 Hi everybody, welcome to the March 11, 2021 meeting of the Arlington School Committee. As people are coming in, I'm going to go ahead and read the script. We have a very full agenda tonight, so we want to make sure that we get started with our budget hearing at 6.30. So good evening. This open meeting of the Arlington School Committee is being conducted remotely consistent with Governor Baker's executive order of March 12, 2020, due to the current state of emergency and the Commonwealth due the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus. In order to mitigate transmission of the virus, we have been advised and directed by the Commonwealth to suspend public gatherings and as such, the governor's order suspends the requirement of the open meeting law to have all meetings in a publicly accessible physical location. Further, all members of public bodies are allowed and encouraged to participate remotely. The order, which you can find posted with agenda materials for this meeting, allows public bodies to meet entirely remotely, so long as reasonable public access is afforded, so the public can follow along with the deliberations of the meeting, ensuring public access does not ensure public participation unless such participation is required by law. This meeting will feature public comment. For this meeting, the Arlington School Committee is convening by Zoom as posted on the town's website, identifying how the public may join. Please note that this meeting is being recorded. Some attendees are participating by video conference accordingly. Please be aware that others may be able to see you take care not to screen share your computer. Anything you broadcast may be captured by the meeting. All of the materials for this meeting, except any executive session materials are available in the Novus Agenda dashboard. We recommend members and the public follow the agenda as posted. Shortly, we will be turning to the first item on the agenda. I will introduce each speaker. I will call on members of the committee to speak. Let's see what else is there in here. All vote take, every vote taken in this meeting will be conducted by a roll call vote. So let's go ahead and do attendance. We have a lot of people here with us tonight. So I'm going to do my best. So Ms. Extin here, Mr. Cardin, Dr. Allison Ampe here, Mr. Thielman here, Mr. Good evening, Mr. Heiner here, Dr. Bodey here, Dr. McNeil here, Mr. Spiegel here, Mr. Mason, Ms. Elmer here, Ms. Keys here. OK, this is when it gets exciting. We got a lot of screens. So I, oh, Mr. Heim, I see you. OK. And then I see members of our elementary, secondary and high school principal teams. I see Ms. Thomas, who is the Met Co. Director. I see Mr. Pusey from the Arlington Human Rights Commission. I see Megan Carmody, who is our student representative. Welcome, Megan. Let's see. OK. All right. So, Dr. Bodey, if there's anybody, we have we have quite a bit of preamble until we get to where I think we're expecting a lot of these people to participate. So if there are any issues, definitely let me know. But so I'd like to start to this evening is kind of a confluence of a lot of events that are happening that we didn't we didn't necessarily know all of these things were going to stack up the way that they are. But we are legally required to hold a public hearing on the FY22 school budget, which was presented to the school committee by the superintendent two weeks ago. And so this is our public hearing. And what I need to do by law is I need to ask three times if there's anybody that would like to speak to us about the FY22 budget school budget. And the way that we're going to do that is if I guess if somebody on the screen would like to speak to us as part of our hearing, raise your hand. And if somebody in the participant list would like to speak on the FY22 budget, please raise your hand. I know that there are people who were instructed to raise their hands for public comment, which we're going to do in just a minute. But I will confirm with each of you, just to make sure you don't want to talk about the budget, because we this is like super legal. And Mr. Schlickman will tell me if I do it wrong. So my first for the first time, is there anybody here who would like to speak on the school budget on the FY22 budget? So Ms. Hall, I'm going to promote you to a panelist. I think that you want to speak for public comment and not on the FY22 budget, but I do need to make sure. So Ms. Hall, can you hear us? Can you hear me? Ms. Hall, can you hear me? She is signed up for public comment. So I think we can safely assume that that is what she is here to do. And if she would like to tell us about the budget, she can do so during her public comment period. So for the second time, is there anybody here who would like to speak to the FY22 school budget? And for the third time, is there anybody here who would like to speak to the FY22 school budget? All right, seeing none, I believe we can move on to the next item in our agenda and consider our budget hearing closed. The next item on the agenda is public comment. There are seven people who are signed up for public comment this evening. Members of the public are afforded three minutes. The school committee, we do need you to give us your name and address before you provide your comment. And if you would like to use your camera, you can certainly do so, although it is not required, but you are respectfully requested to use your camera if possible. So there are seven people for public comment, I will limit you to three minutes each. Oh, Ms. Fitzgerald is stuck out of our meeting. All right, I will work on that. So if you are somebody who is prepared is up for public comment. Ms. Kaneli, Ms. Pellower, Mr. Pellower, Ms. Hall, Ms. Mulla, Ms. Talline, and Ms. Sadat, if you can raise your hand, I'm going to start working to promote you so that you're able to speak. We'll get this organized. So Ms. Kaneli, can you hear me? Oh, I can. Can you hear me? Yes, I can. So if you can give us your full name and your address, please, and then you have three minutes. Okay, Kristen Kaneli, 59 Old Mystic Street, Arlington. Great. All right. So I am a lifelong resident of Arlington. But first and foremost, I'm speaking as a parent of a high school student. I'm also bringing my experience and background of both teaching and nursing with me tonight. I've taught in the Arlington school system, and I've worked as a nurse in this in the school system, as well as a district care coordination nurse in the Arlington school system. I'm currently working as a labor and delivery nurse at mouse general hospital. And I've been on the front lines of this pandemic since March of 2020. I've been caring for a COVID positive patient. And I did so wearing personal protective equipment, and without a vaccination until January of this year. It's been terrifying. It's been heartbreaking. And it's been necessary and essential. My most grave concern for Arlington high school students is that they seem to be the forgotten children of this town. I'm deeply disappointed in the lack of thoughtful planning for this specific population of students. I believe that keeping our high school students from their lifeline of socialization for this extended period of time is what we used to call in the open circle curriculum, a double D dangerous and destructive behavior. We have so much evidence based information about the significant social and emotional needs of this age group. We've created entire curriculums to address these needs. When I was a school nurse at Audison, I spent so much time advocating for behavioral health that the district care coordination position was developed in an effort to provide case management services for school refusal, psychiatric hospitalizations and transitions back to school. One of the hallmark philosophies in helping students with these difficult transitions was that getting them into the building was the biggest priority. Longer they were out, the more difficult their transition back to school. We're doing our students an extraordinary disservice by not making in person teaching, learning and social support for high school students a top priority. In August, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education asked district to develop preliminary reopening of school plans for three models in person, hybrid and remote. Ah, students were not only not offered any of these models, they weren't offered any educational instruction until September 21st, not acceptable. Students weren't offered all of their classes, their schedules were set up to bring the classes into half year classes. Some students read their summer reading and then found out they wouldn't have English class until February. Some students had no math instruction from March to February. No math for 11 months in any grade is is unacceptable. But you know, as a junior preparing to take the SAT, just it's it's unfathomable. Arlington's created significant educational disparities for their high school students. Educational disparities in Arlington, Massachusetts, not acceptable. We voted for you guys to serve our schools. We voted for an override to build a new school worthy of accreditation. We trusted that you are planning to bring our students back to school and you've let us down. The Google survey and presentation of back to school models was disgraceful. Frankly, I believe it was nothing more than smoking merits. I'm a well educated woman with a lot of letters after my name. And not only could I hardly make heads and tails of that PowerPoint, but most importantly, what was presented was not even offered. We are still not in school. Five to six shifts in a six month period of time is not hybrid. And it's not fully in person and it's not acceptable. As of February 12, nearly 80% of Massachusetts school districts were providing at least some in person instruction to students. Remote teaching is no substitution for in person learning and social connections. It just isn't. The bottom line is that the Massachusetts State Board of Education has determined and essentially decreed that high schools across the common law, they're on deck. It's the bottom of the ninth. We need a home run from this administration to come from way behind. You'll have potentially as little as two weeks notice to open our high school and teach our students in person. It might be terrifying for some. It might be heartbreaking, but it is necessary and it is essential. And anything less than that is unacceptable. I really hope that this time is used for preparation. Thank you very much. Thank you. Ms. Pellower. Yes. Hi, can you hear me? Yes, we can. Okay. Thank you. Hi, I'm Shauna Pellower. I live at 22 Jean Road. Thank you for your time today. Since I began advocating against onsite MCAS during a pandemic, I thought that reminding the school committee of our commitment to the social emotional well being of our students would be enough. It wasn't. The resounding response I have heard with the exception of Liz Exton was this. We need the data. How can we get meaningful data under these circumstances? When I polled Arlington parents about MCAS on Facebook last month, I learned that 48% are planning to opt out. 24% are leaning towards opting out but want to find more information. And 28% are sending their children. 89 people is a small sample, I know. But the responses show us that this year, the district's data will not be valid. And that's the key for this year. Liz Exton's resolution is not about how the MCAS is fundamentally flawed or biased. But the fact that for this year, we cannot use MCAS data as we did before the pandemic. The Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents knows this. On February 25th, they called for MCAS cancellation for this year. Representative Garbley knows this. He alongside 39 other state reps is cosponsoring a bill that would cancel MCAS for this year. Senator Ed Markey knows this. On Tuesday, he joined five other Congress people urging Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to reinstate federal waivers for state exams for this year. I know you want the data. And I know you want it for the best of intentions, which is to make sure that we address the deep loss on so many levels that we have encountered. But this year is not like any other one. And I know you know that. And I also know that school committees cannot cancel MCAS outright. But that has not stopped Somerville, Cambridge, Concord, Winchester, and recently Brookline, Melrose, Maldon, Medford and the Boston City Council from taking a symbolic stand. And no gesture is less significant because it is symbolic. Supporting Ms. Ekston's resolution and saying that MCAS is not right for us this year, that we don't need to do this to our kids and our schools this year is a start. And I urge you to join these other cities and recognizing that for this year, we can and we should choose to do things differently. Thank you for your consideration. Mr. Michael Pellower. Yes, I'm Michael Pellower of 22 Jean Rood. Honored peers of the school committee, thank you for making the time to listen to me, a parent of a hybrid fourth grader at Thompson. Let me start by acknowledging what a challenging position you will find yourselves in and thank you for your service. There are no home runs here, no easy decisions. Any specific reopening plan that the district provides will anger or worse in danger, a notable, notable portion of the Arlington community. To make my position clear, I am personally opposed to reopening the schools in April. The state state government has made a decision that burns the future in a misguided attempt to slightly improve the present, one that forces an enormous burden of exposure and risk on to unvaccinated or under vaccinated population of teachers, administrators, students, parents and caregivers. However, although I personally object, I am practical enough to believe Superintendent Bodhi when she says that this tidal wave is unavoidable. And so rather than rail against it use, I will suggest three concrete simple actions, small steps that we can control as a district. All of my recommendations fall under the general strategy of plan for the worst, then be pleasantly surprised if things go better than that. First, I think it best that we acknowledge upfront and openly that this effort could very much result in more remote learning time for students rather than less. The math here does not lie. If you grow the population in a poorly ventilated school building by three, increase the days per student by 2.5, decrease the distance by desks by a factor of 2. Well, then maybe transmission rate goes up by 15. Plan for the worst. We have an innovative tool pool testing program and it is excellent and it is rightly praised. And because it is so good, we should set the expectation that it will come up with significantly more positives after reopening than before. Students who are currently going to school two days a week could very well end up at home full time. Therefore, my first concrete recommendation is that before reopening the district prioritized publishing exact guidelines for when our in person students will need to quarantine. What thresholds we will use to switch entire classrooms to remote only and when we will declare that an entire school must go fully remote in the face of a serious outbreak, this must include explicit recommendations for the siblings and cohabitants of the affected students. We do not want administrators to be making these key decisions in the heat of the moment under intense pressure from all sides. Furthermore, the parents, teachers and community need to understand these guidelines ASAP so that no one is blindsided before they make the decision on remote versus in person and whether that's right for their family. Secondly, I want to address the most practical human concern. Plan for the worst. The real worst. What is Arlington's plan if a teacher administrator parent or student dies of COVID after this reopening? How will the affected and students and community be informed? What resources will be made available to those affected? Perhaps the district already has a plan for this. It may even be a good plan for all I know. My point is not to debate the particular details of our plan. I trust the superintendent, but I do urge the committee to ensure that the district's plan is published to the community before the date of reopening. Finally, let us be explicit that there may be people in this community who take schools reopening as some kind of all clear signal that the virus has been defeated once and for all. Some people are desperate for their lives to go back to normal and they look to their government institutions to understand what the new normal is to wrap up Mr. Pellower. Yes. Yes. So my final recommendation is that any communication from the district be phrased to avoid intentionally avoid any kind of all clear signal. Thank you for your consideration. Thank you. The next person is Ms. Julie Hall. Miss Hall. Hi, good evening. Can you hear me? I can. Can you make sure you give us your name and address? Please. Yes. My name is Julie Hall and I reside at 189 Jason Street. I have second grader at Brackett, seventh grader at Audison, a junior at Arlington Catholic and a freshman in college. I'm going to speak very differently than your previous speaker. I feel passionately, very passionately in a different way. So I hope I appreciate your time tonight. I'm speaking today for many reasons, but most importantly, to advocate for our students and especially for Arlington High School students. Today, I'm the voice of many parents listening on the Zoom, but too afraid to speak. I am the voice of the parents whose team spends hours up in the bedroom and won't go outside. I am the voice of the parent whose child cries to sleep at night. I am the voice of the parent whose child is inflicting self harm. I am forever grateful to a small group of parents who started advocating for in-person learning for our children last summer. Today, we are known as Back to School Onlington on Facebook. We recently launched a petition on change.org, which has reached 600 advocates who support a full-time in-person return to school. From all of us, we thank you for your support. Since its publication, though, Commissioner Riley in consultation with medical professionals subsequently issued directives to bring our K through 8th grade children back to school full-time. The commissioner has issued new guidance around safe reopenings, which we understand is an overwhelming task. However, districts around us continue to move quickly, many moving to bring students back far in advance of required dates. At the last school committee meeting, Dr. Bode stated that plans to reopen K through 2 were in the works for weeks. In addition, two motions have directed the superintendent to present written plans for full reopening for all grades tonight. However, the superintendent's last communication remained silent on this issue of AHS reopening and offered little hope for Gibbs and Audison. I'm confused how measuring classrooms is holding up plans for grades 6 through 12 when all schools were measured this past summer. I would like to see our K through 2 learners back in school before April 5th, and the Gibbs and Audison sooner than the new date Desi outlined April 28th. The renovated Gibbs could be opened right along with K through 5. I'm hopeful that tonight we may possibly learn of earlier opening dates of all our schools. I recently learned that in December of 2020, Arlington High School parents advocated with their own petition to bring Arlington High School students back to school this spring. And here we are today, March 11th, no plan, and the students are barely in the building. After talking to many parents, I'm learning that they're quite frankly they've given up and the current in person plan is gross negligence in my opinion. Our Arlington teens are suffering from depression and anxiety from this isolation. That to me is unacceptable. That is not being talked about anywhere. We have a new mental health pandemic. And why are we not talking about at the school committee meetings? Why are we not hearing about the students were falling and not attending Zoom classes? Are they forgotten because their deaths are empty? In closing, I'd like to thank our teachers, support staff, school nurses, principals, guidance counselors, social workers and our TAs for the courage to come into school every day and work with our children. You're essential. You're our heroes. And I look forward to helping the schools reopen safely with vaccinated teachers. Thank you for your time. Thank you. The next person on my list was Rima Mulla or Mula, but I don't see them in the participants list. So if you can go ahead and raise your hand if you are here, I will call on you after Ms. Stephanie Tallene. Ms. Tallene, I believe I promoted you. Oh, wait, we've got two people with their hands up. Hello. Oh, there you are. Okay, great. Yes, you can go ahead. Just make sure that you give us your full name and address, please. Oh, sure. My name is Stephanie Tallene. But first of all, thank you for letting me speak tonight. My name is Stephanie Tallene and I live at 273 Gray Street. And so I'm speaking as I'm a teacher in a neighboring community, as well as a parent to my sons in second grade at the bracket. And I have a sixth grader at the Gibbs, my daughter. So sorry. So I personally have been advocating for some of my students, my own students that I work with to be in school four days. As a high school teacher, and we have we have our community went back to school in person in January. So since then there's been, you know, we do the hybrid program. And so I've witnessed firsthand a lot of my students that are on zoom aren't showing up to class, or they'll show up and they'll go back to sleep or they're just not able to focus at home. So they'll turn their cameras off and maybe go back to bed. So these same students, the same students that are on hybrid when they're in front of me in the classroom, they're able to engage in school, they're able to do their classwork. So it's like night and day. They're and you know, many of my students parents work full time, and they're not able to be there and be supportive of their learning. There's not a lot of structure at home. And it's difficult for them to engage in learning at home. So both myself and my colleagues have received many emails from students expressing how withdrawn and isolated they are feeling they're depressed, they're anxious. And a lot of my students have lost older family members due to COVID. So they're, you know, grieving these losses, trying to care for their younger student younger siblings and trying to learn remotely, which has been so difficult. So on a personal note, my children have been you know, having a difficult time at home, you know, a lot of days there's tears, they want to be back in school with their friends and their teachers. They miss, you know, they're tired of being at home. My daughter's been struggling a lot, you know, she loves the Gibbs and loves all the teachers and the principal and she just wishes you know, she says to me every day, why can't I be back at school? So it breaks my heart. And you know, with the I actually I just got my first vaccine today. And with teachers being vaccinated now and with the 95, you know, some of the data shown that 95 percent immunity to the virus once you get your first shot. So I just I'm just advocating that, you know, hopefully as soon as we can get, you know, our Gibbs kids back to school as soon as possible. And just because, you know, I've seen like the mental the suffering, you know, their mental health is suffering. One of my own family members works at Children's Hospital and she's seen, you know, she reports to me that there's 30 to 50 kids per day coming in ages seven to 18 suicidal attempts, suicidal thoughts. So it's very concerning. So I guess I just I, you know, I'm hoping that we can get these kids back as soon as possible, you know, so they can be with their friends, their peers, their teachers and, you know, being a supportive, nurturing environment. So thank you everyone. And thank you for all the work you're doing. Thank you. Ms. Alham Sadat. Hello, Alham Sadat 62 Magnolia Street. I'm a parent of a second grader at Hardy Elementary. Good evening, everyone. And thanks for the opportunity to speak tonight. I'm speaking on behalf of myself, Mara Vats, Angela Cristiana and over 100 other Arlington parents across the district to ask you to prioritize outdoor spaces. There's smoke downstairs. The alarm may sound. It's going to be loud. Apologies to prioritize outdoor spaces for mask free activities such as lunch, snack and mask and mask breaks on all in person days on less severe weather prohibits outdoor time. The health and safety of students and teachers must be a priority in any plan to return to in person school in any of our schools. And we must take every step to reduce the spread of covid. Thank you to every all the work that APS has already done and taking critical steps such as improving air quality, enforcing mask mandates and implementing covid surveillance testing for all teachers, staff and students. We believe that eating outdoors is one additional safety mitigation that should be implemented to keep everyone in APS buildings and their families at home safe. As you know, covid-19 can spread from person to person in micro droplets that waft through the air and accumulate over time and indoor spaces. The CDC recommends to minimize transmission. People should utilize outdoor spaces when possible and wear it masks indoors with with people not in your immediate household. Additionally, current CDC guidelines for in school meals is to prioritize outdoor seating through partnerships between parents and APS principals last summer and fall. Some schools have already identified suitable outdoor spaces and purchased stadium seating to allow outdoor eating to happen safely and effectively. While several schools have been successfully utilizing outdoor spaces for mask free times of the day, we would like to see this adopted as a district wide priority as part of the return to school plan. Please consider advising all APS schools to identify accessible outdoor spaces and seating options that can be used on most days the spring and beyond for lunch, snack and mass breaks. Such recommendations would add in one additional layer of safety to keep everyone in our school communities safe and healthy. Thank you again for your time. Thank you. And I don't see Ms. Rima Mola or Mula in the attendees list. So I'm going to assume that they are not here. So the next item on the agenda is an update from the Arlington Human Rights Commission about the land use agreement that so I brought Mr. Pusey here from the HRC at the direction of the policy subcommittee and they requested that we get an update, a quick update about just where they're at and what action if any we need to take at this time. So go ahead. Thank you so much for coming. This is it's kind of a wild time for the schools and we appreciate your participation and we're excited to hear what you have to tell us. Sure. I'm glad to be here and I appreciate that this issue is probably one of the smallest issues you have tonight. So I'll be very fast. I'm just going to put on my screen if I can one small document, actually a snippet of a document, you can find this. Can you see this warrant article thing? Right. So the Human Rights Commission is bringing four articles to town meeting. This one is the one about land acknowledgments and to be clear, it is a nonbinding resolution that we would like town meeting to support that would encourage. There will be some edits, I think before the draft is final, but to encourage the reading of a land acknowledgement statement at the beginning of public meetings. It is nonbinding, so it doesn't mean every town meeting. It doesn't mean this exact acknowledgement, but we would like, we recommend that the chairs of meetings do it in a regular fashion rather than an ad hoc fashion. So, you know, it's not on a whim. Do we do it or not? It's if you meet, you know, every other week, maybe you only do it once a month or, you know, within reason. And the importance of this is that land acknowledgments are particularly important in public meetings for local governments because their jurisdiction is so tied to nearby borders. So the link to the immediate vicinity and its history is very important. This acknowledgement was written by Ferris Gray. This language here was written by Ferris Gray, the Sagamore of the Massachusetts tribe. So it has the legitimacy of that. And finally, I just want to make clear that this is a land acknowledgement, not, I think, in your agenda, you said land agreement. And people have expressed concern in the past about does saying this erode any legal standing of deeds or ownership or anything? And it does not. It's really a cultural, historical and just overall a respectful acknowledgement of the history of the land we're on. So we have presented this to the select board. They have passed it with their approval on to town meeting. So we will be spreading the word among town meeting members to explain to them exactly what it what it's for, why it's important. And hopefully, you know, leaders of various meetings like yours will consider celebrating and recognizing the heritage of Indigenous peoples in this way. Any questions? Very much. And so I think, you know, what would be helpful if you could take back to the Human Rights Commission is that, you know, that this would go through town meeting. I think we're looking to take the Q from town meeting around the language, right, so that we're all using a common language. And then we, you know, we have our own policies as a school committee. And it just takes us just just takes us a little bit of time to sort of, you know, what we're what we're going to do and whether or not this would be something that we would put into policy. I would, you know, defer obviously to, you know, whatever the the policy sub committee makeup becomes after after April. So but, you know, there's obviously significant, significant interest. So I'm going to ask you to stop sharing your screen so that I can see everybody who's about and then just look and see if there are any questions for you from the committee. But we do really appreciate you coming. I know that you met with our policy subcommittee already. And we've we've taken up a lot of your a lot of your time. But it is, you know, it is important that we all speak with a common language and that we understand where we're at in this process. So is I'm looking for members of the committee. If anybody has any questions about this, you're split on a couple of screens. All right. Seeing none. All right. