they'll sit in the box for a year until I get to it. But Perkins doesn't look like it's going away. We are one of the few schools in the area that get it. We're one of the few types of schools that get it. Because we, I think Mr. Siddique, were we a type? We're a chapter. Non-Chapter 74, I keep forgetting what we are. But that means we're not fully vocational, but we have some vocational elements. So while we can meet the requirements of Perkins, they'll keep fiddling the money towards them. We have a great guy who takes care of writing the grant and making every, all the purchases we write, he processes and makes sure around 1st of December, things start to roll in. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks. So I have the pleasure of going to high school with somebody who now is responsible for the 3D printer that created your crown. Excellent. So I just like to point out that high school students, people who graduated from Amherst High Schools are also responsible. And he now works for a 3D printing company in Cambridge. So I think it's important that we, that bit you were saying about the physics and the math, like he was a physics major with these types of classes that didn't exist back then. But I think it's really exciting and potentially, I don't know if I'd be happy to introduce you to. That kind of connection might be useful. That would be very nice. But then I guess my only thing is, I'd love the idea that this could complement the visual and the theater arts classes. And were you thinking about making things that would end up on the stage? Or are you thinking about just the design skills? We could make props. We could make parts of props. You're limited by the size of the printer and how much time it takes to print something. A lot of students come in and they see the printer and they instantly want something printed. And they'll say, you know Darth Vader's head? I'm like, yes. I want a full size. And I'm like, it's going to take eight hours. And that whole spool, so it's going to cost you 50 bucks. And you're going to have to babysit that printer for eight hours. And then it's like, oh, well, how about one that big? 20 minutes. It's going to cost you five bucks. So yeah, I can see this feeding into our robotics curriculum because now we can custom make parts. Students can design on the CAD software. We can print it. And then we can immediately bolt that to something. That would be really cool. That is something I want to do. Yeah, we could turn out products that could actually benefit the school, not just things to sell in the school store, which we can't do. But there's many little things that could help students with special needs, things that help clip things together or aids to help people hold things. All these kind of things. There's loads of designs out there. And we could also have the students to think of something that's spot a need around the school, design something, and make it. And we did that before with old school techniques of soaring up big boards of wood to make portable desks or foot rests, or adjusters for chair heights, all those kind of things. I want to add one thing. Is it my friend who works for the SpuYu Penting Company. He's used it to fix little pieces of his children's toys. And so if there's an opportunity to kind of turn this into repairing things from either the community or within the schools, I think that would be great in multiple ways to give it a really practical opportunity. This piece keeps breaking. Can we make it better? And can we retrofit like this? We could print this. Couldn't do the inside of it, but we could print the outside. So if it got cracked, we could easily do it again. Thank you. OK, thanks. Thank you for your time and going above and beyond to keep a vocational opportunity, which is hard in budget constrained times to do, but it's something we value. And I look forward to seeing the jet engine turbine blades that you spoke about. Well, actually, I've just had a student for his final project for semester one, designed a turbocharger for a car with all the blades in it. We're not printing that. I was grading it this afternoon. It's just you can just fly the program. You can just fly into it and see all the pieces fitting together. And you can see how it would move. And he's pitched the blades and got the curve on it. Not sure it would work, but it impressed him. It was very happy with it. I'm embarrassed to say I didn't realize we were receiving Perkins funds. That's actually very impressive. And I think it's a real, it's a calling card to the quality of the work as well as the thought behind it, the execution behind it. So I think that's absolutely outstanding. And I think this is another great example of just the amazing creative thinking, innovative work that's being done by the faculty and staff here. So it's remarkable. Thank you. OK, thank you very much. Thanks, thank you. But I'm really excited you're a Chinese literature and culture. We'll be, I don't know, we'll introduce. Hello. I'm William Roundy, Department Head of World Languages. Ordinarily, our language courses go from level one up to level five. Level one is our beginners. Level five is our advanced placement level. We have students entering the school with Chinese skills that exceed advanced placement. So advanced placement is too easy. Or they take our placement test and they place into level four or level five as ninth graders. And they want to continue taking Chinese throughout their four years, enter Chinese language and culture. Yes, I'm teaching Chinese since 2003. So about this time in 2017, a group of the parents from Chinese charter school that came to contact us, they want to transfer their kids from the charter school to our high school. Then they also want to continue Chinese. So since then, we started a new kind of Chinese course called Chinese Culture and Literature. So this is a two-year program. So the kids, when they move from transfers from the 7th or 10th graders, they have two years in our program. Then when they reach to junior or senior year, they can continue Chinese in University College. So this course, that's why I like it. And also, another group of students, if they're heritage speakers, so they are like a high level of the language. So this course is taught all in Chinese. So the instructions and the readings, writings, everything in Chinese. So we will study a range of literacy works, classic and contemporary. So usually the first semester, we basically do the classic works. And the second semester, we do contemporary works. So we studied the journey to the West. And Three Kingdom Romans is very famous. It's like two of the four famous classic novels. And we studied a series of Chinese poems, ADMs. And for the contemporary work, we studied a lot of famous writers, poems, or free style writings. And so we not only in this class, we not only study language. We also study Chinese cultures, histories, and the philosophies. We study a lot of ADMs. And why those ADMs are based on the old times. So they have that, then, behind those, the Chinese culture and the philosophy in it. So each, we study a book. So for the journey to the West, we use this in this first semester. So usually I give them the introduction to the book, the writer. And we study a couple of chapters. And because this book happened in Tang Dynasty, then in the middle, we studied with project research for Tang Dynasty. So after that, then we study a couple of chapters. And the students will select the chapters. They will self-study with my help. So then they will share their study to the whole class. So the presentation to teach others. And for poem unit, when we study Chinese poems and the students, the rules how to write Chinese poems. Because the old fashioned poems are not free writing. You have to follow, like, say, each, like, say, a series. You have five characters, or seven characters, each line. Then four lines of poem, or eight lines. So these tracks, then, the students end of the unit. They will create poems. And for contemporary, like, the piece, we studied, like, winter in Jinan. And after that, students will write, like, a spring in Amherst. So they follow kind of this Chinese article. So they will write, like, their own version of everything so in Chinese. Yeah. So that's basically what we do. We already started, like, the new course as Alps, not formal class. But it's a regular, like, same, like, other Chinese class. So we meet every day. We study every day. So that's been two years. This is a third year. So, like, the first year students, they already graduate from this program. Then one student is my student, like, assistant in a novels level. So, yeah. Wonderful. I'm going to go around the table starting on this side now. People have any comments or questions? Yeah. Thank you very much for this presentation. Just an amazing example of the array of electives we have at this high school. I didn't realize that you could take Chinese language at Amherst College for two years. You could take two years of Amherst College. Amherst College, so if you're junior year and senior year, so you can always take a college course, yes. So they will have, like, a placement test. Then you can play in the level. Thank you. And the quick question. So for the students who have come from the immersion program from the charter school and are now taking this course, and they've been in it a little bit, just from your experience talking with them and their families, have they found it engaging, satisfying enough sort of content? Or has your approach evolved over time based on their feedback? How does that? Yes, exactly. Because for most students, they start the Chinese charter school things like kindergarten. So they more focus on their function like a daily life, speaking, listening. And so because our course is more focused on the literature and the culture. So the way I'm reading is authentic Chinese materials. It's not like, say, someone write for language learners. So it's, yeah, they feel it's really exciting, yeah. Thank you. Wonderful. Thank you. How many students do you have? So the first year, we have six students. So one is heritage students, exceed like the AP course, and the five kids are from the charter school. This second year, we have 12 kids. And the one kid is actually she like just from China, she finished her like 10th grade. And then she's learning in my class. I say, oh, why? It's interesting because some like things she didn't learn in China. So she end up want to make friends with other kids. And then other kids feel like really good. She's in like the class. They can really know each other like about what the students they are doing like in Chinese, like a China school. So it's really cool. And this year, I have 11 students signed and then two students because they are scheduled. They want to take a different course in Amherst College. So now I have nine students. And then do you have all the materials you need and all the materials you need for next year? Basically, because a lot of those like a classic famous, so I can find like online. Also, I find I bought some books from China. I use those kind of textbooks from Chinese, like they are using in the middle school way, like school. Yeah. Thank you. Yes, he already asked the question. Thank you. That's great. Thank you very, very much. It's really gratifying to see Asia in general and China in particular back in the school and has a presence here in the school. And so I thank you for not only addressing the language issue, but also the cultural material as well. Thank you very much. Yeah, well, thank you. Two questions. When you say the course is taught in Chinese, once the student enters the classroom, do they ever hear English, or is it all? Oh, sometimes they were like, when I speak Chinese, they will say like English. And today, a student taking, we are doing a final exam. So they're supposed to summarize a chapter they studied. So then the student, I say, oh, you have another hour. Then the student say, oh, like a one, xiao, shi, then mixed English and Chinese. I'll say, oh, because you say, I will take a point from you. Then they even didn't realize, like, why? You say, why? Yeah, you say one. And in English, then they say, xiao, shi, Chinese. Like, ah, why are you Chinese? So yeah, sometimes, when they were here, they would say that. And are you the entire Chinese faculty? Yes. Good morning, Sadie. I think just following up on what Mr. Fonch said, I think it's been critical that Chinese has grown, not just at the high school, we're talking about it tonight because they're talking about high school and new courses, but also at the middle school. So separate from students, either are native speakers or coming from an immersion school, that Chinese has more of a life seven through 12 than it did maybe five years ago. And really, that's a lot of that steeping's work and the working department will. So I just wanna kind of second that notion and perhaps expand on it that it's a seven through 12 program tonight. It's about a new course that's been in Alps. And I think a number of, and I'm gonna use this as a segue back to the whole group, is that a number of these