 Welcome. Today is Thursday, January 12th, 2017 of the Arlington School Committee. I'm going to open my meeting and talk about some of the art that we have in the room. So over here, I believe these are all bracket. We have kindergarten, fabulous feasts. Many artists use food as subject matter for their work, and food is often present at celebrations of all kinds. Kindergarten students spent a few months focusing on many aspects of celebration, masks, costumes, party drawings, and now feast collages. Students were instructed to create a feast by cutting out appropriate shapes and colors to represent the various foods, imagining the colored paper background as their tabletop. And then there are small details added with paint. Over here is the Gotaku fish printing, old and new grade two. Students in the second grade took their previous printing experience from earlier grades to new levels with the introduction of this lesson. Fish. Fish. Go ahead to print, print. Wait, you're not? Oh, up the back. You know, the back. Okay, okay, thanks. Gotaku, and I know I'm butchering this pronunciation, printing was traditionally practiced in Japan several centuries ago as a way for Japanese fishermen to record particularly memorable catches before it influenced artists and developed into an art form. Students were told that they'd be combining traditional and new techniques of the printing in an artwork of their own. Thin paper is placed on the rubber fish and gently rubbed to create a print. Then students were ready to try the technique on their own. Once complete, the second step was to create a background on which to mount their fish print. Students were given a variety of materials including watercolor and collage and encouraged to combine the materials and use previously learned techniques such as watercolor, resist, and wet on wet painting to create interesting and vibrant effects to highlight their fish print. So, okay, that's cool. Grade one, using line constructively, tree line drawings. And that is here, right? Excellent. For their first lesson of the year, first graders revisited the element of a line and discussed how lines can be found everywhere in our world and that artists can use different kinds of lines to express their ideas more fully. Students examined and discussed several examples of drawings by various artists explaining how each artist used line. Next students were shown several paintings. They were led to notice how particular types of line changes the way we expect a tree to look. Finally, students were instructed to create a line drawing of their own choice. That said, everything in the picture had to be constructed from a variety of appropriate lines and the subject had to include at least one tree. So everything is done using lines, whatever, and yeah, so that's cool. And they're encouraged to think about how lines can be used to represent the many parts of a tree and different species of tree. Grade four, and I think that's this one, unity and transformation in sculpture. Fourth, in which we have pictures of the sculptures. Fourth graders were introduced to design element of unity in which an artist employs something which visually holds the artwork together. Students also discussed how an artist can utilize the idea, process, and transformation in a work of art. Students were then shown several examples of artwork by Tara Donovan, an artist who uses common disposal materials such as paper plates and styrofoam cups and transforms their appearance by ranging large amounts of the same material in unexpected ways. Sculptures of this nature often tend to be abstract and organic and silent content. Students were encouraged to explore this idea while also creating a stable, secure structure with balance and support. Looks pretty cool. Architectural facades is something that's partially hidden. Is that back there? On the right-hand side? On the right-hand side. Oh, they're both on the same page. Okay, got it. Students in grade three have been learning about architecture and how architects plan buildings. For this lesson, students learned that the front exterior wall of a building is called a facade and requires specific elements to be considered. Students noticed that architects like all artists often borrowed design ideas from existing buildings and adopted their own ideas. Students were instructed to create a styrofoam block print of a building facade of their own design while paying special attention to details and various structural elements such as arches, columns, balconies, and towers. Once the prints were dry and complete, students had to create a background setting for their building using a variety of media. And that one, then, is grade five, designing better products. Students in grade five were introduced to industrial design and discussed several examples of the kinds of factory-made consumer products industrial designers helped conceptualize and construct. Students were led through the multi-step process in which an idea must be carried before a product can be sold in stores to potential customers. They were assigned into design teams consisting of groups of four to five students. Each team was given a design assignment in which to either improve an existing product or invent a new product for potential purchase. After preliminary ideas were dried out, conceptual sketches when drawn on graph paper and students were required to show a minimum of two views of their product including front view. Labeling product features, characteristics, and special selling points were also required. Okay, so it's great to see what the students are up to. I think we want to go back to school. So next thing on the list is community participation. Do we have no one's on the list? Okay. Okay. So next on the list is community education, summer fund approval, trip approval. And I think Mr. Zurich can come speak to us. And our director of community education, Jen Rothenberg. Yes. Good evening. Thank you for having us here tonight. I'm Jen Rothenberg, the director of Arlington Community Education. This is Tom Zurich, the seventh grade English teacher at Audison Middle School. As most of you know, Arlington Community Ed offers seven weeks of programming during the summer. We offer half day, full day, and field trips as well as our ever popular insiders guide to Audison. About five or six years ago, Tom started our adventure day trippers program, where he led middle schoolers on trips to different places for a week. Each day they would go on a different trip for one full week. They would surf, they would do sea kayaking, they'd explore the dunes up on the North Shore, and they'd hike Mount Minamak. The kids love these experiences and gain so much from them. We're here tonight seeking approval for a new program. Tom has stepped it up a notch, and he's approached us with the idea to run an 11-day camping trip in Maine. The trip includes both a separate canoe and kayak excursions as well as hiking in Acadia. Tom has a great deal of experience leading these kinds of trips, and we're very excited to have the opportunity to offer one like this to students in Arlington. As you'll see in your packets, we've done a great deal of research, and we have a lot of information for parents. We feel the trip is well planned and are confident that it's going to run smoothly. So now I'll turn it over to Tom, and he can walk you through the 11 days, and we're happy to answer any questions. So I started thinking about this last summer. I did not do the adventure or the day trippers program. I was a little tired after doing five or six years of them. But in the middle of July, when I would have been doing it, I was kind of bored. So I started thinking about what I could replace it with, and I thought about doing a trip like this a number of years ago. So I started thinking about it over the summer, made some initial inquiries, went into websites, found out some of the better canoe guides, kayak and guides in Maine, and then went to Jen, I think early September, with the idea of doing this trip. And the number of days really around a three-day two-night sea kayak trip, three-day two-night wilderness canoe trip, and then a three-night camping excursion in Acadia in between the two, and it fell out to 11 days. Founded by Van, pulling a trailer with all our gear in it, and then again using licensed experience guides. This is not something that I would take on myself. Just logistically, it's very difficult to do on your own. Even though I'm comfortable with leading kids in kayaks and canoes, I wouldn't try a trip like this on myself. So that's how it got to this point. Jen was mildly enthusiastic and mildly skeptical. I should have gone that way. Questions and comments? Mr. Hanna. How many students will this be involving? 10. 10 students and a co-leader who is currently a freshman in college who's a graduate of Arlington High School, Kate Brennan. Thank you. Other questions, comments? Yes, Mr. Cardin. I just want to make sure we cleared this with the town council before proceeding with it. Yes, I have been in touch with town council. They've provided me with liability waivers. I will have them review all of the other waivers that we have because there are separate waivers with two different excursions. So we will have them review those as well. I initially set the number at 10 because it's a manageable size group. I have done two camping trips to Vermont overnight camping trip as part of the summer fund program. And both of those I did take 12. So 10 seem like a good place to start. It's possible we could take up to 12, but that would be the absolute maximum. Dr. Alsnambi. I'm wondering what the student-adult ratio will be with the guides on the canoe? I believe there's two guides per trip for the kayak and the canoe. So it would be for adults along with the 10 or 12 students. That's it. That was my question. Yes, Mr. Schliffman. So we're hard on the Canadian border. The St. Croix River is the border there. Do we have any issues with passports or crossing the border? I don't think we actually cross the border. Okay. Because I saw that the international coordinator signed the application. The international trip coordinator signed the... Mary Valano, yeah. We'll be careful not to stray into A and Y. I wouldn't want to see a student stuck on the wrong side of the border that can't get back. I guess I did go sit with Mary Valano to review the trip and to make sure that we had dotted all our I's and crossed our T's and that we had all the proper paperwork. She has supplied us with a lot of great samples for lists that we can give to parents, behavior guidelines, medical information sheets. So that's where some of this information came from. Cool. Mr. Hinner. On the trips and stuff, do you have provisioning food and stuff like that at different times? The canoe trip is fully provisioned. That's the nice thing about paying guides to do that. All the food, dry bags, the boats, the guides, that's all covered with that. The other will camp about five nights on our own and we'll provision ourselves with that. But those are split up into one night. One night before the canoe trip. We'll drive up to Maine. It's about a seven-hour drive. So we'll drive that. We'll spend the night in a campground close to the canoe put in. We'll be in Acadia for three nights and then we'll drive down to Bristol and camp there so we're close to the kayak put in. And at the end of the kayak trip, we'll do another single night camp. And so that will feed ourselves. The camping isn't out in the bush itself. This is good car camping. Yes, Dr. Asnambi. One more. Are you expecting the kids to be experienced or are these trips within beginner range? No. The canoe and the kayak trip both start with instruction on kayaking and canoeing. So it doesn't really require any past experience with that. It requires a sense of adventure, a willingness to be uncomfortable at times to get wet and cold and hungry. But as far as the experience that they need, no, they don't. So I did a two-week backcountry canoe trip around this age and it was just a fantastic experience. It was incredibly difficult but it was really altering. But I just have one question. Are students expected to provide any more gear than the shoes and basic clothing? Is there anything else that they would need to purchase? I have sleeping bags. No, they'll need sleeping bags. They'll need a good day pack. We won't be actually backpacking. We'll just be day hiking. Okay. So they don't need a real backpack. Right, just basics. And for both of those trips, they use dry bags. And the best way to pack dry bags is to put your gear into soft, really garbage bags. Because then you can stuff the dry bags full. Trying to get a backpack into a dry bag doesn't work well. Okay, great. A sleeping bag would probably be the biggest thing if they don't have a good sleeping bag. Okay, great. And I really, I appreciate that you have an option for somebody with limited means to potentially get a break. So I think that that's, to be encouraged, that's nice to see. Yeah. Good. And we would hope that if there were a problem finding gear, I know the high school program does own some of their own sleeping bags. That might be a way that we can help as well if students aren't able to get bags for themselves. Great. Thanks. Just one quick thing. It brings back my Boy Scout experience and stuff like that. Some of these kids might be able to, boys and girls' cuts might be able to get some credit on Merrick Badges. I'm sure they could if they hadn't thought of that. Great. Thank you very much. So we need to vote. Vote, actually, don't we? Yes. Do I have a motion on the floor? No. Move to approve the summer fun trip. Okay. Motion by Mr. Heiner, seconded by Dr. Alson Ampe. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposition? It's unanimous. Great. Thank you. Thank you very much. We'll send you a picture. Can I ask you to come back and maybe a little slideshow? Oh, some pictures. That'd be great. Yeah. We'll definitely take some pictures. Yeah, that'd be awesome. That'd be great. We'll only pass it next time if one of us can go. Yeah. We'll do an adult one next year. Thank you. Catherine Ritz, who is our director of world languages, is here this evening to do a presentation just as an overview of the department, the offerings, and she'll be here to answer any questions that you might have. This is something we've been doing over the last few years, is having curriculum leaders come in and have a chance for you to hear about the program and to be able to ask questions. So, Catherine, thanks for coming tonight. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here and I'm very excited to talk about my department. I'm very proud of all the work that we've been doing and I hope that the town of Arlington is proud of this program as well because I think it's rather phenomenal. I do say so myself. So, I will get right started. So, I wanted to just start with a little bit of a peek into what our classrooms look like because certainly from when I studied language, things have really changed. So, an important philosophy if you come visit our classrooms is the concept that we are using, what we call the target language to instruct our students. So, if you come in, we follow the national standards. 90% plus of the instructional time is in the language. That's a pretty big change. It's sort of an immersive style philosophy. And so, that's something we've been really working on over the years to ensure that all the teachers have the strategies they need to enable that to be successful so that students can understand so they're not, you know, overwhelmed or are able to follow along and understand what the teacher is saying. And then in the past two years or so, we've also been trying to implement the 90% plus standard also applies to students. So, really establishing an expectation that in this classroom when you come in, you're speaking the language. And that begins at level one pretty early on. We establish a rule with our students. And it's incredibly transformative. So, we're really beginning this in the middle school level. All of the teachers are on board that this is an expectation that you speak the language in the class and students actually ask permission to use English. But as I'll show you some of the testing results, the proficiency level of the students really skyrocket. This is just a really, really powerful instructional method. We try to focus on student-centered classrooms. Our goal is communication in the language. It's not about grammatical forms or accuracy. Certainly that's a component of communication, but really the focus is on communicating using real-world, purposeful context for language use. So, this is just a couple photos I pulled just to show you some of the activities. We actually brought in a guidance counselor. Students prepared a flyer for potential Spanish-speaking students who might come to Arlington and wanted to learn about the community. And the guidance counselors came in and kind of rated which one they thought would be the most helpful. We also use an activity called speed dating, which you can see on the left is really popular. You can know what speed dating is. So, imagine Ding-Ding moves to the next partner. You're talking on a specific topic. It's really fun, very interactive. It's very popular. We've also been trying to integrate more and more Skype connections. So, you're all familiar, of course, with the Arlington TeoSinte group. Elizabeth Dre is actually coming in next week again to speak with our AP Spanish course. And she's helped us set up Skype sessions with students from TeoSinte and our AP Spanish students have been able to speak with them, ask questions. And we've been trying to do that as well. We had a teacher last year who did a Skype connection with Columbia. So, we've been trying to expand this as much as possible. So, really bringing the real world into our classrooms. And then we have a really fun assessment. If you can believe this is an assessment. It's a gladiator game in the eighth grade. It's a cumulative assessment. So, we really want it to be fun and interactive and purposeful. So, it's just a peek inside our classrooms. Some of the important initiatives that we've been working on. The first, this is a really multi-year process, is a thematic-based curriculum revision. So, we've been, for the past two years, we've been working on developing our own thematic curricula. So, this year, all of our level one teachers, and this includes all of the middle school, was considered kind of a level one, including our level one high school teachers, are implementing new thematic-based curricula. So, these are common units across languages. They're what we call language agnostic. So, it really doesn't matter the language. It's this kind of unit. And then the cultural components are adapted to the specific language. So, we really focused on can-do performance targets. So, for example, we have a home and family unit. So, what if I grew up in another country, is our essential question. And the performance target, I can have a conversation about our home and family. So, we're really trying to emphasize the conversational skills in our classes. An important component of these thematic curricula are using what we refer to as authentic materials. So, in foreign language, that means it's made by a native speaker, for a native speaker. So, it's not this adapted simplified teacher-made text. So, just to show you some examples of what these look like. So, we're using Pinterest to collect all of these. So, you can see these are authentic resources. The one on the left is from Mexico. Kind of, we have a nutrition healthy eating unit. So, they're looking at authentic documents from Mexico. And then, mi plato is from the United States, but in Spanish. And you can see how even a beginning level student can approach this because of the imagery and the structure of it and can make sense of it. So, we're really trying to bring these in. And these are important for many reasons, but not the least of which is it's building kind of problem-solving and critical thinking skills. When you look at this and you maybe understand, you know, 80 percent. So, here's another one, a school schedule. You have to use a lot of deciphering skills to try to figure out the rest of it. And that's something that we're trying to teach in our units. We're really phasing out the use of textbooks in the modern language program. So, as we're implementing the thematic-based curriculum, the textbook's still used as a support, but it's really no longer the driving force of the curriculum, which is an important shift. So, this year we have two teachers that are piloting a level two and three curriculum, and we're also having a group revising and trying to finalize that, and then we're hoping next year we can roll out for all of our level two teachers a common level two and three sort of intermediate level curriculum. Can you just explain level one, two, and three? Sure. Oh, I'm sorry. Sure, sorry. So, the middle school program is sixth, seventh, and eighth at the end of which most students enter into level two course. So, if you think of level one is really, they're attaining a novice high level of speaking proficiency, and then in the level two, we're looking at a low intermediate level three. We're hitting a mid, intermediate mid. The intermediate takes a long time to kind of progress through that as a language speaker, and we offer up through level five is the highest level, which would either a five A, curriculum A, five honors, or an AP. So, in a high school, if a student followed the full sequence, they would go up through level five at the high school. Okay. Sorry. Another part of the thematic-based units is what are called integrated performance assessments, IPAs. So, these are replacing the traditional chapter tests that you may yourself have experienced in your language program. So, they provide students with real-world contextualized scenarios for when they might actually be using the language and have them do a little bit of research, do some speaking with a partner, and come up with sort of a final presentation of some kind. So, there's three modes that they kind of go through. I won't go into those in detail, but they're