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for coming and we will be in touch. You're welcome. All right. The next item on the agenda is options around desi requirements for student learning time. So this came up as part of our meeting two weeks ago. Dr. Allison Ampe requested that some of our council come to talk to us about that at the time it was sort of the initial guidance from desi. And I did speak with Mr. Heim who is our town council as well as Ms. Valerio who is our school committee attorney. And Mr. Heim is here tonight to give us an update on that and be available to answer questions from the committee about about where we're at with this as of right now. So Mr. Heim, you're not on my first screen, but I think when you start talking, you'll pop up here. Good evening members of the committee. Thank you, Madam Chair. Good evening to all of the parents and members of the community, teachers, staff who are on this meeting. Obviously, this is a matter of great importance and I appreciate from the tone of the public comments that this is something that is difficult no matter what your overall perspective is. By the way, I'm going to apologize for my somewhat spectral appearance with Town Hall behind me. Don't have a great spot in the house to to appear from at the present moment. So I'm forced to use a virtual background. I don't want to take too much of the committee's time in the sense that I do feel that Desi provided a fairly straightforward and thorough guidance that addressed a number of questions that might come up. I'm happy to go through all of that, but I'm just mindful of what the committee would like to focus on. One of the primary issues that was put to myself in Attorney Valerio is what are the consequences if we don't essentially follow the directive that Desi and the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education has set forth for all school districts in the Commonwealth. And I do want folks to understand that that is a that is something that doesn't really present anything other than relatively nuclear options for for Desi. So their primary stick in these circumstances is to withhold state or federal funding under Chapter 49, Section 1B. There are probably more likely outcomes in terms of what would happen if the district does not, especially if by design comply with Desi's directive with respect to school reopening. They can refer to the Attorney General's office, which again would be a relatively severe outcome. They can also try to work with the district on a sort of mediated plan. The elements of that could be pretty far ranging from discussions about how student learning time will be made up for within the current school year or in some other fashion. So the long and short of it is is that the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education is very unlikely to be particularly receptive to any effort to essentially say that well, we can't or we won't comply with this latest directive on reopening. And they have provided a fairly detailed set of instructions for what they will consider with respect to a waiver and what they will not and what the requirements are for submitting those waivers. So again, I'm happy to talk about that process if it's a good use of the committee's time. I'm also happy to talk about anything else in the Desi guidance, but it is a very straightforward and not particularly nuanced set of options. It's obviously designed with respect to all districts across the Commonwealth. So the individual circumstances of any given school district are only going to be accounted for within the prism of the waiver system that they have designed under the circumstance. One other thing I will say that's just maybe more for public information than for anybody on the committee is that it's important to remember that the student learning time requirements had a default before the pandemic began. And the ability to engage in remote instruction in hybrid learning was essentially a blanket waiver provided to all school districts in light of the health crisis that we're all still dealing with. They've essentially revoked that for K to 5 as of April 5th and for K to 8 as of the 28th. High schools, they're essentially have relayed to everyone that they plan to have a further guidance on that in April and that the status quo remains in place until then. There are a lot of other details with respect to more specific circumstances ranging from special education to some specifics for school districts that have not done as good of a job frankly as Arlington has with respect to providing hybrid options. If you're a district that didn't provide hybrid options until recently, for better or for worse, you're given a little bit more leeway under the waiver system than districts like Arlington have been providing hybrid for elementary and middle school kids for some time. So with that, again, I'm happy to talk in a little bit more detail about waivers and what your realistic options are. But I do want folks to know with some clarity that there's not a great option here that doesn't run enormous risks of saying we understand what Dusty's position is, but we're just not going to we're going to deviate from that anyway. Thank you, Mr. Heim. So from the committee questions, Dr. Allison Ampe. Thank you. I don't actually have a question. I just wanted to explain that the reason I had asked Mr. Heim to come to or for you to arrange for him to come was because two weeks ago we didn't have this detailed outline of what the consequences were. And I felt it there's reasons I have significant concern about Dusty's plan, which I'll get into later. But I wanted all of us to be on the same. Plainfield understanding what our options are, which is basically that we don't have them, but just to make it very clear. And also I wanted to add that my understanding is that both Mr. Heim and Ms. Valerio have spoken together and they have the same basically the same feeling about this. So that's why Ms. Valerio is not here is because there wasn't a need to be redundant. So thank you very much, Mr. Heim, for attending. I'm sure I may add something. Yes, please go ahead quickly. What Dr. Allison Ampe said that that you, Mr. Heim met, did speak with Ms. Valerio and were in agreement. I think I lost you there. Oh, OK, go ahead. Sorry. But that's right. Attorney Valerio and I did conference about this. It's obviously in a usual circumstance, Arlington would not under ordinary circumstances be considering an option to essentially not follow does the guideline, of course. And it's only under these very rare circumstances. I also want to note my appreciation for what Dr. Allison Ampe has raised in the sense that as part of Attorney Valerio and I's discussions about these issues and explorations of them, we did reach out directly to legal counsel for Desi. And without over inflating Arlington's, you know, importance within a common wealth full of school districts, I do feel that that some of the clarity that they provided were probably in response to the articulation of these concerns. And I feel for better for worse, even if one doesn't agree with them. Desi has made the landscape that much more clear under their guidelines. Probably not just in response to Arlington, but but in response to Arlington and other school districts who express some concern about how these guidelines pair with some other guidances and things like that from other jurisdictions. So I think it was been a well worth a worthwhile effort to sort of relate to Desi what the feeling is by at least some members of the school community. And I think we have a clearer guidance for it. So I'm I'm very much appreciative of that, even if the outcome remains that there isn't much in the way of options other than again to pursue the waivers. If you think you can meet them under the guidance. Right. Anybody else from the committee for Mr. Heim, Mr. Schliffman. Thank you, Madam Chair. From where does Desi get the or rather the state board of elementary and secondary education get their authority to compel us to do something. Well, the thank you, Mr. Schliffman. Their regulatory authority is of course rooted in 603 CMR 27 with respect to student learning time. But their sort of more broad authority is rooted in Chapter 69, which outlines the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education's rights and responsibility with respect to education in the state. So yeah, go ahead, sir. So the legislature has granted the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education the authority to come down here and tell us to do this. That's a that's a summary of what is a complicated landscape, but yes. So that legislation by the great and general court that is either signed into law unlikely in the case of this governor or survives a gubernatorial veto overpowers any desi regulation, correct? It would depend, sir, on what we're talking about. You could certainly have a legislative effort to reform or provide some special provision of Chapter 69 or you could, you know, create a situation where there's a potential conflict of law. Ideally, if you were, I think if I understand where you're going, you'd amend some piece of Chapter 69, which gave local school districts some specific authority with respect to public health pandemic or something like that. Yes, some emergency provision notwithstanding any other regulation in Chapter 69 of the general laws. The state board of elementary and secondary education shall not direct districts to whatever. That's right. Yes, sir. So that if the legislature acted quickly, if in their wisdom, April 5th opening was unattainable due to the vaccinations, but in April 26th, hypothetically opening was appropriate. The legislature could enact special legislation to direct desi not to force the school to reopen prior to April 26th. Yes, sir. In theory, you could pass a special act or a session law. I mean, it would have to be signed by the governor, which I think you alluded to, which would create a political conflict. But yes, in theory, in theory, if you pass legislation all the way through, you could do that. Or if the governor vetoes it, it could be overridden. But that takes X number of days between passage and override. Yes, sir. OK, I just wanted to understand the context. They have a trump card over us, but the legislature essentially has a trump card over them. Is is law to regulation to poor victimized school committee? Well, yeah, I would say in the abstract, yes, without me being an expert on the legislative and political realities involved in that. Yes, sir. Yeah, I'm not getting into realities. I'm just asking in terms of the structure of governance. Yes, sir. So that anyone is unhappy with the April 5th opening, we can't do anything about it. But in theory, your Repson senators could. In theory, your Repson senators, if they could get something off the ground with the rest of the legislature. Yes, Dave Rogers, Sean Garber Lee, Cindy Friedman. Those are the people to talk to if you don't like where we're going. Thank you very much, Mr. Cardin. Thank you. So since we we raised the possibility of non-compliant, I just want to I think it'd be good to put it for the committee to take a position on this. So I've scribbled down a motion moved of the policy of the committee is that the district will comply with the revised student learning time regulations and that the superintendent will not submit a waiver without the prior approval of the committee. I will second it. I can speak to it. For the purpose of discussion. Thank you. So again, just because we've raised the specter of non-compliance, I know a lot of us are upset about the way and the manner and the timing of the regulations. I think there's a split on the committee as to whether reopening is a good thing or not. But this is where we are. We have these regulations. The nuclear option is pretty severe. It seems like we've hopefully we'll find out later we're moving towards being able to implement them. So I'd like the committee to be on record that that is our policy that we will comply. If it turns out we need a waiver, then the superintendent can come to us and request that. Under the desi guidelines, she actually can do that without our approval but I want to make it clear that you should seek our approval first. Thank you. Would anybody else like discussion on Mr. Cardin's motion seconded by Mr. Heiner, Mr. Thielman, and then is Dr. Allison Ampe. I think Mr. Cardin summed it up well. There's a lot of different opinions within the community and there's different opinions on the school committee and there's different takes Mr. Riley's approach and how this came about. But there has been some conversation tonight and there's been conversation in the community and I think Mr. Cardin is right. I think it's just best to clarify that this is our policy to put us on the record to make it clear to the public, to parents and others that this is where the district is going. So there's no further conversation. Certainly people can write us and email us and email the district leadership about safety protocols and logistical issues that's to be expected. But I think it's important that we set forth and make clear our policy. Dr. Allison Ampe. I had already considered and discarded the idea of putting a motion forward basically for the opposite and chose not to because I think doing this on the floor doesn't allow my fellow committee members time to assess the complexities of both. At this point, we haven't heard anything about why this might be a good idea or I mean, why going back to school might be a good idea or why it might not. So I haven't decided if I'm going to vote no or abstain, but I'm going to do one of those two because I don't think first, there was no motion to suggest non-compliance. There was a desire to understand what the options are and to have them spelled out in clear legal fashion because Desi is asking us to do something which I'll explain later. I think it's a problem. I think it's a problem for Earlington. But there has been no suggestion that we will not comply. Just what are our options? I don't think we have to say that we're going to comply. That's what we're going to do or not. We just want to hear our options. Anybody else? Mr. Schlickman? I agree with Dr. Allison Ampe and I don't want to be constrained on either side of this as evidence comes forth. This only happened less than a week ago and there may be movements by multiple districts to try to push the envelope a little and I don't want to put us on record as opposing doing that. Not that I'm advocating civil disobedience. I also don't want to put us in a position where we're voting to do absolute compliance no matter what. It's not a necessary vote. I think everybody should assume that we're heading towards complying with the state. But if the ground rules change in any way, I want us to be able to maneuver within those ground rules without staking out a position at this point. I will join Dr. Allison Ampe in voting against this. I hope she does too. I initially and then Ms. Ekston, I'll call on you. I initially didn't think that we needed this motion either, but the more that I think about it, this is deeply personal for me. I have a very young child who has an April 5th return date and I am not interested in spending our meetings and our time on social media and our emails negotiating and hedging about whether or not we're going to comply with Desi. We need to come up with a plan. We have all of these people here tonight to talk to us about what this planning looks like and what they're doing for our kids, my kids, my kid who is a couple of weeks away. I appreciate that people don't like the assignment that we've been given. I broadly think that we do need to bring kids back to school full-time, but there are parts of the assignment I don't like either. But we're going to be graded on the execution and I want to move towards figuring out how we're going to do this and how we're going to do this for our kids and for our staff and for our teachers. I support Mr. Cardin's motion only just to give a really clear signal to the community and to all of the people that work in this district that this is what we have to do. We need to turn our focus instead of talking about all of the ways that we could end run around this that we need to focus our energy on figuring out the best way to do it. I think that's what leadership looks like right now. I will be supporting Mr. Cardin's motion because I'm ready to hear from the people who are going to tell us how they're going to do this. Ms. Exton. Thanks. I'm in between abstaining and voting yes on this motion. For a long time, I felt very strongly about K2 coming back. I still feel that way and less comfortable with the older students at the same time. This is a plan that people have been working on for a really long time and I think we need to keep moving forward with it. But I do want to publicly acknowledge that I don't think that this was the right way for Desi to make this happen. I know how complicated and difficult it has been for teachers to get vaccinated and I also know the relief that they feel once they have an appointment or they've been vaccinated. At the same time, this plan needs just to move forward. Similarly on the fence, as I could also name be, but on the other side about whether to move forward or not make a decision that we're going to definitely comply or not comply right now. Anybody else? Seeing none, motion by Mr. Cardin, seconded by Mr. Heiner, Ms. Eksten. Yes. Mr. Cardin. Yes. Dr. Allison Ampey. Abstain. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Mr. Schluckman. No. Mr. Heiner. Yes. I am also yes. The motion by Mr. Cardin carries. Does anybody else have anything for Mr. Heim? Seeing none, we're going to move on to the next item on the agenda, the suspension and discipline report from the secondary level. So Madame Pierre Maxwell and Mr. Merringer. So I'll turn it over to you. Good evening, everyone. Can I share my screen? You should be able to. There's a little green button in the middle on the bottom. Yeah, I just want to make sure that I had access to do that. We move the people from this side. So. I do know we're focusing first on the plan, the give discipline. So I'll move to that presentation. OK, thank you for having me, everyone. I have here with me tonight assistant principal, Wendy Salvatore, which who will chime in at times to help present the data. As you know, give school was open in 2018, 2019 school year. So the information I'm presenting tonight stem from 2018 to 2021. And a few of the slides were slides that were shared two years ago prior to my arrival. So this is a beautiful picture of the school. When things go back to normal, we hope to see the children coming that way to the Gibbs. So this is the 2018-2019 school year, first year of the school existence. And this is taking directly from data that Dr. Magnil had shared with this body two years ago, or also part of information that was shared last June when we present the discipline report for the district. It shows that we had seven in-school suspension for children who were Caucasian children and one for one Hispanic students. If you look on the top of the slide, there are the key to the races of the students. And that year, we also gave 14 out of school suspension. We had 14. It's not necessarily, it was 14 students. It may have been 14 students altogether or less. But that's the data that I copied from the presentation to share from the first year the school was in existence. The second year, 2019-2020, we had two detentions. I remember, as the principal, Salvatore, speaking to those last June. And we also had two in-school suspension with three for African-American students. And then four for white students, Caucasian students. And then come to this is where the data is presented a bit clearer for that year, 2019-2020, zero detention, zero suspension. And these were the students that received the three and a half day in-school suspension. Three males, two Caucasian males, one BIPOC male students. That's Black, Indigenous people of color, which is the new term that we referred to minority students. And two students on an IEP. And all three of those infraction occurred in the month of December of last school year. And so we come to this school year. I want to first address the group about our approach. So this is for this school year, 2020-2021. This is the discipline report as of this month. We have no detention to date, no suspension to date. We have issued two logical consequences slips, which is where the students receive a slip that goes to their home with the specific infraction or violation of our school routine and expectations. And so, and this were one for inappropriate language and one for time out of class. These were the two slips that went home. We also have one social emotional learning referral for a student who at the very beginning of the school year left the school ground. And in fact, the student was driving home, it was driven to the school and the parent had just left. The student had not actually entered the school, but luckily one of us had seen the students being drove off by mom, but the student went the opposite direction of the school. We were able to give the proper assistant to that student since then. And currently this week, we are working on two specific incident that occurred at the school. So we have two pending logical consequences that have not been fully addressed yet, but I'm in the process of addressing these two very serious incidents. So I wanna speak a little bit to our approach to discipline at the Gibbs School. So we looked through the sixth grade lens when approaching discipline, thinking about the kids developmental stage and the fact that they're going to some serious, not only changes in their body and their understanding, but also making a huge transition from elementary school to middle school. So from that perspective, as a rule, we do not really issue detention. Our discipline system is modeled after the responsive classroom approach, which involve giving very clear expectation to our students. Those expectations are taught on a daily basis. They are modeled and they are posted for students. We also skill built by giving students their lagging skill when a student do something we look for what missing so we can properly instruct them and redirect them and reminding them of those expectations. We hold a lot of problem solving conferences with students between students to students, students and teacher, just trying for them to understand the cause for their behaviors and if they're going to improve, what does that look like and the reason why to have the improvement. Positively reinforcing students when they following expectation. We do daily announcement. We like to celebrate what we see that's going well. So the students do know that. The teachers do a very good job at that also in classroom. The students have daily lessons in their advisory classes focusing on community, belonging activities, growth mindset, et cetera, helping reinforce and maintaining our values around being understanding unified and unstoppable which is our three core values in everything that we do. We look for students to think of these words and what's their place and whatever they're trying to understand and do. So in mitigating and resolving students and appropriate behavior, we use logical consequences which is if you work something, you fix it. There are some stuff student break they may not be able to fix. So it's a conversation with the parent. There are time and space where we offer students the opportunity to go and have a break, give themselves a break, give them some permission to say, I'm not focusing right now, something is bothering me. I need a minute to be able to recenter myself so I can attend to learning. And so it's not a punishment and it's something that students can ask for when they know they need it. Of course we have some students who need some support in recognizing they need to ask for that but it is something that we have as part of our school. Students do a time-made loss privilege and that depends and we try not to make it unreasonable. It is to really match what they have done and is that loss of privilege is not gonna create more issues with the students. So we really try to be mindful about what does that mean? And it depends from students to students infraction to infraction. Time-old, it's something that we hold student accountable to give and it's really time-old to themselves. So for example, if a student because of their behavior had to come to the principal's office or had to speak with Ms. Salvador. So they miss in class time, there's an expectation that that student's going to communicate with their teachers and the teachers know where you were to make up that time. So it's time-old for time on learning that the students can perhaps stay after school when the teacher has their office hours or in these days, it's mostly virtually that student will be connecting to make sure that what they miss is being made up. Of course, I've already spoke of the logical consequence slip and then we understand the importance of collecting that data. So everything we do is recorded in our power school system. So something else, we use a multi-tiered system approach to really understanding that we need to make sure that when it comes to the climate of the school, the environment, the learning