courses you heard, well, a couple of students were interested. And so this is gonna bookend my introductory comments, so we did an Alps. So people found time to try out a course, see if it worked. And that's, again, the kind of, we want our staff being creative, experimenting, following student interests, student needs, in this particular instance, affinity as well as skills. And when we have a course like this one that's been successful, we've tried it out. And it was an Alps. We wanna formalize that structure into a core part of what our program of studies at the high school. Wonderful, thank you very much. I would like to applaud the teachers of Amherst High. Sure. Yeah, sure. They might have appreciated we did that after the vote. But, because my next question is gonna be, if there are any other questions that are sort of procedural in nature around the approval, otherwise I'd entertain a motion when we're forthcoming from someone. What's going on? I moved to approve the courses that's presented for Chinese Literature and Culture, Music Production II, Environmental Studies and Engineering Materials and Manufacturing Processes. Is there a second? Second. It's been moved by Demling, the second did by Bunch. Is there any further debate? Any further discussion seeing none? All those in favor of the motion is presented signified by raising your hand. It carries unanimously, nine to nothing. We haven't had a nine to nothing vote in a while. We haven't been able to, and now we have it. It's very exciting. Thank you very, very much. Thank you all, and I think that is, what Mr. Manino said is quite an order. Thank you very much. Thank you all. Anyone need a two minute break? Yes. Yes. Okay, with acclimation, so done for a break. Come back in two or three minutes. But I'm gonna call back to order the meeting. And just, I think it's not funny to say because I know we're being broadcast live. As a procedural and sort of like administrative agenda matter, these are honestly some of the most fun, enjoyable, and worthwhile meetings we have. But every year, we assume it'll be brief. And it's like Charlie Brown with the football, right? It's like every year, we assume that there'll be some way to have this conversation and dialogue that's concise, and it never ever is. And I didn't wanna say that, and this is why I'm saying it's funny that it's being broadcast. I didn't wanna say that in front of the teachers because we all deeply admire what they're doing, and they're doing amazing stuff. And also, this is honestly one of the most satisfying and worthwhile things that we learn every year. But we gotta figure out how to organize our agendas differently. But we just, we gotta carve it out differently. Because if we know it's gonna take an hour, we've gotta start carving it out for an hour and figuring out how to do that. We need to learn. No, that's exactly right. I mean, there's probably a short course we could take that was elective already. The agenda organizing. The Alps. Exactly, an Alps that had organized agendas. But in all seriousness, it's just like, I've done this now, what? Three or four years now, and it's like every year it goes on four times or five times longer than we think it's going to. We just gotta start baking it into the agenda. Well, one year went to 11.30 at night. That was also the committee's fault because we actually said we wanted even more, like we begged for even more in-depth explanations than we were getting. And it's sort of like, be careful what you ask for. Dr. Morris. So I would add that I agree and there were four new course offerings which is atypical, so usually it's one or two. Well, but the funny thing about it is though is that I actually think if we didn't have these, we would need to invent an excuse to bring in teachers from different departments to have this same conversation because it's like, seriously, it's one of the rare opportunities we have to really dig in, deep and listen and learn about what's happening in our school, both from the students and the faculty. It's an exceptional thing. Oh, good, thank you. I really wanted to say this, how loud we have to do that so we didn't lose that, but then I really want, we gotta see what we can do. Yeah, and so one item is that, item F that Mr. Sullivan- Yeah, yeah, yeah. organisesly organized. Students didn't feel like they were quite ready to come tonight, so item F will have to be delayed for a future date. Not that- We've been fitting with that class. It would have been perfect. And I actually think a number of these items since most don't involve a vote and most are rather brief updates. And even the vote item is a rather brief one that was previewed previously. I do think we'll be able to, I'm optimistic we'll be able to get through the agenda at a reasonable hour tonight, the rest of it. You're on. Okay, so I'm going to introduce Mr. Slaughter there, Dr. Slaughter. He is going to, actually I'll do a little more of the introduction, the memos in the packet. So the topic is athletic fields, capital projects. Exactly, and so a couple, maybe two months ago we talked about this, the committee expressed an interest in expediting some of the work, not to wait for the capital cycle, which would start till next summer. We presented a couple options or an idea that Mr. Mangano presented for how to fund schematic, initial schematic design and engineering work for the field. We got some feedback from the committee. We've come with our revised plan, which I think I may just roll with this if it's okay with you, Mr. Slaughter, you can jump in. We received, as you know, rural school aid grant this year and we got a bit more than we were anticipating, more than we got last year and so that wasn't money we were sort of banking on. Yeah, they do have some ideas of it for its use, but it is unrestricted use for those funds and so we thought, separate from pulling it from accounts that we might be saying, oh, we're going to come in under, this is actually something we were not planning on receiving, we're gracious to the state and to the rural school coalition who advocated for this, but it seemed like a really wise funding option from the staff, from our perspective, to fund the initial project, part of the project and we also wanted to scope it out of what's reasonable, it's mid-January now, what could we actually get done and so in conversation with Dr. Slaughter, the two pieces that we feel like were the most critical, if you think of phase one from that original, which is looking at the current, what's often called the soccer field and track complex, the prior project reoriented the field and the soccer, the soccer field and the track pitch, there was some discussion both at public meetings as well as at this meeting about the cost benefit of that because there is a financial cost and why would we do that and how big does the soccer field need to be? Does it need to be a championship sized field? So having someone itemize the cost and benefits and much more detail than what we had at the initial feasibility level and also looking at grass surface versus synthetic surface. There's cost implications up front but there's also long-term maintenance cost implications and those are two pretty critical topics that came up frequently throughout the prior study that Mr. Sullivan was the school committee rep for. The feasibility study got us to a certain place on those but there's still a lot on resolve that we need answers to those so that the next phase we can get really specific, engage the larger community. Ms. Stewart has been updated on this, she's aware this is on the agenda tonight and it doesn't require a vote because it's not transferring budget lines like some of the other original ones were but we want to gather the school committee feedback and input so that if we do move forward, Ms. Stewart's ready to engage the community and get the work started. Ms. Slaughter, I mean you have other things that I'm going to defer to you but anything that I'm missing? No, I think I captured it through up. Okay. Great, you're looking for questions or feedback. So I'd just like to add the reason, the big reason for reorienting, reorientating the track is because right now the track and soccer complex and also the baseball field that's on community fields are not ADA accessible. And the whole, the big thought of moving the track in the soccer field was to use the bank where Summit Academy is now and that way it would allow access to the bleachers for handicapped access and besides making the field official size and redoing the track is terrible. Can I ask a question with that? So what you mean is that since the, right now it has an east-west alignment, let's talk about doing a north-south alignment, but then moving into a north-south alignment and then also then further moving the field a little bit further east from where it is now. Toward the parking lot and bank area to allow to benefit from that for accessibility purposes? Yes. Okay, cool. I get to understand what you meant. And so the goal you can see when he's playing goal and not being blinded by the sun. Yeah, yeah, of course that too. I was just gonna add the piece about the east-west versus north-south orientation. Having to look into the sun if it's east-west. I was just gonna add that. And just to be clear, I'm not suggesting or advocating one way or the other. I think I'm glad you had that context, Mr. Sullivan. I think people in the community, we need a little more detail than what the prior study was able to offer so that when it goes to the community we have more clear answers on how would the ADA access work in either setting? Because one might, a question I've received is why couldn't we change some of the walkways so that it's accessible and maintain the orientation? Would that be less expensive? I don't have an answer to that question. We need people to help us answer that question. Okay. So this work product and deliverable would be sequenced in such a way that it'd be done now and then would then be released to the public, us and everyone else. And then presumably what we talked about a few months ago was that we felt like there needed to be sort of actionable steps where we could move the work we're trying to do around supporting new athletic fields in a way that could activate both informed discussions with the member towns, with the town of Amherst or relative to their planning or capital planning and planning. And then also if there are gonna be booster activities that could organize fundraising around this that they would be able to do so. And so one of the things that we felt like we were in a few months ago was a chicken and egg thing where we couldn't figure out how to get the information we needed to then organize people effectively and engage stakeholders around making this seem like a real project that was gonna happen at some point. And on the other hand, the idea that if you didn't know when you were gonna do it, doing a full blown project plan, you know, detailed design schematic plan seemed like it was overdoing something that you didn't know whether you're ever gonna fund and all that kind of stuff. And so you're seeing this as basically being a chunk that allows you to get information that could then be a foundation for engaging those different stakeholders? Yeah, so it's really, we wanna set up a matrix of options that both, you know, Victoria, Ms. Stewart, and Boosters and the larger community can then make decisions by. And right now we feel like the PR report was incredibly helpful and we can't really set up that matrix of options. So when someone says, well, what's the difference between turf and non-turf? You know, we could point them to a page in the report. The price ranges are hugely variable in that, because it was a feasibility set. It did what it was supposed to do. That's not a critique. And we need to get much more finite with that and the field orientation issue so that when people are saying, yeah, that's what I think the community needs and can build rally support around, we have the answers to the questions that right now we don't have that. So. The other thing I would add, one of the other pieces that came out of that, that initial planning study was part of the idea with some rearrangement of the fields is also to better utilize the actual square footage we have. There's some inefficiency in what we've got and there's some rehabbing that can be done. If you get behind this building, it tends to taper off into the research forest. So it'll be interesting to see how the science classes see the impact of change if we go and do work around that area. The other thing though that we literally started last week was Mr. Mangano had written some proposals to each of the four communities, their Community Preservation Act committees. Each of the four towns has that option for funding projects in their community. It's an addition to property tax. It's above and beyond that if you don't know. There is some state matching funds. So if you fund something with that, some of it's somebody else's money. Likewise, we're funding other projects and other parts of state as well. So that's a nice benefit of using that type of funding. And