sort of circling around a specific topic. So, I won't read this over for you, but just in a nutshell. So, we've come up with a scenario. This is in our food and nutrition unit, where we're imagining that there's a group of exchange students coming to Arlington from a specific country, and you want to help them find healthy eating choices in the school cafeteria. So, you first understand how, what is healthy eating in their home country? So, what is that considered? Now, that's an important first step. And then, what types of food would students from that country actually like? And then, you're comparing it to your own culture and saying, okay, well, what's offered there? What's offered here? What might these students enjoy when they come to the cafeteria and also be able to eat healthfully and so on? So, you can see we're bringing in those authentic resources, the sort of nutritional guides from various countries. They're having conversations with their partners. And then, they're coming up with a final flyer of presentation of some sort in which they make some recommendations for these hypothetical exchange students. So, just to give you an idea of what that curriculum looks like. So, something along with the revised curriculum that we've been working on is proficiency testing. So, we were fortunate to get a grant from AEF a few years ago and we're able to do a sample testing of the proficiency levels of students, of a sample of students. Kind of get a sense. You know, are we hitting the targets that we're coming up with? Are our common assessments in line with what we're hoping our students are achieving, getting a little bit of external data? And then, very fortunate that the district picked up the cost for the past few years and we'll also be testing a group this year. So, we use different assessments for the different languages. So, stamp for our Italian. It's called the Standards-Based Assessment of Proficiency. So, students are assessed in their speaking and their listening skills. Apple is the Actful Assessment of Performance towards proficiency. So, we use that in French, Mandarin, and Spanish. And it's really nice. It's got like an interactive, kind of a Skype video type thing where they're asked questions. They have to respond spontaneously. It's a really nice performance assessment. And then, the Alira is the Actful Latin Interpretive Reading Assessment. So, we were able to test just over 300 students last year. We're hoping to test the same amount, possibly if possible the same exact students so we can really see are they making progress. And we also want to make sure that the results we got last year are valid. That they're not, we're just a one-off year. So, we've set the proficiency target. So, as I was mentioning to your question before about the level, so you can see we've got what we call our pathway to proficiency. So, in the middle school, we're really trying to hit a high novice speaker. And then in level two, if they follow the full sequence would be a freshman. We're getting intermediate low. And then we kind of, it takes a long time for students to build through the intermediate. Levels up through hopefully advanced low is really the highest we're shooting for. And Mandarin takes a little bit longer, not surprisingly, for students to get a higher level of proficiency. So, what you can see here, this is the data from last year. What's in the box. Oh darn it, I thought that was going to do that. Sorry, this seems to, I just wanted to use the camera and it keeps me out of the presentation. Sorry about that. That we're shooting for. And you can see what's shaded is where the percentage of students that were hitting in those various groups. So, we were very encouraged. You can see the French, where you see the target we do have in most cases the majority of students are meeting or above the proficiency target that we've set. So, we found that was really encouraging. We saw a similar scenario. Not everybody, but you can kind of see again that black box is where the proficiency target was. And then the blue is where the students, you can kind of see a progression up as the students go up over the years. Is the proficiency verbal? Sorry, this is oral proficiency. Oral proficiency. Correct, yeah. The assessments do test in what you traditionally are the four skills, the reading, writing, speaking, and listening. We've been focusing on speaking. Primarily because it's, well first I think it's the most important reason that you want to learn a language. But also that historically and traditionally teachers tend to favor written. And I really wanted to put an emphasis on speaking. So, these are for speaking. Thank you for asking. So, how would it work? How would an oral proficiency test work? So, as I just mentioned, they go into the language lab, they have the headsets, the microphone, and it gives them a series of prompts. It looks like a Skype conversation. So, you have the person asks them, they start something simple like, oh hi, my name is so-and-so, what's your name? And then it's a simulated conversation. So, the head kind of nods and waits for you to respond. And then you provide your answer and it records it and then it's assessed. And it's scored by- It's not scored live, it's scored by an actual person. So, it takes a couple of weeks for us to get the results. So, it's not a multiple choice assessment. It's a performance assessment. And it's scored by a person. It's scored by a person. I'm sorry to interrupt. That's okay, please do. This is all obvious to me, so I appreciate the question. So, as you can see, we're really happy, we're hitting, for the most part, at or above the target in our Spanish. Come on, clicker. Can you just hit the down? Yeah, do you mind? I don't know why this is not always working all a second ago. You just click to the next one. Arrow down. The down arrow. I'm responding to you either. You know, I heard that this was up, there we go. There you go. Okay. So, are you going to sit there for me, Robert? Okay. In Mandarin, we were so excited. The middle school, this is actually rather outstanding. Our middle school, seventh grade, we had students that were testing novice high and intermediate, and then even in eighth grade, we had students that were testing in the intermediate in the oral proficiency, so we're really excited about those results. We did see some regression in the high school, so that's an area of improvement. So, again, we want to test again this year and make sure that's a valid result, but we are kind of watching that. Latin, our students, this actually, they flew well beyond and above our proficiency targets, and to the point that we were like, we think our kids are strong, but this is maybe a bit too high, so we're kind of trying to get some national data and find out if this test is really testing what we think it is, but in any case, we were delighted with these results. Italian, so it tested the speaking and listening separately, so this one actually, because of the structure of the test, it tests both the listening and the speaking. So we found that our students were exceeding the targets for listening, but struggled a little bit with the speaking, so again, questioning whether that's an area we want to work on improving. I just wanted to also take a minute to highlight some of the enrollment news, I guess, in the department. The most significant piece of news regarding enrollment in the World Language Program is our French enrollment. So we have seen a doubling of enrollment in the French program, beginning in the middle school, and the students have hit the high school this year, so just to sort of give you a sense of what that means, if you go back to 2012, in our eighth grade French program, we had 37 students the following year 52, 44 the next year, and then in 2015-16, we have 88 students, and then 82, this year we've got in the high 80s as well, I think our sixth grade, maybe at 91 at this point, so that's a doubling of enrollment. And I will gently just acknowledge that we haven't added any French staff, so we've been a little bit squeezed with that. And the kids have now hit the high school and the program there is, it's great news, but we are a little bit tight, and as a point of comparison, the eighth grade Spanish, when we had 37 French students, we had 133 Spanish students, fast forward to this year, we only have 143, so while we've got 10 more Spanish kids, we've got more than double the same amount in French. So it's just sort of interesting that more students are choosing French than they had previously. The Mandarin program, so we were able to get Mandarin to the middle school a few years ago. Mandarin's been a little bit slower to pick up an enrollment. We are excited this year that our seventh grade, so last year we had 21 students in the seventh grade Mandarin, and this year we have 61, so we're really encouraged about that. It's just been a slower language to pick up in kind of popularity throughout the district, but it's finally starting to kind of take off. And the Italian program, we started, we launched it back in 2013, and we've been able to grow, even thanks to a grant from Cosit, and have been able to grow from a level one through four, so we now have a four-year Italian program. And just this past week, we were in discussion with the Italian Consulate, who is giving us a grant for an after-school AP Italian course. So our Italian teacher will be offering, I think we've got eight students that will be doing after-school studying for the AP Italian, and they're really grant-funded from the Italian Consulate, so we're really excited about that. So actually, can you just go over for the audience which languages are offered at the middle school level, which languages are offered at the high school level, and are any of them sort of threatened because the grant is about to go away, or are they all sort of recommitted to all of them? Yeah, so at the middle school, we currently have French, Spanish, Latin, and Mandarin. So as I just mentioned, Mandarin's been in the middle school just for a couple of years, and at the high school, we have those four languages, and we also have Italian, and that was thanks to a grant from this organization called CASET. The grant from CASET only covers a small portion, so it covers about, I think, two-thirds of one class for one of our teachers, and the district is covering the rest. As far as we know, it's a yearly grant, renewable grant. We don't know from year to year how much we're going to get. They've assured me we're going to get the grant again next year. They're very happy that we're going to be offering the after-school Italian for AP, which is something they're really trying to encourage. So I guess I feel some confidence that that will continue, but those are the only grants that we have that are supporting the staff. Okay. Does that answer your question? Yes. Okay. You'll also see, I just pulled these figures, the overall enrollment in the program as a whole has increased, so if you just go back to 2011-12, at the high school, 73% of students were taking a language, and we've now grown to 84%. So we've seen, we think more students sticking with their language over the years, which we're very excited about. Another component of our program, to your question about what's offered, we also have an elective online language offering. These are through Brigham and Young University. They have online high school credit courses, and we offer students American Sign Language, Arabic, Japanese, Korean, German, and Russian, and this year we have 18 students that are taking one of those languages. So those are an elective in addition. It gives them a nice exposure to the language, but some of the students taking them are just incredibly passionate about those languages, so we're excited to be able to make that offer thanks to technology. Go ahead. So a couple sort of things that have been going on beyond the program, one of which I spoke about last year at the school committee is the Seal of Biliteracy, which is an award that recognizes students' proficiency levels in English and one other language. So we piloted that last year. We were very excited to have, so last spring we had 51 students that we assessed and 41 of them qualified for the Seal of Biliteracy. So this follows state guidelines. So the state language association working with an English language learner teacher association has established guidelines that we're following. So we have a lot of students that are testing. There's three levels, platinum, gold, and silver. So our students, we had 19 that made the advanced low, which is the highest level of the seal. And then we did test again this spring, I'm sorry, this fall, and we'll test again in the spring. We had 15 students that assessed this spring, this fall, sorry, 14 of whom qualified for the seal. So we've tested in languages, French, Latin, Italian, German, Portuguese, Spanish. And this year we had three students that submitted portfolios for Japanese, Polish, and Western Armenian. So we're really excited. Those students obviously are not studying the foreign language program. This is a home language that they have demonstrated proficiency for. And this is actually going to go on their transcript and gives them a chance to show the colleges that they've got this skill that they're bringing with them that they'd never be able to show them otherwise. These are just three of our award winners from last year. These are three seniors, the rest of the students were juniors. And I will just take the opportunity to invite you. On April 27th we're going to be having a big award ceremony for all of these students and a few others. So I will give you a formal invitation later, but please mark your calendars. Another program that we launched last year is the Global Competence Program. This is a program that exists in a number of neighboring districts and it's really an interdisciplinary certificate program for students. We had five of our current seniors successfully that completed the program in September. They have a number of requirements, academic component, community service, travel, and then they have to complete what's called a Global Engagement Project. As you can see from these titles, we had students who studied the involving gender roles in Peru who studied Korea. That's actually one of the students who's taking the online Korean, investigated the two Koreas, a student who wanted to study Nazi Germany and Italy's government and so on. Just go ahead. So you can see the evolving gender roles. She did a really nice video presentation and then another student made a collage about the two Koreas. I'll briefly highlight some of the travel we're trying to expand and give our students the opportunities to experience the language in the culture where it's spoken. She could click around. This year we are running the France Exchange as well. I know you're all familiar with that. That's been a long-standing program that we've been running. The students came to visit us in October from France and we are going in April to stay with them. We are launching this year in April as well, a new trip for our middle schoolers to Montreal. So they'll get to speak some French up there. We are expecting a visit from students in Beijing. I think many of you may have hosted some of these teachers. I know someone did a dinner at some point. One of the school can be members for our students from Beijing, but this is from the same school in Beijing that we've been working with for a few years. So they'll be here in January. Next year we're planning again Quebec Homestay. I think this would be the fourth year we would be running it. We have some new exciting exchanges under works that we haven't yet presented to you guys for approval, but we'll be soon. One is an exchange with a school in Barcelona that we're working on for next year. And one is an exchange with a school in Florence in Italy for our Italian exchange students. And then we have some initial planning for a trip for our Latin students to Rome. So that's also coming down the pike. I also just want to make sure the school can be aware that we offer National World Language Honor Societies in all five of the languages that we offer at the high school. We just launched the Italian Honor Society last year. So those are among the students that we recognized at the awards ceremony in April. So we have had, I think, upwards of 50 students every year that qualify for the Honor Society. And then we also have a number of extracurricular clubs, activities, and other awards, one of which is the Kurtamen competitions that our Latin students have been participating in very, very actively. They're meeting almost weekly to prepare for these and are going all over the place to compete. We have a number of language clubs. We've been raising funds for the Arlington Teo Sinti Group through selling handmade pulseras from local artisans from El Salvador, both in the middle school and the high school. We have got a French club, a Spanish club, very active. You may be familiar with the Café Parisien, the junior year French project that Veronique Léhi launched a number of years ago, which is still ongoing. If you're not familiar with it, you can think of the show Shark Tank where you have to come up with a business proposal to open up a restaurant in Paris and then defend your proposals. It's very exciting. And we also have been offering annually the National Language Contest in French, Spanish, and Latin, and we always have had national level winners at the highest level, so we're really excited about that as well. I hope you are aware, but last year we were awarded the Exemplary French Program with honors from the American Association of Teachers of France. We had to put together our very rigorous portfolio and were the first school in Massachusetts to be awarded this award. I'm very excited about that, and we've had also a number of... I won't read them over, but a number of French students that received various awards in oral competitions, summer travel scholarships at last spring that I just wanted to bring to your attention. And finally, I just really want to highlight the teachers in the department and how active they have been, not only within their classroom and providing really high quality teaching for the students, but also sharing their knowledge with the larger foreign language community. So we have teachers that are presenting nationally, Abby Holt in the middle school, Anne Zachary, Nalu Hogan, who you can see on the right, as well as myself presented at the Actful, which is the national... because over 9,000 people attend, made presentations there at this foreign language teacher conference. We're presenting regionally. I went with a group of two teachers to Mass Cue, the Massachusetts computer using educators conference to present on ways that we're integrating Skype and other technologies. Last year, I was invited to speak at the Desi Fall convening about the assessments that we've been using as models for other districts. And very uniquely, he has brought, as you can see on the top right, photo group of students to present at the Regis College project based learning conference, which she's been sharing on that Café Parisien project. So I think we've got a really active and dedicated group of teachers and I hope Arlington feels proud of this program as strongly as I do. So I will open up for questions. Thank you. Great. Mr. Slickman. Well, it's obvious that you have a lot of pride in your department and the work that's going on and that every year you seem to be raising the bar in improving our world language program in the district. And I think that the data you're presenting in the narrative you have is quite commendable. Go back a slide. Oh, sorry. Who was the casualty in the law? Yay. I wonder about that too. You know, you don't put a slide up of a... That one. ...somebody lying on the floor looking quite dead without attributing. So that is actually our phenomenal middle school Latin teacher, Abby Holt, who presented at the Actful, the National Conference, which is very selective to be accepted to present there. And I'm not sure exactly what she's doing. I'm fairly certain she's casting a spell in Latin and has... ...done something... ...than language or something. One thing that fascinated me was you talked about the conversion of the classrooms to an immersion model, so that once you walk in the door you need to speak that language. And I'm thinking of those first-year kids in September who are walking and knowing nothing of the language. How long does it take before you're able to at least get the basic classroom commands and phraseology so that you can run a class for a day without reverting to English? And how difficult is that? I hope I won't shock you. It's day one, level one. So the first day is entirely in the language. We do this by a lot of body language. So you can imagine all the classroom commands, raise your hand, sit down, take out a piece of paper that you can show the students while you're telling them. There's a strategy called TPR, Total Physical Response, where you give a prompt, a command, and the student doesn't need to speak. They just need to show physically that they understand what you're telling them to do. That's extremely effective, particularly at the beginning, where you're doing this type of thing. But it's actually amazing. So yes, students, it can be a little scary that first day when you walk in and the teacher is speaking only Spanish. And they truly, I think, are amazed themselves at how quickly they can understand and follow along what's going on in the classroom. It takes strategies. The pictures, the visuals, the body language cognates, certainly in French and Spanish, are hugely helpful. You know, the word for question in French is question. So you write that on the board, and oh, you don't need to translate it. You've shown them pretty quickly what it means. So there's a lot of strategies, and it takes training. So that's why I said when I started here, I would say we were around 50-50. So some teachers were using the target language. Some teachers, you know, needed some support. And so that's something that we've really worked on ensuring the strategies there first. And then it's really