environment we're setting up for students, we are making sure that the tier one approach, all the students have access to what they need to really feel included and feel that they want to come to school. So these are all the strategies and activities that we use to help our students feel that they belong to really, especially in the time of COVID to we have quite a few kiddos who's having a tough time getting to school or tune in on the screen or those who are in the remote to really participate and engage. These are some of the things we're doing at the level one that all students are connected to or are receiving. I will not read the entire list to you because I know you're looking at it but I wanna point out 95% or more of our staff are training responsive classroom. The staff who started the school in 2018, 2019 did receive a more extensive training but all new staff who were hired prior to October have had the training so they can have a good understanding of how do we run our school. We have a subcommittee of teachers to create lessons based on a responsive classroom that teachers use for our advisory lessons that happens five days a week in the morning. We also do activities to get the kids excited about being kind to each other. The school counselors participate and list our school to participate in the great kindness challenge this year which was phenomenal. Got all the kids excited about being kind. We had a menu of positive out-of-the-box activity to do to really show the love, show kindness to everyone and the student thoroughly enjoyed that. The counselors have something called a calming corner where students can go and find different activities of their choice based on what they need in addition to having a twice-weekly virtual lunch drop-in via Zoom with the counselors and sometimes the school social worker. And that's in addition to what teachers are doing with our students. Again, we focus on growth mindset practices and strategies and a touch of mindfulness and positive affirmation for our students to really learn having good skills on how to cope and be in an environment where they're not going to be sent into detention or be suspended unless we find a situation that demands for that. And as you can see with the data, this year definitely with all the other challenges we really try to tend to the students where we don't have to get to that point. Tier two and tier three, I want to highlight that for children who needs a little more, they receive everything we do for tier one in addition to the extra support they need. So a student who identified needs tier two support would of course get all the what's on the menu for tier one but also would get something like a modified delivery of something we call check-in checkout. That's when an adult is identified to connect with a student based on a plan created by the social emotional wellness team of the school and where the student has specific time of the day to check-in. And the checkout is that at the end of the day, most of the time the kid would get a feedback on how their day went and there's a communication with home that really helping that students encourage somewhere so they can do what they need to do to be successful. And that system is part of the PBIS which is Positive Behavior Intervention System that we are being trained on. We have a full team from the GIB team who's learning about this PBIS and then we hope to be introducing it to the staff at the end of the school year getting ready to implement that fully for the 2021-22 school year. We also piloting something called relationship mapping which is where the teachers come as the learning communities to intentionally look at every student. Okay, so now we're in March, how are they really doing? Where the teachers are analyzing based on their observation do they feel that every child in that classroom is making connection with their peers and with the teachers themselves based on how they're communicating, how they responding to the in-person or via the Zoom classroom and then whether or not they feel that that child is connected. And if the data, the conversation is showing that that child is not then we can do something like a tier two or perhaps a tier three depending on the data that's collected. And finally, tier three, of course we have a student support team where children or we have conversation around children's need. A teacher can present the student for that conversation. A parent may do so or an administrator. Any staff in the building may feel that a student really need to be the center of the student wellness team for us to decide is that a student who needs more? And most often there will be a behavior intervention plan built in breaks for that student. We had started the year with the student taking that survey, which as a result of it, we created a group called COVID-19 stress less. This group is facilitated by our Gibbs school counselors. And that's been very successful addressing some of our students who were tier three. And also we have something called project success that is a collaboration between the Gibbs staff and AYCC staff who's supporting our students who need more of an intensive support throughout the weeks. And of course we have tutoring for some of our students who need more support with their academic learning. So next step for us is to continue to analyze the panorama data survey results that we've received that was given, I believe from third grade to 12th grade in the district. We've already gone over the data with our staff and looking to see what can we do better between now and the end of the school year based on the result of the survey from our students, parents and staff. And we're also looking to take a look at the survey result for our incoming fifth graders. I have that table for the month of May after we made the transition to having a full house. And so we can be better prepared as we receive the fifth graders in the fall of 2021. We will continue with our training for the positive behavior intervention system which we hope will enhance how we collect data, how we improve on our consistency of common language and signage all over the building. So the students can feel secure on continuing to understand what's required of them and how they can be supported. And then finally, we'll continue to train with the district around implicit bias, white privilege and the systematic racism. And as a school, we're looking to see what can we do differently to make sure that every student feel that they belong, they are welcome and that we're caring for them. This is a space that they feel safe and happy to learn with our adults. This is the presentation that Ms. Alvator and I prepared for you this evening. If you have any question, we're happy to answer them. I'm going to stop sharing my screen. Thank you, Madame Pierre Maxwell. Any questions from the committee? From Madame Pierre Maxwell on the Gibbs Discipline Report. Mr. Thielman. I want to thank Madame Pierre Maxwell for the presentation and the overview. I thought it was excellent. The only thing I want to say is that I always get a little nervous when we go, we get this much into the weeds of the number of students who have had certain things happen to them and identify them by race or special education. Cause in a small town like this, you can, you know, sometimes you actually know these kids. So I just want to point that out that I don't know how to make these presentations in the future, but it just makes me a little uncomfortable to see numbers that small with identifiers because you can actually, if you know the community, you can actually hear about some of these kids' names. So that's all I want to say. I'm not mentioning names. I'm just kind of expressing a little concern about that part of the presentation, that level of detail. But otherwise, but by the way, those numbers are good numbers and it's impressive that so few students have been subject to any discipline. So congratulations to the staff on their hard work. We appreciate that and thank you for the comment. We will be mindful, it's a slippery slope because we know that we want to be clear about who are the students and sometimes it's a plus, sometimes it's a minus to listed, but we'll be mindful for just the reason you stated. And it's really the few students being having any disciplinary slip is a testament to the staff. Our school counselors, the assistant principal, the classroom teachers, really everyone understand if any year we need to be all hands on deck, this is the year and focusing on making sure that we are giving time to have conversation with the students making sure that they understand how to improve their behaviors. And I will say the fact that so far we've been half at capacity when the children are in the building, it is another factor why the numbers are low because we're hoping it won't double the numbers when we get all the children back, but that is also a factor, thank you. Thank you, thanks very much, appreciate that. Anybody, excuse me, anybody else from Madam Chair Maxwell? All right, seeing none, thank you so much for coming to do the discipline report, Madam, I think we'll be hearing from you in our next item, but for now, Mr. Merringer, would you like to do yours? For the other one. Sure, so with me tonight is Rachelle Rubino, who's the seventh grade assistant principal and Julia McEwen, who is our new eighth grade assistant principal. So Julia, do you wanna put the presentation up? Great, looks good. So most of this data was given in July at a school committee meeting, but I wanna make sure that I'm going over it. This is the last two years of school discipline here at the Audison Middle School. So first of all, our views on discipline is that every student should feel safe in our school, physically, emotionally, and psychologically. Second, our students range from the ages of 12 to 14 and they're gonna make mistakes. And so our hope is that they're teachable moments and so kids can learn from their mistakes when they're at this age and when possible take responsibility for anything they might have done. And one of the other things that we stress is students should not have their education disrupted by their classmates. So overall we want our kids to learn from their mistakes. So two years ago during the 18, 19 school year, there were 34 students that were suspended. 30 were males and four were females. Half of them were IEP students. The racial breakdown was the most students suspended were white, 68%, but our white population was 74%. Four African-American students were suspended, which was four times what the population is. So our African-American population at the Audison is about 3%. Obviously, suspending four students was 12%. Three students identified as Asian 9%. Our Asian population that year was 11%. Three students were identified as multi-race non-Hispanic, 9% when the population was 6%. Zero Hispanic students were suspended that year. You'll see that we had an uptick in that in the future year. And there was one student identified as an English language learner. I am not sure why they were kind of characterized that way by the state. The biggest reason two years ago that we had kids suspended was vaping. So we definitely had a decent amount of students who were vaping at the Audison. It has, we've seen an incredible decrease in that. I assume that the information out to students and families is how dangerous vaping is and we are not seeing it to the same extent at the Audison. The grade breakdown, there were 13 students in seventh grade, there were 21 students in eighth grade. The detention data kind of mirrored what we had with suspension data. The white population were 67% of the detentions where we have a 74% population. You'll notice that African-Americans are disproportionately given detention than their population and the same with mixed race. Asian students and white Hispanic students is how they're categorized in power school were a little bit less than their population. That takes us to last year. There were 23 students who were suspended. The year before there were 34 which seems like a nice decrease except for remember we weren't in school after March 13th. The gender once again is the same in terms of there are 20 male students and three females. 61% of the students that were suspended were special education students. That is definitely a theme. The racial breakdown were 14 students were identified as white, three students as African-American, one student as Asian, one student as multi-race non-Hispanic and four Hispanic students. There were none the year before, there were four last year. The biggest reason was not vaping but it was student conflicts whether it happened in the cyber world or happened in the halls. We had 15 students that were in seventh grade. We had eight students that were in eighth grade. So in both years, that particular class last year's eighth grade when they were in the seventh and eighth grade were lower than the other two grades that they were worth. Detention more or less fell into the same realm. We had 110 incidents that resulted in detention, heavily male, if you look once again, African-Americans disproportionately given detention. They were five Asian students, they're 13% of the population, 4% given detention, mixed race, 6.8% of the population, 4% were given detention and white Hispanic, you'll notice it's about disproportionately double. So overall, analyzing the data, we have a few takeaways. Male students are much more likely to be suspended or receive a consequence than female students. Special education students are disproportionately suspended. African-American students are disproportionately suspended. I do wanna point out that for the last two years, there was less than one detention issued per day. So we have approximately over the last two years between 850 and 900 students. We usually have one detention assigned a day. And a majority of our suspensions are in school. We much rather have the kids in school working and making sure that they're doing work than obviously being outside the school. Rochelle is going to now tell you some of the next steps as we try to analyze the data and move forward. Rochelle? Thank you, Brian. So as you can see here, our next steps, we wanna meet with the secondary level. Rochelle, your audio is really tough to hear. Can you mute yourself and unmute and see if it gets better? Can you hear me better now? No, it's not any better. Rochelle, if you take your headphones out, you should be good. I think it's a Bluetooth issue. Yes, I believe that too. I was gonna say the same thing. No, so I'm gonna go, I'll take it over. Sorry for the technical difficulties. So we're looking to meet with the secondary level administrative team just to make sure that we're consistent six through 12 with some of our discipline approaches. We're gonna need to look obviously because of the disproportionality of who we're suspending. We need to still look at our anti-racism. We need to dive into implicit bias, white privilege, systemic racism. We also need to look a little bit closer at microaggressions. We are looking at the multi-tiered system of support to make sure that we're giving all the necessary support to students at the level they need. Rochelle has spearheaded some ruler training, which talks about social, emotional, looking at the kids and making sure that we're all set. And like Fabian said, analyzing the panorama survey data to make sure that students feel comfortable at the Odyssey. So we're looking at the data and like anything, we're trying to improve. I did wanna mention that unfortunately there has been some suspensions here at the Odyssey. We're not assigning detention. We do have a handful, unfortunately, of suspensions and most of it unfortunately has been a result of things that have happened in the cyber world. There was a couple of weekends that the worst day of the week was Sunday night when we found out that kids were kind of back and forth on the internet. And I'll be more than happy to take any questions. Thank you, Mr. Merringer. I thank you, Ms. Rubino. All right, questions from the committee for our Odyssey team. Dr. Allison Ampe. Thank you. Mr. Merringer, on the sheet, on the pages where you mentioned detentions, it didn't separate out how many kids were on IEPs. I don't know if you're, are you collecting that data? Is it known? You know, so I'm not sure I'm gonna have to go. So for a while, we weren't necessarily collecting it. I think it was something that the school committee asked because you wanted not only the suspension data, but the detention data. And so we were able to ask kind of the power school texts to get us some information to look at. I think that was an excellent suggestion, but we didn't dive a little bit deeper. I would suspect highly that the detention data would be fairly consistent with the suspension data in terms of IEPs being disproportionately given detention and given consequences, but I don't have the specific numbers. Great, I guess my question, my follow-up question would be, I understood, I like the approaches that you're taking, but I didn't see anything that really addresses the disproportionate appearance of kids with IEPs having suspensions or detentions. And to me, it feels like there may be, and this is where not being educated, it makes it more difficult, but it feels like there may be things in the IEP that need fixing or things in how kids have responses or anyway, I don't know. And I felt like that's something that I suspect could use looking at. Thank you. I agree, I think some of the things that we're looking and hopefully doing a better job is making sure everyone feels comfortable and successful. And so usually when students feel successful in the class and they feel like they're getting the appropriate support, whether that's from a counselor or from teachers or from tutoring, you usually see suspensions and detentions going down. So I think we're trying to look at how we can be better in terms of the whole child so that their kids aren't being disruptive or getting consequences for certain things. So I do feel like that's something we have to look at and I feel like that's not only a cultural thing that we're trying to become more positive in an overall environment and then looking at the kids who receive multiple consequences and figuring out what is making them and what is the root cause of why they're acting out. And for some of that, it might mean getting more counseling as part of something in their IEP for some of it, it might be developing more trusting relationships. So it is definitely something that we're concerned with and I think it's really looking at the whole child. Thank you. Mr. Schliffman. Thank you, Madam Chair. Mr. Thielman mentioned before that it was a little anxious by some of the smaller numbers and I concur. I wanna call everybody's attention to the state website. This won't show up anyway, but they suppressed data for small numbers of students and I think that we should be doing that and seeing that the number of disciplinary incidents over the past year or two has been relatively small that would suppress if we're breaking it down with school by school level that there are a couple of things that are big like the difference between males and females is a huge number. The difference between students with disabilities and not as a huge number. So those are the things that are appropriate to bring forth but I would ask that when we do this going forward that we do this as a district, say talking about K-8 and then having some of the storytelling that addresses what we're doing to support kids. Because I think that's the most compelling thing that Mr. Merringer is saying right now is how they're looking at students and evaluating the suspension or disciplinary action and what strategies they need to do to reduce suspensions no matter who they are and then coming back to us with commentary what we can do to support them to further bring down the numbers among all students. So I appreciate the hard work of compiling the numbers. I'd sort of like less numbers because I don't think we should be getting as granular as we are and the trends seem to be pretty consistent K-8. So thank you and thanks for looking at this in terms of reflective practice and what we should be doing next. And I look forward to any other discussion about what we can do as a school committee to support your work in terms of reducing disciplinary incidents and making this a more welcoming environment for everyone. Thank you and I think the other thing by looking at the numbers you realize and what we're trying to reflect as an administrative team obviously is that we're not letting our own bias affect what we're doing for consequences. And so when you do look at the disproportionality of African-American students that is something we have to look in the mirror and look and make sure we're doing everything that we're doing possible to make sure everyone feels comfortable at our school, at the audition. And I think that's obviously some of those trends to look at I think are important but I do think you make a valid point when there's one or two students and someone can say oh, I think that might be whomever it gets to be a little awkward. Yeah, or whatever individual circumstances are going on. So if we're looking at students of color, we know that if we're looking at white students versus all students, you can disaggregate back and forth without identifying publicly in a presentation forum such as this. While appropriate with your leadership team every time you suspend a kid, it's why did we get there? What led us to this position? What can we do about it? And so that when you're coming and talking to us you can say, well, the incidences have led to detentions or suspensions have been a result of this path to that point and what we should be thinking of moving forward. And if right now that we're struggling with issues surrounding incidents online maybe we need to be thinking about that as a separate category of work to address policy and to think it cooperatively with you to come up with some good actions to make this a better place for our kids. Anybody else for Mr. Miranger? I see Dr. Bodie. Thank you, Ms. Morgan. I would just like to, now I have a question for Mr. Miranger but concur with the observations that Mr. Schlickman made about the small numbers. And I would welcome perhaps putting this topic of what should be included in the public discipline reports that are mandated by the school committee to be given annually because as these numbers become smaller and smaller the point that Mr. Thielman made and you've made as well is that they become more identifiable. And so I would like to have us revisit this. I know that some of this came from our meetings many years ago with the Human Rights Commission but I do think that this is something that we should take another look at before we do annual reports next year. Thank you. Anybody else for Mr. Miranger? All right, seeing none, the next item on the agenda is full return to school planning. So Dr. Bodie, would you like to start? I know you've got your whole team here tonight. So I do wanna thank all of you for coming, trying to keep this agenda as tight as possible and keep moving through it. And so, but you wanna start, I assume. You're still on mute. Yes, I will start. And first of all, thank you for acknowledging the team that's here tonight. It's all of our principals, assistant principals, deans, curriculum leaders who have been working very hard all year long, acknowledge their work because there's been so many moving parts things to decide planning this had to take place to have the success with the programs we currently have. So I want to thank them and acknowledge them. I also want to begin by just saying how this presentation is going to go and the committee can think about whether you want to ask questions after what I present. But following me, I know that part of the motion that was presented, voted on the last meeting was to also hear the planning that was going on at the middle schools as well as the high school. So this evening, our secondary principals are going to give a brief presentation on the planning that's going on there as well. I also want to say again, before getting into very specifics about where we are with the planning is that all of the administrators and teachers and staff believe that students should that they should be in school full time. This is, we recognize that schools provide needed opportunities for young people to socialize with their peers for all the social emotional skills. And while certainly that has been an effort in our part to maximize opportunities for students to have those opportunities, whether in our hybrid programs or athletic programs, we know that many students would like to have more time, full time in school. There are also students who are concerned and their parents may be concerned, are concerned about their safety in our schools during the pandemic. We also recognize that our youngest children in the district are students in kindergarten, first grade and second grade have perhaps struggled the most this year with the remote days in the hybrid program. And prior to this pivot by the Board of Education, the district was looking into having our kindergarten students return, that plan that was being developed and very close to moving forward with actually required two classrooms, one classroom for the cohort A and one for classroom cohort B. So that really is not a possibility at this time given the space that we will need. We also were beginning to plan on returning students in K in grades one and two, but that was contingent on teachers receiving vaccinations. But we are not there at this, at now, we are in a new situation where the Board of Education has given the commissioner the authority to basically ask, require schools and school districts to return to full time in-person instruction. If I may, could I share my screen? I think you can, already. There's a green button at the bottom. All right, there we go. Here you go. All right. So as a very brief, and I really mean this, we very brief recap of this year. In the fall, actually as we were going through this in the summer, pretty much all decisions were local. There were certainly general requirements to look at three models. There were health and safety guidelines, but basically each district designed different solutions. The Middlesex League Superintendents worked collaboratively together in sharing the work that we were doing within our own districts. And all of the communities in the Middlesex League all have hybrid remote and four-day programs. Our four-day programs were offered to students that would benefit from being in-person four days a week and we have those programs at all of our elementary, middle, and high school. One of the safety considerations that we all agreed to last summer was that we would maintain six-foot distancing between deaths. As a result of that, class sizes had to be reduced in order that we would be able to have deaths placed at that distancing. I do want to remind everyone that the high school did not start in a hybrid program this past year for safety reasons. And that had to do with the ventilation system that required a lot of more time to make sure that the HVAC systems were at design capacity. In fact, even during that process that went on for a while in the fall, some of the work that was done had to be redone. So it was due to that that we began the year and the high school began a remote model. The schedule that was chosen, which was a four by four schedule, which was not our usual schedule and the high school was chosen to make the remote learning experience of students better in that model. Once you choose a model schedule, that is the model that you're going to have for the rest of the year. So we are where we are right now and that is the department of elementary and secondary education has notified districts that the structured learning time requirements that were put in place due to the pandemic have now been rescinded and they