it is one of the required areas of Community Preservation funds is for open space and recreation. There's some things you can't fund with it, stadiums being one of them. So things that would be qualified as a stadium would not qualify, artificial surface would not qualify. But I did go to Leverett last week and spoke to their committee about some potential support for that next phase of design and engineering that would need to be done. What I'm hopeful of with this piece is that we can clarify some of the big first questions. Which direction? What kind of surface? And then that'll help, I think, narrow the next steps to be more precise and require a little less funding. But I think the overall ask of all four CPA committees is $200,000 and we have a portion of the way we do region capital generally. Some may say yes, some may say no, some may make it dependent upon the other towns chipping in. You know, there's a lot of, you know, as we talk about, you know, assessment methods and everything else, there's a lot of moving parts and so we'll have to see how it all plays out. But that's potentially some source of getting the project going, but also creating some inertia behind it as does this project of just getting this base bit of information. I think it creates some inertia for the project and so those that are interested in fundraising or building support for capital expenditure, you know, have something to lean on and use to help motivate those actions. Right. This is a discussion item, no vote, any questions, further questions for the committee or comments? Yes, Mr. Stemling. So I get the need to do the analysis in order to produce the matrix of options in order to then to be able to make a decision. And correct me if I'm wrong, but making a decision on these two items, the orientation and the graph surface, would be, those are dependencies, those are requirements in order to do the full design and engineering work that happens next fiscal year. Okay, so then my question is, and if you don't know, you don't know, but right now what's your thinking on when that decision gets made and who makes it? Because, you know, on the one hand, I can imagine like a six to 12 month process where we talk about field orientation and graph versus synthetic for a really long time. And that's great, except that it doesn't move us, move the ball forward at all. Or we say, look, we're gonna get the information, we're gonna get some feedback, we're gonna talk about it, and then we're gonna pick it and stick it, and we're gonna get this thing going. Like, do you have a sense about that sequencing yet? Yeah, we did. I think you might be in. And I heard about the process is also literally who's making the decisions. Right, so the couple of things. So this first piece of work has to be done, delivered by June 30th. That's the rules of spending money in a fiscal year. So that's one piece, but I think that that, the way I see it is that that then puts the ball in your court to decide which of those options you think best suits our needs and our budgets and our, and then it's, you know, that helps to sort of immediately frame the next process. And if we get, whether it be CPA funds and or capital funds. So when we talk about capital in the region, we'll be talking about this as well, among other things. But my opinion would be that we could try to start articulating the next phase and start, you know, engaging that process into the summer, beginning of the fall would be my thought on that, but Ms. Morse may have a different idea about that, but that's what I was thinking. I think that's right. And I think in terms of who makes the decision, I think we need feedback from a broad set of stakeholders because separate from this committee, where the representatives of the member towns at the end of the day, this would be a vote of the four communities. So I think that's where having accurate data and doing a lot more engagement and outreach in the community so that there's feedback that comes not just from athletic department boosters, people like Dr. Slaughter and myself, but actually that's a broader sense of, yeah, the communities will support that looks something like this, something that looks like A, or yeah, that's really desirable, and yet some of our towns are saying, we can't afford what A looks like, but B will get us to a place where our fields are in good condition and playable, right? So I think that's the honest truth is that I think we need to engage the broader set of stakeholders much sooner, and that includes both the community, but also the finance committee's select board's town council of the member communities because at the end of the day, they're going to vote to fund it or not. There is a school committee vote obviously on capital, but that's going to require a vote of all four communities, and any of the options will be much more expensive than people perhaps want to feel. Not that they don't support athletic fields being redone, but the sticker shock is real for these communities who are struggling with tax rates and tax caps and all sorts of other needs in their communities as well. Okay, any further feedback or comments for Dr. Slaughter and Dr. Morris or Yama Vaughn? Yes. Mr. Morris, a question. How, I mean, typically in a town like Pellamore I live, we approve this kind of thing at our town meeting, which is in the spring, late spring. Sometime, well, there's usually a special town meeting in the fall, but would this be some other kind of a vote by a town or would it have to be part of the town meeting? I'm not familiar necessarily with that kind of process, so. It's a really hard question to answer because it's really up to the individual towns whether they would do a special town meeting for a vote like this, it would fit in the normal town meeting cycle. Would this come out of their capital? Would some towns choose a different funding mechanism? So I'm sorry not to give an answer, I'm just very cautious about making decisions. It's given me an idea of the questions that need to be asked or answered. That's good, thank you. Thanks. Wonderful, fee schedule. Sure, so Mr. Slaughter's gonna present, maybe just sort of answer questions primarily on the fee schedule that's in the packet. The way this works is that we present the fee schedule at one meeting and typically the next meeting or the next month's meeting, depending on how it works out with timing, we ask the school committee for a vote. So in your packet you'll see the last five or six fiscal years, the draft fee schedule for FY21, the increase in real dollars, and then the percent increase from FY20 to FY21. I think the only comment I'll make, I'm sorry, it's right after the athletic fields in the packet schematic design, the only comment I'll make is the school meal prices. You may or may not remember last year we thought for a while we would have to go up to $3.25, there is a requirement because we accept federal aid for subsidized lunch and it goes up with inflation, and last year we sort of maxed out at $3 and we know it'll be more than $3 next year just because inflation's not zero. And we tend to go up, and you can see this in the history, we try to tend to go up 25 cents at a time and then stay with that for as many years as we can, usually that's three to five years instead of incrementally going up like seven cents at a time which creates lots of problems for our cashiers, our students, even though most people play digitally, not everyone pays that way, and so the idea is to raise it at a level where it would stay constant for the next few years. Certainly we can answer questions on anything on this, on the chart, but that's the one I've pointed out in particular. Two questions. One is what percentage of total athletic costs to the fees pay for? It's, you know, so that's a number that Mr. Slater can get back to you about. I know it's an increasing number as we reduced funding support over the last 10 years for that and as more students are receiving subsidized, the lower cost for athletics based on income, we've been increasing the reliant on fees. So that's something that Dr. Slater can get to you. Get to the committee. Thank you. Second question, and I don't know if this is an appropriate time to do it as opposed to items for upcoming meetings. Is it possible, can we put on the agenda at some point before June a discussion about the sustainability of the food service program? I think that's definitely an item for a future meeting and we can certainly do that. I think we should have a present. I think, are you, would you welcome that specific question also being packaged in an update about our food service program generally? So that specific question, but then also. My concern is in a broad sense, the food service program and its sustainability. What are we gonna have to do going forward to make sure that we can keep providing lunches and breakfasts for kids? But secondly, I believe there's another issue that's very, very different, but very important and that is behavior of students around the lunch program. And is that something that is costing us revenue? Sounds like that might be a good thing to if we do have a presentation from the food service director to have both of those topics. Yeah, I mean the reason I ask you to elaborate is just to help inform agenda planning. So I think that's helpful. My hesitation has to do with the fact that I'm sitting in on negotiations with the food service people, folks. And I could not resist bringing the issue before the committee because regardless of whether we're negotiating or not, it's simply too important to ignore. And I think the committee needs to address matters around the issue of access to lunches. I think we, I think we've gotten the input we need to help frame the agenda. If we keep going further, we're debating items or discussing items that's not on the agenda. So I think we've got the feedback we need to appreciate it. Thank you. Anything further on this? Meaning the fee scheduled generally, not just food prices. I'd just like to point out, as the grumpy guy from Shootsbury, that the preschool located at ARHS, we eliminated that to save $25,000 along with the foods program. So it doesn't exist anymore. And that's why there's no draft fees for FY 21. Listed. We could eliminate the line. It should be eliminated as a line, Adam. That's an oversight of my part for having not taken it out. Actually, when I spoke with Mr. Mangano, my predecessor of this, he noted that and said, oh, we should take that out. And then we forgot. Well, thank you for not so I could just say that. Now you can remove it. That was a two for them. They're both substantive and also, you know, formatic. I like that. I'm going to wrap this up unless anyone has any else on their mind. We are hereby wrapped up. If something, obviously, if something occurs to a member offline, they should just contact Dr. Slaughter or the superintendent directly and raise a question. So I'm not trying to check you off. I'm trying to show you off right now. Sure. So the next item was also previewed at a prior meeting. This is, no, next meeting. Oh, next? Yeah, no, the first one is presented. No, it's all good. This was that a few years ago, the committee voted to be an offtaker for a solar array. That solar array was the contract was signed. We're on D, budget process. Oh, it skipped it. I had a check on it. There, I was trying to be so expeditious. One of the things you tend to do is you tend to jump in with a sort of a stem winding preamble before we get to the topic. And one of my sticklers is, I like announcing what the hell we're talking about. Yeah, that would have been helpful if I did that. Actually, forgive me, wrong camera. I apologize for using that language. I apologize for using that language. So budget process, this is really, could have been done in the superintendent update. I just want to highlight the fact of our scope of our next few meetings as it relates to budget. And so the next meeting is January 28th. And at that point, we'll have our initial budget presentation, which we'll look at projections. I want to suggest to the committee that there were multiple assessment methodologies shared at the four town meeting in December. And what we will be presenting in late January is our recommendation around the budget, but also there's a connection to the assessment methodology. And the timeline is that meeting's on a Tuesday and then five days later, there's the second four town meeting on February 1st. And so it's just previewing that that conversation sort of flows from there into the four town meeting. We'll also talk about capital at both of those meetings. And then in February, in mid-February, we get to our specific budget, which is a budget hearing. And that's where we get very specific on budget ads, cuts, adjustments. We provide that to the public and to the community a week before. And it's a full hearing. And then one question I have at the end is the March meeting is that we do have two meetings in March. We've heard feedback from some of the member towns in the past that the late March meeting is too late for warrants to get onto town meeting agendas. You know what I'm