amazing how effective it is. And then establishing, you know, week two, week three, no English rule in the classroom. It's such, it's, again, it takes strategies and it takes training and practice, but it's incredibly effective. And I do think the teachers at this point are able to do that in an effective way where students feel supported. Excellent. It's exciting. And I would love for any of you, if you'd like to come in, the middle school Mandarin classroom is rather outstanding to come and see what's going on in there. And you're like, oh my God, I'm in Beijing, and the kids are all speaking Mandarin. So it really works. Yeah, you say... Yeah, Dr. Ritz. Dr. Ritz, and I've met with... What was the name of that gentleman who designed the language programs in Utah? We had a visitor from Greg Duncan, who came last year. And one of the things that I learned in that meeting with him is that this is best practice. That the old way of translating, teachers translating what they're being said is, first of all, it's created a generation of people who don't speak. So I want to applaud the whole department, and Catherine, in particular, for her leadership in this, because it really has been quite transformative in terms of the performance of our students. And ultimately, I agree that what is the goal is to be able to communicate, and if they can go and talk in the language, how wonderful is that? Absolutely. Dr. Allison, MP. I had a couple of questions. First, this is really wonderful. So I'm wondering what you said that you're trying to phase out textbooks, and I'm wondering what will kids have as reference material when they're trying to do stuff at home? Yeah, so we've truthfully been developing a lot of the resources, so the kids are getting... So we're using the shift has been the textbook dictates the curriculum, and we go through the chapters, too. We've come up with our units, and maybe we're pulling a piece here, a piece there from the textbook. There are so many online resources available today. I know a lot of teachers... I'm thinking of one who's put together a YouTube page where she's found presentations that help explain the different concepts for students. Other teachers are making their own... You know, it's the flipped classroom concept where they're creating their own references or supports for students at home. But it's really a shift... The reference materials tend to be... I imagine what you're thinking of is like a grammar explanation, and that's something we're... The grammar is important as long as it helps with a communication goal, and we really want to step away from getting... Having students be bogged down in heavy grammar explanations which really don't help them communicate or learn in the language. So the grammar explanations are really subsidiary to using the language and speaking with it. So it's sort of a shift. I guess I would say that, that teachers are pulling together resources from different areas, some textbooks, some online, some video, and so on to help students. And I will just point out that for Latin is the one exception because it's really a reading-based curriculum. We do need to have a book, so that's not the area that we're leaving the textbooks. And then the other question I had was about the online courses, and I'm just wondering if you could explain how they work logistically for the students. Sure, so we're offering them as an elective. There is a small fee, however... We sign up through BYU. It's around $200 for a year. It does offer a scholarship, and they've actually been fairly generous. I had two students this year alone who got almost full. If it's $200, they paid $20 for the course. And the district, I think, in at least one or two cases has paid ourselves for a student, so we've tried to be conscious of students who may need some financial support. So students register online through BU, and I'm actually the person that facilitates them, and I'm an official proctor for the course, so I can see their grades, and I go through in power school and monitor their grades in BYU and put the grades into power school. I'm in email contact with the students. They come by my office for questions or help. I had two students come by today with a question because the end of the term is coming up. So I'm sort of overseeing and facilitating. And then they do have a final exam that's mailed to me, so I'm the proctor for that exam. I mean, speaking is the one piece that you feel like you would miss in an online course, and it really is, but they try to compensate. They have what they call a conversation cafe, so students have to log in and have a conversation or for American Sign Language with having a Skype conversation to show their signing skills with them, but that's the logistical explanation. Are they doing it in the library? Oh, sure, sorry. They're working independently on the course. They are allowed to use the language lab. A number of them prefer to use the media center, so it's not a course that attendance is taken for. They work on their own, but I'm kind of monitoring them on a weekly basis. Some students do it at home, and that's fine as long as they're working about an hour a day on the course. And, you know, I would say I am thinking of one student who had some other issues and wasn't able to complete the course, but I think all of our students have done it. Thank you. Sure. A couple of things. First off, in that Latin assessment with the gladiatoria, was that a pass-fail? No, I meant, I'm kidding. If they survived the bump, that's all. The second part, I just want to share with you in the military language course, there's total immersion and it begins with their first day in the dining room. They learn quickly. Sure. Thank you for everything you've done. No problem. Mr. Tillman. So the 98% all taught in the line, how do you measure that? So the National Guidelines 90%. So how do you measure it? It's a 48-minute class. It's 47 minutes, right? So that's a good question. So people get confused. I don't mean to get too into the pedagogy here, but if you get confused, what does 90% mean? So 90% does not mean that I'm kind of timing myself and maybe if I translate a little bit here and there in English, I'm still like 90% of the time in French, that's okay. It means being conscious about when you're choosing to use, and purposeful about when you're choosing to use English. Because there's that 10% that you say, okay, you could use English. So the times that it's appropriate to use English in a foreign language classroom are referring to the goal, having students set goals for themselves. I mean, that type of thing. Even sometimes assessment prompts because the purpose of the assessment prompt is to kind of motivate and get the student engaged. That might be a time where it's appropriate to use English. So really, if you walk into the classroom, maybe you, and a lot of the teachers are at 100%, I will just say that, that they just don't want to speak English anymore. But what might be, and which is good, they want just the kids, even Spanish, that's it. But what might be appropriate is that the beginning of first five minutes, I review the goal with you. I review the agenda. I ask if there's any questions. And they say, okay, now the rest of the class, up until the last five minutes, is 100% in French or Spanish. And then at the last five minutes, we reflect, okay, did we meet our goals? How do you think we did? So those are when English is being purposefully used and thoughtfully. So not for, as Dr. Brody mentioned, it's important to avoid. So I'm going to talk to my son all in Spanish now that I know it. So that's it. You know, I was, I took, I know you're fluent in Spanish. I know. But I took Spanish years ago in college. And then when I went to south, when I went to Peru, I'm interested in the gender improvement in Peru. I was there about five years ago. I don't know how much it's improved, but okay, I'll take the study for what it says. And that's in one of the classes, which is all in Spanish. This whole thing I had to do for eight weeks. The inflections and the way they would talk, what was the word you used? Cognates? The teaching methods? Body language? So in one class, I was yawning. And so I'll never forget how, that's why I learned the word bostezando because she made fun of me in the whole class. I forgot it again. I never forgot it. It was actually a good way to learn the word. That's the total physical response. Total physical response. You get right in my face. And then I figured out what bostezando meant. You figured it out, problem solving skills. I had limited. I was limited. I made progress. Thank you. Mr. Cardin. I wanted to ask about the sixth grade programs. There was a different program. Then we went through the budget crisis. That was changed to just like a survey program where they went through different languages over the year. And then last year it was changed to they get to pick a language. And they only do that language for two days every other day, I guess. But then in seventh grade they can pick it. Basically they start all over again. So how does that work? Why do we do it that way? Is it only because of budget? Yeah, it's been a couple of years. It wasn't last year. I think it was at least two or possibly three. We have gone through a few different models with the sixth grade. When I came in it was a different model. We tried what's called the exploratory model which is problematic for a number of reasons. And then we said, you know what? We're just going to start the language. So the current model we have is students choose a language in sixth grade. And then they study it every other day is the way that we have the current program. At the end of the year we do give the students a choice of switching. So they're not officially... I wouldn't say that they're starting over in seventh grade so we've got around 75% of the students that stick with their language but there's a couple that want to switch and the reason we did it this way is because we do have transfer students who might come in. We have a number of students that don't take a language in sixth grade because they're in academic support classes so they can be exclusive. So let's say 75% of the kids in the Spanish class took it in sixth grade and then you've got a few students that are new into the course. So yes, there's a review at the beginning of the year in the seventh grade but because the bulk of the students have had the language before you can go fairly quickly through it and it actually brings up the level of those students who may not have had the language last year. So we're trying to strike a balance that's not a totally slow so there is, again, it's a review but it's a fairly quick review that brings the students up and we've tried to plan, it's not entirely possible because you're beginning the language you're going to be repeating certain topics but we've tried to think of different things that might happen in sixth that would happen then in the seventh but that's the structure of the program currently. So it's just a challenge when we're trying to find, we want to be inclusive so if it were 100% of the kids were taking it all year and we knew that was it, we could be stricter about that but that's the balance we've tried to strike. Well I'm going to ask the obvious question which is about Gibbs so we'll have a new school in a couple of years and so potentially the opportunity for a new model do you have any thoughts about what you might recommend? Well so yes Dr. Bodie and Dr. Chesson I've been talking a lot about what we could potentially do at the Gibbs so we haven't made any final decision we've been thinking about some different scenarios I think what's important for me I think Arlington really should be proud of the diverse language offerings that we have this is actually if you look at other districts you might find two languages and the fact that we've got four in the middle and five in the high school is really I think a point of pride for this town at the same time we're able to do that because we've got some larger schools so we've got a mid-sized high school we're able to do this we have enough students that are interested that we can offer a range of languages the middle school has been fairly large so we've been able to pull off four languages if we're moving to a smaller model with the Gibbs which is what's going to be happening it becomes really challenging to keep that high level of diversity with all four languages so I think I hope we're going to find a balance where we can keep some of the linguistic diversity in our program while also recognizing the constraints around you know the smaller school the staffing the scheduling constraints and so on so I think that's I hope the direction we're moving in with our ultimate program is not made but that's sort of some of our preliminary thinking okay great thanks actually one more question I've been asking everyone so you've said a little bit about how you feel that foreign language has evolved over the last 10, 15 years where do you see it going in the future so where do you see us or Arlington evolving in the next 5 to 10 years you know there's really I've mentioned the word proficiency a lot tonight proficiency movement afoot it's something we've been talking about when I meet with other teachers from other districts or other department heads you know you ask the question what is a one what is a two it's sort of arbitrary there's a lot of discussion in other districts about that I'm participating in as well and really questioning can we refocus our courses to really have a proficiency based model getting a novice high and now you can move into the intermediate low group that's something that needs a lot of thought it's a complicated change it's just a very different program structure than the one that not just we're accustomed to in Arlington but really every school I'm familiar with has so students can move at their own level you're saying which is exciting but presents it's just a very different structure for a language going so in an ideal world when you've hit novice high you can test out and move into the intermediate low and some students I said that the intermediate can take a long time some students are much quicker maybe they already speak Portuguese at home and they can whip right through the Spanish up to the advanced level so do they really need to go through level 2 level 3, level 4 could they move more quickly but that's just not the structure we have right now I've been thinking about and I've had conversations about but I don't think we're quite there to make that kind of a radical shift in the structure of our program but perhaps coming here and telling us about the program and we've learned a lot it's really a pleasure to speak about a program and I appreciate as well the support of the school committee and the administration in letting us run such a great program so thank you very much okay so we have sort of an open discussion about school committee priorities for the budget and actually when we start Dr. Alice Nampi do you want to sort of introduce this topic or is there something that budget can say at this point I guess I can talk about what budget what happened at our budget subcommittee meeting because it may have some pertinence to this so we reviewed the current revised ask document which unfortunately I'm not seeing on novice and we'll make sure that it gets to you guys tomorrow well I guess yeah tomorrow okay but we reviewed that we reviewed the expectations for funds and what all we're going to have and the bottom line is that we have even less money than we thought that we did which we'll hear more from Ms. Johnson later right now the difference between what we're going to get and our kind of things that we have to fund the salary increases and step in line all of that leaves about $120,000 so we also did some discussion of is there anywhere else we could free up some money and one of the ways that we are in discussion about is the possibility of using some of it so over the past five years or so we've been taking our circuit breaker money and keeping it until the next year and then spending it we're discussing whether since next year we're going to be getting a much larger amount of circuit breaker money assuming that reimbursements are the same and everything next year we're going to be getting a lot more because we're spending a lot more this year we're discussing whether we could take some of that extra circuit breaker money and use it in FY18 it certainly has small amounts of risk because anytime we decrease our padding we're more exposed if anything happens and can you explain our usual practice then would not be to touch that money until our usual practice would not be to touch that money until FY19 and prepare something that would say using some of it now and then sort of paying it back to ourselves over the next few years so that eventually we're back at the same not touching it at all we've asked Ms. Johnson and she's asked the appropriate staff member to get us a better estimate of how much circuit breaker money we would expect assuming reimbursements and stuff and the first thing is to have an understanding of what the amount of money that we're talking about is my back of the envelope calculation would say around $400,000 extra than this year but that's a very rough not knowing much details and making guesses Ms. Johnson has put it at $200,000 and I mean that's her back of the envelope so we're talking about the possibility of being able to supplement that whole $120,000 with perhaps 100 to 300 dish but again this is all we just started the discussions we haven't got the numbers and is this I know that last time we spoke there was a discussion of sort of reserving a couple hundred thousand for possible increases in special ed costs that's already built in that's already built in so we're still making that assumption that that amount is being reserved I'm sorry I couldn't hear what you said so last time there was a recommendation by Ms. Johnson to save about $200,000 and not spend it for the possible increase of special ed costs next year so that's built into the base budget going forward okay so that's kind of the framework to give you an idea we'll know it's going to probably be a week or two before we have even the estimate of things so maybe at the next meeting we'll have a better idea and we can discuss because this is our idea it's everyone has to agree to it and I know there are people who are not in favor of it but we're concerned that there's big needs in the schools and that this is not the best time to be sitting on big pots of money if we feel it's not absolutely necessary right so why don't we if people want to comment on that now let's do that first and then let's go around and talk about what people's priorities would be for that limited amount that would be left that's one thing we are also we being the central office are looking into the FY17 budget closely we are not there yet in terms of what recommendations we would make for some reductions that is one of our goals too is to be able to free up some money going into FY18 as well and as we work on that over the next few weeks we will be presenting the superintendent's budget will be going to Swifties at the end of the month and not be presented until the February 9th but I think by the time we get to January 26 we will have a much better idea as to what those numbers will be just a question our budget going forward with all the concerns we have we will be entering negotiations with the staff next year is that something looking ahead that we have to be concerned with I don't know what our numbers will be I understand but we are looking at a budget right now none of us are happy with what we got I just want to be prepared for everything going forward it doesn't have to be answered tonight so I have to say one of our issues is that we have had a larger increase this year than we had last year in terms of number of students that we paid a year later we are getting paid for the slightly smaller increase from last year but having to serve the larger amount of students this year and that is just an issue but okay Mr. Stillman so I have a couple of questions is the process in which you are going to be evaluating possible savings and your assessment of FY17 going to be complete by the end of the month or when are you going to think it is it will need to be by the end of the month you will complete your analysis let's say you might find savings of X and then this process gives us another X Y thank you and then what I have to cry in terms of triple X may not be the same number okay so in other words when are we going to have so the meeting on the before the budget goes to Swiftie we are not going to have a chance to know what the actual number is so let's say that number is a half a million that is optimistic say it is 350,000 we are not going to know that for sure we are going to give you the proposed budget on the night and then you guys have at it then it becomes your budget so it gets printed but it is not it is yours to do it as you will at that point but I would like to say and I speak only for myself in this I would hope that we can dig enough out of the FY17 budget so that we make that not a good option I hate that option passionately so if I can find enough money to meet our top priorities without doing that I would much prefer to do so I think circuit breaker is a movable feast and part of the deficit that I enjoyed so much when I came here was due to circuit breaker mistake and how it was budgeted I just don't think you should ever go down that road again if we can meet the top priorities of the senior administrators without doing that we absolutely should I ask just one can I get a better flavor for the whole discussion so I look at it as a time timing issue so we've had this increase this year under the circuit breaker formula by the state they fund you a year in a rears because they can't fund you in advance because they don't know what your expenses are going to be so you spend the money and then a year later you get reimbursed for it we've adopted a very conservative approach where we actually wait an additional year so we've had this big increase and we have to