have given districts new structured learning time guidelines that must be complied with. So begin with, we already talked about this model. This is what the department of education has put out that shows the progression of the phases back to full-time in-person instruction beginning with the elementary schools on April 5th and middle schools on Wednesday, April 28th in the high school is to be determined, but we will be given about two weeks notice in April. In both middle schools and the high school we have obviously become planning. In fact, literally the day after the commissioner announced that elementary schools were going to be returning April 5th to full-time in-person instruction. We began our planning. So let me first begin with what does this mean in the way of structured learning time was different now than it was before. Before we were talking about number of in-person or synchronous time that could both count toward the requirements for structured learning time. Now the requirement is at the elementary that on average elementary students should have five hours per day of in-person instruction. That now I wanna emphasize the word average because that time can be spread over the course of a week. At the secondary level that requirement is for five and a half hours on average every week. The other change is that the Department of Education is saying to districts that the research is now showing after we've now gone through many months with this pandemic that transmissions have been shown to be low in schools and that's certainly been true in Arlington and we're seeing that with our pool testing. And I will take this opportunity to thank our parents for making sure that students who are sick are not coming to school, which has certainly been a factor in that. But the other piece of that is that some of the research is also showing that transmission levels in schools that have a different seating distance, six feet to three feet, are not seeing much different transmissions than we're seeing in schools in Massachusetts right now. So the recommendation is that classrooms now be organized with three foot distancing of desks, but there is one change from last summer. And that is the calculation last summer to measure six feet, it was middle of the seat to middle of the seat. Now it is seat edge to seat edge. And so we have, we did an initial audit and we're now with this new definition that literally came out two days ago. We are now going back into our classrooms and taking another look at the audits for how many desks can be in each classroom. So the first audit, the initial audit was done beginning when the commissioner made his announcement and we really do have to take another look at that. Now one thing that is not changing is the requirement for six feet of distancing for lunch and snack. I would say that this is probably one of the most challenging aspects to plan for. And there are many different ideas that the elementary principals, teachers and staff are looking at right now. For example, in fact, this was even in the suggestions but we had been thinking about this before the suggestions came out that perhaps students who are right now students are elementary schools eat lunch in their classrooms unless they eat lunch outdoors which is certainly a preference. We're going to be doubling or more than doubling the size of the number of students in the classroom perhaps half go out to recess and the other half have lunch and then that gets reversed. In order for that type of plan to be feasible we have to make sure that we have sufficient staffing for the supervised revolves of both having students out having recess as well as having lunch in the classroom. Other ideas are being considered and there's a lot of sharing and collaboration is going on among our elementary schools to develop a plan that's going to meet the six foot distancing and certainly be safe for all students and staff members. One caveat in the plan to pivot to in-person full-time instruction is that families that chose a remote program in Arlington that's called the remote Academy they may remain in that program through the end of the school year. We've also been told that at this juncture I suppose that this could change if there was changes in metrics for next year around the spread of the COVID-19 virus but that at this point we should not plan having remote Academy programs next year and that if there are any need for alternate plans for instruction for students that have medical needs that those would revert to how we handle those prior to the pandemic. One of our concerns and has been through all years in planning for returns to in-person full-time instruction is that we wanted our teachers and staff to be able to be vaccinated first. Recently, I think everyone's aware the governor has moved up the timeline for teachers and school staff to be vaccinated and just, I think it was yesterday, opened up four days for teachers and school staff throughout the Commonwealth to have a vaccination at one of the state sites. I actually wrote here four Saturdays. It's actually three Saturdays and a Sunday does reserve for teacher vaccinations. Our hope of course is that all, if not all, most of our teachers and staff will be able to secure the vaccinations prior to April 5th. Though the two of the days that have been offered exclusively for that, for the state are actually the weekend after we open on the 5th. Now someone, this apparent in public participation this evening asked about what would happen if we had a positive COVID case and then also asked for a little bit more information about metrics, what we've had in place all year around students having to remain out of school is not going to change. If there is a positive case in a classroom, then all of the students in that classroom are going to be considered close contacts and they will be asked to be out of school for the time that we have had all year long. In the middle school, that's been very challenging because of the way that is organized in terms of students in a learning community moving among teachers or the other way around. When a student has a positive case it affects the entire learning community. And I don't expect that that's going to change as we move forward in the spring. So we will be monitoring that very carefully with pool testing and I can report that this week with the pool testing that we did do, we had negative pools. Now I will add that I would encourage parents who are listening this evening that if you haven't provided consent for your child to participate in the pool testing program that you do so, we would like to have all of our students participate so that we have a very good view of surveillance view on what is the level of virus in our schools. And at this time, we know with the level of participation with ranges from about 60% to 94% that our level of virus at least with a known case our known population being tested that it is very, very low. But we'd like, as I said, like to see that increase. So what are our next steps in this planning process? We sent out a letter yesterday to elementary families and we will do something similar at the secondary this month. And we were asking elementary families if they wanted to consider, if they wanted to request a change of program meaning did they want to change from hybrid program to remote academy or vice versa remote academy to hybrid. Keep in mind hybrid on April 5th will become a full-time in-person program that they could send a request form. They were also told that it might be possible that they would have to be placed in a not in their home school because we're going to maintain just as we've done this year with six feet we're gonna maintain the three foot distancing in all of our classrooms which will create some capacity issues at different grades in different schools. The Department of Education has also indicated in a conversation with superintendents this week that there's realized that we have a window, a small window of time to do all the planning for the return of our elementary students so that if you are still looking for staff or if you are not able to honor all the requests that that can be delayed to a little bit later as we move a little bit later in April. So I said that earlier that developing Lens plans is underway and as I said, also one of the biggest challenges of actually the return of students. We also are reviewing a student and teacher assignment which could very likely have to change. This will become more of an issue, I think at our secondary school than is in the elementary. On the other hand, at the elementary, we are our specialist teachers and these are teachers who teach music, art, physical education. Those music and physical education were two of the subject areas, discipline areas that were considered had safety concerns with them and there were regulations that were given by the Department of Education to schools back in the summer, then October and now most recently March one and how you could offer that those courses within four students. The requirements that we were operating from earlier this year caused us to change and have our specials offered on the remote learning days in the hybrid program. As a result, our specials are often the way that we cover teacher prep day, prep times and lunches. So teachers can have lunch and so that was what caused us having to have a 145 dismissal rather than our 230 dismissal because these teachers were teaching remotely with students in a hybrid program as well as a remote academy. In order for us to return to in-person full-time instruction, these teachers are going to have to come back into our schools and as a result, their assignments will change. The order of the day is going to change and those plans are moving forward right now. We also in planning for lunches, one of the things that principals are considering is whether we have lunches in the cafeteria and also possibly in the gyms or elementary schools. Now, there are different ways to approach that in terms of how that would be done. Currently, we would not be able to use our cafeteria tables because we would not be able to have very many students at those tables and they take up a lot of space. So we are looking into what furniture we need in order to potentially have lunch in cafeterias but we're also looking at other ways that that could be done which could be one of our elementary schools has uses stadium chairs and students can eat on the floor in the gym or outside. We're looking at ordering yoga mats so we can also have that kind of creative flexibility in what we will do. So we will also be, our facilities department is going to make a tour of all the classrooms and verify that the ventilation system that was updated to design capacity, the start of school is working at design capacity. We also are looking to purchase more air purifiers. We have quite a few, 160 distributed in the district right now, including the preschool and we are ordering more air purifiers to have in our returning classrooms. The, well, let me just go on with that. So anyway, we acknowledge that the returns of full time is going to, we are definitely going to need even more than we do now address the social emotional needs of our students. We will have students returning into a classroom which is going to be twice the number of students in that classroom than they have experienced all year. This is going to take some adjustment. It's going to take a re-look at all of the protocols for the classroom. Even though they have the protocols in their smaller classrooms, there is going to be a need to look at this. We may have some students returning from the remote Academy who have not been in a classroom all year. And so I know that we have a team of people looking very carefully at what we can do to support our students as they return. So looking ahead, we are in the process of developing acceleration programs for our students who have been identified that have some struggles learning this year. Last year we had an expanded title one program in the summer that was virtual. This year the Department of Education has said that whatever programming you have at the end of the school year, you need to continue into the summer. So we will have a summer programming with for students that will probably also be open to students that are not identified, though that still remains to be determined at the moment. The Department of Education has said that they were going to be running acceleration programs that is now back for the districts to organize these ourselves. And those programs will be developed and parents will hear more about that in the weeks ahead. We are planning, and I will say this, emphatically, we are planning for all of our students in preschool through grade 12 to return in person in the fall. That is the direction we're going. That is the current mandate from also from the Department of Education. So the remote Academy will terminate at the end of June and we will not be continuing that next year, but we probably will have some kind of remote virtual summer program and have both going this summer in person and remote. And as far as risk mitigation measures next year, I think that's to be determined yet whether we will continue pool testing remains to be seen. I think it will depend upon what's going on at that time. And I don't expect that we will not be back full time next year. So one thing I did not mention earlier as we look to next steps upcoming is that this last fall, the Department of Education allowed school districts in the state to have 10 days of planning time before schools opened in Arlington, they opened on September 21st. Arlington utilized nine of those days. Normally we have two scheduled teacher planning days before school opens and one during the school year, usually in November. One of those days was not utilized and was moved to the end of the school year with the intent that should we have a major programming change that we would put that planning day in before the change in program. This clearly rises to the level of major program change. And what initially we had looked at a number of options but after some rethinking on part of teachers and principals throughout the district, we've come back to what actually was maybe considered the first option for the planning day and that is Thursday, April 1st. And the reason why that day has been chosen is a lot of physical preparation of classrooms for the return of students on April 5th. In order to change and move that planning day to April 1, a vote of the school committee is needed. And I would like the committee to vote on this this evening. The reason why the school committee needs to vote on that is that the effect of that decision will mean that the last day for elementary students will be one day later than currently is scheduled. The other vote that I would like the school committee to take this evening is to change the middle school Wednesday dismissal time from 11.45 to 12 o'clock. And the reason for this request is that we want to meet the structured learning time requirements that have been required by the district and we would need an additional 15 minutes in order to meet the 27.5 hours per week for the middle school. There is no need for a vote of the school committee about the elementary dismissal time at 11.30 unless you were to want to change that. But in terms of meeting our structured learning time requirements, we would still meet them with the 11.30 dismissal. We're required to have 25 hours per week. So I don't know, Ms. Morgan, if you'd like to stop for some questions or comments at this time before we move on to the brief reports of the secondary principals. Yeah, I think we'd like to make sure that people have a chance to ask questions. And then if we're in a place where we can do the dismissal time and the planning day motions, that's fine. But if people would like to wait to do that until after we hear from the elementary principals, obviously that's fine with me as well. I won't be making the motion for either of them. So I will be deferring to the rest of you for that. Dr. Bodie, can you stop sharing your screen so that we can all see each other again? Yes, I can do that. Okay, let me go down. All right, working on that, why don't you move ahead? Questions from the committee about what we've heard so far. I can only see Mr. Curtin, Mr. Thielman, Ms. Exton, and Mr. Hayner. So Mr. Slickman, if you have questions, we'll get to you when the screen gets turned off. Actually, scroll down. So questions from the committee. Oh, here we go. Brilliant. On what we've heard so far, Ms. Exton. Sure. First, I just want to say thank you to the principals and the administration for all the work that you have done. I think it was a year ago tonight that everything shut down. And I know that from that time until today, you haven't stopped planning and re-planning and supporting students and supporting teachers. And I know that it's been a really difficult, challenging time. And I just want to express my appreciation for all the work that you have done. And to the teachers that are watching tonight too, I very much appreciate all of the work that you have done and all the dictates that have come down and changes that are happening. I know it's really stressful and I appreciate all the work that's gone into all of this planning. I just, I wanted to sort of reiterate some of the comments that were made in public comment about the outside time and the lunch issues. And I know that in the fall, some schools ate lunch outside a lot and some didn't. And I, I guess in some ways this is a more of a question for the committee, but is would it be appropriate for us to put into place some kind of policy? I'm thinking similar to the recess policy, where the weather is this temperature and that set of precipitation that there is an expectation that students go outside. I'm just, I don't know if that's through Ms. Morgan. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to call on Dr. Bode to respond because I think that she would want to, to, to, I mean, we can, we can write whatever policies we want. Right. And, and, you know, through the policy. Dr. Bode, did you want to address that? Yes. I would use this section. You definitely share the view of all of us that being outside makes the most sense. That was true in the fall. We have secured the tents that we had in the fall as well. And they're going to go up the week, the week of March 24th. We all know though that we live in New England and they're going to be gays when that is not possible. So we have to have a plan for when that occurs. And that plan has to make sure that we have our, our students being able to eat a six foot distancing for the safety of everyone. But yes, will they go outside? They will. And in fact, let me just add one more comment because to the extent possible, we would have classes, physical education classes outside and possibly even music classes if possible. But we are planning for the, for either them being in the school. Or. Okay. I lost her there. I don't know if that's going to happen again, but I understand that like that people can't eat outside every, every time and there has to be a plan for inside. I guess my, my concern is that in the fall, I know, and even I think it right up, even after the fall, perhaps in January, some elementary schools were still eating lunch outside. And some elementary schools never went outside for lunch. And so I'm just thinking about it. I appreciate that there definitely needs to be a plan for indoors. You know, we all agree that outdoors is safer. And so I'm just wondering how we can ensure that. When it is possible to eat outside, that that is happening across the elementary school. So I think. Go ahead, Dr. I would say that just the, the nature of the situation that we're in with having as many students now, a doubling of our student population in schools isn't going to necessitate that. I don't see that there's any way that we cannot really do that effectively. So I would, I would, I don't, there's one of the elementary principals who would like to speak to this as well, but certainly being able to have students outside as much as possible for lunch is going to be our, our first. First, first plan A, I would say. So, and I'm happy to call on whichever one wants to speak. I mean, I will say, you know, echoing what Ms. Exton said, kids at pure school were eating outside in January, which is extraordinary. And, and, you know, they were, they were still going out, which is great. And they had a really long good run at the audition at the beginning of the year. We had some good weather and they were out and out and out and out. And then, you know, we've definitely heard from families in other places where that hasn't happened. And so whatever we can do, to sort of be really clear that, that, that as a committee, this is what we want and that what we expect. And I recognize that there are, you know, I was one of the people that did the recess policy as a parent before I came on the committee and. And it was tough, you know, it's, it's a tough thing to have, you know, requirements around being outside. But, but I, you know, it's really important that the kids eat outside as much as they possibly can. I absolutely agree with this. Excellent. It's safer for, it's safer for adults. Again, we have to be able to accommodate them in the building. We can't rely on it. But, you know, and recognizing that different schools have different spaces. They're obviously like pierces are smallest schools. So that, that, they can do it for longer. You know, doesn't surprise me. But, you know, I hope that it's something that we can really prioritize. And if this is something that, that principles need support on to make happen, you know, we need to know what you guys need to be able to do this. So I guess more comments about lunch. Dr. Bodie, was there somebody who wanted to speak to, to lunch from the elementary principal team? You're not all on my screen. Right. What if you want us to make a comment? I think. You can get. No. All right. Ms. Donato looks like she wants to talk to us. Sorry. I'm back and forth on this. I mean, I'm happy to make a comment. I think it's really difficult to make broad stroke decisions around such things. You have to really take into consideration the individuality of each school. And you really have to. The weather is, as principals, this stresses us out unbelievably. We are texting. What, what do you have for a temperature? Are you going out? Like it. It's so different in East Arlington compared to the other side of town some days. So it's really difficult to make those broad decisions and make those broad policies around things. We have to be able to. Know and assess what's happening in our building with our staff, with our students. Sometimes on a daily basis. And, and taking heat for things like that is really challenging in this role. Mr. Mr. Like to say something. Thank you, Dr. Buddy. Thank you, chair Morgan. I just, I want to acknowledge it at Pierce. We, we do go about whenever we can, but I also want to acknowledge what. Karen Donato is saying is that, you know, a lot of this is space dependent, child dependent, scheduled dependent. So, you know, my, my own philosophy. Pierce is whenever possible. Or whenever you're on the fence, go outside. But I, but I don't want to speak from my, my colleagues on that, but I do believe we're on the same page in terms of. You know, safety for students, safety for faculty, but I, but I don't want to speak from my colleagues on that, but I do believe we're on the same page in terms of. We're on the same page in terms of safety for students. And I don't want to talk from my faculty, but I, but I would just say that this is, we have different, you know, land spaces that we're on different configurations of the school. Different layouts of our classrooms and how they exit the building. So there is a lot to consider. And I just want to acknowledge that publicly. Great. So I see Mr. Hannah and then mid keys. And then I want to get back to the committee with Mr. I just want to get back to the committee with the, you know, the general general general. So I see a lot of similarities of each campus. You know, for example, Stratton school has a very large footprint. It's a, it's a long school. So taking the, the trip. From recess to lunch. Is, you know, a longer version. And then that adds some variables about going outside and the largest substantially separate special education program in the school. So all of these things like factor into the decision-making. So it would be, in my opinion, my humble opinion, it would be difficult to implement any kind of universal policy around. But having said that, I so appreciate how collaborative the committee and the school administrators are. And we've heard very clearly this evening about the preferred default to outside. And we'll do everything we can in our design to honor that. Great. Thank you. Ms. Keyes and then Mr. Schluckman. Yeah, I just want to say it's absolutely the teacher's preference to have the kids eating lunch outside. That's where we think it's safest. But the other thing I just, somebody mentioned comparing this to the recess policy, the thing with recess is the kids are up and running around. The thing with eating lunch outside is a lot of times they're sitting on the ground. And I don't want to get into a situation where like, sorry, kids, it's 60 degrees and it stopped raining three hours ago, but school committee says you have to sit on the mud. So I think just practicality-wise, being able to make those decisions, we know what spring is like in New England. We all want to be outside as much as possible. I would just hate to have there be like a sticker policy that says, like, you have to go now, even though, you know, there's still snow on the ground or there's mud or something like that. Great. Thank you. Mr. Schluckman. I make a motion that where practical the school department should provide lunch in other suitable activities outside, period. I'll second that. So motion by Mr. Schluckman. Mr. Schluckman, would you like to speak to your motion? Yeah, I mean, all this discussion we're going around in circles. I mean, I don't want to set a firm policy in anything, but I think that it's just expressing our intent that when we can do lunch outside, we do lunch outside. When we can do phys ed or music outside, we do it outside, because it's the safest thing possible. So without casting judgment on anybody or anything or any individual circumstance, the motion is, when practical, go outside. Anybody else like to speak to Mr. Schluckman's motion? Mr. Thielman. Thank you, Ms. Morgan. Should we add on it? We know what I'm sitting in the mud either. I mean, look, I have great confidence in the judgment of the principles to make the right decisions on the ground every day for our kids based on what they see outside and what they know is best for their kids and what their teachers think is best. And I'm sure I've actually said, somebody said, the principles are texting each other every day to figure out what the best practices and how you're trying to solve the problem. So I'm happy to support Mr. Schluckman's motion as a goodwill gesture in the part of the committee so people know where we stand. But I will say to you that I have great confidence in every principle in the district to make the best decision about whether kids should eat inside or outside every day. Mr. Heiner. I too, I agree with Mr. Thielman. I will support the motion, but I think one of the hottest jobs going second only to teachers is being a principle. Mr. Cardin and then Mr. Schluckman. Thank you. So I mean, I'm a little disappointed that we don't have more of a lunch plan before us because parents are deciding and it's unclear where their kids are gonna be eating lunch. So I mean, that's part of the problem is that our original plan in the summer is sort of punted on this lunch issue when we had a full return. And then when we started talking about a full return, we're still trying to figure this out. But to