trying to say. Steve's nodding his head, so I think I'm good. So one of the things that I ask is not for Amherst, but for the other three towns. Certainly we can ask, but if you're getting any feedback from your member towns of when they need school committee votes beyond town meeting warrants, that'd be really helpful information to have. And we can ask that and we will, but sometimes it may be something that's more readily available to elected officials in those communities. But at some point in March, we'll ask for a formal vote on both the assessment method and the actual budget. And that's what gets forwarded to the four towns. So I know it's a long-winded thing, but I just wanted to just scope the next couple meetings as it relates to budget, especially with where four town meetings sits in the middle. You may have answered this. The assessment method will be determined before we have the budget hearing in this group. A recommendation will be made before then. You are the ones who vote on both the budget amount, as well as the assessment method and both of those items go to the towns for approval. Are they currently plans to have a meeting of representatives from the four towns to outside of the area of school committee meetings to discuss the assessment method? Right, so on April, I use April, February 1st, at the four town meeting, we'll talk about both the budget as well as the assessment methodology and capital. Those will be the three primary topics that gather feedback, and we've got a tremendous amount of feedback at the last four town meeting, and we're trying to integrate that into our approach moving forward. Thank you. So we, back in December, I think we talked about having a special meeting, extra meeting to go deep dive into the budget for sort of everybody's education. For us. For us. Not the four towns, but us. Correct. And because of weather and travel and whatever, we canceled that. So I just want to raise the question about whether we want to do that again. I personally, I'll just say, I would find it really helpful. So can we look at scheduling that again, if others? It's up to the committee, what would be beneficial for them? I think we, yes. As this being my first year on the committee, this is my first time through the budget. And I mean, I'm a little bit familiar with the process from Pelham, but this is a whole another ball of wax. And I, it would be very helpful to me. Honestly, we decided to do it already. And so I'd rather not re-decide that we decided that we think it's valuable, but I think what we need to do is go through a scheduling exercise and see if we can find a time to do it. And we've, I mean, I'm not trying to override what you're saying. What I'm saying is we've already debated and discussed, we think this is really valuable to do. We definitely want to do it. We should be rescheduling it. Great, we will do that. And that's one of the reasons I want to put this item on the agenda tonight, which is to go through that. So let's have feedback. Great, so having done that, if you could explain the meaning of a stop-all in less than five minutes, that would be valuable. Yeah, and I apologize, I got ahead of myself. So this is described in a memo, actually that Sean wrote before he left. It's about the benefits of the public from a solar array. Yeah. And so I think it's a brief enough where I can just read it out loud, which I think would be helpful for the members of the public. So district signed a 20-year agreement several years ago to become an off-taker of a solar array in Deerfield. The benefits of this agreement included supported renewable energy and an estimated $30,000 reduction in annual electricity costs, so far as agreement has worked as intended. The corporate owner of the solar array is changing and we're therefore being asked to sign an east stop-all document to confirm that there's been no default of any kind. The ownership is changing from Kenyon Energy's Affiliate Sun Financial to Kenmair Street LLC, a subsidiary of Goldman Sachs. The change will not affect the operation maintenance or billing of the solar array. The district's legal counsel has reviewed the east stop-all document, indicated it's acceptable to sign as long as the agreement is operating as intended. If it can be approved, the next step would be to authorize the superintendent to sign the east stop-all document using the motion below. The date needs to be updated, my apologies for that. Oh no, no, the date is correct on the motion, excuse me. To move to authorize the superintendent to sign the east stop-all document provided by the Kenyon Energy, dated October 4th, 2019. The reason this is becoming for a school committee vote is any contract that is of this length, requires school committee approval and that's why we're bringing it to you, not because of any reason. If it was a short-term contract, it wouldn't require a school committee vote but anything over a certain number of years requires school committee approval since the contract will remain in effect with a different vendor. It comes to you. Okay, and it has been reviewed by district council as the memo says. Is there any questions about this? Seeing none, I'd entertain a motion. I move that we authorize the superintendent to sign the east stop-all document provided by Kenyon Energy, dated October 4th, 2019. Is there a second? Moved by stancer, seconded by Menino. Any further discussion? Yes. There's a bunch of assertions in the east stop-all document. But certain defaults haven't happened and certain other legal things that I don't understand. Honestly, that I don't understand. Have that happened? Chair mentioned that the council has reviewed it. I assume everything there is correct. These assertions are true, the best of our knowledge? Yep, and that's what, and it was followed up by a legal council, the one who works more with the finance office as opposed to the school committee and that was their opinion as well. Thank you. Honestly, maybe the most important thing we could learn about this thing. And just following up on that point, it says that the change will not affect the operation maintenance or billing, and I'm assuming billing means the amount that we're being billed. If there's no price increase, or is it being the billing procedures? I think my understanding is it's both, that the off-taker, the benefits of the district will remain as the original agreement indicated. Yes. Yes, please. The long story short is this is a document that formally allows the parent company to swap and that we're noticing and taking notice of that change and we're aware of it. None of the underlying agreements are changing. So that's really all it says, is that you know that they changed who owned the parent company, and that you're aware of it and that's okay. And everything else is status quo. All right. The key thing is we've double checked that, as Mr. Spitzer said, and we've really double checked it with the council specifically like that. And between those two comments and the responses we've gotten, are there any further questions or debate on this item? Seeing none. All those in favor of the motion as put forward? Signify by raising your hand. Carries unanimously, now these are up. So now, the next item is G warrant review, update sharing of warrant approvals from our designated representative. Yes, that's me. I was dreading this moment because I'm still learning how to do this. I can sign my signature, which is what I'm supposed to do, reporting back to the committee. I need some advice on how to do that. Secondly, this has not always been on the agenda. And consequently, I have warrants in my possession to go back to November. And so, do I tell you folks about all of them? How do I do this? Just a question. I thought when we debated and discussed this, there was like a little template that was going to be filled out that had sort of master categories that were going to be presented and that somebody probably from the business office was going to help Mr. Funch put that together. Those are the documents that he was holding. They have those categories. Really? Yeah. So, they're all there, but there are several of them because each warrant is independent and so. Right. Some of these are payroll, some of these are X, Y, or Z, and not all the same category. Okay. In the future, what I thought we were going to do, because it was something we talked about and looked at, was there was literally a script that was going to be put forward with like one page on it, which described for, I mean for all of them, or like two of them, few pages for all of them, and like a motion you could literally sit there and read what it said. I'm fine to do that, but I would ask permission to wait until next time so that I have time to put that list together. Is that a, okay? The, it's a really a question. So, I think that's fine from procedural standpoint, and yet there are vendors and payroll that needs to be paid. So as long as the committee's comfortable with Mr. Funch signing off on those, I don't think we can wait another two weeks. I've signed off on all of those. Okay, I just want to, and I don't mean to push the point I just know. How many pages do they have, anyway? Excuse me? How many pages do you have to read? Lots. Yeah. Okay, so the report that was expected to be read is just the front sheet of any of those packets. Right. Right, but you know, there are potentially eight or nine categories to be read, so that's all. But those have been prepared. Eight or nine pages. No, no, no, no, eight or nine categories within that might have a dollar amount associated with them is all. So, yeah. I think what we, and perhaps, you know, the committee can correct me if I'm wrong. So I think what we talked about was to have them aggregated and totaled so that what Mr. Funch would be doing would be the total of these eight warrants was $145.20 in category A. Right. Right. That's what I was recalling. Yeah, that's exactly what it was. It was like a paragraph or two. And it literally, it had, whatever it was signed. It was a script? Yeah, it was a script. And it summed up by different kinds of like payroll category, different kinds of vended objects. Yeah, please. So, in my understanding, may not be perfectly clear, but I think, and it may or may not be a requirement. So I can check on that, is that each one would have to be distinct because each warrant is distinct. So the narrative is exactly the same barring the dollar amounts, but I was understanding that each warrant, because it is distinct, the report would have to be distinct because it's a report on a warrant, not on a series of warrants. And so, but again, once you're caught up, the most you would have in any meeting is one or two. So again, it's not, we can check on the sort of formality of whether we can cluster them into a single one, but. Mr. Farage. Thanks, Doug. I could tell you this evening, for example, from the general fund, I signed a warrant for 320,312 dollars and 16 cents. Is that what you want? What's the example for the next one? See, that's where it gets a little shaky because that, I'm sorry, scratch the word shaky. This next one actually comes from four different funds, but it's the same warrant. What does it say? General fund expenses of 97,446 dollars and 72 cents, revolving fund expenses of 10,875 dollars and 39 cents, grant fund expenses of 991 dollars and 95 cents, and other fund, and Kathy wrote in capital of 22,400 dollars. Cool. Take a glass of water or a sip and keep reading. Okay, you got them. Next one is payroll of amount of 751,928 dollars and 26 cents. The next one is a payroll warrant for 2,449 dollars and 89 cents, don't want me to keep going. