 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 the transmission of the virus, we have been advised and directed by the Commonwealth to suspend public gatherings and, as such, the governor's order to suspend the requirement of the open meeting while 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 that 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 a public comment. For this meeting, the Arlington School Committee can be convened via 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 recordings. All materials for this meeting, except in the executive session materials are available on the Novus agenda dashboard. We recommend members of the public follow the agenda as posted on Novus unless I note. Otherwise, I will introduce each speaker on the agenda after they conclude that I will go down a list of members inviting each by name to provide any comment, question, or motions. Please hold until your name is called. Please remember to mute your phone or computer when you are not speaking. Please remember to speak in a way that helps generate accurate minutes. Excuse me. For any response, please wait until I yield the floor to you and state your name before speaking. If you wish to engage in colloquial with other members, please do it through the chair. Taking care to identify yourself after members have spoken. So sorry, we don't have any public comment. That gets me every week. Each vote taken this meeting will be conducted by roll call vote. As a preliminary matter, I'm going to take attendance. I do want to make a note that Dr. Brody is not available this evening, but Dr. McNeil is here and will be addressing agenda items and our assistant superintendent and Mr. Bill Hayner, school committee member is also not available this evening. So there's six of us and I need to make a note of that in my order of calling on folks. So let's see, who do we expect here? Ms. Ecksten. Here. Mr. Cardin. Here. Dr. Allison Ampey. Here. Mr. Thielman. Here. Mr. Schlickman. Here. And I am also here. Dr. McNeil. Here. Mr. Mason. Here. Mr. Spiegel. Here. Mr. I see Mr. McCarthy. Here. Mr. Janger. Dr. Janger. Madame Pierre Maxwell. Present. Ms. Elmer. Present. I'm just working my way down the grid, guys. All right, and then I see Mr. Coleman. Here. I see Ms. Pease. Here. I see, see every time you guys say here, the grid shuffles. This is going great. I see Ms. Perry. Can you hear us? Ms. Perry? No, she signed in as Deb Perry. It's Ms. DeMotto, yes. It's Ms. DeMotto, sorry. She looks like Deb Perry. If you don't mind, could you change your name? Because my executive function skills will not be able to iterate on that during this time, unfortunately. Sorry about that. Madame Pierre Maxwell, did I call on you already? Yes, you did. Good evening, everyone. Good evening, Ms. Perry. Okay, all right, so let's go ahead and get started. So the first item on the agenda is public comment. There are two people who signed up previously for public comment. This is just a reminder that public comment is limited to three minutes. And the matter of policy, the committee does not respond to comments in real time during the meeting. Sometimes the comments may be addressed later on in the meeting. So the first person is Ms. Heather Breslau, Breslau. Yes, hi, thank you, Jane. Thanks, everyone. I'm the mother of a son at Bishop in Hybrid and two daughters at Gibbs who are in the hybrid program. Our experience at Bishop has been consistently good during remote days, but I'm concerned about the education my daughters are receiving in sixth grade during their remote days. We chose hybrid because we valued the social-emotional benefits of in-school learning. And through much discussion at the school level and hearing the discussion at the school committee level, it appeared that the curriculum and teaching would be equitable between the hybrid and remote academy. However, that's not been our experience. There are only two days of teaching for Gibbs hybrid. Wednesday is a poorly utilized day. There is curriculum, there is no curriculum delivered during 20-minute blocks. It's simply check-in time. The work assigned for Thursday and Friday is minimal and there's only one academic class for each of my daughters on these days. Neither of my girls has had more than two hours of work on a remote day and it is nearly all self-directed. I've heard from other families that this is consistent across the learning communities. I fear this reduced instruction and education will leave our children in the hybrid program with an academic deficit. And this is not equitable. Compared to the four days of instruction, I hear their peers are receiving in the remote academy. I've shared these concerns with Principal Maxwell and the LC leads for both of my daughters. I'm wondering if the curriculum subcommittee might look into solutions or supporting Gibbs for creative ways that more instruction can be given during those remote days. Perhaps it's getting creative with content delivery with TAs or finding ways to get more specials into those days or video learning, similar to what the elementary schools have found success with. I'm hoping that we can find a way to improve this. Thank you very much. Thank you. And Mr. Grant Cook. Hi, am I coming through? Yeah, thanks. Hi, my name's Grant Cook. I'm a parent of two children at the Dowling School in the first and fourth grade, both in cohort A. I'm here to speak about the current hybrid school calendar and attempts to mitigate the loss of in-person days for my children and their peers driven by the holiday week changes. In looking over the chain of events, I find myself weighing two terms, management and leadership, both are key qualities for professionals in this district. It's been said management's doing things right, leadership is doing the right things. I would posit that the current chain of events display a failure of both with our superintendent. Good management would have dictated that the equity gaps in in-person days, both initially in cohort B and now more severely in cohort A would have been addressed early in any planning and good management would have involved communication to parents about the goal of parity and pending actions around that. Good management would have done this early to provide peace of mind and information to parents to inform their planning, especially so close to the holidays. Good management would have recognized the omnipresent risk of going full remote and prioritized adjustment to schedules within the quarter, as close to any disruption as possible, not 10 or 12 weeks out. Leadership would have been leveling with parents about the disruption for in-person learning being tied to an accommodation to the teachers and not tried to mask it with a mendacious veil around helping out cohort B. Leadership would have been displaying some modicum of empathy for the impact on parents struggling to maintain contact with family and friends, mitigate risk and manage schedules to keep in-person learning working for our kids. Leadership is also being that the balance is being achieved today by counting the last two days of school as educationally impactful as those other days in October and January. Yet those waiting days as the school year are a combination of celebration and growing anticipation for the start of summer plans, not for deep learning. I'm not under the illusion that good management or leadership can be magically instilled where it's lacking, but I'm hoping that by pointing out the lack of both here that they