wait two years to get reimbursed for that and that creates a crunch over that two year period so what we're suggesting is shorten it so that the crunch is only one year and then we would ideally get back on this process because there are some benefits of having a firm number on the circuit breaker in your budget over time another maybe three or four years out we'd be back on track assuming stabilization and not another jump that we'd have to deal with again so to me it's a timing issue and we did have that one problem that was a crisis situation where circuit breaker was cut to 40% and nobody reacted and I think first of all we're all much more aware of that we're also in a much more stable environment and we'll know by the end of the month a pretty good idea of what our circuit breaker is going to be so for fiscal 2018 based on the governor's budget not going to be below that so I think we're on very solid ground we're talking about $300,000 at the most and we have some dire needs we can't do some of the things do without some of the things that are required I mean if we get 80 or more students at Thompson and Hardy we have to add teachers at both of those schools in kindergarten so I'm not talking about adding vice principals or funding sort of nice to have I'm talking about these core necessities and I think the way we've done the timing is conservative and nice to have but it's not something that we can live with this year and so just in terms of people know the timing the governor's budget is coming out in when do we know early February early February last Wednesday of January okay okay you'll get a sense and you'll be able to check with Desi because you'll know what the governor has written into the budget for the circuit breaker line item the thing you won't know is the denominator how much claims from school districts will be there so that's sort of the variable that plays out but there's a reasonable expectation or reasonable trends to get a budget number a percentage of your reimbursement that you're likely to get at this point Desi's very willing to do that so I do think that taking all the circuit breaker out and putting it in reserve for another year is an assumption that we might get zero circuit breaker and we're being defensive now we're not going to get 100% of the circuit breaker we're not going to get zero we're going to get somewhere in between and if we take a very conservative approach at what that circuit breaker number is going to be I see no reason why we shouldn't be able to meet a budget gap particularly because we've got an extraordinary increase in our out of district payments that are generating more circuit breaker that we need to reimburse ourselves for right right so actually just a clarification question is this money then is put in a reserve account it's in a stand alone grant account okay Ms. Starks so I'm wondering if we have done the analysis for like not just next year but the year after and the like do we know that it's going to get better or is it going to be tight like this for the next do we know that our budget situations can get better because we're talking like we're expecting more money in the next year and I don't understand why we think that so we know we're going to get that money right that's not a major chunk of money to depend on sorry I would just really like to see us before we do anything have that view I would like to know if we just get what we know the town we know what the town is going to give us we know what we're going to get I mean if we just make those assumptions do we know what it looks like I mean is it tight for the next 5 years 10 years I mean does it ever get any better or is this like now we have to be in this really like tight like we're not going to be able to do much for quite a while it's tight until we pass an over right or we pass the millionaire tax there's no certainty we have to negotiate with the town the long range planning committee has been looking at this and the numbers don't change until the over right which we're talking about and that's an assumption that's 19 but we don't know we're going to get an increase if there's an over right it could just be a that's what I want to know are we going to change the formula at that point I think that's not a the conversation is getting brought I mean I think you know so the long range planning we're in a conversation about whether an over right should take place in FY19 or FY20 there's a feeling on that committee that the increase is always 10% so it's going to be 10% we haven't gotten to a discussion about what that increase should be I think that's a conversation we should have and I think it should be a lot of public involvement in that because we need to know we actually need to operate the district so that's changing with the more students we have the problem is is that the infrastructure we have was based on many fewer students and now that we have more and more students the requests that we're getting are all infrastructure we can't support the students we have I'm not wedded to the 10% I don't feel like the 10% is the way you have to go we also know we have a building that we're going to have to staff we're getting looser I feel like what I see is our needs are growing and I don't see that we're going to have a lot of money year after year until we change how we're getting money and so that's what makes me nervous about doing this kind of thing if we're going to you know it just starts getting worse you're right I mean we can try and do what you're talking about but the bottom line is it's not going to get better until the formula is changed but we're coming to and we're coming to a point where we're going to need to discuss changing the formula because we're opening a new school because we're getting so many more students because the high school is going to be starting to be rebuilt and I would expect possibly changing its program of studies and stuff this is why we've been asking for the past couple years the staff to provide a really detailed needs analysis not just these are wants that we think you know the few wants that we think will drift to the top that we can fund we're trying to find out what the real needs are and then how much they are so that we have information that we can then go and use to build a case for this is what the funding of the schools needs to be another outside thing that's going on was I saw that that Senator Cheng Diaz has put in an amendment to try and get the foundation budget more fully funded and that would be an absolute godsend and only hope and push for that I mean a million dollar tax might help that so all of these things are kind of in the air if we use the extra money from the circuit breaker it does put off things for a year I don't think it makes us we're not talking about using beyond the chunk that would need to be fast forward to maintain the current services we're talking about kind of using that extra bit if we use beyond that then I think we'd be setting ourselves up to go into a crash later right it does mean that the next year we probably can't keep doing this forever but it gets us one more year and we don't have other funding services instead of sitting on it the bottom line is we can't the current funding formula in my opinion does not adequately staff our schools as we grow right we had that same I know it doesn't when we did it we added only teachers the infrastructure was also when the infrastructure started to we got what we could get yeah at the time right so I think it would be helpful to see a particular proposal out there to get real numbers and then what's the plan you said we might want to play it back I think it would be really useful to get that sort of on the table we need to get the estimate turning yeah by next meeting do we think we can discuss it will have to be it will be really helpful Mr. Cardin had something so for the agreement with everything I do think the formula is on the table going for an education only override should be on the table something we need to discuss next year if we are getting pushback on a town wide override that meets our needs so all that could be on the table this particular problem though is special ed related and we had a large increase this year and we do get reimbursed for it the timing is a year later and our policy puts the timing two years later so that creates a two year period where we're making up the money from elsewhere this year we're making it up from our reserve fund next year we don't have a place to make it up so if we can dip into that other reserve fund and move that money forward that's what just solves part of that one little problem with this sudden increase in special education if it happens again in two years then we have the same problem but if it stabilizes hopefully then it's not and we can make up that money more gradually so again we can have a more definite proposal once we know the number and hopefully it will make sense to everyone okay Mr. Hayner I like what you're presenting I see it going forward I'm nervous about taking from Peter to pay Paul so it's very important to have the facts and numbers for the next meeting thank you very much for all the work okay so I know we're over schedule but we haven't gotten to our main topic which is that we want to talk about our priorities as school committee members and so I want to go sort of down the line and have each person sort of say we've heard from curriculum leaders, we've heard from other people and I want to sort of hear everyone's perspective so Mr. Cardin so without seeing an administration take on what they think are the priorities out of all of the priorities given that we may only have 300 or 400 or a thousand you know to me unfortunately we have to do what we've been doing in the past and that's filling the classroom teachers I think definitely at the middle school and the high school we definitely need to add teaching staff because we've been neglecting those we were able to add some from the sort of found money at the beginning of this year but those needs are definitely dire sort of the enhancement type things like the assistant principals unfortunately you're going to have to wait and then I think the administration has to have a discussion amongst themselves is the high school dean position more critical than some of the other curriculum materials that they want and I'm not sure where we fall on that as far as the elementary school principals I understand I hear what they're saying but before we made that investment even if we had the money before we made that investment I need a stronger case for that I would want to see more specifically what is the tipping point in other districts when they add an assistant principal I do know there are several other 400 student schools that don't have assistant principal that I'm familiar with so is it 500, is it 450 is there a tipping point what's typical what are those people specifically going to do I mean we've added social workers to every school to help address social emotional needs is there some other resource that we can add instead of having five assistant principals maybe there's sort of a floating assistant principal who can go in a school, go in each school one day a week or something else creative rather than adding spending half a million dollars a year on that need so that's sort of my rough thoughts Dr. Allison Appie I'll confess that I spent more time trying to figure out where to find money and I'm still working on it but I think honestly I'm not sure there's too much to look past filling class, putting teachers in front of classes because I think that's going to use up almost all of our money at the various levels and also making sure that we've got our special education needs funded although I think they've been doing a little bit better than maybe some of the other things if there is some amount extra I'm interested in the possibility of maybe doing one assistant principal at the highest the school that either has the highest population or the highest need because those aren't always the same even possibly part time doing it on a trial basis having some ideas of what questions are we going to ask as they do this and how can we find out if this is worthwhile or what the functionality is adding to the school so at the end of the year we'd have a better idea of yes this is a good thing we should be doing or no maybe we should look at adding another social worker or something I understand that the principals are feeling stretched and I feel like with the changes and the teacher evaluations that's added a lot to their workload plus the social emotional things that are going on with kids I can see that there is a stretch with growing the growing populations that they probably could use some more professional hands that can do evaluations or something but I don't see us being able to fund very many but I would wonder about doing some kind of a trial and looking at it as a trial and having a sense of how we're going to evaluate it at the year's end Mr. Sleepman the thing that resonated with me were the cries for help on the administrative and leadership level partly because that's my life in what I do leadership counts and having great principals is really an important part of having a great school and if we create a situation where it's impossible for these folks to do the job that we're paying them an extraordinary significant salary at we are losing from one of the most important things making a quality school doesn't mean that we need to add a second administrator per se but we should be looking through any kind of a method we can to really thoughtfully analyze what our principals are spending their days on are they being instructional leaders or are they doing administrative tasks and to find ways of removing those administrative tasks from the shoulders of the principals so they can focus on working with teachers working with families and doing the things that make a school great that only a principal can do Wallace Foundation funded a study and it was done mostly outside of Massachusetts I think entirely outside of Massachusetts of the school administration manager project and basically bringing in somebody to be the to do the administrative stuff in support of the principal to schedule the appointments to schedule to go hunt down a substitute lunch monitor to do all the kinds of things that principals need to do in a reactive manner that takes away from their time of being an instructional leader within the building so I would think that we really should think carefully about what kind of a model we can provide to clarify the support that's needed on the elementary principals and to provide them something that is going to make their quality of life better and enable them to do the job that we hired them to do the additional dean of the high school is very persuasive when the teachers come in and say we need another administrator that's sort of a 95th percentile kind of thing I think we should pay very careful attention to that I don't see us adding too much this year besides just sort of trying to stay where we're at right now in terms of providing level of service as possible but those are my thoughts I'm not being overly ambitious with this I think I think we have to I agree with what basically everybody said which is teaching and learning has to come first safety and health and then if there's anything left over I mean the administration I believe that the infrastructure is starting to really bear the strain of all the students that we have and wherever that need is greatest so it's a big job of prioritizing you know all of that where is it that the cracks are greatest we have to fill those first and then kind of hope that everyone else can hold on Mr. Heiner we've invested an awful lot of money time both administrative teachers wise on the new evaluation system over the past couple of years I fear that it has potentially going to fall apart on the strain on the principles especially at the elementary level I had a meeting today with Dr. Cheson to help me understand several things about teacher certification and evaluation just looking at that process for one teacher the amount of time a principal has to do with a professional teaching status teacher which is about half the time a brand new teacher is just horrendous and all it will take in the schedule of time and everything one disruption to call the principal for something that isn't unscheduled and that could have a ripple effect through the whole process and I can remember 30 years ago teachers being rehired because they did not have the support to improve themselves and they weren't improving and then all sorts of problems we have a wonderful staff we need to continue to keep that staff so my number one priority is finding a way to get them the assistance they need some school systems may not be a full time some have a half time teaching position half time administrative position just for the purpose of setting up time for evaluation every single day so that when those other needs calls that evaluator away that other person covers it in a creative way we have a very creative top administrative staff the problem is they find ways of doing things when we don't have the money and people expect us to continue doing the magic wand is wearing out Mr. Theowen I think it's been said that we have staff to enrollment so we have to have enough teachers to teach the children that are going to be in the school district next year at all levels I was very persuaded by our argument at the high school about the need for an extra dean having an extra dean in the high school provides support to teachers it allows it gives more it gives more support for teachers and it makes sure that they are able to do their jobs and focus on teaching and learning and not discipline on other issues and so there was a very persuasive case made for the dean that the staff has to make a decision about how high of a priority it is but having heard that I was persuaded by it and I thought it was well presented and I think it's the right way to go and I'll give you my thoughts so one thing I've heard from last few years from both teachers and administrators is how much time and how difficult it is to find substitute teachers I think it would be great if we could see that we don't have clear numbers about what that's going to cost us it would also be really helpful to and we've done this in the past to hire sort of permanent floating substitutes that we could then deploy as needed that we know we can rely on rather than each day trying to scramble and find people unfortunately I think this is we are a victim of the improving economy there are just fewer people desperate for those kind of jobs that we pay and that even a large bump might still leave problems and that's why I think it might be more helpful to hire somebody say you're here for a year, you're doing substitute teaching give them training on that matter one of the things I was very intrigued by is the Audison principal's suggestion that we do more training of our TAs is that something that I think that given that we can't pay as much as other districts if we can offer training to people that we can say listen this is a really good district to get your start in and we can provide a lot of oversight and a lot of training for you and that's something that might be extremely effective at a relatively minimal cost so those are things I've I do think that at some point in the future we want to hire half time assistant principals three for the district or something I was persuaded that the idea that this is a potential leadership channel we'll have people who could assume leadership positions if we need it besides also the use that they'd be in the day-to-day operation of the schools I don't know if we can afford it this year but I think it should be a high priority for us in future years Dr. Ready, do you want to say anything? Well we've been working on among all of the needs what are the top priorities and we've been on basically all of them though there are other ones as well that we really need to consider carefully as you heard tonight how much the world language department is recognizing technology and the one that we also heard and Jason Levy is here I forgot to recognize him but the teacher is want more technology support too and so there's that issue of desktop support there's the curriculum materials and certainly one of the things that Mr. Card mentioned that the middle school the high school hasn't had the FTE increases for staffing they need and that is coming to a point of necessity so that exists but then there's also the necessity when you get students at the elementary there's a certain limit to how many students you can put in a class so we're definitely staffing there so those are the biggies that we've also identified as well and keep trying to get even more trimmed out but the challenge is going to be we're going to certainly work on the revenue side of things and what the assumptions are and then we're going to have to match the priorities to that amount of money and I think that's going to be it is turning out to be a very difficult task and it will continue to be but that's our job to do that and so you'll have a chance we will do that over the next couple of weeks and then you'll have a chance to weigh in as well as we go forward with all of this I don't know if we want to pass this on and see if there's Johnson or Dr. Chesson certainly we have been assessing as a staff and Dr. Borty has summarized those I think the one other are actually the two other things that I need to touch a base on are that we've put a great deal of money both from the operation budget and the capital budget into technology and we're putting a lot of technology into the schools but the amount of support that we have staff to help teachers learn to use that technology is far less than we need and so we're going to have to make at least a little bit of movement on that otherwise we're just going to be putting good money after bad and the other thing is when we look at the interventions that we're trying to put in place at the elementary schools half the time we can't get all the students that we need to get because those students are not