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now this goes back to December. General fund expenses of 212 dollars, $212,141.79, revolving fund expenses of 580 dollars, grant fund expenses of 566 dollars and 83 cents. You need the date, guys. I think it's helpful, it's might as well say it. Okay, okay, yeah. 12-11-2019, general fund expenses of 212 dollars. I already did that one, my apologies. November 12th, 2019, general fund expenses of 33,023 dollars and 0.07 cents from the general fund, revolving fund $93.03 cents. And this one you signed. Well, that's what I was just looking at. No, that looks like Mark. Those are ones I signed and I already wrote down those. Sorry, sorry. But I do have some that I signed. Yes. Well, you still read them anyway, they gotta be read. Okay. I think I read these already. Oh, you did? One I signed, yeah. Then we're done. Wonderful. Well, that wasn't so bad. If you get these, do I keep them? Okay, you can plug up my... Keep them or you can give them back to Dr. Slaughter. Or they're probably actually, it says, click with your records. I just quickly that it might be worthwhile just to ask counsel again, what's the most time efficient manner to dispense with a kind of item that's legally allowable? Yeah, of course. Because I really appreciate the work Mr. Afonk is doing, but it's a meaningless stream of numbers like when it's being read out like that. And if we're gonna, if we have to legally hear a meaningless stream of numbers, we might as well make it a sure response. I mean, it's true. Although the accountability aspect of it for the public is they know it's been signed, they know it's been done. It's been publicly recorded that they have. And if somebody had a question they could in fact look into it. I would just also comment that we're now looking at November, December, and part of January. Ordinarily, there might be one or two of those in a meeting is all. This is gonna get a lot easier. That's what I figured out when you started it where I was like, let's just roll through this because it'll, next meeting, we have a meeting in two weeks and it'll be easier then. Yeah, for some reason it wasn't on the agenda always. Well, it needs to be on the agenda always. Yes. I don't know what the process is, but is there a way that we could include them in our packet so that there is sort of, I mean, to get back to listening to the meaningless stream of numbers, maybe if that's printed in our packets. I signed them every Friday. Just let me know when the packet goes put together and I can get them to you. Packets go out on Friday. Is the important. And I need to know that in advance of what is it, 48 hours? Yeah, Friday's the perfect decision. Yeah. Okay. I mean, they still have to be read out loud, but the point is that the people know. My impression was that the administrative offices would prepare a paragraph, which he would just read. No interpretation, no calculation. Just read the paragraph with the numbers. That was my understanding. Yeah, although that's what we went over. But honestly, what he ended up reading was pretty close to that. I mean, it wasn't that far. Yes. So I did sign warrants in December because Mr. Franch was unavailable and I haven't reported on those. I was not present at the December 10th meeting. I don't know if those were reported on then, but I'd like to, I have the totals here. I don't have the exact dates, but I could. So would you. Do you want to report on them, or do you want to report on them next time? I'm reporting on them from a spreadsheet I created to try it because my impression was we were supposed to total across the dates last time. That was why we didn't, the three of us didn't report. So would you like me to report from the spreadsheet, or would you like me to wait until next? I think if you could report in a way analogous to what Mr. Franch just did now, then please do. And I apologize for not having. That's okay. Otherwise, yeah. So in December 2019, I signed warrants from the general fund totaling $1,109,286.62 from the revolving fund totaling $57,869.51 from grant funding totaling $3,319.16 and from other funds, and I apologize, I don't have noted what category that was, but it was $3,941. All right, thank you. Wellness approach and update. Yeah, and I think the key word is update, that this is a topic I plan to come back to, but I wanted to give the committee a taste of the work that the administrative team and others have been doing, particularly on two topics that relate to wellbeing. One is vaping education and intervention, and the other is LGBTQ plus and intersectionality work. As I noted, most of the slides are courtesy of the Collaborative for Educational Services and Jason Wheeler at Massachusetts Safe Schools. Those are two people who are two organizations that have been working with us on this topic. So these are slides that were pulled from a lot of their presentations, but I thought they would give the committee a flavor of the work we're doing more than kind of a bulleted point list of topics. There's bulleted points in there, but for the most part, I'm trying to get to the content. So I'll start, excuse me, I'll start with vaping and vaping education. And so this has certainly been, as Mr. Demi noted to me earlier, it's in the student newspaper, it's been in the Gazette quite a bit beyond, not talking about Amherst particularly, but talking about another high school or high schools in our area as well as MassLive. It's certainly a topic that is a pretty critical topic for all schools and about adolescents. I mean, people in the health community are talking about this as an adolescent crisis that's going on. So we've been doing a lot of work on this and this again comes from the collaborative, but what puts youth at risk for generalizing it just beyond vaping? What are we talking about when we talk about substance abuse? When we think about the community, family, school and self-friends, those are the four sort of areas that we look for for risk factors. The Spiffy Coalition, which we're a part of, we do surveys of our students as well as other schools in Hampshire and Franklin County every other year that they're organized. Those surveys, there's a lot of work that's been done and you'll see that there are long longitudinal studies or surveys that have been done and what they find is that students are pretty honest. There are some trends and they have some like dummy questions in there to try to figure out are students being honest in this and they really do a lot of work. It's not put together in someone's basement. High levels of reliability for that. And so community looks a lot about alcohol and drugs, easy to get, pro-use message, advertising laws are unclear, it's not enforced. And one of the things that we also talk about is when it comes to family, not just exposure, but what is the kind of family belief structure and around permissibility? Do families know where their children are at different times of day? Do families feel like it's okay for youth to drink? There's a lot of risk factors that we look at. School is one of them and the reason I put the slide up is that when we do our work, we are looking familiar during the school day but what we know is we need to partner with the community, family and the youth culture. It's not just about what happens from 745 to 215 each day at the secondary level. There's a much broader constellation of factors that get into high risk behavior and substance abuse. And when we look at the right side of this chart, it's what do we do to prevent these risks? So what are proactive strategies that both schools, families, community and we can work on youth culture? All of those things, there's a lot of evidence both locally and then nationally have huge impact on the reality for our students in substance abuse. So here's some of our data and the great thing is there are data, they provide excellent data for us and it allows us to compare ourselves to other communities in Western Massachusetts. What we find, although we often think of ourselves as unique in Amherst, is the trends that we're seeing in Amherst are very similar to the trends that we're seeing in other communities in Hampshire and Franklin County. You can see that the red line, orange red, is e-cigarettes or vaping and that wasn't assessed in 2015 because people weren't doing it in 2015. So I think that's one thing on the survey data to note is that it's such a recent phenomenon and as you'll hear later, a lot of university settings, a lot of research is being done because there really wasn't good research and even now there's starting to be research but it's such a recent phenomenon, it feels a little different than cigarettes, alcohol, and marijuana which are the other items on our chart. In general our community, if you look at 2007 to 2019 data, most of it holds, at least the cigarettes hold pretty constant, six, seven percent. We have fortunately seen a drop in the use of marijuana from 31 and up to about 40%, about 10 years ago and this is student self-reporting. Again, we have a lot of confidence in this data, down to 24% now. Similarly with alcohol, we're not quite as low, we did see a dip and then an increase but it's on a general downward trajectory but we are seeing this rapid increase. Again, this is 10th grade students' responses. We have 8th, 10th, and 12th grade data by the way from 2017 to 2019 on e-cigarette use and so these are pretty similar trends. To be honest some of our trends in terms of alcohol and marijuana are better than some other communities that haven't seen a downward trajectory but the e-cigarette is certainly the growing trend in schools across Western Massachusetts. So is the, what's being e-cigaretteed? Is it, I mean what I'm trying to understand is you have 24% of 10th graders reporting that they have used marijuana or used e-cigarettes in 7% saying, I presume that's some sort of traditional cigarette and then I'm wondering an e-cigarette delivers or a vaping device often delivers the active substance of marijuana or in cigarettes, nicotine. And I was curious if there's any understanding about any of the relationship between these things and also whether, I don't know. So we do have that data. Any further elaborations? Yeah, so we do have that data, I tried to condense this slide deck but in general the majority of students self-report that there's not marijuana in their e-cigarettes. It's not a zero number and I can get to that data specifically, I can follow up with it. But one of the challenging pieces of information both locally as well as nationally is many students aren't clear what's in the e-cigarette. So if you ask national survey data, is nicotine in e-cigarettes, I think it's 40% in a recent survey said that there is not nicotine in the e-cigarette. So I think one of the challenges and that one is compared to some of the other substances is that there's a lack of clarity on the user of what they're actually using. Can I ask a follow-up question? It's just that if, I mean, in many ways, I guess it'd be a relief if it's, if there's a general thought that it's not a marijuana related product. But wouldn't that imply then that if, I mean, I don't know, maybe the world is not divided between marijuana-based and nicotine-based vaping devices and that there are other, like there are, I know there's a lot of admixtures with chemicals on them, but my point is maybe people who are vaping something that authentically has neither nicotine nor a cabonoid in it. And if that's the case, I need to become better educated and be interested in knowing. But if that's not the case, and it's largely nicotine-based, then wouldn't that suggest by your graph here that we went from having around 4% or 5% of our 10th graders reporting, inhaling a nicotine-based substance to 31%? Yes. Unless, of course, some of those kids are doing both the vaping and the cigarette, at the same time, but that would still mean even if 100% of the kids smoking facial cigarettes also vaped, that would still be an increase of 7% to 24%, which is a massive, massive increase. That is correct, yeah. And that is the trend both locally and then nationally as well. I think without getting too deep in the weed, this isn't a weed's comment more generally, I guess, is that the frustration, I think, in the public health community is that if you look at the, if we did charts that go back to the 80s, you could see the cigarette use just going down, down, down, down, down. And for us, it stabilized around 6%, 7%, and that's pretty typical. And so from the public health campaign perspective, that was like, that's pretty much a success. We want it to be as low as possible, but it stabilized dramatically lower than it was 20 years ago. And to have the sharp increase that was unexpected four years ago, three years ago, that's why people are using the word crisis, absolutely. So this is how they track their data. They asked past 30 day use. So that's how they try to, the survey tries to gather it. How do you use this in the past 30 days? Because if you don't put a finite marker on it, then the data is less clear. So what you'll see is grade eight, grade 10, and grade 12. This is Amherst data from last year, from 2019, we did the survey in the winter. And you could see that the numbers increased throughout grade eight. The numbers are lower than grade 10 and grade 12, which you would think is typical, but we see the large increase between grade eight and grade 10. And that is highly concerning for us to see that growth from 12% to 23% in a two year span. This is Hampshire County data, so not our local data, or ours is included in this, I should say. How youth are getting e-cigarette, and you could see that the majority has borrowed, used the friends, gave money as a different way of buying, saying purchased or bought from someone under 21. So I think this is relevant in terms of, and I'm not trying to take a policy position on this about marijuana shops in the communities, particularly Amherst North Hampton and there are other communities in Hampshire County, East Hampton that have stores that the majority of students are not at least directly buying it from established marijuana stores. It's much more coming from borrowed, used the friends, and bought it from someone under 21. So that's not to say it didn't derive from those stores, right? We can't track that data, but I thought it's useful to say where is this all coming from? Someone? On the other hand, the one, one of the takeaways I took from this jar is that if you combine the 15 and the 12%, that's 27% of individuals under 21 that are able to attain vaping products illegally. Yeah. Right, so that's, you know, 27 is less than 