me, as Mr. Schluckman said, the default should be outside. Whether, you know, if it's raining or dangerous, then no. But if it's muddy, you know, can we fit people on the black top? If there's not, I mean, obviously there's puddles or something, but you know, the safety concerns with eating inside, even at six feet are significant. And so I think it's the great preference of our parents that the kids eat outside whenever absolutely possible. And so I'm glad Mr. Schluckman made the motion because I wanna be clear about that. As you're building your lunch plans, the first line should be lunch outside. This is the schedule of which class is going to go outside when and where they're going to be. If it's raining or there's other conditions that prevent us from going outside, these are the alternatives. So that's what I would like to see and that's why I'm gonna support the motion. Thank you. Mr. Schluckman and then Ms. Exton. Yeah, I made the motion only because we're going around in the circle for about a half an hour and people were suggesting maybe we need a policy or I think this is just a common sense thing. Let's just get the kids out whenever we can. And by voting this motion, we put this issue to rest until June. I trust these principles to do the right thing. Where is the sense of the committee? We're not directing, we're giving our sense. So I hope everybody votes yes. Ms. Exton, I'm off that thing. All right, anybody else? Mr. Dingman. Sorry, I'm listening and I just, I wanna point out that we have been running our school safely since our kids have come back in September. So when I hear suggestion that we've done anything without a plan, it wrinkles me a little bit. We have done everything with the plan and we will bring our kids back to school with the plan. We have had zero cases of transmission during school hours. Clearly we are able to make a plan with our teachers to do this safely. So school committee, please do what you're gonna do. I wanna though highlight your principles and your teachers can do this safely. We will have a plan to do it. It is our preference to eat outside. We know the constraints in our building, we're there every day. And I'll stop at that. All right, anybody else on screen too? Seeing none. Motion by Mr. Schlickman, seconded by Mr. Heiner, Ms. Exton. Yes, Mr. Cardin. Yes. Dr. Allison Ampey. Yes, Mr. Thielman. Yes. Mr. Schlickman. Yes. Mr. Heiner. Yes. I am also, yes. All right, other comments on Dr. Bodie's presentation for the committee, Mr. Thielman, and then Mr. Schlickman. So yeah, I wanna echo what was said earlier. First of all, Mr. Digman, I have great confidence and I've seen the district's principles and teachers create plans, execute those plans and do it well. So I have a great confidence in everybody on the team to make good decisions and to keep our kids safe. And I have to say Dr. Bodie and her staff have been very cautious and careful with every single possible incidents of COVID and kept our kids safe. So I thank you for that. My question regarding the plan, is it possible, would it be a good idea? Have you thought about bringing kindergartners back maybe a week earlier? Is it possible to do that? Is it possible to bring maybe a younger grade back before April 5th? I'm wondering if there's been any discussions about that. I respect the fact that all of you are making the plans, but I think it's important to ask that question because I do wonder if the opening would be smoother if that were the case. Dr. Bodie, do you wanna take that one? Yes, I can take that one. So thank you for your confidence and our principles, I share that confidence. The answer is that once we were asked to pivot to April 5th, really there's a lot of planning that's going to go into this. And in fact, we even talked about whether we should have some kind of phasing K12 and then 35, if that was even going to be acceptable to the Department of Education. But the more there was discussion about this we decided that it made sense because of a lot of the scheduling that has to take place to just do it at the same time. We realized that that first week is going to feel like the first week of school and we're prepared to do that. We're talking about now three weeks to April 5th. We're very close. So that would mean changing that would really be preparing much more quickly. And also I'm asking the committee later tonight after the presentation is out now doing is to improve this planning day. So I would like the kindergarten teachers to also have the benefit of the planning day. Thank you. Dr. Hanna. Hi, just really quickly. It was also thinking about the infrastructure, the furniture, plastic guards and dividers. I just happened to be doing some of that for our kindergarten classrooms for a couple of different reasons. And those things are arriving like just in time for the April 5th start. So I think that that's relevant. Thanks. All right. Did I say something to go after Mr. Thielman? I don't remember. All right, Mr. Schlickman. Thank you. With just regard to the previous comments, I think the point that was being made is the committee hasn't yet seen the plan for how we're going to do things after April 5th. And I don't think we'd expect to see all the details yet. I think we've done a great job of moving things forward. So there's, I don't think there's any sense among the members of this committee that the folks have not done it well. That said, I think that it's important we set forth the structure for moving forward. And I move that we establish a professional development day for April 1st, 2021. Okay. Mr. Schlickman, do you want to speak to your motion? It's a solid recommendation from the superintendent. This is the logical time to do it. We should do this tonight because the more notice we give to our parents, the better. Anybody else want to speak to Mr. Schlickman's motion? So I think I'm just going to add, I think the important messaging on this is this is not a day off. This is this sort of, well, it's not a snow day as a, if you're a teacher staff, right? It's a PD day, but for parents, it sort of behaves as a snow day, right? We are going to do this day at the end of the year. We are not taking a day off from school. We are not losing a day of instruction. This is a day that for families is going to behave as basically a planned snow day, right? It's a professional development day. We will make the day up. I think we're out to the Wednesday of that final week now. It's in the 20s somewhere. So we will see this day again at the very end of the calendar. So I think that's just an important thing. This is something, so an agreement that we made not in writing or signed in blood, but this is something that we agreed to and supported back in August when we were looking at the calendar. And so I support doing it. First of all, I think it's important. And I also think it's important that we keep our word that this is what we said we were going to do. So I really support taking this day. And I hope that others do as well. Is there anybody else who wants to speak to this? All right, seeing none. Motion by Mr. Schluckman. Second by Ms. Eksten. Ms. Eksten. Yes, Mr. Cardin. Yes. Dr. Allison Ampe. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Mr. Schluckman. Yes. Mr. Heiner. Yes. And I am also yes. Mr. Schluckman, unless we forget, would you like to provide us with a motion around the end time for middle school or should we wait until we talk to middle school principals about that? Let's let them justify it. So the community understands why we're doing it. Okay, sounds good. All right, other questions for Dr. Bodie and her team on the presentation that we've seen so far. Dr. Bodie, you're on mute. I want to clarify just one point for elementary parents who are listening this evening. When we talk about coming back full time, that means that the dismissal time will be 230. So we're going back to a regular elementary school day. So if there's no question, could we go through the secondary principals presentation just talking about some of the issues that they have to, like the elementary, there are some similarities, but then there are some uniqueness to the planning that they have to engage in. Great, yes, I'd like to hear from them. Okay. Sorry, just to clarify the previous remark though, it's 230 except for Wednesday. Yes, thank you. It would be 1130 on Wednesday. We would stick with the early release time. Just so parents understand, I'm glad you asked this question, Mr. Cardin. From many, many years, we've had an early release day on Tuesdays. And that has been a one o'clock dismissal, but by our remote, our specialist teachers are going to have to teach remote classes on Wednesday morning. So we still have to stay with preps and lunch after dismissal, okay? Yeah, so 230 Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and 1130 on Wednesday. Madame Pierre Maxwell, do you want to talk briefly about the Gibbs schedule? Of course. The Gibbs, yeah, the planning that we're, that you're having for return to full time in person. Yes, thank you. Let's do this. Can everyone see my screen? Not, yes, we can now. Okay, all right, thank you. Again, good evening everyone. Ms. Salvatore and I are going to present to you what we have done so far in preparation for the impending April 28th reopening of the Gibbs school. We hope to cover with you Gibbs capacity prior to COVID-19, our setup as of the month of September, 2020, the proposed reconfiguration for April 28th until the end of the school year. Our successes and challenges so far that we've identified and some unanswered questions, which I think some of them were answered actually as Dr. Booty presented. I wasn't too clear, but her answers and presentation did clarify some things. We've already presented the discipline presentation. Okay, so pre-COVID Gibbs school opening in 2018, 2019 opened with five learning communities, which involve every learning community having the four core subjects, math, science, English, social studies and students being in classes of their ELC classes, which is their exploratory learning classes with consists of art, PE, music, facts, et cetera. And so year one, we had 463 students. The school, by the way, can hold up to 500 students, I believe. And on year one, the capacity, classroom capacity was a ratio of 20 to 23 students to one teacher, 2019, 2020, 486 students, classroom ratio of 20 to 24 students per teacher. And these numbers are more likely the number where we ended the school year. For example, this year we started with 505 students on the actual enrollment in September. And currently we are at 483 students for the school year. We added an extra learning community in our remote program. And we ended with two learning community in the remote program and then four learning community in the hybrid program. And then pre-COVID, all the spaces that made gives the ideal place for students to start their middle year's career, such as the media center, the gymnasium, breakout spaces on our two floors, the music room, black box theater. All these were used for their intended purposes, which is this year we're not quite doing that because of the setup we had to do due to COVID. So adjustment we made for the school for the 2020, 2021 school year is as follow. Of course, we have currently a 483 students enrolled in the school with 321 of them in the hybrid program, meaning that we have a cohort and a B cohort, six feet apart all locations within the school, the cafeteria and the gymnasium are set up for lunch right now permanently. And we also have our high to moderate students with need coming in four days a week. And we have 152 students in our remote program currently. So I'm going to have Ms. Salvatore speak to our schedule, which she at the beginning primarily work on putting that schedule together for us, a schedule that really took this day into consideration, this conversation we're having. Ms. Salvatore. Yes, so what you're seeing on this slide right now is these schedules that we showed you back in the spring. We start every day with advisory. A student would have intensive science, music, math, MTSS and ELA. And the way we set up our schedule was our ELC classes, music facts, art, tech, world language, PE. If I missed somebody, I'm sorry. They meet with kids in school, they meet with kids outside of school. Students on, if you're a Monday, Tuesday student, you have music in the building and then at home you have world language. So for us to bring students back in, Madame, if you just want to, if you want to go to one of the, if you want to go to the schedules that I created for tonight, that would be helpful for me. Well, this is an actual schedule. This is a student who has Ms. Grodman for advisory. This student has ancient civilization, science. Science. I don't have control of that's okay. This student has ancient civilization, science, math seven, MTSS and ELA. When this student is in school, they have art. When they're at home, they have PE during that third period. A B student has the same exact schedule. When they're at home on Monday, Tuesday, they have PE. When they're in school on Thursday and Friday, they have art. So we are able to give, if we combine our A and B students into one learning community. So Rachel Grodman will have her A students and her B students and her advisory. These students will all have ancient civilization, science, math seven, MTSS and ELA. Monday, Tuesday students will still have, like the A students will still go to art. On Monday and Tuesday, they'll go to PE on Thursday and Friday. The B students will go to PE on Monday and Tuesday. They'll go to art on Thursday and Friday. So for our LC classes, the four core classes, they'll combine and be cohorts of anywhere between probably our smallest group is 19. Maybe our biggest group is 22 or 23. We have enough room for 24 kids in a class at three feet apart. So for their LC classes, they will be together. But for their ELC classes, they will separate out. So art will still stay a small cohort. PE will still stay a small cohort. We were able to do this because we made music, computer science. You can see on Monday, Tuesday, they've already had music. They've already had computer science. They'll have facts. They'll have tech. Because we made our ELC classes go by quarter and our world language classes for half the year, our schedule will work out this way. When we set up the schedule, and so there's an example of LC one schedule. If Madame goes down, you'll see an example of a learning community two schedule. It's pretty consistent across the board. The kiddos all have the same LC classes. We made little cohorts, a little pods when we made the A cohort and we made the B cohorts. We made these little pods. They all traveled together. So they all had the same classes. So we are fortunate that we do not have to do a lot of hand scheduling at all. We can bring the A and B students into the building. We have room for it. Their schedules are already set up. They don't have to have new teachers. They don't have to change their schedules. It does not at all have to feel new to them other than getting used to having double the amount of kids in the building, double the amount of kids in the hallway and getting used to that. Don't get me wrong, we have challenges. It's in our slideshow, but our schedule for the most part will work to have the A and B kids come in and combine. So knowing that Monday, Tuesday students will be in school Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday with those B kids in their little pod of classes. Thank you, Ms. Salvatore. So now we wanna jump to discussing our successes. First of all, as Ms. Salvatore pointed out, the schedule was created to fold into itself for this very specific reason that conversation we're having, having the students coming back before the school year end. So all students will be able to remain in their LC classes. We are able to welcome all of the hybrid students, the A and the B students as of 428. The classroom were measured in the fall. We double checked those numbers. Currently we are able to sit all of our students in the hybrid program. I don't think we have the capacity to welcome the entire remote program. For example, if every parent said, I want my children, I want my child back into the building. That said, I promised Dr. Boody very soon sometime next week, I actually promised for tomorrow, but she will not get it tomorrow. Today was interesting. So she will get that closer number to with us looking at every LC, every advisory, combining them on paper, making sure we have the right calculation. And then we'll be able to say, having all the student in and every classroom, this is how many more seats were able to end anticipating that some of our parents from remote may want to bring the children back. And vice versa, we may also expect some of parents from the hybrid program to say that, maybe I want my child in the remote because of how we're going to set up a school as of the 28th. So the student will not have a new schedule as Miss Elvator shared, the teachers will maintain their current Google classroom setup. We've been combining students on Wednesdays in their advisories and in their short classes. So while they're not physically acquainted with each other in the building, they are somewhat acquainted and we understand they will need planning around transitioning the students to make sure that we have activities. It's a little mini reopening of the school, really going over expectation because now the children are together. We teaching a lot of the things they already know, it'll be a very interesting sort of lesson. We'll make it interesting to just re-engage them but together as a group, as a new group. Wednesday, we're hoping is remaining a half a day to allow us to continue to offer the Ben Chorus and Orchestra on the Wednesday afternoons because currently that's not fit within the schedule either remotely or in person. We are teaching it doing the afternoon on Wednesdays remotely. And lunch schedule does not need to be reconfigured because we did set up the year with three full lunch rotation. Currently we're not using the middle rotation fully, randomly sometimes we have some children eating in it for whatever reason but because the schedule was already set up with three full lunch rotations, we'll be able to do the lunch. We'll talk of the challenges that comes with that but physically in the space at 111 students between the cafeteria and the gymnasium we'll be able to service three lunch rotation. We have space for our exploratory learning community classes to take place coming back in the building. One of the challenges when we have everyone in the building is that the world language teachers, for example, they travel. So I believe that we'll be able to provide a classroom for them because we don't have all the five learning community physically in the building. Even with returning we still will have four learning community in the building overall. So now here are the challenges. There are some families who did not select a world language at the beginning last spring 2020. So we will need to place these children in a world language because if we don't do that, we're going to have a certain number of children. I think right now the count per Ms. Talbotor's calculation is somewhere between 35 and 50. If it's small, we'll be able to be more accurate once we take a closer look. But that said, we're going to plan to send a survey, not a survey, it's a form to the parents saying these are the availability and this is where we can place the children. And within that limited flexibility, then the parents can select a language. So we're already in the conversation with the world language teachers, they understand they're going to need to tweak some things to make that work because some children will be entering these classes, already have missed part of the third quarter. Language, world language is taught for two of the quarters even though we divided the year into quarters for the ELC classes, where language is the only subject in that category that the children take two quarter back to back to make sure they have a real experience in exploring that language. And then there is also the notion that in that subject also, because when the children were taking these classes remotely, we were able to do some mixing to really give people more of their first choices. So now that we're back, there will be some instances where these groups are mixed. So for example, in the schedule that a simple principle Salvatore showcase, we are maintaining those ELCs within their group whereas, so we're not missing someone from learning community one with someone from learning community four, but in this case for languages, it may happen. To what extent, we're not quite sure yet. Again, we have to do a deeper dive to be able to give you that data. So what keeps me awake at night since we have been talking about this is the hallway transition. Now our students have done a fabulous job, a phenomenal with keeping their mask on which was I shared the last time we were here that was one of our primary concern. Oh my God, are the children gonna be able to keep their mask on? Not an issue. I don't think zero, zero issues. Now the spacing as they get more acquainted and more used to each other in their small community, we find it very difficult when they're transitioning. We need to be there to remind them outside, even though it's outdoor, we know it's more safe outside. We're still trying to get them to maintain a reasonable spacing between them. So now when we're imagining doubling the numbers in the hallways, this is where it is. So of course, we're already started the conversation with the staff about what does that mean for us in regard to supervision, to monetary, to the teaching we're going to do, what will that look like? We also considering perhaps not moving the children but rotating the staff. So all that is too early for us to be able to say, definitely this is the way we're gonna go with it. So but we're gonna have a lot of teacher input, a lot of conversation over the next five weeks so we can be ready to execute and everybody can know exactly what is it gonna look like. Even though we're gonna be able to manage the three lunch rotation without adding another lunch rotation in the schedule, we do then end up with a split lunch. The middle one will be split, meaning that that teacher or these classes that have that middle lunch, they will start class, stop, go to lunch and then go back to class to finish, which no teacher ever liking to have that spot in that schedule. And then the other one of the biggest challenge we're having is really our intervention. Student who receive other services. So we're not gonna receive the services. If you can think back of the schedule, the students were receiving services on their asynchronous time because they were at home facilitating a lot of the work they had to do. So it was a benefit actually to have the provider go into that asynchronous day to make a connection and give the service. Now that we're back into the building, we really have to sit down with all of our special educator liaison, the service providers to be at the same table. So we are analyzing the data. Who's receiving what? Some children receive multiple support in different subject. So this is the big challenge. To figure out that we're not pulling students too much from their core classes when we're thinking about TO1 instruction that they're not missing so much of that to try to fix something and by then making the problem bigger. So stand by for this report out. So we're just at the beginning of that conversation. Currently, we are missing 303 desks and 225 chairs. Why they're not equal amount because we had some extra chairs in the building. But to be able to add these additional chairs in the classrooms and still maintain servicing lunch in the cafeteria and the gymnasium, we do need extra desks. There's been a conversation about possibly getting yoga mat for the students. I've had that conversation with the school council and with the teachers. We're wondering maybe in sixth grade they may be a bit too old to maybe use the yoga mat. Hopefully we'll be able to come up with some other sitting arrangement that's more flexible, a little closer to that sixth grade age done the little people. We are also, one of the challenges is really felling on administration to be super mindful of the staff's framework, frame of mind. How are we responding to their needs? And as we're asking them to double the number of students in the building they were into service. I don't think the staff has an issue with having our children back. I think they are looking forward to having the children back. I think right now it's more of the issue of the vaccination. Although I know as of yesterday there was good news that four days have been put aside but it is still a challenge of currently one challenge that's not listed there is that as staff are signing up for those vaccination appointments we find ourselves short on coverage. And certainly I know the conversation has been since our nurse and many other nurse go into the community to give vaccination we do the pool testing. So one of the big questions is that could that vaccination come within the school system? So our nurses could vaccinate the teachers and make that a wonderful process where we're having less issue with coverage, less sub in the classroom, where we also losing, because we know, yes we have some fabulous building sub and people who support but then the preference is to have the core classroom teacher supporting our students at all time. So this is some of the challenges. Other potential issues I think we've covered it's the intervention that really needs some hands-on some intensive looking at to see how we're going to make sure that we're still being able to offer equitable access to learning when all the children return. The BCO cannot happen without a half day. So that's something I think I'm hearing it's a definite go. I'm hoping that's in fact correct. Also having the half day, maintaining the half day on Wednesday would allow the custodians to continue to clean the staff, giving it a deep look at cleaning to make everybody feel safe because we have a safely tend to building. And of course I've already addressed the language issue and how we intend to address that. And we end this conversation with some teachers wondering and concerned as I shared when we had two meetings with the staff optional conversation this morning, 7.50 a.m. and yesterday at the end of the school day. And we plan to hold a lot of those short optional conversation and this is what came out of that. And also I had a chance to present this preliminary plan to the school council of Gibbs and this is the summary of the concern. Again, it's will everyone have an opportunity for vaccination prior to returning? Will we continue to conduct the weekly testing pool? I think I did see that in Dr. Bodie's presentation. It's a strong yes that will be happening. I can remove that and put it under successes. Will remote staff be required to return in person? And I think we've received some very clear directive from conversation with Dr. Bodie and again tonight, which is what I communicate to the staff but they still wanted to have that. And what's communicated to the staff so far is that the parents in the remote programs will have the option of remaining in it till the end of the school year. They also have the option to request to return to the in-person as of April 8th. And there isn't a timeline to say no, you may not make that request to return. So, and which followed the next question will family still be able to request more between hybrid and remote for the remainder of the year, which I just explained. And then some of the teachers are asking, why is it all of a sudden safe to be three feet apart? Which, I give the logical answer, which is that we follow the CDC, the CDC give communication to the Department of Health of Massachusetts, the governor and the commissioner of Decation give directive to the superintendent. And here