accessible to us because of the schedule and that schedule is sorely constrained by the limit of the specialist teachers at the elementary schools and we're not able to get teachers together we're not able to get students together in groups because of the schedule we have some students that may be missing parts of the core curriculum in very few cases but still any case is too much because of the specialist schedule so those are two other things that I think we're going to have to look at. Ms. Johnson do you want to add you don't have to we also know the recommendations have been made to increase our learning specialist at the elementary and we see that it is something necessary as we work as a district to narrow this achievement cap to make sure that all students are able to be successful and one of the ways to do that would be to create more support for teachers in the classroom with special education teachers last year we made some inroads in that where we had now a couple of schools with three learning specialists so that they can focus on only two grades rather than three but that's not across the district so that also remains out there as another I think you know when we talk about the budget drivers being out of district tuition students don't go from a general ed classroom they go through special education and then out of district so I mean the other piece as I would say is the priorities we continue to talk about the demands of social emotional needs on students and we're talking about the demands that creates on principles and you know we have limited funds to do very little with I do think the director of social emotional learning whatever you want to call that role really looking at the whole district and building the capacity of individuals within the schools to meet those needs could be para training it could be staff training it could be building safe and supportive schools teams I think again you know thinking about what will affect the largest amount and get the most out of so that's where I replace my priority great thanks I just want to ask a question the program that we had I don't know what it's called now it used to be called Milbrook and we were talking about probably expanding that into the middle school and stuff are we looking to increase the funding in that to make those things happen I'd like to make let me rephrase that I don't need we're on time now I'd like to make that even a higher priority I think than what I said before only based on the fact that I think that saves us an awful lot of money in the long run I'm being very materialistic about it in that potential aspect of it we're meeting on this very topic next week about what to do we also don't know what the effect yet are going to be the new regulations that kicked in so that's another unknown and another unknown is where Milbrook is going to be next year the whole special education thing may change this is Supreme Court case going right now if they up the ante on that that's going to have a phenomenal I'm I don't even go there thank you okay so I know we're over schedule but I think this is an important discussion to have and to have fully next we're moving on to the monthly financial oh we need a motion you're right I'm sorry we need a motion to vote the number that we are receiving from the town so do you want to read it? so move that the school committee accepts the proposed town appropriation amount of $60,928,485 dollars for the FY 18 school department budget motion by Mr. Steeleman seconded by Mr. Hayner any discussion Dr. Allison Ampey? I'm just going to make the statement that we've had discussions here before that this year we recognize that we have a lot of unmet needs that we will not be able to meet with the budget but we are choosing not to try and push our we're going to work within the number that we're giving the number we're getting okay this here great Mr. Crudden so I'm going to abstain because I think this process is still the wrong way to do things I understand that the town manager needs to put something in his budget but for us to agree to that without actually getting our own budget together first just seems backwards to me so I'm going to abstain okay so attempt to vote all in favor of the motion please say aye aye so anybody opposed no and abstentions so we have two abstentions Mr. Crudden and Mr. Hayner and the rest is an aye great so monthly financial reports John hi as you know from the memo after digging down deeper into the overage in longevity I discovered a completely nasty surprise I guess the best thing that can be said is I'm not handing it off to my successor that I found it before then we rolled in a lot of teachers and the way longevity works it's not as easy to capture out of the payroll there's no real easy way to capture it we had been with the exception of my very first year when we were in deficit every other budget year our teacher longevity had hung around 200,000 plus or minus maybe 10 it was very static and for FY 18 it's going to be up to 360,000 and that change didn't happen overnight it happened over the course of 16, 17, 18 I didn't do the end of the year report because I was out so I didn't catch the change in 16 and I didn't see it coming when I did 17 so we caught it now that's the best that can be said and just for the public these are for teachers who are with us for how many years in their 13th year they become 13th year they become eligible for a and it goes up in gradations over other periods of time this is a footnote I think it also speaks very loudly to the fact that teachers are staying in Arlington and they stay here for a lot of very positive reasons once again victim of our success yeah Miss Johnson I'm not great in the numbers but this will not go down it will increase for a period of years unless a lot of teachers don't get they decide to leave you're going to see upticks in 1920 and 21 unless the numbers turn really ugly okay so other points you want to make before we open up to questions no okay questions comments about monthly reports I had a series of questions I managed to lose it all I'll talk to you okay yes I don't actually I've looked at them but to clarify again I think I asked this last time the variance the $821,000 variance we're making that up how I'm still very conservatively projecting but there are some lines that we can really pick up some savings based on what I've seen so far so I think some of it we will make up with savings I think the majority of the special ed out of district overage we can make up with the reserves we have ourselves and the $325,000 that's with the town so I think we will close this gap I think the gap will narrow assuming I don't kick over any stones and find any other ugly surprises like that I think it will narrow as we approach the end of the year if snow stays good and all the other things happen I don't think we'll end anything like that big if things continue as they have started that's what I wanted to clarify, thank you is this our your last meeting with us? I will be here at the end of January and I will be here in February to discuss the budget then I'll be done great okay school calendar first reading everything is on there but some crucial stuff is do you want to walk us through it? yes I would be happy to do that eventually we'll probably be able to get to a multiple year but right now it's very important at least in January have parents have a very good idea as to when school will start and when school will end because there's a lot of planning that goes on and then at this point what we're going to be looking at are the major parts of the calendar so we will be revisiting the calendar again later and hopefully earlier this spring when we're able to identify the secondary early release days and conferences and so forth but for right now what are you looking at what is remaining the same for next year is that school will start on the Tuesday after labor day and you can see what the holidays and the no school days are that are the holidays being state or federal holidays and then where there have been some no school days such as the one that's in September and there is one again later on in March the last day pardon? yes and then well I was going to come back to that in one second but since you brought it up let me bring it up if you notice you put the teacher professional actually it's all staff professional on Wednesday November 1st earlier this year I received a petition from the 5th grade it was actually a petition sent to me about I don't know four days before Halloween asking if we could change the professional day to the day after Halloween and had very interesting perspectives the teachers would be happier we're a little crazy with the sugar we're tired the next day all of that and so there wasn't anything that could be done at that point once you set the calendar I explained that to the calendar set but I said that we would definitely take that into consideration next year next year is a year that we can do that no elections so when we have major elections which we would consider major state elections and federal elections the I've had an agreement for a number of years now with the town hall it's just too many people to manage onsite on the off years and we've done this before we've had professional day at the day after Halloween and I would strongly support this proposal did you tell them that did you communicate to the 5th graders I told them that I was going to make this recommendation and if we vote this I will let them know that this happened if that's our decision yeah well let me go back to the last day so the last day of school I should say another way of saying that is the 180th day of school on our calendar we are obliged by state regulations to actually have five snow days built into the calendar so technically for the purpose of planning the last day of school is June 25th in fact it could be being later than that depending on how many snow days we have fortunately in the last decade I think we've had only one year that we've come to five so it's a pretty good chance that we will not and next so but in terms of planning what that means is that parents and teachers need to be conscious of the 25th when they're setting up summer jobs or camps or whatever unfortunately that means that you're rolling around a weekend and the 25th is a Monday so can I have a question about the EA the early all that's only if that's the last day right so if the 18th turns out not to be the last day that will not be an early race I'm not sure we should put on the calendar that way because it looks like it's a permanent it looks like that is no matter what happens so even if we finish on the 25th we're having an early release on the 18th you can have an early release day the teachers working the rest of the day no technically yes you answered my question they're having grades in that's fine I feel like that's confusing for parents to read that as a permanent part of the calendar let me see what we did last I don't remember that last year but I'm not sure let me see how we can fix that because you have this little note saying last day of school is 1130 dismissal we could do that that information is available to them I know you're not done to say but Mr. Hanner do you have something quick real quick I'm assuming we have an early release day on the very first day of school is that something that we can I can't imagine coming in for I don't know nice way to start when we were in negotiations about this we talked about that issue and we decided that for consistency it's just better to just keep it regardless just keep it early release so then why is there not an early release on April 24th well there should be that's a mistake we'll have to get that one because I was going to say if you were going to take one off you might want to make it the first day of school and I can see that we don't have the whole issue of bolding here alright so we'll fix that another piece here and this is some discussion it involves the day before the holiday break which is Friday the 22nd right one of the things that we saw this year on Friday is enormous absences I'm not saying that this would this would make a difference but in fact it may encourage more it's only a half day I understand that in fact several weeks before the break thing maybe we should just change it but it was just too confusing things like after school care you don't understand all the ripple effects that involve people when you make a calendar change so you live with what you make as your judgments at the time but you're making this change 12 months early right no this is not if you made the decision going forward to not have that as a school day sufficient notification to the community the only other part would be for you to reschedule whatever you had planned for the teachers that afternoon right you're saying that there's sufficient time for everybody to understand it the only early release day you can have and allow everybody to go home under the law is the day before Thanksgiving got it Desi expects the schools to be functioning for a full day whether the kids are there or not on the early release day other than that one day of course this year there's a slightly different ish I mean it's not quite as bad as the year we had because of where Christmas is located for people to celebrate that I'm just based on our discussion for discussion at the table got it yeah Christmas was a Sunday this year right and so actually Lowell was closed on Friday a lot of schools were so and this time it's a Monday there were a lot of folks around on a road on Friday just in terms of going about doing what I'd normally be doing around here the highways are packed and people were traveling I think with Christmas on a Monday I don't think we'd see that I don't think Lowell will end up closing on Friday the 22nd right so I think the pressures to get some place are going to be a little different in 2017 than it was last year yeah that's true I don't see the need for this I think that in terms of the climate and the way families responded in Lowell this year it was a real benefit to them to have the 23rd off but I think the 22nd is pushing it yeah and to the point it may encourage more and so I don't think this we want to do because when we have school we have teachers go through there right they continue with their curriculum so one of the things as a counterpoint and part of the problem is when you have the full week before that vacation so if it falls the way the holiday falls you only have four days or three days or two days then there's not quite so much pressure but when the kids are there for the full week and they're antsy and they're expecting all this stuff and that Friday was hard in the elementary schools in particular so I actually support I'd like to hear what your principals say do you support making that a half day especially for the elementary schools if not system-wise okay so two more things one is kindergarten this year let me remind you what we did this year right we began we've tried different ways that we do screening and for a couple of years we tried screening the first week of school the suggestion was that this wasn't working as well as we would have hoped in part because it didn't give anybody an opportunity to adjust classes so we started last year doing screening in June and that worked much better however there were because there was a lot of students enrolling during the summer in fact there are a lot of kindergarten students enrolling that number of schools were faced with a fairly large number most said that it worked but nonetheless it was a little bit of a strain so we've had some discussion with the elementary principals as to how if we want to change and what we've done this year so let me remind you what happened on Tuesday kindergarten students started school but they had just an open house parents and students came they staggered that so you'd have groups of ten coming in other schools they did not do it that way that's entirely their choice and then on the next two days which were full days half the kindergarten came and then the second day the other half came and when we got to Friday it was a full day all there were a lot of positives to that except for the parents that had the first day didn't like the gap till they went all so that was an issue which we've been discussing so another idea we had and I would like to say we thought we'd like this but now we're rethinking it a little bit that maybe the Tuesday and the Wednesdays would be half the class one day half the class the other combine it with an open house but have both days one o'clock dismissal because Tuesday already is but for kindergarten having that on Wednesday so they're comparable and then have full days Thursday, Friday since talking about it on Monday there's been some conversation going on in emails that well we didn't think of this we didn't think of that so we're going to revisit this next week with the kindergarten steering committee and the principals on the 20th so that when I can let you know what the recommendation is before we even come into the next meeting but the other part is it actually goes to your comment about substitutes one of the struggles we had this year I should say in June is getting adequate coverage so that the teachers and the people supporting them, specialists we have enough subs to cover the the days that we're going to do the screening so I'm going to come up with a different model to do it next year this coming June but for the following June 18 we want to propose something to think about having kindergarten and a day and a half earlier than the rest of the students and then do the screening in those two days now there's disadvantages there in terms of families and after school care and so one of the things we might do after school as to whether they could accommodate them that's going to be sketchy I have to admit and some schools have the space to do it and some schools don't so I think what we will do is come back with the proposal for kindergarten but the thing that kindergarten parents need to know for next year is that they will be starting school that first week and what the model will be for a later time but they'll probably know the end of this month I think what works for teachers and administrators is the right call but I think parents need to know as soon as possible I understand now the last thing involves all of you when Karen put this on there's a lot of conflicts with your pattern of second and fourth on Thursdays for meetings so what she did was basically put on what fit that pattern to second and fourth and if it was a conflict there's no school committee meeting so it gives you the opportunity to decide what you want to do in the months where all these conflicts occur so that's your job tonight so basically we are required by laws to have 20 meetings a year there's only 16 on the calendar so we have to find a way to add four now we can cancel a meeting later on we just have to put it on the calendar as a possibility in my mind I see an easy way to add two but adding more is not as easy yeah we could add on December 7th like we did this year so double that up and not go into the third week which I think is just too hard so I think we do we need to in December because that's our budget presentations one possibility that I was thinking is that we can do December 7th and 21st rather than the 14th I'm thinking that last week gets more crazy because of the holidays because the holidays are coming that's why I'm thinking do 7 and 14 7 and 14 I mean I think we absolutely need so and then what about November right and so then November and I think it was February still have only one June has only one and so we could add one and that's another easy add to add one in June that might be cancelled if we've decided that the business is completed so I we should definitely add one in February because there's always budget stuff that we can't seem to resolve anyway so that seems to be easy it's either the first of the 15th whatever people want I would say earlier is probably better given the amount well the first we have three in a row then that's true just pointing that out I think the 15th might be better okay well I would say that we should do our homework and come back the next meeting the first read but we're throwing out ideas now we're not deciding it we've also got in November we don't hold a meeting if it conflicts with the annual MASC conference I don't have the date for that right and I just went on the website and I don't see the November date for that so November we could do 16 and 30 these are placeholders remember all we're doing is scheduling them yeah they're placeholders when the MASC issue comes up we cancel it I think we could find out when that is I think November 16 and 30 that's the month we'll do the superintendent's evaluation yeah we need two meetings we've been able to streamline it in the past the first time we did it under the new process we gave it a whole night and only took half the night correct me if I'm wrong the rest of you it's only taken about half of a meeting usually something to remember I like the idea of the 16th and 30th in November I think that's I know I have a conflict already on the 30th that's the case conference okay eventually going to be right right we could pass the budget that night we'll do the evaluation that night we could do 9th and 16th then for that for November and I think an easy thing to add is the 21st of June or do 7th and 21st because 7th and 21st would work then we don't have any double up and and then if the 21st seems like we're done then we're done then we're done we have a party or something okay so September and October are as is yep just saying November the 9th and the 16th yep in December the 7th and 14th yep wait what did we say in November 9th and 16th I'm guessing that the 9th will be the conference for the veterans day yeah they will they'll avoid it they'll push it up for earlier I think for the public when was it this year it was before veterans day so I'll bet it's going to be the 2nd and 3rd so we can shift things around these are placeholders but placeholders make sense so November 7th and 14th January is fine in February the 15th yep at the 