50, but it's still more than a quarter of what's going on. Online is very easy. Right, right. And so as, I just, I point that out because, you know, the community discussion around legalization of marijuana had a lot of crossover into what's the impact going to be in terms of availability to younger people and how much do we need to focus on that? And let this happen, at least at the county level, is that it is something we can focus on. Yeah. So then before I go to the next slide, what we had this data, so what we've decided to do is partner with the Educational Collaborative. They are our specific partner. They have kind of resources, particularly around well-being and health more generally. And the three areas we wanted to focus on to have in place, you know, we're working on this year, but certainly solidly in place for next year, one was on curriculum activities. And that's focused on having an aligned vaping education as part of our health curriculum in grades five through 12. So I know we're talking at a secondary level, but the reality is if we're waiting till kids get to middle school to do vaping education, which is not wildly different than what we're doing now, that's too late. And so, and that's not about grade configuration because I know that someone may see this and think about that. It's that if we're waiting till kids get to a middle school level before they've had education on this, we're waiting too long. The second was on policy consequences and interventions. And I think one thing I shared with this committee last spring, perhaps, was that I went to a conference with a number of staff members last year. And one of the things they said is if we're suspending kids for vaping and they're addicted to nicotine and physically aren't able to stop without support, that's a really false method of intervention. It's not gonna help kids stop vaping. Like if that's the goal, that's not gonna be a successful goal. So we wanna have a clear policy, and by policy, I don't mean school community policy, lower case P policy consequences, intervention plan for students who are found to be vaping in the school setting. And the last is on parent and family engagement. How are we, right? If you think back to that chart at the beginning, how are we working not just with the school community in during the school day, but the larger community give them the tools they need to support students? Because one of the things that comes up all the time is vaping devices are small. They look like the USB drive that is in the computer right now. Someone was telling a story the other day that a parent came in and they thought their kid had a vape pen and it was at last night actually, and it was a writing pen. But I think the concern is how do families keep up with the evolving quote unquote technology as it relates to e-cigarettes? And so that's the way we wanna have a consistent approach in those three areas. Over time, we'll need to refine that, but those seem to be in our determination that three carriers to work on. So working with, and I'm sorry this isn't, it's not unclear, it's just not as clear as I'd like. Working with the collaborative, you can see some of the ideas that they've worked on us with around curriculum activities, because we do have some of this in place, but I wouldn't say that our curriculum and activities in grades five through 12 are consistent. Policies and consequences and interventions, we wanna be really clear on what, do we have a treatment plan instead of a consequence plan, so to speak, when students are found to be vaping in school? And again, how do we engage families and provide them resources and support? So this is sort of our map that we're working on completing this year. Just a note that top part, which I didn't talk explicitly about universal prevention curriculum. So some of it's around health and some of it's about social-emotional skills and some of it's around school climate. What does it mean across the school? I'm not on the individual level. In the school level, how do students feel? Are they able to talk to a counselor, to the nurse about things that are happening? And how do our policies engagement and equity and social justice play into that? And the collaborative shares our viewpoint on social justice that we are highly concerned about who this is affecting and is this having a greater effect on some of our, on some populations as opposed to others and how do we support students in those ways? Not every student has a family member who can make it to a family information event. So how do we have multiple forms of outreach for all of our students? So here's our follow-up actions. This is just again a summary. So as was shared with you last spring, we were fortunate to get a DPH grant and it took us a while to find a nurse manager that we were comfortable with and felt like was going to be a good fit in our community and with this district. Unfortunately, we did. So she started to work a couple weeks ago. She's fabulous and she's taking on a lot of leadership role around vaping education doing own professional development, but she's worked in community health settings before as well as school. So she has a really nice way to think about what happens here, what happens with pediatricians, what happens with families. That's coming more from a clinical background than perhaps just a school-based background. I think in this particular instance that's incredibly helpful. We have two vaping education events as I shared earlier, planned for the larger community in February. We are one of the districts along with Northampton who is participating in grant requests that Harvard is working on and they're working on alternative approaches to vaping and some of that really has to do with getting away from consequencing students in a way that actually has no impact on the actual problem at hand. So we're doing our work, but if Harvard's willing to, and they are willing to have us and they get this major NIH grant that we can partner with them and that the collaborative is working on curriculum and how to respond to vaping incidents. Next week they'll be here two days, they'll be here in one afternoon with health teachers and other teachers as well as administrators working on the curriculum piece and aligning our work. And the next day they'll be back with our administrative team on how do we, what are the logical consequences that promote support for students and families in the case that students are addicted. I think the two other quick things that aren't here is that our nurse manager is also doing professors' development through Northeastern University who's done some research in this area as well. And really the framing is that from Northeastern's point of view, vaping is a pediatric crisis, right? This is where we are and what are both school-wide as well as individual responses that are appropriate. So I know I'm just doing an update and there's one other part of our update tonight, but maybe I'll pause here and see if there's a question. That's particularly helpful. Yeah, that's right. I just want to go quickly around the table because of the time, but also this is important and luckily it's not the last time that we're going to be talking about this. Certainly not. I'll start over here and just run around the table. Stanza? A quick question about the Harvard support. Is it through a research study that they're... Can you send us the slides? Oh, sure. Because the packet we got had the note function like you're at a conference and you have a cup of coffee and you take your notes. And because they're really dense slides, I found them completely impossible to read. Oh, I see what you're saying. And so ideally we would get a copy that's both in color and ideally full-size, frankly, because they're just so... I'll just send you a PDF from the full-size. That would be awesome. Thank you so much. I like the approach I'm thinking about how to treat the problem as opposed to discipline the problem. So one more tactical question. Do you know are we still locking the bathrooms during the day in the middle school and high school? And if so, is there a plan for figuring out an alternate approach to that? Yeah, well, that's... Mr. Demling's reading an article about that right now. No, but we're not. Actually, you know, Northampton's gone this approach. This is a complicated issue, so I'll try to give a short answer and certainly we can follow up in the future because I don't think I can do it justice in a 30-second soundbite. But a lot of the approaches have gone the opposite way of locking doors. It's actually keeping doors open in Northampton, for instance, they have the... Not the doors to where people would... Not the stalls, but the door to the bathroom stays open. And that seemed to be an effective method. It's odd as it sounds. I think the Northampton superintendent said, well, oddly we want to reduce privacy, not privacy in the stalls, but privacy into the bathroom spaces. And yet, not everyone's comfortable. And we've had the same experience at our high school where not everyone has been comfortable with that approach, although it was effective. And I think that gets at some of the challenge of how do we talk about spaces where we're never gonna have video cameras, we're never gonna monitor, right? We're not gonna have, you know, the surveillance piece doesn't make sense in that setting. And yet, we get reports from students who less so this year than last year, particularly at the middle school less so this year than last year, but who are concerned about, you know, do I wanna walk into the bathroom because I just wanna go to the bathroom and yet, you know, when I walk in and the students are vaping, it's not the environment that feels comfortable to me. And so that's the conundrum we have. So we're trying multiple approaches and I think I'll probably leave it there because it's a larger question. So I should actually say, I appreciate, are you done? Yes. Okay, because I realized I started in as if you were done. I like the comprehensive way in which you're approaching the topic and sort of the all hands-on duck way of looking at the different members of our community who are an important part of our students' lives and play a role in understanding this issue, but also obviously helping intervening in support with kids. I also think I really appreciate the fact that you're looking, you're doing lots of things, but also you're looking at ways to try to address better understanding education and support for students who might have reported that they used one of these substances in the last month but might not again for another seven months because it was literally just a matter of, yeah, well, like when you do a survey that says they've ever tried such and such, the answer a kid might give, honestly, is, well, yeah, I have tried it, and I nick Michael's beer. But if you ask a further question of, was this something you've done in the last 30 days or you do regularly, the answer might be no, right? And I'm not saying there isn't support and engagement for that population, there absolutely is and you've talked about it. But then there's also, as we've talked about here, a really strong correspondence between kids who present significant at-risk challenges or identifying markers of at-risk behavior, social behavioral issues, sometimes mental health challenges, whatever they are, that undiagnosed, unsupported, untreated can then also lead to much more significant problems with these substances. And I just appreciate the fact that you're, without judging any of it in terms of how you intervene, you're trying to look at the thing holistically and take kids and families and our community where it is and try to find ways to be supportive and helpful. So I just, I appreciate it because all of those things in my opinion are necessary. So I mean, I guess my general comment would be the same to the next topic you're gonna talk about, which is, I really think for an issue like this, we need to make sure that we engage students directly in trying to design what eventually our approach is going to be, because like for cigarettes, for example, we still don't want kids to smoke traditional cigarettes. And it's not great that it's at six or seven percent. But that's much lower than it used to be. And I think reading through this article here on the graphic by Judy Katz and graphic staff, he does a really good job about interviewing different students and how the bathrooms are ground zero for this. And there's so many different issues and Principal Jones says this is not an easy problem to approach because it brings up these issues we've mentioned about privacy and rights and that most kids are bothered by it as well. And so trying to engage people who are doing it in a non-punitive way like described, I think it's impossible to do that without talking to people directly about what's your experience with this and how do we flip the script on that kind of aspect of student culture. To get it to zero is probably next to impossible, but to get it down to those lower numbers, I think that's going to be essential. Mr. Menino. A point of clarification. I did not hear you