become a remembered concept to help guide you in responding to this situation and in future disruptions and challenges that will undoubtedly arise. Thank you for your time. Thank you, Mr. Cook. All right, so moving to the first item on the agenda, this is a fall reopening update. And then Dr. McNeil, you're also gonna address the calendar change as an update. Is that all right? Yes, I will definitely do that. So thank you, Ms. Morgan. I will start off with the... Wait a minute, can everybody hear me? Oh, okay, make sure I was unmuted. So thank you. Good evening, everyone. So the first thing I would like to talk about on the superintendent's report is the COVID testing. We've had some recent interest in the community about the amount of testing that we're providing for staff and what some of the data is that we've collected as a result from that testing. So I will start off by saying we, through the testing and through up until now, currently we've had no positive cases of COVID-19 that can be linked to schools or any of the things that happen as it relates to sports attached to the schools. So all the cases that have come up or the different cases that come up positive have been linked to outside activities, mainly to social and large family gatherings and non-school related sporting events. In addition to that, just to give, there was also questions about the funding that we have secured in order to maintain the testing within the district. And I can say that the October 9th testing was $25,500, which did not come from any of the funding from the schools. It's coming from, it's through the CARES Act and it's CVRF grants. So I did wanna make sure that the community understood that. Our intent at this moment is to continue testing throughout the year and have that take place on a weekly basis. And just some of the metrics related to the testing that we've already done that have been completed on September 16th and September, I'm sorry, on September 16th and September 17th, we had 427 staff members tested on Friday, October 9th. We had 249 staff members tested and on Monday, October 19th, we had 200 staff members tested from which we did not have any positive cases. So I just wanted to talk about some of the metrics involved with the testing. And I'm very pleased to say that because of the different health protocols and the diligence of our staff and our students, our students have been doing a very good job of following health protocols. So we've fortunately, at this time, I've had no positive test associated with school activities. So I can pause there before I go into any other parts of the report to see if there's any questions, because I know that there were some interest or some questions or comments regarding our testing. Great, thank you, Dr. McNeil. I'm just gonna look for members of the committee if you have anything, any comments, questions, additional. Okay, thank you. This is really important. We need to, we absolutely support this continuing. I'm so grateful that our teachers are electing to get tested. And I appreciate that that's something that they're doing after school on their own time. And that's something that, as a parent with many children in school, I'm very grateful for. And I think that it sends a really important message to the community about how important we think testing is as a town. And I think that actually it also continues to help drive to make sure that parents are doing the right thing to get their kids tested early and often and to get those results back to school nursing staff so that we, obviously to the extent we can do it safely, we want kids in school and in the building and we want them to have their COVID tests before they come in. So I think that it's just a really important thing that this is available to our teachers and that we're really transparent and open about it. And I'm grateful that they're taking full advantage. Ms. Keys. I just wanna say thank you again for making this possible. It is so important to our staff. I'm actually home in quarantine right now because I was exposed to school. So it's been so good for me knowing that we're gonna be able to get the regular testing because it's scary. So thank you very much. Thank you, Ms. Keys. All right, go ahead, Dr. McNeil. So to your second question about the, there's also been concern in the community as represented in our, one of the comments regarding the inequity or the different amount of instructional days for the cohort A and cohort B students. And so as a central office team and as a district administrative team, we talked about how we could respond to that concern within the community and come up with a plan to take care of that discrepancy in days. So, we talked about many different options and trying to see which one would mitigate any type of disruption to instruction and also give people enough time to plan for what that plan is for how to respond to that change in plan. So after considering several options, Dr. Bodie and I'm reporting out that we have decided as a team that on the cohort A schedule during the week of January that we're gonna add one person a day of in-person instruction to the cohort A schedule during the week of January 18th. Monday is Dr. Martin with the King Holiday. And so that week, students in cohort A will attend school in person on Tuesday and Friday. Students in cohort B will attend school in person only on Thursday. And on Friday, cohort B students will have the remote schedule they missed on Monday. So cohort students will have their regular Thursday remote schedule, Wednesday schedule will remain unchanged for both cohorts. And so that's part of the plan right there. So I don't know if it would have any questions on that. Any questions or comments? Mr. Schlickman. Yeah, I just wanted to tell the community to be patient with us because we're gonna have blizzards and snow days and other things happening. There's a commitment on the part of this committee and I'm sure from the administration to even things out as we progress through the year but it's not gonna be instantaneous. So bear with us, we want equity in this and we're looking out to do the right thing for kids. Anybody else? All right, Dr. McNeil. Okay, so that is the two main issues I wanted to report on as part of the superintendent's report for the reopening. I don't know if there's any other topics that you wanted me to cover. I don't think so. Are there questions from the committee generally on the topic of reopening? We have a very robust meeting agenda tonight with the district goal progress which is critical generally and also with an eye to wrapping up timely superintendent evaluation as well as an update from Dr. Janger about a few things. So if you have questions with respect to reopening for Dr. McNeil, we can certainly entertain those now but I am trying to keep us going but that's not a way to say don't ask questions. Do you have a question? And I also wanted to add to that that I did not add is I wanted to let families know that the reason why we were looking at January is because we do understand there's childcare changes have to be changed. I mean, childcare changes have to take place and we wanted to give parents an opportunity to plan for that as well as our teachers. So in order to do that, we wanted to make sure that we gave them enough time to be prepared for that significant change. Okay, should we move on to 2019-2020 district goal? Progress from Dr. McNeil and some of our curriculum leaders who are here tonight? Yes, so