we are. So we all listen to the same news. So, but I think that three feet apart is causing some stress to some of the staff. I will be, you know, it is to be noted. That's where they are. So thank you for listening and we're open for questions. Ms. Talvatore, I don't know if I miss anything. Was there anything else I needed to say? No, I don't have anything to add. I would just, yeah. So I'm going to stop sharing my screen and we'll be happy to go. Great, thank you, Madame Perronville. Questions from the committee about the gifts? I think, oh, no. So I just want, I appreciated the questions that you put at the end, you know, questions around whether or not teachers will be vaccinated. You know, it's, these are, they're hard questions, right? I mean, of course we want them to and there doesn't seem to have been effort made at the state level to line up these timelines. The pool testing though, you know, that sounds really positive. I share your concerns about the movement between the remote and in-person programs. I was surprised that the guidance basically required districts to repoll all students. And so that's really challenging for, it's really challenging for districts. And I appreciate that Dr. McNeil for the elementary schools, I believe. Well, actually I know because I got it. The survey went out for K5 yesterday, which is great. And- You're frozen, Jane. Oh, really? Again, no idea. Anyway, I'll stop. All right, any other questions from Madame here, Maxwell, about the Gibbs? All right, seeing none, Mr. Merringer, you ready for us? I think so. Or are we ready for you? I don't know. Yeah, I think so. Mine's a lot more complicated. So Ms. McEwen, can you share the screen? And so hopefully we can be able to explain this the best way I can because this is a lot more complicated where Fabian can kind of fold her schedule. I cannot. So we're just gonna go through this and I assume that we'll have some questions and I'm gonna try to do my best to present this. Okay, next slide. So what we're gonna try to do is figure, is I'm gonna try to tell you where we are now and how we got here. Go over kind of the tasks and timeline that we need to go, some of our needs and questions and then some of our next steps. So the Hybrid and Remote Academy, how did we get here? So this is probably in order to understand where we are now, you have to kind of understand what we've done traditionally. Traditionally there's been a seven period day, kids are assigned to learning communities. There's about a hundred students this year on each learning community. You are grouped on one learning community for English, math, science and social studies. Then you go off team and mix with other learning communities for specials, art, technology, facts, music, whether you take for band, chorus, orchestra, PE and world languages. So we have four that you're with your learning community, three, you're mixing with other kids from other learning communities. So if we can go to the next slide. The ground rules are kind of the constraints at the beginning of this year where kids needed to be six feet apart, meant about 11 or 12 desks in a room and students needed to remain with their learning community. So we developed the schedule that had the four classes that you're always with your learning community. We were able to divvy up quarterly classes into learning communities, but we then had to take out all world language classes because they mixed learning communities, all PE classes, mixed learning communities, band, chorus, orchestra, computer science, ACE, all of these courses mixed. So we had to take them out of the schedule that left us with five periods that we had kids. We added a sixth period. That more or less was the schedule. We went to six periods. On the days kids were home, we put world language for a period and we put PE band, orchestra and chorus. The problem right now is we have to take those courses that we've taken and taught remotely and we have to put them back in the schedule. So everyone's schedule who's in the hybrid program, 600 kids now goes from six periods to seven periods. And that is really the task that we have is so how do we go from an original seven period day to a six period day this year, back to a seven period day? The other thing we were told is really early on is that we needed to offer the same classes in the remote academy as we did in the hybrid program. Next thing. So just to let you know, the remote academy in the hybrid have more or less run as two different schools. In the hybrid schedule, 600 kids, six period schedule at home, they had their cross-cohorted teams. The remote academy stayed with the seven periods that we've had for years and they had three or four synchronous classes each day with the same courses that were offered in the hybrid schedule. So the current tasks are, we went and measured the rooms. Most of our rooms can have 22 to 24 students. Just to let you know, teachers teach five classes. If they have a classroom with 22 students, the most students they can have is 110. That's what's gonna be capped as a learning community. We have six learning communities. We can have 660 approximately students in the hybrid program before we would have to take some of the remote academy teachers and put them in the building. Ventilation. We're also looking at which rooms we can open. Because we had two thirds of our kids and we could close certain rooms. There were three rooms that the ventilation is broken. We use those for storage. There's two rooms that have extremely small windows. We didn't put anyone in there and we have seven interior rooms without windows. Today I walked around with Fergal O'Brien, who's the head of building maintenance. And I walked around with Greg Walters, who is the new facility directors. He is gonna come in and just check the ventilation system for all of those, because we're gonna need some of those rooms going forward as we have more kids at the Odyssey. The biggest thing right now we're gonna have to start off with is a commitment. How many students are gonna walk through that door? Because that commitment level will not only impact the current teachers in the building, but it might mean that it will impact the remote academy. And then the scheduling. Because we're going from 600 kids who take six periods and we need to expand it to seven periods, we need to now go hand schedule 600 kids. It's probably gonna take five to six minutes per kid is our estimate in kind of checking off boxes. What we do usually during the summer is we put the classes in, we put the kids' requests, we hit a button, that button sorts all the kids, we get a nice easy schedule. Once you've hit that button for the year, you can't hit it again because it wipes out all attendance records, all grades records, all discipline records. It would almost be easier if it was 1975 and we just hand scheduled everyone and we could do it that way. Like the technology now is limiting us from actually making some of these changes. Next slide, please. So decisions to be made. Number of students that return to full in-person learning because we're capped right now we can absorb probably 40 to 50 kids. After that, we're not gonna be able to, we're gonna need to have more staff in the building. Second thing, and this is the biggest issue is cross-teaming. So in the summer, you had to make sure that all the kids, let's say in the air learning community stayed with those kids all day. The problem is when you get to language and you get to other subjects, the kids have to go, unlike the Gibbs in which it can be a quarterly class languages, we teach it all year and we couldn't divide the kids up into a Mandarin learning community, a Latin learning community, a Spanish and a French. So the question is, are those kids gonna be able to cross cohort? And the last thing is we do have some teachers who teach remotely, it's a small group and I'll talk about that in a second who will be teaching, who take classes in the remote academy can bind with the hybrid kids. Next slide, please. Okay, I think we already had that one if we can go. Okay, great. So I'm gonna talk about the cross-teaming classes. Every class that we had that had kids cross-teamed, we put out of the building and taught synchronously. We have 16 teachers. In order to have those 16 teachers come back and have a French teacher, the decision will be have to be made of whether they can be kids in the air learning community, the earth learning community be in the same classes. If they cannot, the teachers will still have to be remote. We'll have to get students by learning communities in rooms taking different classes. So think of it as I'm a French student, Rachelle's a Latin student and Julia is taking Spanish. We're all on the same team, but we can't cross team with anyone. We'd go in the same room, put on headphones and we would take our language. If we cannot cross team, that is our biggest problem. The problem is when you cross team and a kid has, let's say they're in a Spanish, they're in their language class, there's kids from all different places than if they have to quarantine, it affects different cohorts. And that's really the biggest issue we have. And we can go to the next slide. Is currently we also have some classes that are taught remotely during the day. Example, geometry. We have about 20 students in geometry. We have about a third of them in the remote academy. We have two thirds in the hybrid program. They go to a room right now and they all receive geometry. But if those 14 kids now are coming in every day and the teacher wants to come in, are we allowed to have that teacher have students outside the building and inside the building be on the same, be on a Zoom? Any next slide please, Julia? Great. So the urgency for us is the decisions. So first of all, we wanna make decisions as soon as possible because the staff is sitting with a lot of uncertainty and we need to make sure that they understand what the process is. The more time we get them to prepare, the better they're going to be prepared for the students. Second of all, the better that the staff who has been fully remote, they might have childcare issues. They might have taken care of parents. The more lead time we can give to them, the better. And will the staff all be able to return? Scheduling, as I said, we're gonna have to manually change because we're going from six periods to seven periods, we're gonna have to change 600 schedules approximately because power school can't help us with that. And we're thinking that's probably gonna take us 60 to 80 hours and maybe another kind of additional 34 hours to do the structure. Now, there are myself, there's two assistants, Maureen Murphy, who is the assistant principal right now in charge of the remote Academy. There are four of us dividing up all this work. So while the hours seem daunting, I think between the four of us, we'll be able to get it done. And then is the time to rearrange the schools, to put in desks, to get lunch spaces, to make sure that we're all prepared. Next slide, please. So required tests, surveying families, building the schedule, rescheduling kids, resetting rooms, making sure that we have teacher planning and prep time. And we're talking about a student transition time. I'm gonna admit that I'm still working on when we would transition back, we know we have to be back by the 28th. And I think that gets us to questions. Thank you, Mr. Merringer. Questions from the committee for Mr. Merringer. I guess actually, you know what, I will start. I guess any of those decisions though, Mr. Merringer, other than the professional day, which we've dispensed with, or we haven't dispensed with it, but we've dispensed with the decision about it. Those aren't decisions though that you need from us, right? These are the decisions that you need to make for your, with your team, obviously. So what I don't know, and I'll ask Superintendent Bode, is the cross-teaming of kids. I don't know if that is right now, if that is the superintendent's decision, if it is something that has been worked on with, you know, a memorandum between the school committee and the, and the union. Well, Mr. Merringer and I have talked about this issue quite a bit. I have brought it up to the director of our health department. And I will say that right now, what's a little bit confusing is the CDC is still saying that you should cohort students in your schools, which goes back to some of the issues we have the elementary level as well in terms of lunches and so forth. So we have to get some guidance on that because there seems to be, I know that the director of our health department is looking into this. I've asked our director of nursing to look into this question. And we're just sort of waiting, but we can't wait too long. We have to make some decisions on this, but we don't have the answer yet. Great. So I hope that you get those answers soon too, Mr. Merringer, because it sounds like you got a lot to do. Ms. Keys and then Dr. Allison Ampe, Mr. Heiner. I just wanted to comment on the cohort thing because that's kind of all of this is hinging on. And I would also like to get the medical professionals to weigh in on it because the CDC guidance does say, especially if you're limiting, if you're taking away the six foot distance, you need to make sure you keep the kids in cohorts. So it scares me a little bit to lose both of those things. One of the challenges also with losing cohorts is right now, if there's a positive case in a cohort, they all go home as close contacts and everybody shifts to remote learning and learning continues. But if you've got like a kid in a Spanish class, the test positive and the other like five kids from a particular team are in that Spanish class, the rest of the team isn't going home for remote learning. So those five kids are just absent for 10 days, right? And they're just on their own. So it does interfere with the learning in ways that are a little deeper than just like, oh, they're exposed to more kids. That's all. Yeah, I mean, I wish like they could have at the Gibbs that we could have co-ordered kids by language. Our numbers just didn't work out that way. Well, and you also had kids come in to the Odyssey who had already chose language, which makes it harder, right? I mean, my kids at the Gibbs didn't get their first, second or third choice of language. And I was like, great, have fun at school kids, but it's different once they've been in it for a year. And I second Ms. Key's comment about the cohorting this happened to my daughter. Thankfully, the entire LC wasn't exposed to the case, which is good, but she was and it's a long, it's a long two weeks of no instruction. So no way around it, but it's tough. All right, Dr. Allison Ampey and then Mr. Heiner. Thank you. First, I wanted to say thank you first to Madam K.R. Maxwell and then to Mr. Merringer. I thought both of your presentations were really helpful and impressive, especially under all the circumstances that we're in. Mr. Merringer, my question for you is in terms of the scheduling, is there any way that we could throw money at this and make things better for you? Like could we buy another subscription for power school and create a shadow school and make it do the schedule so that you have your real one over here and then you have your fake one and you make your schedule and then you just go and program your fake scheduling as your real schedule. I don't know if that would work at all, but it's just. No, I love the idea. I've been checking in with the IT professionals that we have and they're helping me kind of through this process to look for shortcuts and look for other ways. We know that we can do it hand scheduling. We're looking and talking to a consultant to find out if there's a better way to do it. The problem is right now is how you report to the status through power school and you have all the attendance, you have all the grades and that's why I was told that you can't kind of make a shadow one, but Jeff Connors, who I'm talking about who's been fabulous has come up with some ideas. So we're hoping to shorten it if we can, but as of right now we just might have to divvy up the hours and get to work. So I appreciate the offer. I will definitely ask the IT people who work with power school, if there is anything else that can be done, they don't think so, but we're still kind of researching, but I appreciate the offer. I wish in hopes that there is just, it seems, I understand you can do it, but it seems like a waste of your time if it can be done quicker with technology. So that's all. Thank you. Rainer and then Mr. Schlickman. Ms. Keys brought forward my concern about the mixing of the classes and stuff and what might happen, worst case scenario. Thank you. Mr. Schlickman. Yeah, thank you. I'm a power school novice. My expertise is on ASP and X2, but have you looked into pretending you're scheduling for either a summer school program or for next year? I mean, if you program it for next, if you pretend that this year is next year and schedule it, pull the schedule, dump it and then schedule for next year. Is that a possibility for you? That's one of the things we're finding out. Like, could we do a dummy schedule that would at least mix all the kids for us and then we would have at least the blueprint so that when we're hand scheduling, it could be easier. Yeah, I hope there's some sort of a sandbox schedule, a feature in there that you could play, but I don't envy you. I admire the work you're doing. Good luck to you. Anything you need, make sure we understand that. Great, thank you. All right, anybody else for Mr. Merringer? All right, seeing none. Dr. Bodie, what's next? You're on mute. Yeah, yeah. Dr. Janker is going to give, because that was requested by the school committee to give a view of the plan that's going on there. Hello? Hang on one second, can I share the screen as well there? I hope so. Okay. Point of order, Madam Chair. Sir. I hate to say this. Can I move the 10 o'clock rule to 11 o'clock? Yep. Second. Yep. Okay, Ms. Exton. Yes, Mr. Cardin. Yes. Dr. Allison Ampey. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Mr. Schlickman. Yes. Mr. Heyner. Yes. Yes, I'm also yes. All right, go ahead, Dr. Janker, thank you. So thank you all very much for taking the time and I hope we don't have to go to 11. I felt a little embarrassed to come and speak tonight just because I know that Ms. Paramax, well, the elementary school principals and Mr. Merringer are immediately under a time deadline. But the moment the announcement came out for the elementary school, we sat down and started penciling out plans for the high school because as you guys asked us back in December as we were planning for semester two, we kept being asked, you know, what happens if things change in April? And the key change that became clear coming from the state was that they were moving to the three foot distancing. And the way I think of it, it was six feet center and now it's three feet from the chair which is actually four foot three inches based on our measurement, which is too bad because if it was three feet and safe, we could fit a lot more kids. So we've done a lot of planning. I do not have quite the detail they do because there's a bunch of things that are held sort of on some decision points that we're still waiting on. And as soon as we have those decision points, we will be able to give you some more detailed version of this is where we're heading. So for us right now, actually uncertainty is the hardest part, right? It's very difficult again for us to be like, are we, what are the constraints that they're going to give to the high school in terms of timing and how we're going to do things, when will they require it and will there be different constraints? But we're acting basically at this point based on these expectations that the distinct requirements are now dropped to three feet to the edge of the seat. The only in person time, the same as this happening at the other schools will count as time on learning that we need to schedule that gives us 27.5 hours per week of instructional time. That's the 990 requirement that we've always had. And for us that we are likely to be at a point where most teachers are vaccinated because if you go just a little bit past the April 28th, we'll start to really get into the point where teachers are at least receiving first shots if not finishing up. Then we would keep surveillance pool testing in place and be expanding that out. And for us, one of the nice things there is that as we go into the spring athletic season we'll have over 400 athletes. That's mandatory for those. So 400 of those students automatically will be part of a testing pool. And then we would do really promote surveillance testing and pool testing amongst other students that we need to- Can I just interrupt you really quickly? I just, because it's so late, I just realized we, if it's fine with the committee I wanna make sure that we can let all of our other administrators go if that's okay with Dr. Bodie. You guys came here and it sounds like there is a lot to do. And I don't wanna hold you with us any longer if we're not gonna be coming back to you. So does that suit you? Dr. Bodie, does that work within year? Because the only thing that we have, you still need our approval for the 12 o'clock middle school release. But I think unless the committee has anything else on that, I think we can let those colleagues go. Yes, I'm just looking for- Yes, I agree, they're gonna get up early tomorrow and have another school day. So yes, thank you for- Sorry, Dr. Jinger, but thank you very much for coming to all of you. We really appreciate you coming here and it's so helpful to us and it's so helpful to the community that we're all speaking with a common language about the challenges that we have to, that we're gonna work together to overcome to make this work for our staff and our teachers and our kids. So thank you so much for coming, have a great night. Thank you for having me. Thank you, you too. Thank you very much. All right, go ahead, Dr. Jinger, apologies. No worries, I always appreciate it when you tell me you don't need me anymore. So I'm happy to do that for my colleagues. And so then the last piece, which I think is important to remember is that this basic schedule was designed so that we could most easily probably, hopefully transition from one modality to another. And so our expectation is that we would keep essentially the same schedule in place. So this was the six-foot room capacity. I've got a big spreadsheet of us remeasuring and fine-tuning what we think we have in terms of the new capacity. It, at the very least, pretty much doubles the capacity in these rooms. And so it does make it so that depending on how we organize things, we can fit. We will still be at about 98% capacity. We were 98% capacity before COVID. And so we will be very tight. We will have a lot of space issues, particularly around things like lunch, study halls, and other things that require more space than we've used. We're hoping, of course, the nice thing is we're heading into warm weather. And so we will make a lot of use of the outdoors. We had the patio heaters going in the courtyard today. And so we'll expect that we'll use that for a lot of supervision of students when they're not in class. And then some classes will go outside. So what are the issues? And I think that's what I want just the school committee to have a sense of. So when I come back with a plan, you have some perspective of kind of where we've gone. So one is how to figure out a timeline. The biggest, obviously, is still class capacities. We're still at 98%. A big issue for the high school is going to be the remote academy. We've designed our current instruction so that we have students who are remote, but those are students who've opted out of the departmental shifts. All of the students, it was really important for us to give all of the students access to all of the classes. So students who've chosen to remain remote are still in all the AP classes, standalone electives and other programs. And figuring out how to keep that happening is probably the biggest challenge. We have some ideas, we're working it through. We had a big staff meeting yesterday where staff brainstormed and problem solved around ways to do this. And so we think we have ideas about how to do it, but that's probably one of the biggest issues. We have to cut sections. We can cut the number of sex. Right now we have 320 students out of 1,410 who are not coming in even for the shifts. So I'm gonna guess that some of those students are not doing it because of the transportation, it's not worth it. But under none of the models we've ever done it more, has there been fewer than 20% of students who don't wanna come into the building. So we have to assume that about 20% of students are gonna be getting their classes elsewhere. So the issue then becomes this is high school. If we come in April 28th or a little bit after April 28th, we're into the last quarter, the seniors don't have a lot more time, we're going into APs, I'll talk about that more later. So there's a lot of ways in which that disrupt students' grades, classes, credits and programming. As I said, APs and stand-alones can't be offered in both in-person and all remote if we separate those academies. So how do we figure that out? Lunch at six foot spacing will take up a lot of room. We need that room for other purposes, like study halls and classes. So as much as we can figure that out, cross-cohorting will be an issue. For us, the issue with cross-cohorting is that students are going to three or four completely different groups of students, although they tend to travel in groups. And if a student is test positive in one of those classes, all three of those classes at this point would be considered closed contacts and have to go remote. And we have to set things up. We can't do what the elementary school is talking about, where one kid misses a couple of weeks of instruction. We have to set it up so those classes can stay remote and continue to participate. We're gonna have to increase our safety and hygiene capacity right now. Our custodial staff has been cut back. I know we're supplementing elsewhere in the district. If we're back to having our 400,000 square foot building in a mile and a half and hallways filled with 800 kids a day or 900 kids a day, we're going to need to have the custodial support. Maintaining other current supports. We've set up an Impressed Academy. We have programs in the school, ELL, workplace. Those programs are actually working really well, giving really strong levels of support. The students are being pretty successful and we don't wanna disrupt that by pushing them into different spaces or having their routines be affected. And then students have been out. We've been transitioning back in. At this point, everybody's gone through at least one cycle. So students were coming into the building, have now been in, which is a really positive thing. But transitioning kids back into crowded classrooms, it's gonna be an issue for the high schools as much as it's going to be for the elementary schools. And then we have these issues of teacher workload, switching over everything that you're doing, their own stress about their safety and their families and other issues and their own safety concerns. So some important dates. For the high school, usually March is kind of, we push through March and then things kind of run downhill till the end of the year, wrapping things up, summarizing, learning, closing out grades, catching up with students who've fallen a little behind, finishing up big projects. So the start of quarter four for us is April 18th. The Ottesons, the middle school returned to school as April 28th, if the state puts us within a couple of weeks of that, then potentially the start date would be May 12th. It could be earlier, but around that time. In that time, we have the AP exams. We're trying to make as many of those be done at home, but students would end up staying home for those. And many of them have to be offered in school, which will be a