15th what about doing 1st and 15th in February so we talked about that 1st and 15th would work if it was we were talking at 1st and 8th there would be 3 meetings in a row what if we just bump it I think that would work what do you mean bump it so change it around so do 1st and 15th rather than so get rid of the 8th 8th and 15th do the 1st and the 15th so it's the 1st and the 3rd Thursday instead of the 2nd and the 4th it sort of feels like it would be easier if it was in general the 1st and the 3rd I know right that would be less problematic for us it seems like all of those would work send that to policy we can change the policy there's always a 3rd week oh that's why that doesn't work that way if policy had it as 19 it would be easier if we need to you can suspend a policy you don't necessarily have to change a policy for one year no no I know these are things that have to be on the calendar I scheduled a 20 and then cancel it when I first came on board we scheduled two June meetings every year and I think we only had one year I don't even think we had that June we're having the 7th and the 21st so also moving those also moving that instead of the 14th and so that should get us to 20 and we should all look at it and see if there's any other conflicts on 2nd read we'll have maybe we'll move things around again but we'll just sort of throw that as a proposal so when we get to 2nd read what else do we get do we start getting conferences at that point or no not yet take it longer well no I don't think we'll have I don't think we'll have the well we'll try on that the early release date that might be a little soon but maybe we can try for April March or April this year to get that the next piece of it done and I urge communication that if at all possible the truth of the matter is it's not sometimes the principles it's music because they just schedule the concerts that happens as well they have to go through the building don't they have to go through the building principle to schedule the night I mean this year I missed both the middle school and the high school we'll put it out sort of curriculum nights nice to meet the teachers this is why it will take a lot of time to figure out conference nights once we get the structure in here then we can start putting all that in so we're going to de-next rate the next meeting okay great okay so we are about hour off well yeah so next on the agenda is discussion of the job description for the chief financial director as a sort of hinted at tonight is leaving us for another position I think February 10th so we are searching for a replacement and we wanted to talk in the school committee meeting about the description that was written and sort of tweak it or have just a discussion about it so let me open that up to people who want to Mr. Hayner the description that we got a copy of ended up having my edits on it I just want to let you know that so I'll start it I'll start it down under necessary knowledge skills and abilities I just suggested in fact I think it just said it says be nice to everybody is what it was going to it left out the administrators the school administration so I suggested add school committee members or a statement just regarding administration just to go along friendly thing and then down further under essential duties and responsibilities on the second page prepare monthly financial reports for school committees that was left out it just had principles and department heads and down further it talked about the budget presentations it said bi-monthly does that mean once every two months or does that mean every two weeks I have no problem changing I just wanted it more clear that's all two meetings a month well I mean I have no you can just say it's regular school committee that was all regularly scheduled grammatically it may be two meetings a month but it lends itself to misconfusion a little bit further down it talked about and other committees as needed I just want to know who determines that needed as a former president of a union when it said as needed I always said it was the teacher's need not the administration's needs so just a little clarification there and that's the only things that I wanted things on Mr. Slickman the other thing that I saw and I pass this by our CFO and lol the Massachusetts association of public purchasing official certification is something you can only get as an incumbent so that we should have it eligible for or make it preferred to have it a requirement as an incumbent meaning you've already been a financial officer in the job in order to get that okay so you can get that when you're in the job and it's not that difficult to do but you can't get it until you're an incumbent you can't do that previous to taking a job so to have that is eligible for or restricts our field we could potentially screen out people who we'd like to hire that's a good point Mr. I think I'm not really sure how to do it but one of the things I know that was sticking point with Miss Johnson I want to be very clear about how many evening meetings every week every month we expect this person to go to I do not think as needed is clear enough I think that we need to you know there's going to be two school committee meetings a month that you're going to have to go to you have to attend long range planning you have to attend all school building meetings you have to and really spell out exactly what that is because I don't think or give a range expected range exactly you know but something that we're going to hold to because I feel like a lot of as needed and I'm like but we required her to go to all of those and that was a lot of meetings and we need to be clear actually I have I sort of in a way had an opposite reaction to this so like what is our goal our goal is to accurately convey the job and get the best possible person we can get and I worry that having such an incredibly detailed job description could scare somebody off and I want to make sure that this job description is sort of in line with what other districts are doing but I think I just worry that it raises red flags if you have a job description that's so much more detailed than other districts are doing and so I don't know the answer to that but I this has to be I would hope that in the contract that we have that it references job description and if you don't have that it's not going to be in it and I don't I think this I don't see this as being I defer to Rob I want to know what other districts are doing all our job descriptions right down to our administrative clerks our details on what their education what their skill level is coming in what their expectation in the job is and usually at the very end and it says all other things that the superintendent and we also want to build in some flexibility so that if things shift around a little bit the top administrator the superintendent you have all the detail that Ms. Stocks just asked the superintendent has the discretion at times to say it's going to be a meeting that you don't need to come to tonight and you can pass on it but if it's clearly out there the person has the expectation that they may be asked to come on this basis there's no problems Dr. Alice Nampy can you Mr. Spiegel explain what this job description will be used for is it the basis of the contract or is it posted in the thing or is it supplied to the candidate as they request it it would be in the posting so it would I would usually our job descriptions are posted either on school spring or the other places where we would advertise this position we would advertise a little more broadly in the Mass Municipal Association MASBO some other organizations to broaden the search to people who are looking specifically for financial and municipal government jobs in addition to just people who school spring is really targeted school jobs we will post there but we'll also post on the other places so we usually post this as the job description that is posted it could be referenced in the contract as well it can be something that is obviously once there the person if we are successful in hiring someone they have a copy of their job description so that's for all of those purposes yes do we have to post this for the job I mean I know we have to explain to the person what the requirements are but does that have to be in the ad right as opposed to the contract for example I'm just some ads have sometimes it has to be condensed depending on some of the space restrictions or line restrictions in some places in school spring I could post this whole thing and it could be this whole copy and paste this whole job description into the school spring posting and they can see the whole thing in other places you can attach it so it really just depends on if there are space limitations but typically I do post the job description if I may in the current contract approved by our attorney it says under duties the chief financial offices duties are fully fully described in the job description in appendix a attached to and incorporated by reference into this agreement this is only one model right but this please this is a standard boiler plate contract approved by our attorney worked on very hard by Liz Villario all I'm saying is that she is the one who did this and she is the one that supported that I don't want to belate you know the thing is is that in looking at job descriptions in school department some are very detailed and some are not and I think that's more a matter of institution and style than it is of having any consequence in people applying for job with the exception of if you're listing job require you know the qualifications that are required that you can't fulfill so that if you see a bunch of must have this must do that and you're missing one of those people will drop out but I don't think most people would be scared off by more detailed descriptions just an element of district style we've been served well by doing this except that I think the points of calling out and being specific about the culture of the community and the number of night meetings we require because of the high level of citizen participation is an important signal to place there so that somebody doesn't come to us six months later and say gee I didn't know that I'd have to go to all these meetings other than that most of the stuff in here is pretty typical school business manager type stuff and nobody should be surprised okay Mr. Steven oh sorry yes I can if you'd like I mean before once you put in all of your inputs and suggestions for changes I can send this to Liz for her review to make sure that she's okay with it and would say that's fine to post as is and it's reasonable that it would be attached to a contract that would ultimately be entered into which is what you said Mr. Hayner that it is it's in the document that she created the last round of negotiation with our current CFO I would just hope that we'd be able to do this quickly because I think we need to get this on the street as soon as possible time is the essence so couple things could you I mean Paul made a point about the message association of public purchasing officials could you check do you have to be a CFO to get that because I know there are people in the Boston but yeah no okay but they have to be an incumbent meaning they have to be in a public school district in a business office so you can train your position and get your credentials your cert, your licensure okay and have everything all set to go but you can't get that till you get the job all right got it so I'll change that to eligible eligible yeah okay so the next point I want to make is this and so I this has been said but I just want to say it again it is important to be specific as possible in here about the number of night meetings so when you know in different organizations and you hire people sometimes you're very specific 50% of your time is going to be traveling and it's just best to stay up front 50% of the time you're going to be traveling out of state by plane and you tell applicants that and they know it and they either buy it they're into it or not and some you know in the organization I had I tell them you're going to be traveling to Manchester, Lowell and Lynn and you know I actually have them actually do that and experience going to those offices they're finals for a major job because I want them to because they can't they're not going to be into it and it's going to be too much we just need to know that right away so don't waste each other's time so I think the more specific you are about the number of meetings and I would get the number from Diane I'd put it in there generally speaking you know typically during the during the school year from September to June the expectation is that you're going to have X number of night meetings per per month whatever that number is and it's right up front it's right there in the job description the applicants know it and they apply or not based on that reality and their own personal situation Mr. Cartman so I want to ask just or just raise a sort of a broader issue and you know every time we have a high level position turnover I think we should take a look at do we really want to keep it as exactly as they are or is there perhaps some other model or type of person that we're looking for in light of this opening so you know the one thing that I know that Dr. Bodie has been burdened by as I watched her sort of administrative duties and her educational leadership I think has suffered to some extent because there is nobody else to take off some of the administrative duties so I do wonder you know certainly the other model that you see is a chief administrative officer that is also the chief budget officer so I just hope you know we don't have much time but I just wanted to know if you've given any consideration into at least highlighting some other administrative duties that this person could have in addition to just running the business office the answer is yes I actually spent a lot of time thinking about this in fact I've also done surveys of all of our lab partners to see what their business offices look like and the one thing I can say is that they're all different and so then try to look at functionality because one of the things that we question was whether we would go forward and hire the accountant position that position has always been in the district it's had different people over time and it's been called different things but essentially that is the role but given Ms. Johnson's departure and this job will be posted for June or July 1 or sooner having that person in position is going to be important but I totally agree with you what can we do for example I mean certainly there's issues around project management as we go forward and I think that's something that Tom manager and I've talked about as well because there are levels of project management and we are in a great shape in terms of having all these projects but they take a lot of time and so yes but the thing about the permanent Tom building is that that is suggested and maybe to your point maybe be a little more explicit about building projects for sure and in fact one of the reasons why we put this wasn't in the original job description, the MAPO is that one person who sits on the high school building committee has to have that certification and there are three people in this town that have it so the CFO is one of them so that's an issue that we have to cover Ms. Starks I notice there's nothing in here that says that they will help with negotiations and I think that she plays a vital role in that I'm actually looking at the Lawrence public schools of CFO and theirs is at least a page longer than ours so they are very detailed about what they are supposed to do some other towns I look at and they're more general but this one in particular has a lot of very specific pieces but some of them are like we'll make sure that technology is used in their department to increase productivity and be the leader of that we don't have stuff like that I agree with Mr. Cardin that this is the time and I know we feel like we don't have the time to do this but if we don't do it now and really fill this out with what we really expect this person to do I think we end up not being clear in what the job really intends you also have the possibility of something changing later if we think that the candidate has the right qualifications and the right role there is a line in there on providing management support in the areas of human resources and contract negotiations I don't know if you want that more explicit the other thing I just want to respond a little bit to Mr. Cardin's point I also looked a lot at titles to Dr. Bodie's point offices are all different titles are all different CFO is a title that's referenced in a lot of our policies because it's been a long-term title here it's a different title in other districts where they have director of financial operations or director of financial services or in some districts there are assistance superintendents for finance so it's all different I think because of the way it's referenced in our policies and our history keeping it as chief financial officer and I put in parentheses school business administrator because I just want people to know that's the license and they have to have that to do this job yeah we have spent actually a fair amount of time looking at job descriptions and one of the things that was clearly the survey certainly our colleagues is that our position is unique in some respects in that we now have a town facilities department in some districts they oversee all facilities in some districts they oversee payroll we don't do that we have a town school payroll system so the scope is different really but I do think having some language in there I should probably go back and double check to covering the clarity even though they're not going to be taking the role of a director there still has to be a strong facilities involvement but even I think that exactly is why it all has to be spelled out because every single one of these is different and so people have to read this and understand the uniqueness of this uniqueness and you know I know we don't put in there what they don't have to do that's something that has to come out in the interviewing process but I think it's very important then that this is as specific as possible so people understand Mr. Heiner the piece that you were just talking to Dr. Bode the attendance at the permanent town building committee maybe met by that if it's goes all the time in other words not just when the school related projects there so they'd be aware of all the facilities and ramifications of that throughout the town that part I think when it says permanent town building committee should belong to your purview of when they do or don't come the other thing I'd just like to say I don't know how effectively but we did survive as a school department for 60 days without Ms. Johnson so I mean you know better how the bumps and grinds that went with that aspect of it but to go to the idea of rushing into this I think it's important to make sufficient time to make it clear so we can avoid the bumps that we had over the past year year and a half I would favor putting something out quickly to bring in candidates if we start looking and the candidates we get will inform whether we've written the job description correctly or not I don't think that we should be spending a lot of time right now trying to tweak it without the benefit of the data of the candidates that would respond to the search and if we're getting somebody who's highly qualified and can step in and do a great job for us based on this job description we had a winning job description but if we think that we want to throw to open the pool again and see if we could get a different candidate then we get in our first line of responses then we go back and take a hard look at what was blocking us from getting the people we wanted in the first round so we can always pull we can always stop the search we can always pull the posting we can always repost but I don't think that we should take a lot of time going around in circles and trying to edit it at this point I want to see who's out there and the longer we wait the greater the chance that somebody we like is going to go take a job in another district okay I'm feeling Dr. we can always update right as long as it's before they sign it and they see it and they agree we're not on school spring once it's posted even when we're starting to talk to them we can say we've gone over this and we realize there's a difference here it is and neither say Mr. Heiner quick I would if a motion is appropriate move that we go forward asking Mr. Spiegel to take the minor edits that we put in tonight and presented to Liz Lario council and if it's appropriate that document go forward or bring it back to us at the next meeting either way do we feel we need a motion on this I just have one question yes just as a point of clarification I think the motion needs to be specific I think the motion would be to authorize the human resources the person responsible for everything anyway authorize the superintendent to make revisions based on this conversation review the document with council and upon approval of council advertise the position that would be the motion did you want to say I agree with that one of our one of our hurries on that is going on okay motion on the table made by Mr. Schlickman seconded by Mr. Hayner all in favor of the motion on the table aye opposition unanimous I just have one question have you been recruiting candidates and this has been coming for some time have you been putting the word out okay good I just wanted to hear that but on the other hand I know the markets try to do that with an interim and there's not many people if there are any potential CFOs out there watching this the answer is yes wonderful place to work we've got some great school committee members here who will support your work and efforts the one thing that is different here is a number of night meetings I will say that while some job descriptions are much more robust in terms of facilities payroll but when I talk about night meetings hardly any other than maybe school committee right and that's an issue big difference