do I have the ability to share my screen? I don't know, that's always the million dollar question. Is it green down there or no? At the bottom? It is, it is. And that goes well. So before I begin, I wanted to make sure that I wanted to begin by saying that we have over 89 slides in our presentation. So it covers all the content areas. And in order to mitigate the time that it will take to go through all of the slides, I discussed with Dr. Bodie who also had a conversation with Ms. Morgan. So we're going to take it in chunks. So the first presentation, two presentations we're gonna make today are for ELA and math. And then I could work with Ms. Morgan in order to plan when the other curriculum leaders and directors could come and present on the goals in their particular content area. And I will also want to state that, many of the goals that we wrote for the 1920 school year were for the entire year. So going into the year, of course we did not, we weren't able to plan for the school closure. I'm sure that it's taken everyone by surprise. So as we look at the goals and you listen to the presentation, some of the goals we were able to complete, but many of the goals we still are working on going into this year. And even now we've had to take a different perspective on how we're writing the goals for this year which we will present at a later date and focus on some of the things that we've worked on in order to prepare for this year. So one of those things is, looking at how we're engaging students within a distance learning environment. And so we focus on those things like the online technology tools, talked about how we're adjusting our teaching practice. So that's just giving you a preview of some of the things that we've considered for our 2021 district goals. So I'm going to share my screen. And so this is our slide deck. So I'm going to introduce Deb Perry who was our director of ELA in English for K through 12, for kindergarten through 12th grade. And then we also have some of the literacy coaches who are here. We have Maria Mato. We have Shannon O'Brien. And I believe we also have Mrs. Trisha Staden who was here. So I'm going to hand it over to Ms. Perry and have her begin. But, and I will advance the slides to the appropriate slides to where she can begin. Sorry, thank you very much, Rob. So hi, thank you very much for having us. We have four goals to talk about it. And the 1.1 goals correspond well with the 2.1 goals. So we're going to talk about them together. 1.1 has to do with student learning and 2.1 has to do with teacher preparation or professional development. So those things combine and that's what you'll hear us talking about. So we have a first grade, we have third grade, we have fifth grade and we have the high school. So I think we'll go through that if it's all right with you and then take questions at the end of those four. Okay, so for grade one, Tricia Staden's going to talk a little bit about what's been going on or what went on actually last year. Sure, yep. So the first goal was to work on implementing a new early assessment called the DIBLS. And there was two subtests that teachers needed to learn and then learn also how to interpret the results. So they were able to become familiar through training of the two assessments and they were administered in March. They also attended professional development provided by literacy coaches and also consultants on the assessments and also on how to look at the data and figure out how to form small groups and provide individualized instruction based off of the assessment. Yeah, the last thing I wanted to just say is that also they were provided a support from the literacy coach on how to provide that small group instruction through demonstration and also through coaching cycles. And so we were able to make pretty good progress on that last year, which was great. Thank you. And before we go forward, because I just want to also give some context as to what the goals state. And that is something that I just want to make sure that everyone understands what the goal is going to cover. So the goal one is about is cover student achievement. And I won't read the whole goal because everybody can see it right there in front of them. And then goal 1.1 is looking at how students engage in the curricula and how we're designing the instruction and how it aligns with state goals and state standards, I'm sorry, and coherent with each discipline. So one thing that we've decided to focus on within the Department of Curriculum Instruction, the overall theme you'll see through all of our goals is how we're addressing tier one instruction because we understand that provides a foundation for everything that we do. And when we're evaluating students for an IEP or we're looking at the types of support that we're providing other students who may need ELL support or be on a 504 plan, we have to make sure that our tier one instruction is robust and solid so that when we are evaluating those students, we understand that they're coming from a strong foundation and that any type of deficits that they're experiencing is not, cannot be tracked back to our lack of having a strong instruction. So many of the themes you'll see throughout all the goals is looking at tier one instruction, whether it be assessments, whether it be like different types of strategies that we're trying to implement in order to strengthen that tier one instruction and provide all students equal access to that challenging and robust curriculum. So you'll see that theme as you go, as you listen to all of the different presentations. So I just wanted to add that context so you'll be able to understand. And that each slide is, has been formatted where you'll see the goal. You'll see the goal, you'll see the objective and you'll see the progress that was made on the goal. And we've also added evidence as a link if you want to click on that link to see what types of things were done in support of that goal. So I just wanted to make sure I added that. So I'll go back to the slides and then Ms. Perry can continue. And please, my screen went dark because I'm sitting in my office and my lights are on a motion sensor. So if I don't move, they go dark. So I'm gonna turn off my video so I can turn on my lights by moving. Okay, well, we'll go ahead while you lighten yourself. Yeah, you can go ahead. I have to light up my room. Stricia, thank you very much. So the next goal is like grade three and Maria Amato is gonna talk a little bit about what happened last year in that category. Thanks Deb. So our goal for grade three last year was to have teachers implement all three reading units of study which there were two fiction units and there is one new nonfiction unit. And we did this in order to have a really well-rounded grade three reading curriculum both fiction and nonfiction that was consistent with grades one through five. And the final unit of the three was implemented last year. Could you advance to the next slide? And last summer, we were able to provide professional development and teachers were able to create daily lessons that align with all the units. And Litcoach has also provided individual coaching sessions as well in the fall at a teacher's request. We were able to implement all those units and we were lucky because all the units were actually taught prior to the school closing. So even the new unit was implemented last year and we're continuing to do that this year. In terms of our other goal during the fall, our goal was to use