disruption to all the other classes and spaces. We have the MCAS coming at that time, which is gonna be a couple of days, during which time most likely a lot of programming would have to be remote because we'd be using all those classrooms for the MCAS. That's May for English, and then again in May for math. The seniors then only two and a half weeks after that May 11th date are into senior week. So for them, there's really very little time in school. So I think looking at maybe bringing them in for some school time, but we've currently, and I'll talk about that also later, we've begun to move forward on planning for a bunch of senior events. We believe we can run a prom-like activity that'll be shorter and outside. We believe we're planning for an in-person graduation. We're planning on doing a school sunrise, sort of where they can get together. And there's a set of those events. And so seniors may not want to come in because if they're a close contact right before the prom, they're not gonna be able to attend the prom. So there may be some real concerns about losing those activities if they're in person during those times. Then graduation is on the fifth, science MCAS, and then the last day is only six weeks after that day. So we think we can do it, we're planning for doing it. I'm kind of excited, I'm not kind of, I'm very excited about doing it. And yet there's trepidation, but the idea that we can bring kids back in and if we can do that safely, it's really gonna be wonderful to have them back in school and really begin to have that experience again. So we've taken a lot of feedback from staff already. We have a lot of really good ideas. We're gonna need to get sort of do an iterative plan where we get feedback from students and families on the choices about remote and in-person that they're likely to make based on our modalities and develop the schedule options, work through all of those details. And you've seen an example of that for the middle schools. One of the things we're looking to do because as we move to four foot spacing or three foot to the chair, we can begin to pilot in-person classes. If that's a safe expectation, students can create shifts in classrooms. And so we can start having that as an option in order to figure out our tech, figure out our layouts, figure out the issues that are up around that. One of the issues will be in order to have the 27.5 hours, we can't have PE that only some students are taking in the middle of the day. And we can't have PE that only some students are taking on Wednesdays. So we're gonna have to reschedule PE for once the in-person academy happens. And then we'll build the new schedule and we'll do the room assignments and then hopefully we'll be up and running. And then just to remember that there are, a lot of other things happening right now at the high school, because I know sometimes people say, well, they're all remote, but we're not all remote. We had the end of this semester, we've looked and our outcomes thankfully continue to be academically comparable to previous years. Some students are succeeding who weren't in the past. They liked this model. Some students are struggling were, who were successful before, but the actual number of struggling students is remains fairly small and comparable. We know we have the issue around students with elevated levels of social emotional stress. We did the screener, we're offering groups to those students. We're continuing to outreach and please encourage any parent who's saying, my kid is at home and really miserable and unhappy to reach out to the deans and the social workers. We have supports in school. We have options in school. We have ways of getting kids connected. The in-person academy now is offering core classes in every grade level. And we have still got capacity. We initially started a curriculum A to make sure that we were really focusing on students who were needing that support just to access the curriculum. We expanded it to curriculum H. We still have capacity. We're tight at the freshman level, but at the other levels, we still have capacity. We, you know, almost all the core classes. So that's a positive thing. Although we're getting into the term right now, we'll look again at interims to see whether there are students who might do well to shift into those classes. I mentioned already about senior events and as well we're creating a process to have a sort of a regular cycle of events for underclassmen. We're looking at sort of some movie nights, maybe a big end of the year, open air event. And club events are ongoing. Clubs are meeting. People keep asking, you know, can clubs meet? And the answer is yes. If clubs are meeting in, you know, club-sized groups, they come in and we socially distance, we supervise and clubs have been meeting all year in various different activities. And then athletics right now is about 200 students. We'll finish up this season and we'll go into the next season when we expect to have over 400 athletes. I think that is the last slide. So that is everything. Thank you very much for your time. And I hope I'm not the only one taking you to 11 o'clock. No, you won't be. All right, thank you, Dr. Jinger. If you can stop your screen share so that I can see everybody. Questions from the committee for Dr. Jinger. Mr. Cartman. Thank you, Dr. Jinger. So I'm confused about the senior schedule. On our calendar, the last day for seniors is June 4th. You have senior week running that week. So senior, so the last day for seniors is senior week. Senior week is always included within sort of last time. So if we came back on May 12th, I see three and a half weeks for seniors, but anyways. I guess my only comment, my only suggestion is, I mean, even three and a half weeks is short. If we're comfortable and, you know, if we're gonna shift to three feet anyways, one place where I think it's more urgent to get the students back in is for our seniors. And I wonder as you're planning, if you would consider bringing the seniors back first, obviously they share classes with other students, but that's gonna be a problem no matter who we bring back first if we do it in a phased approach. So I would suggest that we consider that given the urgency for our seniors. So I would say depending on how we structure this issue, sort of some people being remote and some people being home, one of the things we have considered is having some initial days when both the seniors, I think having a day, maybe when they're coming in, because I think they'd really appreciate just getting to see each other, but we really don't want a lot of mixing. So we'd want a lot of supervision and then possibly as well a day for the ninth graders who now have all been in the building. We had people beating them at the doors for the first two weeks because they hadn't been, but they haven't been all over the building. And so having them be able to come in and not navigating a full building at the same time as it's an unfamiliar building, I think is also something to look at. Great, thank you. Mr. Thelman. Yeah, thank you, Dr. Jengar. Mike, question is, are there any additional resources the school committee can supply or the school district can supply from any funding we might have in our budget to support you and getting students back to school in the next few weeks or, you know. I mean, I guess as I understand it, right? Mr. Mason and Dr. Bodie have been scraping the budget and shifting money around. They've been fantastic about when I say I need 50 tables or 200 chairs or projectors or sound systems providing the money for that. So yes, there will be costs I'm sure associated with this, but I think that, you know, we've been shooting that information out to them. So I would defer to Dr. Bodie as to, you know, whether the money needs to be allocated by the school committee or whether they'll make sure that they take care of us. They've done a great job so far. Actually, Mr. McCarthy said to me, you need to stop saying we have money for that to people because they've been really great about getting us what we need. And, okay, I mean the question is for Dr. Bodie, but I'm just curious, you know, not in terms of, you know, capital resources, of course, but also even staffing resources, anything like that. Yeah, I mean, staffing, I suspect, I mean, the answer would be, we are gonna want more people in the halls because supervising the halls and the lunches and all of those spaces, keeping that safe with high school students, you know, when I've said to them, we always say you can't be in the links, we really mean it. They're high school students and you know how much teenagers believe we really mean it. And I don't, you know, in the last week we've been discussing we need to bring, we need to bring the plan A as we like to say, you know, and so it's been like, you after, you know, like we can't, we've talked to you, we got to deal with it. So that, but to potentially be helpful, more staff would always be great, but they're not easy to come by, you know, we were really lucky to get a bunch of great folks that are supporting the in-person academy and shifting that around and repurpose and folks to be able to do that. So sure, if we can get new staff, if we find a hole that we have to fill, we will, but we'll have to see. And then I do, I want to echo Mr. Cardin said, I said, if there is any way to get seniors in, you know, even, you know, when the elementary school comes, kids come back or the middle school kids come back at the same time, regardless of what the state says, I would strongly encourage it. I mean, I think there is a burning desire on the part of those students to, that many of the students that, whose families I know, to come back into the building, be with peers. I mean, we all saw it in the video of the signing of the beam. Kids were happy to be together. And so to the extent we can make that happen more and more for the senior class, I wouldn't support it. And you should, I mean, in addition to that sequence of activities coming up pretty quickly, actually, there's also a group working on having some sort of regular smaller activities coordinated by parents. And, you know, we will include the seniors among the first round. In order to bring all the seniors back, we have to figure out how we're structuring the classes and all the teachers back into the building, put them into the classrooms, regardless. So that process is going to have to happen. We have to make those decisions first. But I agree with you that I think the seniors will be a high priority to bring in. Hey, thank you. Mr. Carden. Sorry, just a follow-up point. I mean, it sounds like a lot of this was triggered by and is contingent upon a state mandate. And I would just encourage you to keep planning and give us those options, even if the state ends up backing down on high schools because we should at least be developing that option. Now that we're going into a three-foot measure, you know, we are where we discussed, like you said, in December, we were approaching April, our staff will be vaccinated. The state, you know, the data is showing three feet is safe. Let's make a plan for what we can do and make a decision regardless of what the state requires. Thank you. Agreed. All right, anybody else for Dr. Janger? I think we made it to 12th grade, started in kindergarten a couple hours ago. We made it to the end. So Dr. Bode, do you have anything you want to say to sort of wrap up this item? Or, oh, Dr. Allison, do you want to go ahead first? Go ahead. So Dr. Allison. And then Dr. Bode, if you have any final remarks and then we're done with this piece. Okay. So mine is not so much a question or a motion because I ultimately decided not to make a motion, but I wanted to go through it. And because of my schedule, this is when it ends up being. I have very strong concerns that the desi directive is a mistake both for Massachusetts and for Arlington. I asked town council to speak today on what are our options, because I feel it's important for all of us to understand what are our choices. I thought about making a motion to ask the superintendent to file for a waiver or to consider non-compliance, but ultimately decided against it at this time because the consequences of non-compliance are so severe as to potentially destabilize our town's finances and incur additional school days, et cetera. It did not seem fair to my fellow committee members to do this with only one or two days before we met. Instead, I want to briefly mention why I'm concerned and the actions I plan to take. Desi's directive is predicated on the assumption that in-school transmission is rare under current mitigation strategies. They give a number of references to support this claim. I've been reading through these references and comparing them to the situation here in Arlington. First, I'm extremely frustrated by the cherry picking desi does with its sources. On the website, it has the CD guidelines as one of its two highlighted links. And in the desi guidelines, it cites the CDC in terms of not requiring vaccination for teachers to go back to work, but desi does not address the vast difference between the CDC guidelines, which suggests we are nowhere near ready to have in-person school and their directive. There are other references which do address the spacing issue, but many have an underlying condition that Arlington does not meet in my opinion. I'll get to this in a minute. I focused a lot of my attention in this on the article by Berg et al, which was accepted for publication in clinical infectious disease. I found the accepted draft in the journals website because it's not in desi sing. The article looks like it would be a good prediction for our situation. The study is based in Massachusetts. It's large, encompassing over 450,000 students. The demographics of the districts are similar to our own in terms of economic status. They divided districts into three feet distancing and six feet distancing based on reading the plans that have been subended to desi. Then they compared whether there was a difference in transmission between the two groups. Their conclusion was that there were no significant differences. The problems I have with this study are several folds. First, they only looked at plans, not what was actually happening, and they don't supply district names or their assessments as a check. One quarter of students fell into the three foot category. This seems high from what I've heard from other school committees. Second, in both groups, three feet and six feet spacing, the percentage of children in poverty is significantly different than what desi reports for Massachusetts students. It ranges from 10 to 12% versus 36%, which is what desi reports. So even though this is a very large study, it does not appear to be representative of Massachusetts. And though our numbers do align with the study, but I'm concerned about what else is not random but that we don't know about. My biggest concern is with the results. They show that the incidence in COVID in students is significantly lower than the incidence of COVID in either staff, which is higher for the community, which is highest. That's not what we are seeing here in our intent over the past month. Here, I'm not talking about pool testing. I'm talking about the students of staff who have reported positive testing. For the past five weeks, my calculations show that the incidence in the schools, here I've had to do mostly staff and students combine, although I've heard most of the positives for students is higher than the incidence in our community. I don't see how we can use this study to suggest that no transmission is happening in the schools going forward. The same condition that the prevalence in students is lower than that of the community is what's reported to many of the students on three feet spacing and is part of why I questioned their applicability. Sorry, I'm almost done. The other topic that's not addressed in the DESI guidelines are the COVID variants. The UK B117 is especially concerning. I can't find current stats from Massachusetts, but it increased prevalence from eight to 12% in New York City over the past couple of weeks. It's more infectious and it appears to affect children more than the regular strain. My concern is that there will be significant in-school transmission of the virus, resulting in either a child's illness or infection of their family. Not only do I feel that the current DESI guidelines will not prevent this, I'm concerned that they may have the opposite effect. I do not believe that surveillance testing once a week is enough for a rentness. I'm also concerned about our staff, but they're getting vaccinated, so I'm not going into that. I know that everyone wants kids back in school and I've heard many, many reasons and I understand that. I know what I'm saying now is not what anyone wants to hear, but I still feel it's important to be said. The actions that I plan to take at this point include communicating my concerns to our legislature with a request. So I wrote this before listening to Mr. Heim, so I'm not sure that this is the right sections, but with a request that they consider suspending or many for this year, MTL Chapter 71, Section 4A, which is what the commissioner is citing as his authority to garnish state aid to districts, as well as his authorities under earlier sections of Chapter 71 in defining learning time. I'll also bring my concerns about the incidence level we are seeing in our schools to our public health department and I'll decide whether I want to offer a motion for our next meeting and get it in sooner. Thank you. All right, thank you, Dr. Allison Ampe. Mr. Schuchman. Thank you. Dr. Allison Ampe is far more eloquent on this topic than I can. She has a lot of experience and a lot of background and she can say things I positively can't. But as a public policy person, I think that what we're seeing is a petty bullying governor who isn't acting in partnership, looking to do the right thing for kids and teachers and families. To begin with, I think that a two week difference in the start date for bringing back elementary kids to start after spring vacation rather than April 5th would be far more sane and give teachers the chance to get vaccinated and give us all a chance to establish a safer and more sane return. It also comes at a time when the weather's gonna be a little bit warmer. The thing that we're looking at here, friends, is that there is no partnership. The governor has not listened to us and the issues that are involved bringing back schools. And he's doing press events, blaming the teachers unions for his own failures in terms of establishing a vaccine program and trying to push an opening before the vaccines are available locally. He took the vaccines away from us. We're capable of doing the vaccinations. We're capable of doing this work on the town level. We did it for our first responders. We can do it for our teachers and he denied us the opportunity to do this. He's resisting the efforts of the president to open schools safely and to get vaccinations into teachers and other professionals and other staff members of our schools. This is deeply concerning and the price would be paid by our kids, our teachers, our families. I have been in contact with state representative Garberley and there is a lot of folks out there in the legislature who are not happy about this either. Kersi is dead right in terms of pushing on our legislature to take responsibility for what's going on there and not just sit back and watch the state board of elementary and secondary education exercise their regulatory powers that have been granted by the legislature. The legislature can take this back temporarily. They can restore some sanity here. Two weeks isn't a big deal. Straightening out the vaccines, making this a healthy return, doing this with common sense with teachers and school committee members, people charged with actually implementing this being a part of the process. We have a state board of education is making this decision right now. Not one of them is an education professional because state law prohibits educators and school committee members from serving on that board which is nonsense. We've got a lot of work to do to fix a broken ship and when it comes time to this crisis, that's when it's falling apart because we've got a governor who doesn't care and a political structure that abandoned us. Thank you very much. All right, anybody? Mr. Cardin. I believe we still need to adjust the middle school dismiss. So I move that the Wednesday dismissal time be changed to 12 noon. Second. It's keys. Sorry, just starting when? Starting now or starting when we give our full return? Yes, so I suspect Dr. Bode, it's for starting on the 28th or? That's correct, I was 28th. Okay. Thank you, as adjusted. Do we have a second for Mr. Cardin? Yes, I second it. Okay, discussion. Seeing none, Ms. Extin. Yes, Mr. Cardin. Yes. Dr. Allison Ampe. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Shliffman. Yes. Mr. Heiner. Yes. I am also yes. Thank you, Mr. Cardin. We would have been back here again in a few days having to deal with that if you hadn't remembered. So brilliant. All right, anything else on this one? Dr. Bode, do you have anything to finish up with? We've done the pieces that you needed from us tonight. Thank you very much. Yes, you very generously provide the two important pieces, the planning day and the change of the dismissal at the time we had the middle school return. We've had a long night and I suspect we'll probably have some more as we go forward. This is all very complicated and I expect to come back next meeting and give you an update. But I hope that one of the things, there's a couple of things that we take away from tonight. One is just the kind of planning that's going on, the belief of our administrators and teachers that we can do this and we will do this. But also understand how complex this is. It sounds so easy. Just have elementary come back on a certain day or is not easy and it requires a lot of planning that needs to go on. The secondary even more so than the elementary that that is not easy as well. But are we dedicated to getting this planned and making sure that our teachers and our students are safe? They absolutely yes. And we are doing that, which I hope that you understand from tonight's presentations. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. The next item on the agenda is the superintendent's proposed budget FY22 discussion and approval. Is there any discussion over this? Is it, I'm seeing Dr. Allison Ampilip confused. I thought we, did we approve this already? I don't know. I maybe, well, we've had our hearing. We wouldn't have approved it before our hearing. No. I thought we approved it next meeting. No? Yeah, I'm seeing other people not. Yeah. Okay. So we've been waiting two weeks on that, Dr. Bodie. Yeah. That's fine. It's fine. Okay. All right. The next item is a ENCO update. So where are we? This is sort of more a conversation, I think for the committee, right? Dr. Bodie, other than from you, I feel like you've provided us everything all the time. I did. And to Dr. Allison Ampilip's request, I put a memo into NOLIS today about what the assessment would be this year, where that money would come from, and then what the range would be when the organization dissolved, what that range would be and where that money would come from, depending actually if it was all come due next year or whether we could even amortize it would be the same in terms of sources of funds. So hopefully that answers your questions in that regard. I put the motion into the memo. It's the same motion that we had at the last meeting. Okay. A reminder, this is something that we need, if we're going to do it, we need to do it by the end of March, right? So my preference, although I am fine if the will of the committee is to bring this back up in two weeks. I'll put it on the agenda, but I would, I'd like to get some, I'd like to know where we're going on this tonight possibly can if people, depending on where people are at. So Dr. Allison Ampilip, I saw your hand up and then followed by Mr. Schupman. I was just going to report out as chair of budget. So budget had been asked to take a look at this which we kind of did at our last meeting, but we didn't, at that point we didn't have this information. And so we didn't take a motion to suggest to the committee how to vote. We just asked that the superintendent obtained the information about the costs and provide that to us, which she has done. So this puts us ahead of where we were with budget. I'm still, I don't know, I'm still having a hard time wrapping my head around all of this. So I'm not feeling inclined to make the motion. And also my understanding is it doesn't make it matter if we make the motion tonight or not because it's already been, there's been enough committees that have voted positively so that the decision has been made. But anyway, I'm not super inclined to make it myself right this minute, but maybe other people feel differently. Mr. Schupman. Yeah, I think we've hit beyond the point of no return on this thing. But if Dr. Allison Ampe wants another two weeks to look into the numbers and maybe come up with some, something thoughtful to be attached to it, I'm willing to wait. All right, anybody else on EDCO? Okey-dokey. So I will have it put it on the agenda for two weeks time for the 25th. We'll see where we're at then. Okay. Resolution MCAS and high stakes testing, Ms. Ekston. Sure, thank you. Do people want me to share my screen? Can they see it in novice? We can see it, but if people do, what do people, do people wanna see it or no? We've got it in novice. Okay. So this is a modified version of a resolution that was passed at the Massachusetts Associated Association of School Committees Delegate Assembly back in November. And when I brought this to be on the agenda, the MCAS was scheduled to start on April 5th when students were being asked to come back into the buildings. Since then, the window has been pushed back. Last night, the MASC voted unanimously, their board voted unanimously to support legislation HD 1448 and act to cancel the administration of the MCAS for the 2021 school year. And then the MAS Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents presented a position paper asking that the MCAS and access testing be canceled for this school year. So there's been a lot of movement on this resolution since November to now. So I'm gonna make a motion to approve it and then I'll hopefully get seconded and speak to it there. So I move that the school committee vote to approve the MCAS and high stakes testing resolution as presented. Second. Second. Great. So do you wanna speak to your motion, Ms. Exton? Sure. Amir, two to six weeks after returning to fully in-person instruction, this assessment is an inappropriate use of instructional time. We have far more important uses of the two to three in-person days the MCAS will take up this spring. The educators have far better and more immediate ways to measure the academic impact of the pandemic. To be clear, this committee cannot waive the MCAS requirement for our students. However, with a non-binding resolution, we can speak up for our students and teachers and let the state know that administering the MCAS is the poor idea this school year. Asking the committee to support this resolution for three reasons. The MCAS is flawed in the best of circumstances. The MCAS results are too delayed to provide immediate feedback. And the MCAS does not tell us about students' mental health. In an ideal academic year, the MCAS proposes to develop a common benchmark for all students across the state. The hope of the assessment is to guarantee a baseline of academic achievement for all graduating students and highlight potential areas of growth for school districts. The reality is that the MCAS does not live up to its goals, even in the best circumstances. Further, the MCAS comes with well-documented costs. We know that students face anxiety in the face of high-stakes testing. And quite obviously we have to give up instructional time to administer