and in cities people coming from cities even more so so they need to understand it's a different kind of job and so that's the benefits of the facilities and the payroll that they don't have to deal with but we have the other thing which is that there's a lot of night meetings I'd venture to guess that in the cities they have assistance to go to those meetings and in the smaller communities they may even have other staff that they do it too we may have fewer meetings one being the top person's job there's no time meeting it's more than an hour over so let's move on to super intense report should we move the 10 o'clock move not yet I think we can get it I think we can get it just saying that get Cindy mad let me give you a quick overview of where we're going with some of these the building projects starting with Stratton things are going well we're staying to the timeline nobody sees any issues there and in fact there will be some fair amount of contingency money that will probably not need to be used because we're beyond the point of some of the big surprises so we're in good shape there does that mean less money that the taxpayers have to work over in the end? don't go there yet is that what that means? the answer is yes and no it's just keep in mind we have other projects going on simultaneously they're not being handled by MSBA so one of them is Thompson and there's a little worry on the timeline at Thompson I have to be honest on that but things are moving along there were some permitting issues in the beginning and then there were some drainage issues that had to be remedied but I went over and actually personally met with the owner project manager to go over all of the schematics and I think that we're going to be seeing steel going up sometime in early February and hopefully we don't have 36 inches of snow while that's going but they do have a plan I've talked with the architect also that they feel confident that the plan still has this opening with no problems in September cool that's two that's two Gibbs Gibbs is going along well though I have to say it took longer to figure out some of the floor plans because the building well it's going to be adequate it's going to be adequate it still is constrained in terms of getting all of our programs in the building because there are special education programs you're aware of all of the curriculum kinds of programs we have at the middle school and of course we're definitely dedicated to our music our art and so this a lot ELL a little bit longer than we anticipated figuring out floor plans I would have loved to have been able to have you have the presentation tonight but I don't have the presentation yet but as soon as I get it I'll give it to you certainly ahead of when we are going to go out for some for the comment and I would hope that you would give some comments on this I will tell you though that a lot of thought is involved everybody here and also curriculum leaders making sure that all their needs were adequately met so and the public meeting is the public meeting is going to be this coming Tuesday the the this week was picked because it worked and also permanent on building and it works to have all of them on the same day so we're going to have over at Addison in the afternoon at 3 30 we're going to have a meeting of teachers who would like to come and see the plans ask questions give comments the same thing for parents starting at six o'clock and then we've been we're going to be a little bit later on the agenda for permanent town building so we'll then be going to permanent town building so we want if there's any comments or things that need to be tweaked this is a time to do it because the plans really do need to be finalized by the end of January so this is Tuesday January 17th at 6 o'clock at 6 o'clock at Addison so at 6 o'clock I sent out a notice to parents and I will remind parents on Monday and then hopefully people will be able to come but the thing I also said is that if you can't come and it's understandable it's not obviously the most ideal time but 7 o'clock is not necessarily ideal for families either there's pros and cons to any kind of evening time all of these documents are going to be on the website and included the URL for that already there are a number of documents up there that people can take a look at so that's happening also selected the advisory committee there was actually a fair amount of interest in this as you probably could imagine so actually I've sort of taken a risky move and what I decided to do is to have a representative from each school but when we bring teachers it's a fairly large committee so I talked to the architect about it the other day and so a community representative from each school yes elementary school and is that chosen by town council or by each school is doing their own no I had I had already put in motion I had them and I looked at people's different things that they brought to the table it's I would be the first to admit that there's probably not an applicant that that sent their interest their expression of interest that would not have been a great member they've been notified yes they have been notified and in fact in a couple cases I've asked them if they would if we have a subcommittee and their expertise would they be willing to serve if we could have had the whole you know a much much larger but it gets a certain sense of workability plus we have teachers too we don't want to have this totally unbalanced either and we've talked a little bit about this as well but there are a lot of things that would be the one advantage of having more parents on this is as the teachers are going to be going into planning sessions and there's going to be a lot of issues that we need to think about you know a recess for example is it was one example and then there's also the playground and the gardens and and all of that I mean there's a quite a good list but there will be some it'll be nice to have a touchstone of parents who we can run some ideas off of too which is exactly with the point of the advisory committee is to present some give us some feedback so that is going forward it is not going to be a regular meeting it's really as needed because there's you know there's maybe concentrated in one period of time and then there might be a big lull so it really depends on where the architects are in the process as to how often this committee will proceed but that's already in motion so I think we're in a good place there and there's a lot of cost estimates going on hardy I'm still I'm quite upset that we are not getting to see those before everyone else like that we have been left off that you're meeting with teachers you're meeting with parents and no school committee we didn't get it tonight a presentation I know but then the whole thing should have been pushed off it's really embarrassing when things happen in the schools and we're not the first to know because we're the first people that other people call to complain to ask and when we're not the first people to get stuff it looks really bad when I have to pick up the phone and go you know I don't know I don't have any information on that I hear what you're saying and as soon as I had the presentation I will send it to you I just don't have it yet the thing is it's the time frame of trying to stay aligned to making sure everything is going I've been told that they have to finish finish this by the end of January I think originally this would have worked out better if we didn't have to have the amount of time that was spent in December sort of going over every square foot of the building so this is going to be on the agenda for our next meeting in January so we can at least officially give some feedback and hear what what happens and the expectation is that we will get the documents before this public meeting on Tuesday I will try to get those documents too I will contact our architect about that I think that there's going to be a lot of input needed from the school community as we go forward in a number of areas I'm not sure that getting into the weeds of square footage for a particular room is you know you want to know what it's going to look like but I'm not sure that that's the kind of input we have but once we get the floor plans done then there's going to be a whole lot of other things as we go forward there's going to be the whole issue of buses for example that's just one of many and another issue that we have to really look at is do we need to keep and we're certainly happy to have your input into this too do we need to have the middle school the sixth grade schedule and the seventh and eighth on the other hand it can help with split personnel but on the other hand the whole idea was to be able to think out of the box a little bit more about what the sixth grade experience could be so I think we're going to have to have more discussion about that that is there's a lot there's a lot but in terms of the this issue I'm actually not sure because some of the stuff still needs to be decided later right now they have to be able to get the construction drawings done that's what it's all about that's what this push is about I think one of the biggest issues but the forums sort of shifted the thinking on where the main entrance was going to be to the school one of the things that came out of the forums particularly the params you want to have something that's open and inviting and yeah warm tells you who the school is well if you have the tough street side that's not going to happen it's very cramped, narrow so the decision was made to shift it out to the on the foster street side so that's where it's going to be now there's a lot to be thought of but they just have to get these construction drawings because then you've got to be able to go out to bid so we're just trying to stick to this very tight time scale timeline I should say can you speak to the timeline for the principal search that gives well as I've said before I would like to see someone that was internal for a number of reasons one is that person is part of the planning process and that's an important one but honestly another one which I think is maybe even more important and that is when you hire a new principal the first year there's a lot of mentoring and and time for a person to sort of get an entry plan you know get to know the teachers and I think that because this experiment that we're doing and I think it's a very good one I think we need to have someone there that that stuff's behind them it could be any one a lot of our administrators could be assistant principals principals even some curriculum leaders perhaps that that piece is behind that the mentoring is actually before the year starts not during the year because I really think it's going to be important to have someone that's so focused on all the unique issues of starting a brand new school that we're trying to create so that's actually the main reason and then there's also the whole financial piece you can't hire a person a year out from given our financial situation that's just not even in the realm of possibilities but at any rate they need the curriculum work we haven't even done the grant yet there's a little bit less pressure to get moving on right this minute because as you know we've got to do the CFO and we have to get started with the Abyssin that needs to get going and the plan was really to get out there and actually there's only so much bandwidth to do all this so that's a reasoning for the internal search but also do you know what the current timing thought process is for doing that search in the early part of the spring because we'd love to have the person available for the kind of work that we're anticipating doing during the summer so we hopefully should know who this person is this year in June right now I think it's more important to get the CFO going and it's also the Abyssin search so I actually just want to speak with I've got a couple of responses from the community saying that if we do not do an external search we are potentially losing an opportunity to increase our diversity of our staff and I want to push back against that assumption I think that we are going to be doing several searches we're doing a CFO search we'll be doing an Abyssin search if we hire internally we'll be doing a search to replace that person and that those are all great opportunities to look far and wide as best as we can to increase diversity which is a goal of the school committee it's a goal of the administration and that focusing so laser-like on one particular position is sort of that misses the big picture of what we're looking to do as a district where we are looking to make additional hires and we have opportunities to make diverse hires if possible I ask to encourage anyone if you know of people because oftentimes people are attracted to the district through personal connections you know please spread the word it's a great district to work for and we value a diverse staff Dr. Bodie regarding Gibbs and internal we're aware we have available to us all the people that are certified for that position can we? I mean if they've said it if they put it in their records I have access to anyone's in the district who's a certified employee so I can check anyone's certification it really has I mean if the search is internal I just want to make it expansive internal as well I think people have to request that their name be considered they can't it's still a formal process let me just say this though on this piece of it because I've actually talked to a fair number of superintendents it's totally first of all it's totally my prerogative to a point some yes and actually that's done a fair amount in school districts and I actually lean toward that and just had privately talked to people and frankly a lot of the controversy about this it may suggest that we do that but I wanted people to have the opportunity to apply to have a chance to talk about their thinking and their philosophy as we would do with anything but I thought that was a fair thing to do for people who wanted to do it and I knew that there were several people who were interested but that is actually not how it's often done in other districts it's just not and it's just like a teacher you can move you know of a need we have a lot of district positions we move them from school to school when we hire a principal it is in their contract that they can be appointed to any other school in the district that's in their contract there's no reason why I can't do that and frankly maybe that's what's gonna end up happening but I still want to have all the people who are interested to have an opportunity to talk about this and I don't want to cut off the opportunity Mr. Spiegel the other thing we were also talking about the job description for that position because it would be very similar to the job description for the Audison principal position it is a new position in the district we haven't had a sixth grade only building and so we would I think we're working on just drafting that really it's very similar to what we have for the Audison already it's sort of a little bit different wait let me get Dr. Allison MP first about this about the suggestion that we've heard from outside about targeting the search is that even legal to try and target a search to increase diversity no one's saying that they're just saying I'm not saying we're saying that they're not saying that there are no one said that that I've seen so I think what the point is if we if we search externally we don't know necessarily who are the available pool is and we would advertise broadly to include any qualified licensed applicant and we do have a goal many school districts have a goal of increasing the diversity of our professional staff in the district that's not a secret with the limits we have with our current professional staff administrative staff I mean that's where it limits the pool a little bit that's I think that's the point but I don't think it would be only targeting I haven't seen any I'm okay I know the answer because I want to shut down one of the side things that has been coming to us I'm assuming it's not legal to target a search based on we certainly could not limit a search to one racial ethnic religious group we couldn't say only these people can apply we would target everyone if we're but we can limit a search we can limit a search to internal candidates and prefer internal candidates or just do an internal search no no no I'm not questioning about the internal search the first bit is what I thought actually that raises a question do we have those standard lines we're an equal opportunity player down in everything so that we have that I just curious I just want to make it clear I have seen nothing coming to me as an individual member of this committee the issue that I have been getting is the difference between internal and external search there may have been rationale to do an external search but the main premise was to do an external an all encompassing external search but the prerogative does belong to the school district and the superintendent to do everything she has said today under the law and I just want to point out this is not the only search that we are making you know I mean that that we have positions there will be other opportunities to fill positions that we will be searching wide and far we just had a vacancy come up this week for a special education teacher at the Autism Middle School if anyone knows being a special education teacher at the Autism Middle School let me know and of course we need substitutes we need and we definitely always need substitutes but I helped out a little bit so much for the Gibbs yes and Hardy yes we we had a proposal for the school enrollment we already talked about this and we are now at the point of trying to figure out what is the correct amount that would be necessary and I actually had a long conversation with the architect earlier today in fact and to look at really what are the soft costs the thing about when you do small projects the soft costs are higher than what they are in a usual standard industry so when you do I've learned a lot about this so you do your range for your square foot but then you attack on 20% the fact of the matter is in small projects Tom manager and I had some discussion about this but one of the other things soft costs include furniture furniture the project manager architecture fees all of that the per square foot is a construction cost right but one of the other things that came up with Hardy which I think is something that we will discuss at some point and that is whether the cafeteria is adequate again it goes back to that common space issue so I have a couple of scenarios which are going to be costed out and then it's a question of is that something that we think we should do so has there been a vote at the school enrollment task force about one of the plans was the recommendation for a six classroom addition at Hardy and the last classroom addition contingent upon the Tom manager the superintendent meeting to determine financing financing of it and there was also the issue of taking a look at auxiliary areas too motion by Mr. Foskett second by me okay so that's done done okay we're moving forward on the cost piece Charlie are we going to start building next week just going to dig do it we're moving forward we don't have a new number yet that we're working with MSBA there's been more communication this week but we're not enrollment number for the high school the design enrollment number and soon as I know more I'll let you know but I did find something out this week that you know hopefully we're going to move this forward fairly quickly because this year they've cancelled the number of board meetings and now they're going to have a February board meeting and a May so we really need to so I think that's our collective goal is to try to get to that February once we can move this forward and so just to clarify I know there are a number of things we had to do in 180 days I understand we've done all those things but there's still that final thing about the number the size so we're not at the edge of that it's more the edge of when we need to get moving so we can be on the February agenda so that's where we are I'm going to let Dr. Cheson talk a little bit but there's just prophecy in here one of the things we wanted to talk about is the dashboard and just like we have constraints in buildings we have constraints of our website in terms of what can be managed on it so there's been a lot of work to create some graphics about some of the key things people want to know about we're getting it up it's still a work in progress we'll be continuing to add to it but I think one of the things that came up in the recent discussions and I'll let Laura talk more about it and that is that we should also create some links to information rather than trying to replicate it on our website and that's the direction we're going this is already up on the website now and we have three spots that you can locate it so I'm going to turn it over to you Amy says that we're trying to as my technology person we're trying to get blame and yawn with the hot dog budget or hot dog tool so we have some good information I think it's a good information that people will enjoy taking a look at but it's not as interactive perhaps as we would hope to have so if Claudia added this to the district website oh sorry Claudia added this to the district website this week so if people at home go under I'll go back to home under the quick links you'll see the district dashboard there if you go into administration you'll see the district dashboard I just for some reason can't remember where it is and if people choose to go to that so there's an introduction to the dashboard there are a number of charts on enrollment and then I will page down so you can see those district dashboard on the quick links on the left hand side so there's a number of enrollment charts that are out there so you'll probably look familiar to many people that are underneath there and this is what Dr. Bordi was just alluding to so student outcomes most of the data that we present in student outcomes is actually available to the department of education website under the school and district