early release time to introduce our new nonfiction unit to support teachers. And that really allowed us for teachers to give us feedback and ID all the needs that they had. And we were able to give the PD and the teachers were able to hear to get a deeper understanding of every unit with also some additional coaching support. Great, thanks, Maria. So we move on to grade five and Shannon O'Brien is gonna talk a little bit about that goal. Hey, everybody. So grade five, much like grade three, they're actually the last to implement all of the Lucy and Cockens units. They had had one unit in place and they are still working on two. And last year we were able to implement the interpretation book club unit. As Rod stated at the beginning of this, we're really looking for a robust, solid, strong foundation. And now your students in grades one through five will go through each unit and each unit and Lucy Cockens builds on the unit prior to it. And if you know anything about the mass state standards, they're recursive. And so every single year, all the way up through grade 12, you'll hear your students talking about theme. You'll hear your students talking about characters, but it will just grow and get more complex as we go. So in this unit, what's really great is these fifth graders are really turning into interpretive readers. They're really getting deep. They're learning how to write well about their reading. They're developing ideas and supporting it with text evidence. They're really learning the kind of reading and writing to move them to be a successful student up through the high school years. So just like we did in third grade, they were able to implement the unit. It was before the pandemic. So we were able to give professional development. I was able to go in and model and coach teachers through this and give feedback. We were able to look at student data from this unit. And in fact, next week, I meet with the fifth grade teachers and they're going to implement the very last unit in the Lucy Cockens for grades one through five and it's a nonfiction unit. So that will be the next step for your students. Thanks, Shannon, very much. Rob will go on to the high school, please. So at the high school, we had a goal of continuing our work with narrative writing and that we were working to figure out how to integrate narrative writing assignments into the regular work that we were doing and then also to sort of formalize a little bit by making it part of the common assessments that we do. So we have common assessments linked to any piece of literature that we cover and we use common assessments at least four times a year to sort of be able to gauge what the students are, the progress that they're making in writing primarily. So linked on the slide that you have and we won't look at it now are some of the first attempts that teachers were making to come up with assignments that would involve narration. We didn't get to the point of making absolute common assessments that had those choices in them, although we do have two or three that are done but we didn't do it across the board so we'll continue to do that. And as with most things that happened in the English department, we work on a continuum, we just keep trying to improve and to sort of refine the work that we started doing and see how it progresses. We do a lot of work in PLCs and we do and we have a lot of sharing that happens in our department meetings. So it's an incredibly collaborative department. So we're always sharing things. We have files for each grade level that we keep adding things to. And so this is a work in progress but one that's really been, it's been fun to do. I think the students are really enjoying the addition of this kind of writing and I also believe and I think the teachers do as well that this writing really provides an opportunity for students to take the part of characters, take the part of minor characters, particularly ones that we might not think about or see or explore as much and be able to sort of think about how the situations that are occurring in a piece of literature might be seen from characters whose voices we don't know is here. So it's been a great way for us to think about and talk about the examination of cultural, just all the things that happen culturally in society. So I think that's it for us. So we'll take questions. Thank you. Ms. Perry, could you or Dr. McNeil, if you can stop sharing your screen then everybody's boxes show back up for me and I can look for questions from the committee. I also want to comment that this is our goals for 1.1 and so we'll have ELA and English share about their goals for 1.1 and then we'll move on to goals 2.1 because that's where we talk about the professional development that took place in order to support the various instructional goals in each department. Okay, so just so that I'm clear, so you want to do goal 1.1 from math now and then do the PD goal for ELA and math or are you sticking with ELA right now? No, I'm thinking that we could, if you want to have questions for ELA, we can take those now and then we can move on to math or did you want to clump the one goal objective 1.1 for ELA and math and then ask questions or do you want to break it up and put ELA? Let's group them together. Okay, so then moving forward, we have Mr. Coleman, Mr. Matthew Coleman who was the director of K-12 Math and then I can share my screen again and he will go over his goal objective 1.1 for math. Hi everyone, thanks for having me. Let me know if my sound clicks out. So, the math story is a story that's been going on, I would say for the past five or six years. The way we've been trying to structure it is to really think about curriculum, instruction and assessment. And I would say over the past couple of years leading into last year, we were really focused on curriculum instruction. We were implementing a new program or a new version of a program in the elementary school. We were shifting some things around in the middle school, you know, using some other digital resources and some other tech tools that were available. And at the high school, we were really shifting things around where we were adding on courses, we were thinking about pathways, opening up pathways for everyone and that really centered on that. Last year was a shift, pretty much K through 12. And you know, in this it's kind of stating about the six to 12, but essentially it was one of those things where we were looking at kind of auditing our whole entire assessment structure and making sure that one, we understood out of all the changes that we had made, what are those core essential learning standards, both content and practice that we really wanted to reinforce and really wanted to make transparent in the classrooms. And then on top of that, were all the assessments that we were gonna use to try to help us track how students were doing and give feedback. So it was nice for us to actually have, it was in conjunction with Dr. Neal with doing the data bank where we spent a lot of time at the elementary school essentially talking about fluency. You know, so that stands pretty much K through two. So what are all those benchmarks that we essentially want? What are the assessments that we're gonna choose to track and how do we monitor the students throughout those years? So there's a lot of work done in conjunction with the coaches and the math intervention team to start to really dig deeper into that. So that was part of that work. At the middle school, actually