correctly. You locked the bathrooms during the day. So no, what I said was that one thing that has been a method, so that was happening. That's unhuman. So last year I think there were problems at one particular bathroom in the middle school and there was another bathroom to use. So at no point were students unable to use the bathroom in school. And we don't, that's not a current method that's being used, but I want to be clarified at that point because I can understand how that concern would be a rise that students wouldn't have a bathroom to use and that was never the case. Yes, Mr. Smosh. Yeah, I understand all the issues surrounding this matter, but it's yet another social issue, social problem that schools are being told to address in the confines of a six and a half hour day, 180 day school year, and the same amount of funds you have for everything else. I'm wondering if there are any public health resources, CES is not a public health organization, are there public health resources in the area that we could look to for providing the kinds of services that you're talking about that wouldn't put a burden on the school district? Does that make sense? It does, so I would respectfully offer a perhaps different perspective, which is that I don't disagree that this is yet another, I don't disagree with the core premise you have, but like any substance abuse issue or any wellbeing issue, we feel like it's our responsibility to affect our students, then we're gonna take it on. And the reality for us is we do offer health classes at the secondary level, and health curriculum have been slow to catch up because this is such a recent phenomenon, but just like alcohol or any of the other substances that exist, we feel like it's our obligation to do our part in that work because we know it's affecting our kids' education, and I know you'd agree with that. As it relates to public health resources, for instance, the family sessions that we're planning are funded by a public health agency, so they are cost-neutral for us to put on, and where it's possible we do access those resources, and it's something I have talked to the town manager of Amherst about in particular, just because we have regular conversations about issues in our community, and vaping is something that crosses that boundary, as you noted, but we do feel like we have a pretty critical role as the primary caretakers for our children for significant parts of the day, because you said the hours, but we know our students are here many more hours than that to affect the school culture and to provide accurate information, just I don't think it'll be too long, but just to think about the cigarette campaign that's got our numbers here locally at six or 7%, and then statewide nationally, we'll hire them that, but so much better than it used to be, the most effective strategy was giving accurate information to students, to children, and to let them know that what was really in the cigarettes, what kind of advertising the cigarette companies were doing, and right now the same trends, they're modernized for 2020, are happening in the e-cigarette world, so if you look at the e-cigarette commercials, it's the 2020 version of Joe Kool, I mean it's not Joe Kool because that wouldn't be cool in 2020, but it's really the same strategies updated and they're savvy, they have people paying, they're paying millions of dollars for marketing, all that kind of work, so how do we catch up and provide accurate information for our students, because if we don't do it, where are they going to get it? So that's how we're approaching it. I want to wrap this section up so if you have a nice one. But it did remind me of a question we had when we were debating, we're discussing, retail marijuana sales, and I think this is one of those things where regardless of what the percentage is, it obviously overlaps, and anyone says it doesn't, it's crazy, not reality-based. Is there, we talked about approaching the town, about providing some resources for this kind of campaign, this kind of effort, is that in the offing, is it in this, I don't remember any follow-up on whether that's going to happen. Yeah, I think now that there's income coming in, something that I will be, I have talked loosely and will be talking more specifically with the town manager of Amherst. I mean it's slightly orthogonal to what Mr. Hunt was talking about. He was talking about literally other agencies and other stuff, but it just occurs to me that if we can bring in resources, that could support even more effective work on this, we should be, and that's a very appropriate use of some of that revenue from retail establishments in Amherst. Yeah, thank you. Cool, keep rolling. So I'm going to roll through the second part kind of quickly, because I am noticing the hour. Well, take your time in purple, I don't want to. Yeah. We haven't talked about this, and I don't want you to feel like they're blowing up the topic. Sure, so the next one was some slides from Jason Wheeler, who I mentioned before, it's a consultant, he's been here twice for the first time, he was with Carmen Paulino who works at, has a connection to Mask Listen. And the first time, these are mostly slides I pulled from the second presentation, but the first time was really focused particularly on the T in LGBTQ plus and thinking about how to support transgender students. And the second session was taking that at a broader level, because one of the things that we noted is, as we dove into the experience and did case studies with transgender students, the other parts of those students' identity played a critical role in how we approached, analyzed and what interventions or supports we would be able to offer. And so fortunately, Jason worked with us on the second session, which was a follow-up to that first one. And again, he's outstanding to work with and works with schools all over the state on this topic. And really, the goal of the workshop with our administrative team was exploring, the bolded words are intentional, exploring the complexity of student identities and that this intersectional framework was really important to us. And that really came from our first meeting, that when we were role playing, when we were talking about supporting transgender students, the other parts of their identity was critically important. For instance, there were situations where race was involved as well as that, where religion, where family's acceptance or non-acceptance of students' identity unrelated to those other identities, but that becomes an identity in and of itself, poverty played a huge role in that. So for instance, when we did a role play of a student who was going through a gender transition, or gender transitioning, I should say, having the capacity to buy clothes that would match the gender identity of the student, when you think about poverty that has a huge impact on how that transition would go. And so I think once we got much more into depth, we realized that looking at it through an intersectional framework was really helpful and Jason supported us in that work. And so I think the particular part, and I like some of his language on this, is that when we think about inequality and we think about historically oppressed groups, they don't work in isolation from one another. And that's not exclusive to LGBTQ students, but it's part of how we approach students in support, regardless of their identity. And this was a really helpful analogy that he did. I'm gonna go through it, not rush through it, but a little more quickly is he used, I don't know if anyone's read the book, The Borderlands, but by Gloria Anzald, excuse me, Anzald Dua, and I could send that to people if they're interested in reading it. And it's really, she uses The Borderlands, both literally and figuratively in the book, to really describe the center, right? So we think of the center as kind of groups that in our culture and in the United States have been at the center in terms of power and power dynamics, a white male, heterosexual, married Christian, Anglo-American, English-speaking, upper middle class, able-bodied, educated middle-aged and embodying a certain, a particular standard of beauty. And how, again, using this book sort of as a metaphor, how do we knock it in the place of trying to assimilate students and adults in our community who don't fit into one or multiple of those identities in the center? Because that's been the, that has been a trend in America, and it's trend in American schools, is there are students who don't fit in those categories, how do we mold so that it pushes students into a center and actually how do we change what the center is as our goal? How do we shift what's called The Borderlands to students and communities who often feel like they're on the outskirts of the focus of any organization, and how do we get away from the assimilation model to really change what the center is? And so that was a helpful tool for us to be thinking about is when you're in certain categories of those, it's much more apparent. So it was interesting, even in our administrative team, which is quite diverse, how people viewed themselves and viewed others and what part of their identities came out and that some of those kind of identities are more visible and some are less visible for a whole host of reasons. So it was a really helpful centering tool for us to think about what is in the center, how might people feel on the borderlands or outside the center, and what do we actually do to change that model where people have to change behavior, change who they are, change their identities, because it's a perception that they need to fit in there to be successful. So I know that that's a bit of an aside or it might feel like a bit of a side, but it was really foundational for us in the work around intersectionality. Additionally, we worked with the framework, again, this is adapted from racial justice and education and resource guide to guide our intervention supports and decision-making. And I won't go too into depth because I think this more or less is easy to follow, but it's really trying to do root cause analysis, understand how students are experiencing the school setting, what's the history, what questions do we ask, working only then working towards solutions, strategies, and leadership. And the solutions and strategies tend to be a little more on the individual side. And for us, it was a workshop for leaders, how do we take that individual experience, because again, we're doing case studies and getting really into what would you do in this situation, making it very real? And what will we learn as we get more and more of these not case studies, but actual experiences? And how do we learn to embed those into our practices and policies? And I think the key piece is that, and it starts right in the beginning, what inequalities are you noticing or experiencing? So really shifting the dynamic from thinking about, that would be the problem, not the student as a center, what problems are the student having, what are the inequalities that might be leading to those challenges? And so I know it could seem semantic to us, to some, but for us really to reframe the conversation about how are inequalities in our school system, in our culture, in our society that students are experiencing, how is that driving some of the challenges that our students are facing in the school? And how is it intersecting with the multiple identities that students have? And really using this framework as whenever we're working through challenges that students are assuriancing, so can I come up with a real clear decision-making pathway that doesn't rush a process? It considers the identities, because I think all too often, more generally, I'm not speaking specific to our district. People are stressed, though it's true, people are stressed for time, and our teachers are incredibly experienced, our administrators are incredibly experienced, and to really take the time to dig in and say what are factors we're not considering here? What are factors that are affecting our students' academic performance, social performance, how they're getting along with peers, and understanding those better before we get to solutions, and I think it's sort of like the, it's not on here, but the ladder of inference. People often, I think it's just life in 2020, can rush up the ladder of inference and without really digging in more directly into understanding the student experience. So some of our follow-up actions, our schools are developing individual follow-up plans based on these professional development sessions. We're actually talking about those on Thursday at an administrative team meeting. And to be clear, this isn't just our principles, this includes central office staff as well, so I should have, that's a sort of mistake in the slides. Our information systems department is part and parcel of this work. How are our students, and I think we have good systems at this point, when we have, when students express a gender preference, how is that being reflected in power school and the database, all those pieces. So it's not just about what happens in the schools, it's actually what we do centrally