profiles under the assessment portion and under accountability portion so probably next week when you click on this instead of getting the information transferred to the department of education website to those portions of the school and district profile that have that information and they are all pretty interactive so there will be you know you'll get a direct connection so someone won't have to remember what the department of education website is and where you go to Arlington yes it will be a direct link to Arlington the same thing with staffing that also there's also a great deal of information that will be also be put up there and then technology will bring you to a number of charts that you've actually seen earlier over the last year or so that have to do with technology and how many pieces of technology and bandwidth and stuff like that so that's what our goal is but these we have a link to the technology plan that's actually already on the site underneath the departments I believe I was going to say it might be helpful to have a link here but we could have a cross link yes absolutely sure sure the stats on as far as staff and some it's just a number just a plan it says it will say the Arlington school department elementary boom or by the school it also talks about the percentage of teachers that are highly qualified the percentage of teachers that are teaching in their subject area the people that have to ask me questions about they're not teaching in their subject area but I think it's really good to show that we're not competitive with the other communities and stuff like that comparison of our salaries a comparison salary thing I mean beginning inside I'm not looking for Dr. Boyd or teacher Ray and such such average salary compared to other districts but also do comparisons of other schools and stuff like that so those are things we could add over time but again they are things that that we had gotten original feedback on was that folks wanted to be able to sort of like roll over a graph and see what the data point is that's associated with that and we just don't have the tools that are available to do that and we have one person who's supporting 10 schools and doing nine other things in this so but it could be an opportunity to link to other things that are produced so actually on budget information I can see a lot of things that we could be adding so we have some graphs but then we have some links there just an easy way to get to them absolutely absolutely so there would be one place where people could go for a specific information right so that's where we stand now and I expect that over the next three or four months you'll continue to see things added and we'll bring those to your attention as we add them okay so we have 80% 70% develop now we have another couple weeks we'll have even more because we have enrollment and we have budget student outcomes will come fairly quickly yeah the staffing information that Mr. Hayner talked about will probably I have to create those charts and there will be a static link of PDF charts and technology the technology plan we already have that we're in the process of updating it I've already set up meetings with a number of teachers at a couple of different schools to get feedback and we'll be having a parent meeting is an opportunity to give feedback as part of the work we're going to be doing with vision 2020 that was originally scheduled for January and then given the weather they thought better and we pushed it out to March so there will be a joint meeting sponsored by vision 2020 in the curriculum and instruction department to talk about what we envision for schools and one of those places will be for parents to give us feedback about technology and I just to ask a question about this I have to discuss that with AF whether they still want us to do a separate one or they'll put it together or this will be merged in and do one okay great thank you okay any questions, comments about dashboard before anything else okay great thanks okay thank you yes and more from Dr. Witte well I'll turn it really fast actually we're going to start at the top of the list is Danielle Rad who is a science teacher in the high level we will be information in my newsletter more about it but I really do want to acknowledge the fact that the American Association for the advancement of science featured her as the teacher of the month for all of her very creative innovative work and I have to say her courses people can't get into them they're so popular so I want to congratulate this great honor tonight we had just briefly was able to get down there they had students who have been in the internship program do a display of their learnings and what their projects were for and this year we've done it differently in the past people sort of sat in an audience and gave a presentation which actually I sort of like but when you have now 40 students it becomes a little bit more difficult but they set it up like we've done the math fair in which people can go around and circulate and they had to get so many tags of people that they gave their presentations because one of the things that we do want to have in this is students have the opportunity to present explain and there was really the range so interesting from computer geeks kinds of things technical we have one student who's been working with the computer cafe and she does hard drive transfers and we had the food bank we've had people work with the athletic department engineering department it was a wide range and of course one of our efforts in this program is to get more placements for our students so we have 40 this year to grow at least another 20 next year we've talked about having a presentation school committee which I hope we can work out this year I'm sure we can Dr. Janger with then maybe some exemplars of the things that students are doing let me I'm sure that we can do that it's a great opportunity for the students and then you can hear what they're doing from our vantage point this is you've heard a lot what was going on with world language it's students learn by doing and they learn the one thing that came through when I would ask students what they learned they learn about themselves they learn about the skills they had they learn whether they liked it one person said I don't think I'll ever go into this field now but others said yes so it's an opportunity just to learn outside the walls of a school last night I went to frozen Fenway we were invited Arlington and Burlington played we were invited to come and play on the ice at Fenway and it was a lot of fun you know if the number of people that were there were in our rank it would be overflowing in Fenway it felt like sprinkles everywhere but it was a lot of fun our students did well it was a good night it was a perfect night I was thinking about this on Sunday yeah it was a lovely night out there and they did well and but as the superintendent in Burlington said this game is about friendship and fun and that's what it was so we also were invited on Sunday to the garden our girl basketball team played Belmont and again that was a great experience for them speaking of storms a mention of storms came up we did have a surprise storm and it brings up and I say this in the meeting we have that if parents feel that is unsafe to go out in certain weather conditions what they all they need to do is to call the school and say you know my child cannot be there because I don't feel it's safe conditions for them to walk or for me to drive well it will be counted as an absence it is an excused absence because you have two types it's an excused you don't want to be in the unexcused so it's fine but sometimes that was a big surprise hopefully we won't have any more of those this year we'll see that is it okay so I think it is possible we have to push the timing of this consent agenda can I read this because I didn't get a copy so we'll do the consent agenda quickly all items listed with the asterisks will be inactive with one motion there will be no separate discussion of those items the last member of the committee's request in which event the item will be considered in normal sequence approval of warrant warrant number 17098 dated 1215 2016 total warrant to count $532,685.58 approval of minutes school committee regular meeting December 15, 2016 moved so moved by Mr. Starks seconded by Mr. Stilman all in favor opposed unanimous okay this is something we have to get done tonight Mr. Hayner do you want to give a quick description of the recycling if you can call up the policy yeah we have been in a position we thought this was already done and we had already done it we have not done it so there was a grant that we were involved in and they need to have a school committee policy in place before they can get the grant so basically so we're waiving the two reads we want to vote on tonight as well so moved let's play straight forward straight forward Mr. Stilman seconded by Mr. Starksman any discussion no okay all in favor opposed okay that's unanimous do we want to discuss a copy of the emails that I got from other districts you would ask for that do you want to do that now or do you want to do it under policy guiding MASC let's do it under policy okay so actually I want to make a quick comment and I'm very bad at this too but if anybody has a subcommittee minutes to send I haven't seen them in a while so just send them for the next meeting yeah okay send mine I haven't seen the list of maybe because Karen was going away that we haven't I just haven't seen them in a little bit okay so community liaison reports let's see budget okay so you heard a lot of it just to explain there's there was some confusion the draft the reason there's a draft budget presentation is that the budget subcommittee was talking about how we're going to do outreach and we're going to be trying to set up meetings with different PTOs at their meeting and come into a presentation this was meant to be posted to the budget okay not to this one it ended up here you can look at it but it needs to be updated so it's not correct but it'll look something like that okay okay and just and we discussed the the circuit breaker we already talked about that but the other thing that we talked about was that the warrant will close near the end of January and we need to have two things put on it one is to have the creation of a new special education reserve account you mean in the school district right because there's this new regulation that you don't that's what I'm talking about if you look up the law it has to be approved by the town's legislation legislative body which I assume is town meeting so we need to get it on the warrant so it can go through and then we also need to have something put on the warrant so we have the money taken out of the account or out of wherever it is right now of the town special education account yeah okay so is that something that we will get okay is that it? community relations community relations subcommittee meeting will be on Monday the 23rd from 5 to 6 here and I just wanted to know from Jeff and Bill how it went for your school committee chat excellent anybody talk to you? yes a lot of people do you want to send that to everybody after us that report we didn't think of so Bill did a report of how people came by? yeah and we had about the table was full lots of people came to talk to us I don't know why you didn't have anybody come talk to you we had a gentleman that presented a proposal to get substitutes here well it's an escalating pay scale but it's moderate he's been a sub here for a long time he talked about that oh he talked about the pay well people had questions about the Gibbs several parents came to us fourth graders want to know what the plan is for the Gibbs there was a question about when the high school would be done the previous question when is it going to begin but that was the question that was asked there were questions about it was a tax dialogue that we had with somebody who wanted to know where the town was going in terms of the tax burden trying to think of there were times when Jeff and I were talking to the same person the other time separately yeah we wrote it was jammed up librarians so somebody came by to lobby for the librarian pay certified librarians so I think it would be helpful to get reports on every time we do this yeah the timing doesn't matter but it would be really helpful each time we do this we should create a short report one page or something we all get a sense what were those concerns the sign is definitely important because I got there about a half hour early to make sure we would have a little corner I put the sign but there were three empty seats and I kept saying you can sit here it's a lovely block and a couple people sat had the thing left we saw the sign they were the first couple to talk if you could also bring the sign yeah this is the one that is relying on Cindy to distribute these signs I'm happy to do that community relations first there was a lot of fun we had a lot of fun the next one is in February 4th and we don't have anybody signed up for that yet does everybody did everybody get the link to the google doc Jeff obviously did because he signed up I did you signed up for March send the link out again just to make our lives easier that would be great but it was a lot of fun, great dialogues lots of good questions so glad do we want to extend this time period three minutes before I want to hear from Cindy the motion needs to come for Cindy Cindy alright do you want to extend the 10 o'clock rule to 10.15 second I don't care you don't have to second all those in favor aye opposed let's keep going many times it went after 10 it's his paw okay next is accountability curriculum instruction assessment we have to meet that's the issue is everybody available Wednesday I don't know why don't we talk about an offline talk about offline okay facilities the school enrollment task force met there was a good report on it we're building the hearty at this point there's no last year we had a need to meet in advance because there were some more strategic challenges the committee hasn't felt the need to do it this year are you guys continuing to meet there is another meeting coming they haven't set the date yet he's waiting for information on actual pricing I can't remember I think we did I don't know when the next meeting is coming up can you send me that okay it's February 8 Wednesday February 8 that's six o'clock right here in this room okay six o'clock in this room policies policies I sent you folks copies I asked Mike Gilbert to communicate with members that he's currently working with and has worked with on doing the policy books and asked them to please send us the good the bad and the ugly of their experiences he sent me a copy of the email I should have sent that to you I'm sorry I only got two responses and I sent those two responses to you folks yeah okay do you want should those be in the minute and the responses should be in correspondence maybe they are already in there they only got sent yesterday um I don't think they are I don't think they are they will definitely be in correspondence the next time how much is it that it costs $10,000 over three years you pay it over three years and that gets you what a new policy book updated legal legal approvals there's no like ours is already in good shape so it's only half that no we're diligent about keeping ours we're not as much of a mess you got letters from I can see paying $10,000 okay we ask that that was one of the questions we asked do we have to make a decision tonight or does that make sense for the for my for my feelings I would like to have it done so we can start having the contract signed and setting up dates and we can give our priorities of which policies we want to look at first and going through the whole book okay but I mean if folks want to put it off we have a meeting the other part I was going to say our next meeting will be on January 19 30 we will be discussing student activity fee policy that and and MASC schedule if we approve it okay so I'm going to yeah move to contract with Massachusetts association school committees to review and revive an update current policy book second discussion on the moment as a result of this they will end up posting our policy manual on their side for a period of time well within that but there's a period of time for that three years and then we'd have to pay an additional amount for future posting right so but they'll post it for that period of time and then but I would like to say that's a choice because in one of those emails they made a choice not to yeah it's a choice thing so I so the $10,000 gets us they're going to do anything and everything we want with our policy manual then what do we do go moving forward you mean is the expectation that every so often you hire them I don't have access to it right now but I think it's also part of the thing they will provide us with changes and updates to what they've already done as it comes through from the state and the federal's and stuff like that which they I think they do sometimes they do that right now well they send us how we should change it yeah my opinion that's a cut and paste at that point we've already updated it the biggest thing that I see we're doing this and we're not the pros right now and part of the thing is turning around and they're going to do it in conjunction with us so if we we're having the comptroller coming on the 19th to discuss the student activity when that policy would come up we'd automatically invite our people to come in and ask the questions as well but it also provides us the legal that we no longer have to pay legal opinion when we come up with the final product that we want we normally send it to legal for approval on most of the policies especially if we've tweaked it in such a way we're worried about it they have legal counsel to support their document what we come up with as well we're not stuck they're not going to come in and just give us a cut in our very tight financial situation it's just really really hard to want to spend $10,000 on making our policies clean that's all I mean if I had to say something that was a nice to have it's not a gotta have I would say I think I would venture to guess we're going to spend more on legal than $10,000 over a three year period on our policies really? if we could catch even one thing like what happened with the privacy problem that led to our massive legal issues that are now thankfully in the past that would be worth a lot of money okay any more discussion? move the question so all this in favor of this motion which has spent $10,000 over three years to update our policies to engage in a contract engage in a contract with them I'll signify by saying I I I'm going to oppose it just by the start of the abstentions okay not unanimous okay next thing school enrollment we did it it's a law committee liaison reports I wasn't in the a subcommittee on legal services do you want to postpone it until the next meeting and give them our, do you want to discuss it now? I can discuss it now, it's pretty simple, I think. So it's in Novus, I asked Karen to send it out but I don't think, I'm not getting her email, did she email it to you? It's in Novus, it is our recommendation that they're on. Recommendation, so we're already operating under the agreement as revised, so obviously we're gonna continue for the current year. But before we actually sign off on a three-year agreement, there's still some more work we need to do. We want to find out, you know, make sure that our expenses are in line with other towns. And there's a discrepancy in what they said the agreement, what they said the prior agreement was in their new letter and what their old letter said the prior agreement was is different, so unless that changed along the way. I think I remember that it changed somewhere along the way. I don't remember which year and I can't think of what search terms to look for it. So what does that, how high is our retainer at this point, 60,000 or 70,000? I think it is the 70, because the new letter. Well, we'll verify that and come back to you. Okay. So we will come back. So we should have these letters sometimes. So I guess we probably should have a motion to operate under the agreement for the rest of the year, because it technically is an agreement between the school committee and the law firm, so. Do we need that motion in that, I mean, that's a default position. We have not authorized the changes in the terms that we're operating under right now, so we do need a motion. Okay. So I move that we approve. Motion by Mr. Cardin. We approve operating under that agreement through the end of this fiscal year. Okay. Seconded by Mr. Hayner. All in favor, or any discussion? All in favor? Aye. Aye. Opposed? Okay. Passes unanimously. Thank you. And so you guys are gonna continue to meet to discuss the future contract. Yes. Right, okay. Excellent. Okay, any liaison reports? Yes, Mr. Hayner. I presented our budget process to the PTO at Dallin the other night and attempted to answer questions and gave them email links to get more information and to contact the budget subcommittee. I wanna thank Dr. Ampe for providing me the additional information. It's very good. And I also met with a regular meeting with the Pernum Town Building Committee, but Dr. Bode covered everything that dealt with us relating to the schools. Thank you. Okay. Any other liaison reports? Nope. Future agenda items, Mr. Hayner. I would like to have an item for executive session to discuss the CFO salary. Okay. Point forward. That's appropriate, I assume? Yes. Okay. And referring for negotiations, I think it's very appropriate we do that. Okay. Okay, so I have made a decision to not do executive session tonight because it's only to approve the minutes. Okay. And I think we should not go into executive session just to approve minutes. We should push that. Okay. And we will approve the minutes. When we go into executive session for some other reason. So motion to adjourn. So moved. Seconded. Seconded by Ms. Thielman, seconded by Ms. Starks. All in favor. Aye. Aye. Okay. I have 37 minutes. See? We're adjourned. Okay. I have 37 minutes. See? We're adjourned. Okay. Okay.