the most one high school we essentially were taking a lot of time to think about what were those core essential standards. For there, we spent more time in all honesty talking about some of the practice standards or process standards, communication, collaboration, using tools strategically, things that probably shifted the way in which the kids were engaging in the content in addition to just the pure standards. Thinking about kind of making that a little more robust. So we were in the midst of working on all that. The pandemic obviously slowed that down. But one of the nice little twists is this goal is pretty much relevant for us moving into this year because we have to reflect on all this stuff also. Again, a lot of that work of thinking about the essential content standards was good work for us at the end of last year as well as moving into this year. We were able to get some resources both nationwide as well as things that are part of what Turk might be using for us to kind of help us move forward. So that's essentially that goal. It was a timely goal for us last year and it's eating more timely for us this year. This year it's probably gonna look a little bit more with an infusion of technology and how we might be able to tap into some of those things to help us. It's been a good resource. So yeah, I think I may have already talked about the action steps. Trying to think, yeah, I would say last year was some progress just to touch on this slide. The reason why I would say some progress is really the pandemic really shifted a lot of things for us. It was something where we had to halt our work and our fluency at the elementary school. In full disclosure, we haven't circled back around to that just yet. But we've actually started to have conversations with the coaches and the intervention team this week about how we're gonna keep it back on, which has been nice. So then the next goal is, I think there was another goal on computer science somewhere, maybe. Oh, it is. There we go. I'm not gonna lie, this goal kind of breaks my heart because we completed this goal. We have been so psyched about this goal. It was one of those things where we have been, and I think I presented to all of you for the past couple of years on this, we have consistently been shifting around our program and we were so jazzed for last year because we finally had the tools, we finally had the time. We're moving to the point where it's fairly optimistic maybe the next year or two, we'd be able to get a little bit more of a mandatory CS for all. And so much of that stuff is not usable for this year, so we accomplished this goal. And you know, I'll even say this, the help from AEF was fantastic. We were doing virtual reality, we were doing 3D worlds using scratch, doing robotics units, it has been awesome. This year we're kind of readjusting and realigning to the CS standard still and it's great collaboration, it's just the output and what we're doing with kids is gonna look a little different than we would have planned and our hope is, you know, next year we're back in a position to be able to use this stuff and two, hopefully all those cool toys that aren't antiquated at that point, we'll never know, I guess. So we will know, unfortunately we'll be able to use it for this year. So those are the two core goals that we're focused on for last year. Now K-312 really was about the assessment component and thinking about essential standards and computer science in the middle school was a big push for us there. Okay, so at this time, do we wanna take questions on the ELA and computer science and math goals for 1.1? Super, questions? Mr. Cardin? Thank you, so going back to the ELA and the Dibbles, it sounded like we did deliver that or we started to deliver that in March, were we able to get that screening done before shutdown or what happened? No, so I can, I'll answer that. So because of the shutdown and because of the learning structure that we had in place, we did not give the last assessment, we did not conduct the last formal assessment period for many reasons. And so we just didn't complete it, but we did change the assessment for the year and we did conduct the assessment for fall and winter. Okay, so as part of those fall and winter screenings, did we identify, I guess I'm still confused how the Dibbles is related to the screening that we use for reading interventions. So are we still doing a different screening for reading intervention and then does Dibbles identify additional students that need reading intervention or does Dibbles not identify students for reading intervention? Well, I just wanna, I wanna correct one thing. The formal assessments that we put in place are diagnostic, they're not screeners. So I'll have Trisha Staden if she wanted to comment on that. Sure. The Dibbles assessment was given in March and then because of COVID, it was not given in June, but we've already started assessing this fall using the Dibbles assessment. And it does give us information on how kids, the two subtests that we were looking at is the phoneme segmentation and the nonsense word fluency. And those two subtests will give us information on our students and be able to help us figure out the needs that they have in those two areas and then form small groups. Okay, so then yes, so you're confirming that the Dibbles is used to determine who might need that small group support. Correct. Okay, because that was sort of one of the things we had discussed previously that whatever tool we were using before was missing some students. Absolutely. We're reaching upper grades and still not able to decode words. So I'm glad to hear that we've mostly gotten and implemented, say for the interruption of school due to the pandemic. Thank you. That's all I have. And I will say that the information that the data that we collected is in the data bank and teachers can refer back to that data bank this year in order to see how students performed on that assessment. And that is a large reason why we made the change in the assessments. So the literacy department came up with a two year plan for looking at the assessments and making those changes and providing professional development for our teachers so they would be able to understand how the protocols for giving those assessments. Great, thank you. Mr. Gillman. Thank you. Thanks for the presentation. This was helpful. I know I just have a logistics question either for somebody, maybe I have somebody on the committee. When are we going to be approving the goals for this school year? And this question for the Len. Yeah, Ms. Bergen, do you want me to do that now or under committee reports? I just wanted to give you a quick answer. I don't want to. Yeah, go ahead and do it now, Mr. Curtin. So I mean, I think we discussed that given that the superintendent is retiring and that our main goal is to keep delivering school this year that we would not go through the formal detailed goal development process and we would just rely on the high level goals this year. Okay. I mean, it just, yeah, I just wanted to make a point that somehow Arlington in this whole year, first of all, I think this relates to the presentation, but if I'm off, I apologize. But I think we should be measuring learning loss since March and over the course of this school year. I think we should have our own data on it rather than allow others to measure us in the future. So I just want to put that out there that I hope as we think about this year's goals as we analyze what works