the tests. Even if in a typical academic year, one finds the cost-benefit calculus to come down in favor of the MCAS, no one can argue that the math has changed this year. The idea that we can use the MCAS as a way to tell the story of academic achievement during the pandemic is alluring, but it's also misleading. As a district, we have plenty of continuous quantitative assessment tools across K to 12 that can help us understand the academic toll the pandemic has taken. The MCAS data will not be shared back with our district for six months, far too late for us to make budget recommendations and staffing adjustments based off of any potential findings. We've already made plans for supports and staffing for the next school year based on the data that we currently have. The MCAS is an academic assessment and we need a comprehensive account of students that includes social and emotional wellness, not just academic achievement. I believe this to be true every year. This year, in a year when pediatric mental health referrals are at unprecedented level and we have an unknown and potentially tragic need facing our schools next year, we need to prioritize broader assessments. Finally, the time for direct in-person instruction this year will be far too short. Here in Arlington, we are lucky enough to have a group of exceptional educators. These teachers have done an admirable job through hybrid and remote instruction and understand best what instruction can help our students as individuals. We need to let our teachers work as the professionals they are. We don't need to get in their way with MCAS time. I'm asking the committee to support this MCAS and high stakes testing resolution. The resolution itself won't stop the MCAS but it will let our students and teachers know that we support them and it will let the state know that administration of the MCAS is the wrong priority for 2021. Wow, Mr. Schluckman. Thank you. I've talked to many people about that and I have stressed how hungry I am for the data that the MCAS generates because it is consistent across schools, totally across the state. And by virtue of being public, we know what is happening out there in the real world. Get a better sense of what's going on. There are public policy decisions that we're gonna need to make here on the school level and that there are a lot of people who have political agendas are going to be putting before us and before the whole statewide political community many times to vilify what's going on. I think we've been highly successful in our education and I think there's a lot we could learn from good statewide data. I think that we'd find that our remote programs were extraordinarily good. That said, there are a couple of things to counter that argument that I wanna put forth. First of all, as your representative of the Delegate Assembly last fall, I voted for this resolution on behalf of Arlington. Now, I'm looking at this resolution and seeing the word high stakes is being a critical descriptor. And by high stakes, I'm meaning can't be used as a graduation requirement and can't be used for punitive accountability purposes so that it would just be generating the data without any of the high stakes effects. And that's where the concept of testing this year would be. But given the bad faith that's coming from the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education in terms of starting up the school year at this point, I think that if they're pushing us, I think that we do need to push back and if we're being forced for the sake of time on learning to have kids in buildings, then we should focus on time on learning and not time on testing. So I'm in support of going the further step even to the sacrifice of having the data. Now, the other thing is, is that I don't know what Ms. Ekston would say about House Dock at 1448. If she'd be offering a second motion to support that legislation, I seriously consider that as well. So I will be voting for Ms. Ekston's motion after a whole bunch of thought over the past week. All right, anybody else? Ms. Keith. I just wanna say the AEA fully supports this. If you wanna know how the kids are doing just ask us, we can tell you down to the minute detail, but nobody wants to spend more time doing, or any time doing MCAS if we can get time with the kids this spring. So I totally, I absolutely appreciate that. I think the part for me and this resolution is, it feels a little performative to me and that's fine, because we don't get a lot of control over this. I do think though that it's really important. There were a lot of us who were on this committee a couple of years ago when we negotiated with the town and the long-range planning committee over some very, very expensive initiatives that we have taken on as a school district. And we took those initiatives to the voters and a big piece of that was around closing the achievement gap that we met is with MCAS data. And I wish that the way that we negotiated with the town and voters was that we could come to them with what teachers told us kids could do. I wish that that was the kind of world we live in, but it's just not. And so I do, I'm not, I have real question of validity of the data that we would get this year anyway, but I have pause as a committee because we made these commitments around these initiatives. It makes me anxious to then say, but we don't really wanna do the MCAS and I appreciate that we want the kids learning and I don't want them to be tested either for a multitude of reasons that have been outlined far better than I could. I feel really conflicted though about these decisions that we've made around closing the achievement and our need to use data to do that and how things are stacking up in Arlington around when we're gonna need to the voters again or pretend very, very, very significant override. So I need to think about this one. I appreciate the intent of it. It's just we're in a tough, we're in a specifically strange situation in Arlington where we ran a campaign on closing the achievement gap and to then say, well, but we don't wanna do the testing that will let us know whether what we've invested is or is not closing that achievement gap makes me feel, it gives me some pause because I want as much credibility as we can possibly have as an administrative team and as a district as we look ahead towards some really tough decisions. So it's really complicated for me. I sit on long-range planning and I'm on the budget subcommittee and I look ahead towards the campaign. And so that's just, it's another piece to think about. Mr. Heiner. I hear what you're saying. I agree with everything you've said, but I also recognize this is a unique year and this resolution doesn't say we don't want high-stake testing. I personally am opposed to it, but I don't see this resolution saying that. I say, I hear this resolution saying the data that you'd get from it isn't real. And we're looking to bring our children back. We wanna maximize the time coming back, not preparing them for several days of testing. So I think we have a highly educated group of people throughout the town that voted for the increase and on the long-range planning. They will understand that this is a one-time thing. If this was a motion to ask to eliminate it, I think it would be legit. But I think this is recognizing this year's data is not real. Mr. Gellman. I'm gonna make a few comments and I'd love to hear from other people that are involved in long-range planning. I mean, I just, this is, I think this sort of, this is an opportunity for the, for us to educate the public a little bit about how finances work in Arlington. Part of what we do is we try to, when we, we have to, every couple of years, every few years, we have to go to the voters and ask them to increase their property taxes. And then the discussion leading up to that, the school committee and their representatives who are involved in this process, advocate for as much funding as we can get. And we make a case for how we're gonna use the money. And as Ms. Morgan explained, we've made a case that we were going to use that fund to close the academic achievement gap that's experienced by students of color, special education students and others. And so it's important for the public to understand that this data is important in our negotiations, the school committees negotiations with the town in the override number and the percentage of it that comes to the school district. And so that's just a fact of the way we operate in the town of Arlington. And it's just a factor to take into account in this vote. Now that said, Mr. Schlickman and others have, you know, pointed out that administering the MCAS when our kids are gonna be in school for so few hours in the final months of the year doesn't feel right to many of us, including me. So that's where we stand. I just want people to understand. It's not like, you know, we're not listening to people who are concerned about learning time. We're not listening to people that are concerned about the validity of the test. We're just trying to be prepared so we can advocate for more funding for our school district. And I think that's what people should just take into account. That's the position that we're in. I would love to hear from, if they wanna speak on it. Mr. Cardin is Cursey, Dr. Allison Ampe who have been involved in these discussions if they have any thoughts. I don't mean to put you on the spot, if you don't. Hi, Allison Ampe. Well, I appreciate what Ms. Morgan is saying. And yes, it is true that that was part of the promise. This year has upended so much of education in so many ways that it's hard to believe whatever we get. If we show, I mean, okay, let's show that we did close the achievement grant. That's great. But that's an emotional cost to our students. And I don't, first of all, even if we show that we've closed the achievement gap, I'm not sure I believe, I would believe the data. We would have to do some kind of cross-check because it's just, that's too many changes in too short of time. And then you're taking one metric and looking at it. And even if it shows what you want, it doesn't mean it's right. Then the flip side is it doesn't show we've achieved. We've closed the achievement gap. Well, I have the same concerns. It just, it doesn't, there's too much going on. There has been too much going on. And so then the other thing to be thinking about is what is the cost to our teachers? What is the cost to our students in terms of time, in terms of emotional health, in terms of just logistics and having, it's not only doing high-stakes testing, but they're gonna have to do high-stakes testing, wearing the little masks, sitting, not being careful not, not to talk to each other, not, it's like MCAS, but squared, and as they get anxious, they're gonna, they're like, I've got my mask. It's just, and I'm not saying all of them are like that, but it's not gonna be a good thing. And for the kids who are anxious, it's going to be very much a bad thing. And I don't think it's worth it this year. I think this is, this past, since a year ago, this is just, this is out of the realm of any experience any of us have ever had and hopefully ever will have. And I don't think it's worth it this year. So I will be voting yes. I think it's a very thoughtful motion. And I appreciate Ms. Exton for bringing it forward. And I think it is the right thing for Arlington this time. Anybody else? All right, seeing none. Motion by Ms. Exton. Second by Mr. Heiner Midexton. Yeah. Mr. Cardin. Yes. Dr. Alison Ampey. Yes. Mr. Sielvin. Yes. Mr. Sikman. Yes. Mr. Heiner. Yes. And I am also yes. All right. Mr, the monthly financial report, but we've lost Mr. Mason, I think, or he wasn't, I don't know that he was here. So we're gonna punt that one too, I think. Yes? Yep. All right, great. Consent agenda, approval warrant number 21191 dated 3221, total amount 473582.84 approval minutes, school committee regular meeting February 11th and February 25th, 2021. So moved. Second. Yes. Mr. Cardin. Yes. Dr. Alison Ampey. Yes. Yes. Mr. Sielvin. Yes. Mr. Heiner. Yes. And I am also yes. Superintendent's report, Dr. Bodie, do you have anything more than everything you brought to us this evening? Would you like to tell us about the high school building project? Oh, and I actually, I do want to hear it on the travel restrictions. So Superintendent's report. The travel policy, yes. Well, I'm gonna make this very brief tonight. There is, there's a new video on the ahsbuilding.org website. And I would encourage people who are still listening to us. There are still some that it's a great video to get an overview of the project. Tomorrow is supposed to be the topping off. We're going to have a video taken not exactly what time it will start tomorrow, but we want to acknowledge that this was a major, one of the significant milestones in the project and that will be documented that way. So we are meeting monthly and all is going well in terms of schedule and budget. So that's, that's being perfect. And you can see the progress. Well, actually you can see some of the progress because a lot of the buildings are shooting right now, but it's moving along. The travel policy. I can do a more complete report next time, given the hour tonight. Yes, I was just going to say yes. So the policy in the town of Arlington travel is this. And if you come back from traveling outside one of the restricted states, yeah, one of the states that's more that are restricted than not restricted in Massachusetts. Right now, I checked the other day, we're up to five, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Missouri, Oregon, and Washington. Then you need to do one of two things. You need to quarantine for 10 days. The first day is your day of return and you can return day 11. Or you can, on no sooner than the fifth day, get a test, and I think that's been loosened up now to having a PCR or antigen test. And you can then return on the eighth day. So we do not have a change in policy in that regard other than allowing the testing no sooner than fifth day. This discussion has been talked about at the emergency leadership meeting that meets most days. And that's pretty much where the policy is going to stay at this time. And I don't think that there will be much motivation to changing that given the return of students to our schools when April vacation is right in the middle of that. So that's where we are on that. I don't know if anybody wants to comment or have a question about that, but that's where we are. So my question is, is that yesterday or the day before the travel requirement for testing and quarantine was rescinded for people who are considered to be fully vaccinated. And I'm wondering if obviously that would never apply to any students at this time, but I'm wondering if the plan is to apply that to staff and to adults. Obviously fully support vaccination sounds like a really good idea. I'm glad that some will be, but it does create sort of an interesting dynamic where students cannot test in in any capacity at this point. I believe, oh, sorry. So I was curious where you're at with that. I believe that is exactly the direction that is going. And but I don't have a for sure that's exactly what we're gonna do, but do I think that that's a reasonable policy? Yes. Will people have vaccination cards? Yes. So I believe that that will be a very, that certainly can be enacted. I will say that what that has created, and I have heard mention of this in more than one venue of the inequity potentially of that policy because not everyone is going to be able to get a vaccination depending on the age group or the group that you're in. So that is one of the issues, but does it make sense? Yes, it does. I will say this though, that there is with the vaccines, at least when during Pfizer, you know, so the full effect of that vaccination is two weeks out from your second shot. So how that factors into this is going to be, you need to think about that. But yes, and I will say- Point of order, Madam Chair. Point of order. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Emotion is going to be required to continue the meeting. To what extent do you think we need to move? I can stop and I will give you the answer. No, no, no, we need to define the meeting because we have a 10 o'clock rule suspended to 11. We're approaching 11. So this is no- 15 minutes. 15 minutes. Do we have an executive session attached to this? No, we don't. Okay. Then I move the 10 o'clock rule to 11, 15. Second, aye. Liz. Yes. Yes. Yes, yes. Yes, yes. Yes. Go ahead, Dr. Bodie. Or did you have anything else? And then- On the travel policy, nothing, but I will let you know where this stands. I'll probably be able to tell you before the next meeting. Okay. I mean, I will just say I am really happy that I, it feels a little strange to me that we're gonna be in a situation where many of our teachers and staff can travel to any state, anywhere they want. And we still have a very, very strict. And hopefully, cases are gonna come down and students will be able to go to out of state. But right now, the CDC is saying that grandparents can see their grandkids. But if they, if we take our kids across state lines to do that, they're out of school for 10 days. So it's a pretty, like it's a very, very serious situation and it does create sort of a strange situation that we're gonna run into that kids very much have to stay home and stay within the confines of the state. But the rest of the people around them can move around much more freely. So I think that it's something I, I appreciate your willingness to talk about it and to keep talking about it. And again, I hope that the cases everywhere come down such that a lot of these states come off of the travel list, but it is, I feel I have some discomfort with the fact that kids and who can't travel to Connecticut to see their vaccinated grandparents over April vacation and then take a test to come back as we're gonna be in a situation where hopefully we will be in a situation where many of our employees can travel very freely. So that's how I feel about this. Mr. Cardin. Thank you. So my concern is that we're out of line with the state policy and we're out of line with many of the neighboring districts. So I mean, the state policy isn't as five day as soon as you test negative, you're removed from quarantine. And so I don't know why we're still have such a strict policy in Arlington. And I'd like to have it as an agenda item to discuss in the future and get some rationale from whoever is making this decision. Wow, Mr. He. I would suggest that we get some input from Christine Bourne-Jono because I think that's maybe where it's coming from. Mr. Thielman. I'm wondering if, I mean, so this has come up, several members of the public have raised this and we've sort of, and here we are and it's 1105 or whatever it is, 1102. And so I think we should get this resolved by the next meeting. And I think we should take the steps necessary to make sure we do that. Like, and so if that includes a subcommittee diving into this between now and then so that we're ready for this discussion, I think we should do it. So I don't know which subcommittee, maybe it's policy, I don't know, maybe that's where it makes the most sense. So that we can have a subcommittee dive into this, meet with the appropriate people, make a recommendation in collaboration and partnership with the superintendent and then have the school committee take any action that we need to take on our meeting on March 25th. I mean, that's how I think we should do it. So we just have, we tell the public where we got to plan and process in place to resolve this. Mr. Schluckman, are you prepared to take it up in policy? I don't know. I mean, the thing that frustrates me is through all of this, we have consistently asked for somebody from the health department to take a few minutes on Zoom and come talk to us. And we have not been successful with that so that to go and kick it to subcommittee and then have to wonder whether or not we're gonna get anybody from the health department to come talk to us, you know, I don't know. I want this on the agenda for next week. And I do think the policy is overly restrictive. You know, I'll take it up or maybe it goes to community relations because it's really a parent concern over a temporary item. But- I'd be happy to take it and I have a good relationship with Ms. Poinjono. Oh yeah, I don't have a relation. I don't have a bad or negative relationship with her. So if you think you could get her to have a chat with the subcommittee, that'd be great. I don't know about a chat, but I can get some information that I can promise. Because I'd want to talk to, I want to be able to ask questions and understand because we've been on the firing line and on the front line of this for a year. And you know, I appreciate the fact that they're really good people doing their best and the decisions they've made have been very strong going forward. But I'm really very frustrated by the fact that we haven't been able to have a conversation and we're the governing board for the district. Yeah, I was just saying, we should not have a policy that's more restrict. I'm not, if we're gonna have a policy that's more restrictive than state law, then we need to have it explained what we've got at Nemo and information. So and if we don't receive that, then we revert to state law. It's really not that complicated. If we don't get any information explaining why it's more restrictive than state law, then we revert to state law. That's it, it's not complicated. Do we, I mean, so do we want to, so I will put this on the agenda for next week or are we gonna send it to community relations? I mean, I don't know, I just want to keep it moving but I mean, that's just. Well, do you want, can we, I mean, is there a? I move the community relations look into it and report back for the next meeting. Fair enough. Second. Talk about it, Mr. Cronin. Hi. I mean, I think I would just with it, with the understanding that be, that there would be some that made afterwards. All right, so sending it, motion by Mr. Carlin to send this to community relations seconded by, did you second it, Mr. Heiner? Very well. Sure, you did. Discussion, Dr. Allison Ampe. Oh, no, Dr. Allison Ampe seconded it. Yes. Thank you. Okay. Anybody want to talk about it? Ms. Keyes. I believe our Joint Health and Safety Committee is meeting next week. I would like them to discuss it as well. I don't see why not. Yeah, would it be enjoying, I'm confused. We set it up with negotiations. Oh, for negotiations, yeah. So it's teachers and admin and nurses and, okay. Okay, so go. I mean, there has to be a public explanation as to why we're being more restrictive than the state law. And if that, we don't have it, then I want to know why. All right. More. All right, any more discussion on this? All right, motion by Mr. Carlin, seconded by Dr. Allison Ampe to send this to community relations, Ms. Eckston. Yes, Mr. Cardin. Yes. Dr. Allison Ampe. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Mr. Schluckman. Yes. Mr. Heiner. Yes. And I am also, yes. And I will also put it on the agenda for two weeks time and we can get a report from community relations. Okay. Oh, sorry. But are you not done with your report? Well, you know, I just want to acknowledge our students, our student athletes and we don't have many people other than ourselves at this point, but we have a lot of students participate, 168 in the winter season. And as Dr. Janker said, that number is increasing. We're moving into the fall too, there's four seasons this year. But I want to acknowledge the girls basketball team and the boys basketball team, the girls basketball team won the Middlesex League Liberty Division. The boys came in second. The girls hockey also won the Middlesex League Liberty Division. And gymnastics won their first meet in the last two years and they did, it's just terrific that they are doing that. But I imagine they gave them a lot of pride. And then our teams did very well. And we're gonna, as I said, we're moving into fall two, which is going to be unified basketball, football. You can see them outside practicing these days, volleyball indoor track, which will be outdoors. And the cheerleading dancing. There'll only be two spectators at a game and that will be controlled by lanyards. But I just want to wish our athletes great success and mainly to have fun. As I can see that they are in their practices already. So that's wonderful. That's my report. Thank you, Dr. Bodie. Subcommittee, liaison reports and announcements. Budget, Dr. Alston. So, budget met this past week and we'll meet again next week to continue discussing the budget and how rightsizing components and looking into what was spent in FY20. Community relations, Mr. Hayner. We're continually having chats every Saturday that they continue to be good. This coming one is pre-K to five parents. We have the A team, Ms. Ekston and Ms. Morgan will be running it. I have a date with a dunking machine during that time. So they will carry on. CIA, Mr. Cardin. We are meeting Monday with the representatives from the Human Rights Commission to follow up with some of the items we had previously discussed with them in the fall. Facilities, Mr. Thielman. No report. Policy, Mr. Schlickman. Okay, I've been talking to Desi regarding our restraint policy. They're going to get back to us. Once we clear that, we'll schedule a meeting. High School Building Committee, Mr. Thielman. We're doing great. If you haven't got on the website to see the video, do so. It's really inspiring. Please on reports, Mr. Hayner. Could I just ask a question, CIA? Are you going to be dealing with the job description for that position that's been in the budget on diversity? Yes, we will be reviewing the draft job description. Thank you. I have a liaison report. I attended the PTO meeting at Stratton. They, lots and lots of questions about reopening. My best answer to give them was to pay attention, to come to the meeting tonight and pay attention. I saw a lot of the names in the attendees. It was well attended. The teachers there also expressed the gratitude to the PTO, the PTO supported the teachers in getting appointments to get vaccinated. Thank you. Announcements? Mr. Thielman. I guess announcements and future agenda items and all the other stuff. I was about to say future agenda items. I was trying to give announcements that's due, but- Well, because one of it's sort of a liaison-ish as well. I've been attending the Transportation Advisory Committee and they've been talking, they spent quite a bit of time last night talking about safe routes to school. The Down School was one of the first safe routes schools in the state and they're back looking at it again. And I know that our esteemed chair has been in touch with them and we'll have a short presentation from them at the next meeting. And I thank you, Madam Chair, for arranging that. A couple of other things I'd like to note at this point. One for officers for next year that has to be recorded to Ms. Fitzgerald. And I think we should be looking in the future once we transition to the new school year or new school committee year in April to start doing a transition, a superintendent's transition agenda item so that we can just monitor how things are going and show our support for both superintendent Bode and our future superintendent, Dr. Holman. So that's what I have to say on this. Thanks. Mr. Schlipman, what was the timing on that starting from when moving forward? Oh, after we reorganize. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So that's a note for you, Mr. Hainer. Thank you. You're so welcome. Okay. Anybody else on future agenda items? All that I have as of right now is safe routes to school for the 25th and travel policy. Oh, and EDCO, right? Okay. All right. Anything else from folks? Okay. Great. We do not need executive consent into adjourn. So move. Second. Ms. Exton. Yes. Mr. Carlin. Yes. Dr. Allison Ampey. Yes. Mr. Thelman. Yes. Mr. Schlipman. Yes. Mr. Hainer. A few minutes to spare. Yes. I'm also yes. Thanks for everyone. Have a safe night. Take care.