as well. From a facility side, there's a huge impact of how we approach things, bathrooms, facilities. So it's not just about school leaders, it's about district leadership as well. Our keynote speaker, Elijah, at our fall curriculum day, spoke about it with every all staff, but also led to breakout sessions that were widely attended on the support of transgender students. He'd build it as transgender students 101 and 201. So 101 for staff members who felt like they didn't have much experience and 201 for staff members who really want to take more of a leadership role in the district on this to sort of build our internal leadership. As you know, all the school's strategic plans include explicit components of social justice and oppressed groups. And we've accessed additional supports from other trainers such as from the Stonewall Center at UMass, Mass Safe Schools as multiple trainers who have led trainings for our staff members. And at this point this spring, schools be implementing plans. I mean, many have started already, but implementing more formal plans for LGBTQ youth based on this work. And so that's sort of a summary of where we are. And again, I feel bad, I feel like I'm rushing a little bit, hopefully it didn't feel too quick. But that's a summary of the work we've done and much appreciation to Jason Wheeler and Carmen Polina for facilitating work that was incredibly meaningful for our leadership team and got to nuts and bolts. I mean, I think that's sometimes on work like this, you could stay at a very theoretical level, which is helpful. When we get into case studies and it's like, no, what would you do in your role, whatever that could be IS director, could be assistant principal in a school, that really shifts our thinking and makes things much more tangible. And in my experience makes things much more practical for implementation. So we will sneak around the table again, starting over here. I don't have much to add from our previous conversations. I think it's essential to include individuals at the school, to the extent students want to be included in order to gather feedback and drive the policies from their own lived experience. I mean, you just mentioned the same theme, so I don't belabor the point, but not having it all topped down from an academic-theoretic level, but from the actual real experience too. And if I could comment very briefly on that, I think that's spot on. And the middle school has been a good example where they have a student group that's been advocating very strongly around school culture and certain language being used, working with the leadership team, both at the school, actually the district level on that. And I think the benefit of having advocacy groups at the schools is that they're able to take a leadership role in that. And it's to your point, hearing it from directly, the people most directly affected. Do we have non-gendered bathrooms at the middle school also like we do here? So I will email you that. I think I know the answer, but when I'm not 100% sure, I don't want to say it. All right. Are you done? I'm done, thank you. Just, this sounds really great. And I look forward to hearing more of what the follow-up plans will be for each of the schools. Does this intersect or conceptually, or has it intersected with the restorative justice and the circle work that is done? Is conceptually I could see at least the methodologies for engagement in student empowerment, leadership, and articulation to being similar? Yeah, I think it, not directly, but I think indirectly it has because students have reached out to the RJ personnel around some of these issues. So I wouldn't say it was explicitly by design, but because we have restorative justice practitioners or schools, they've been an incredibly helpful resource for students and faculty on this topic. Do you see doing more of that or more of that intentionally? I do believe that will be how this plays out over time, yes. Okay, sorry. Thank you. Just curious how this program intersects with whatever you're doing on social-emotional issues with kids. Quite a bit. And I think this slide sort of captures a little bit of that. So when we have a framework for problem solving, we're often thinking about more actively, not that we haven't, but more directly, what are students' identities that could be affecting some of those pieces? Because we know there's a comorbidity in, let's focus on LGBTQ youth, students who identify as LGBTQ and other challenges that students express. And some of the SPIPI survey that I mentioned earlier, it's not just on substance abuse prevention, it gets lots of other challenges and the comorbidity of that and self-harm thoughts is a good database reason why we need to do this work. Thank you. I would just say I appreciate, I have an understanding now of intersectionality which I did not before, so thank you for that. Next steps, I would appreciate if you would report back regularly to this committee on what you're doing. We'll do. Next, which I think is our last item. We have no gifts. We have no gifts. Then our last item before adjournment is agenda planning. I certainly heard, we heard the desire for food service discussion and presentation so that's on the list already. Anything, and obviously we need to get a budget session planned which will take up some time. Is there anything else that is of immediate interest? Mike, you want to just read through? Yeah, I'll just run through it. So the governance budgets will be released on 22nd so I'll get an update from the commissioner actually on 23rd on that. So 28th, we have budget, we're gonna start with the MCN student update so students who went to the MCN conference are gonna present their experience there as well as their action plan. So we'll start the meeting there so that they can get on their way and do all the activities they'd like to do and get some sleep. We'll have a budget presentation, as I mentioned earlier. We'll have a fee vote. We have a middle school roof. We did not, if you remember last year, we applied to the MSBA. We could maybe push this to February, it's not due till March, but so we'll talk about where that fits best, but we will need a vote on a statement of interest to receive support in funding the repair of the middle school roof or replacement of the middle school roof. Warrant review, so that will be on the agenda, Mr. Frange. Subcommittee rolls, we may push that, I think it's actually till. That's gonna get pushed, but also we're adding in a CTF. Right, I was just gonna say, because that was listed on today's meeting. Right, that's gonna be on the point. They asked to be there. Second quarter budget update, capital plan update. We talked in the fall about a bus contract and so we got bids in. I think at that point, I think we'll be able to present the results of that bid and there may be some decisions for you all to consider based on some of the questions you asked about buses and sustainability. So we'll see, we have all the bids in just of whether the timeline works out to happen on the 28th or February 11th. Okay, so let's just do it, I mean in terms of the highlights then, you can see the hearing on the 11th and then we've talked about overdue balances before. We were originally gonna do I think a November HR diversity department update, but we'll do that on February 11th. Math update, that's one that's, should be brief. No, I'm just saying it's new. It's not like, we have running topics, right, we'll kind of figure out what they are and why they're there. And then goal review update, I think that means you. That does. Indeeds. So anything else people, yes? I'm just noting that the investment of vote pub funds for a possible vote that was on the top of, for January 14th hasn't happened and as the OPEC has D, I think. Look at that. Do we have, it's too bad, Mr. Stuck, Mr. Flarsen. He was going to check whether that vote needed, I think that what needed to happen, we're gonna check, happened in the fall, so I think. Yeah, that's what I thought too, I just. I think it was a clerical error by me that I forgot that that happened. So that's why it didn't happen tonight. Okay, I feel like it happened when Mr. Mongano was here, so I was curious. Yeah, it was one of the housekeeping things that we took care of, I didn't do the housekeeping of removing it from the list. I'd also note the later start time that he's listed here also, didn't make it onto the agenda tonight. Right. That's a big issue. Yeah, I know, that's good. And obviously, because it's nearly 10 o'clock, we can all see why it wasn't on tonight's agenda. No, but we don't want to fall. No, no, no, without losing it. Yeah. I mean, I think my recommendation would be post budget. There'd be a little more space and capacity, my guess is to dig in there. Well, I'm going to remind folks that they can email to myself and Dr. Morris, other toddlers, is telling. Did I just miss, Ms. Spitzer's saying, did she say later start time? Yes, she did. Okay, okay. Yeah, the other thing I think would be where the... Wasn't that exciting? Yes. Someone else brought it up. It was so late, I missed later start time. I think it would also be worthwhile first to have a brief discussion on committee's feeling on the practice of yielding time during public comment. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't think it's called out in our public comment policy, and I think, I don't have any issue with it having happened so far, because I think it falls under chair's discretion, but I think it would be worthwhile for the committee to say a few words about it. Yeah, I mean, I think we could say some words on it, but I think we should be even more actionable than that. We should say, I mean now, I mean, not a future agenda item. We should say whatever words we want to say and point towards whether we want a policy to be developed or refined and then make a decision about whether you want a policy or refined. I mean, I suppose it is chair's discretion, but the reason, without debating it, I'm just explaining, that the reason why I followed the practice I followed is precisely because we don't have a clear policy prescribing it, and in the absence of that, it's not, I think, it doesn't feel like it's a good sort of native decision practice to say we're just gonna shut people off if there's not clarity around. Precedure in that the procedure is then widely published and everybody knows what it is. But anyways. The only other one is, I just didn't know if anyone in the policy subcommittee should we be adding any, you don't have to tell me now or the chair now, but if there are policies that are becoming or should pretend evaluation, just if people can preview that so we can get an agenda, it's great if we can get it like a week ahead of time, not the specifics, but just. Can we put superintendent evaluation as a topic whenever we're doing global review update? Mm-hmm. It seems like that ought to be a paired topic. Not only what's the update from Mike, but then what are we doing? You're okay? Yeah, okay, cool, awesome. All right, we're done with that. You have a motion? Oh, can I be? Yes, sir. Could it be just for a moment again? Maybe. One more time? Yeah, about something, agenda related or relevant or? It's relevant because, you know, we just approved the engineering materials and manufacturing process course. And I just want to point out that up until the school year 13, 14, all middle school students were taking a course to expose them to a range of common engineering materials, wood, metal, plastic, and composites. And that class was cut and that classroom is now leisure services. So I just wanted to point that out. Can I connect that to the budget, to an agenda item, rather? Which is perhaps that's a relevant conversation when we talk about budget next time about budget decisions that if funding was available, the committee would like me to consider. It is, but I think also, frankly, I mean, this is the challenge with the conversation we have really around new courses, is we get this momentary window into interesting things that are going on. And yet in terms of long term planning, the committee doesn't really, doesn't ever really have the conversation of, so, you know, to the executive argument, what would it mean to both not only have a production studio for music production, but also have that, I mean, just one example, there are others. And then connect that to what it looks like for career pathways, professional certification for music production engineers, or for what entrance requirements look like for Berkeley College of Music, right? I mean, I'm not saying you couldn't get answers, but my point is if we wanted to do this, we'd want to start looking at seventh grade or even maybe upper elementary and try to see where are we going with this connection to design, engineering, fabrication, you know, you know what I mean? Well, we never have those conversations. And we can't unless we're intentional about it. So Mr. Giles, do you have anything else on your mind? I move to adjourn. Is there a second? Second. Moved and seconded by Spitt. Moved and seconded by Spitt. Seconded by Spitzer. All those in favor? It is unanimous, we're adjourned.