and what doesn't work this year, we think about loss of learning time, learning loss, what that really means, grade by grade. That's my point I want to make. Well, can I comment on that? Can I respond to that? Yeah, go ahead. So I just want to say that we are going to implement the formal assessment period and literacy for this year. So we are still going to continue our normal battery of assessments. And I do agree with you that we need to make sure that we're collecting data this year in more so than any other year so that we can gauge our instruction. So the data that we're collecting for the fall assessments will allow us to look at that data and be able to provide interventions and adjust our instruction. And I know that it may be a little bit more difficult to do that in this present learning environment, but I do agree that it's very important that we look at that data and we analyze it and see how our students are responding to the adjustments we've had to make in order to respond to the pandemic. So data collection is very, very important this year and we are treating it as such. Okay, thanks. Yeah, I think in your, implied in your comment, Dr. McNeil is that when you get the data, you'll pivot and make adjustments in teaching and learning as appropriate and possibly, absolutely. No, thank you. Great, anybody else? Dr. Allison Ampe. Thank you. And thank you for this portion of the report. I was also curious about the DIBBLS and the grade one goal. And I was wondering if at some point, perhaps at a curriculum subcommittee, we could hear some analysis of what is being found from the, like the original assessment and then I don't know how many beyond that, but I'm just curious how our kids are coming into school and then how their reading instruction is improving their ability to, on the test and also to read or to learn to read. So. Yes, we can do that. We can, once we collect the data, we can give you an overview of what the analysis is and where we saw areas that we need to grow in and what types of things we need to do to respond to that data. Great, thank you. Okay, and my feedback is often the same every year when we talk about early elementary reading is that I'm glad that we're doing these assessments and that we're evaluating our students. I think that there continues to be a lot of room for improvement in how we communicate about this with families. And every year I get told, oh, well, don't worry. If we're worried, we'll let you know. And I, you know, I don't know. And this sort of will trust us. If we have a concern, we'll tell you. I don't know. We have a data bank, we have ways to look at this and this information continues to not be shared with families and that this is sort of the only place ever where, you know, people are evaluating our kids and then not sharing that information with parents. I wouldn't go to the doctor and have them weigh my kid and be like, hey, what was, how much did they weigh and have somebody be like, don't worry. If we're concerned, we'll let you know. So I do think that there's a lot of room to, especially this year when kids are spending a lot of time at home to engage with families about this. I know that there seems to be general discomfort in doing that. And I think that, you know, there's certainly room for, you know, more conversations and more transparency that we're doing these assessments and what they're finding because that information at the early elementary level generally just doesn't come home. And if they're continuing to do, you know, what Dr. McNeil called a battery of assessments, the, you know, young children are spending a lot of their time in person. They're spending not very much time in person learning right now, which is the situation that we're in but they're now spending an even larger proportion of that time doing these evaluations. So we need to work on continuing to provide that information to families. So I just wanna be, I just wanna make sure that families know that through parent-teacher conferences, through individual phone calls from teachers, through progress reports, that we do communicate with families regarding the progress of their students. And I don't know if you're talking about the specific, you know, scores that students are receiving on the individual tests, but I just wanna make sure that families know that we look at the overall picture and we try to provide a profile for what the family can understand as how the, you know, their children are progressing in a certain area. So these assessments give us an opportunity to look at where each child is, how they're progressing on certain discrete skills. And then we can form an overall learning profile to give to parents. So I don't want parents to walk away from this that if teachers are seeing something that they feel is something that they need to address that they would not contact parents. And so that's part of the teacher-parent communication that, you know, I know is going on within our district. So when teachers are giving these assessments, they're giving an overall picture, they may not talk about the individual scores, but those scores are gonna lead them to talk about various skills that the students need to work on in order to, you know, reach a certain level of proficiency and reading. Sure, and I understand that, Dr. McNeil, but I don't, you know, I take my kids to the pediatrician to get an expert opinion on their overall health and a profile of, you know, where they're at as a six-year-old or a seven-year-old. But I also expect to be provided with their blood pressure, their height and weight and all of that information. And it doesn't have to, you know, dictate the conversation, but, you know, there's helpful information in data. And when we don't provide it, you know, it leaves a lot up to interpretation. So I do hope that that's something that, you know, that you guys can look into and consider ways that, you know, you think professionally are appropriate to do that. But I, you know, I do find it frustrating that we don't share that information with families. Any other questions? Dr. Schuchman. I don't have a medical degree. I just want to caution that some of the things we're doing, particularly with dibbles, the scoring for dibbles is not intuitive and even to practitioners so that if we were to tell you how your kid's doing a nonsense word fluency, it would be sort of meaningless. So there is a heavy degree of interpretation required here. We could probably communicate it better is what I'm hearing, but just giving the raw data out to families isn't, unless you're an expert in the field, going to be able to tell folks much. Well, that's also- Anybody else need an update on the way, Dr. McNeil? No, I just want to piggyback on what Mr. Slipman said, is that that's exactly why we want to make sure that teachers are interpreting the scores and giving that learner's profile and being able to focus on particular skills. And then they can help the parents understand how those skills translate into their reading development. And that's what our goal is. Our goal is to make sure that students are receiving the support that they need in particular skills so that they can become proficient readers. And if there's some type of intervention that needs to be implemented, these subtests would let us know where that intervention needs to be focused. So I just want to make sure that- I just want to make sure that parents are confident in the fact that teachers interpret these skills. We talk about the data and the literacy cultures are there to provide embedded professional development for teachers so they can, again, build the capacity in teachers so they know where to give those Tier 1 interventions. And we're understanding, like, is there a certain area of our Tier 1 instruction that we need to strengthen based upon the trends that we're seeing in the assessment data? So we're taking a holistic point of perspective on how we're looking at the data. We're using it to inform our instruction and also to communicate to families. So I don't want anybody to walk away from this conversation to think that we may not be sharing the specific score about a certain subtest, but that subtest allows us to be able to create a learner's profile. And I think that's the most important thing that parents understand. Okay, if my child needs help in this particular area, the teacher is confident of where that intervention needs to take place. So I just want people to walk away from this conversation knowing that we're going to communicate the most significant information that parents need to know and as it relates to their child's literacy development. And then they also have the authentic student work. So they have the student work that they send home so they're able to see multiple pieces of data and how their child is progressing. But we're not keeping the data away if a parent asks for these results, we'll definitely share them, it's not a problem. All right, do you want to go on to goal number two, Dr. McNeil? Yes, I'm sorry, I just have to turn on my light again to wave my hands in. So I'll share my screen again and I'll explain goal 2.0 and goal objectives 2.1. Dr. McNeil, you need a tennis ball to throw at the wall. I know. So in order to continue to support a quality instruction within the district and also to address SEL, cultural literacy and things that we know that we need to make part of our tier one instruction and make sure that it's embedded in that tier one instruction, we want to, within my department, we want to look at how we're delivering professional development. We also want to make sure that the professional development we provide for teachers is relevant and that it's useful. So goal 2.1 really goes to how we're providing that professional development and in what areas and then so each content area and each curriculum leader for their content area will talk about how the professional development links to their goal 1.1 because for every initiative we have within a content area, we need to think about, okay, if we're using the data we want to adjust our instruction, what is that particular instructional initiative and how we're providing the professional development? And so goal 2.1 goes to that. It talks about the professional learning for all of the educators within our district. So I will go to ELA and then I'll have Ms. Perry talk about the professional development that was provided in ELA and English. Well, we kind of, it was my understanding we were supposed to do that together, so we... I know, I know, I... That's it, I think when we went over it before. I don't know that there's anything to add. I don't know. I could ask Tricia if, is there anything else you wanted to add? I mean, the way it tends to work with these goals at the elementary is we use professional, the professional afternoons that we have and we sign up for as many of them as we can get in order to help teachers learn whatever it is or review whatever it is that the topic is. And then the coaches visit classrooms to help teachers in many ways in the classroom to observe or to sort of work with kids at the same time that a particular lesson's being taught. They also have office hours, so teachers consult with them. So that sort of happens just across the board with the literacy coaches. There's also summer PV and there's quite a bit of that where the teachers work with the coaches to construct lessons, which usually are sort of subsets of some of the work that's been done through the years so that then those lessons are distributed to all the teachers at a particularly great level. So these sort of layers of sort of collaborative work between the coaches and the teachers and then between the teachers and the teachers. So we have just a lot of layers of people helping people to understand who better to share materials, that kind of thing. And that description pretty much fits all three of the elementary reports I think that were made. I don't know if Shannon or Maria or Trisha wants to add anything. I can just say that last October, Ali provided PD that guided teachers into looking at the Dibble scores and looking at needs of students and how to go about grouping them and teachers worked in groups to do so, to analyze the data and interpret it. And then examples of small groups were provided in the professional development session and then which provided demonstrations of small groups and what they might look like and then coaching cycles were offered where the coach would pair up with the classroom teacher and work on using the Dibble's data to form small group instruction, based on phonemic awareness and phonics instruction. Thanks Trisha. Yeah. And then I would say at the upper grade levels what we did in grades three and five as we were able to take some time to look at student work that was actually focused on a particular standard that maybe was about author's craft or determining a theme and we were able to look at student work and decide where students were at at the proficiency level. So then we were able to decide which students needed to be re-taught, which students were ready to go on. And so we were able to provide professional development along with how implementation was. We were also being able to provide some re-teaching and pushing forward. Thanks Sharon. At the secondary level, we use PLCs, we use department meetings, teachers sometimes take a full day to review the common assessments and share information that way to be able to assess what the particular issues of growth or issues of needed assistance for kids typically around writing. So that those are sort of the integrated pieces of professional development that the department does by itself and does together. Last year, we sent three teachers to the National Council of Teachers of English and Baltimore. It's the first time we've done anything like that. And that proved to be really, really helpful at the high school level. We were able to see, we were able to sort of assess the work that we're doing against all of the information that these three teachers learned about what's happening nationally. And that was really, really helpful because we were really ahead of the curve in most of the areas. And it made everybody, it invigorated us and it made everybody really happy that the thinking that we've been doing was in fact the same thinking that was happening nationally. And there's also a state version or a New England version of the Council of Teachers of English. And we always sent teachers to that. That's a local thing. And again, particularly around areas of cultural competence around getting new titles, sharing information around that is what we learn. And then that comes back to the department. And then we try new books, which we were always looking at new books to see if they'll work. And if we can sort of build them into to the curriculum that we already have or what should we throw out and what should we put back in. So where a lot of the work that we do is continuing conversations about how we can develop and extend the craft of teaching reading and teaching writing, which are very, as I said before, they just keep building on themselves. So that's pretty much it. Thank you. I wanna highlight something that Miss Perry talked about, which is the adjustment of the various texts that students have access to. And they did look at through the lens of social justice and cultural literacy. And so they have made those adjustments. They've looked at the material to make sure that it's reflective of diverse populations. So I do wanna applaud her on the work that they've done within the English department in order to make sure that we're adjusting our practice and making sure that we're providing ways that students can see themselves in the instructional materials. Along the sides, I just let me add too that we've had, I think three or four English teachers working with a group of students at the high school level since the spring on the very topic that Raj just mentioned. So the students have some ideas about ways they'd like to see curriculum changed and English was the place that they thought they could get it done more quickly and more sort of pointedly. So it's an ongoing committee and it's ongoing work, but it's something that we've been bringing. Okay, so right now I want to sit it over to Mr. Coleman and he can talk about, did you have one? So Rod, there wasn't, I can talk about some things. There wasn't an official 2.1 for math last year because a lot of the work we were doing was an audit work, but I could talk, I mean, I guess I could answer some questions. I'll say this, most of the work last year, K through 12 was really work time. It was us really kind of doing an audit of our assessment system. A lot of the PD, so to speak, was centered on thinking about the different types of assessments. So a lot of our department meetings, six through 12, centered on or focused on, so we have criterion and reference assessments or our tasks open or they're closed. Really just thinking about and working through the kinds of things, so to speak, that we were asking kids to engage with as assessment. So it was less about a formalized PD and more about just having some working time where we had some structure to what we were looking for, that was recorded. Similar to literacy in the elementary grades, in a lot of our meetings, we spent a lot of time looking at student work. Part of the reason for that was broadening the idea of what it means to collect data and what data is useful. Too often we just want, you know, you have a math problem, you get a right answer, you feel good about it. You feel like you've got learning, but it's a lot more complicated than that. So in the elementary PDs that were offered, there was always some option where essentially teachers can have some time to kind of wade through student work and think about what it meant. And I don't want to say totally shift it, but to start to talk about things as teaching from where kids are, as opposed to taking a deficit view of what kids don't know. So that was kind of some of the work that was embedded in our audit of our assessment system last year. At this time, we can take questions, comments. Great, Ms. Extend, thank you all for sharing all of this. I guess I'm wondering how will you get and use feedback from teachers during this PD? If they feel it's effective, how will you make changes from one session to the next? How they're involved in that planning? So that's a great question, because we do make sure, and I'm sure Mr. Coleman's ready to talk about it as well as the literacy coaches about the feedback that they collect because they utilize that feedback in order to plan the next session. So they also send out, well, I'll let them talk about it. Go ahead, Mr. Coleman. Yeah, so the coaches have for the elementary school, I'll start with that just because that's more consistent. And for six through 12, the feedback normally is me just stopping by a classroom and we'll talk about it. And I'll literally kind of have a sense of what's working, what's not working. The elementary school is a little more complicated with the seven elementary school. So we have a core survey that we send around that always has the same three recurring questions that are just dip sticking kind of questions. And then we add on other questions that are tailored to that specific PD. So we do that every single time. And normally the coaches meeting that we have following that session, we spend time waiting through it. And normally you have a couple of days after that from the session. So we'll also get some other informal feedback, we'll get some other information and we'll talk about what went well, what didn't go well and how we can kind of adjust for the next time. And Ms. Perry? Did we do the same? And the other thing I'd like to add on that we do at the elementary level besides just the surveys is that we have identified two teachers per grade level that work with us. And they actually, because they're on the ground in the front lines, they do the planning with us. And they're able to give us feedback with saying like, my students are really struggling with this or our teams have been talking about this. So we really have the teachers be a valuable part of not only being part of the PD, but oftentimes presenting things that like a problem of practice, something that's come up in their classroom that we can really dig in and work on as well. Thank you. I just want to make sure that the PD is useful and supporting what teachers feel like they need to be getting out of it. Thanks. Great, anybody else? Seeing none, do you have anything else, Dr. McNeil, on the district goals? No, so that will conclude our presentation for today. As you can see, the document is very long and we have, like I said, over 80, we have 89 slides. So if you let me know the next content area or next area you would like me to report on, I will contact that particular curriculum director and they'll come in and they can report on their goals. Super. And just to respond to the fact that we have worked on goals for this year as well. So we are developing goals because we feel like that's how we evaluate our progress. So I think it's very important that we develop goals. So we have a way of focus for what we're going to do in our department. And then we also look at the way that we're going to assess those goals moving forward. So like I said, this year has, we've focused on certain things that have to do with the remote learning program and that the hybrid learning program and looking house, you know, what we have to do in order to prepare for those various programs. So I wanted our curriculum leaders to also think about what are the, what are those goals that you want to focus on for this year and then how we're going to evaluate our progress. Shane. Mr. Thielman. So I think we should, the school committee should see the goals for this year even if they're not tied to the superintendent's evaluation which is totally understandable. So we should see them, we should have a conversation about them and we should weigh in on them. Great, we need to approve them. That too. That's fine. That's perfectly fine. But we should have the conversation weigh in before we approve them. Yeah, I just would love to know the timeline for that. That's all. Thank you. All right. AHS update from Dr. Janger. So this, we received these, the written reports from Dr. Janger last Friday. This was part of a motion that was made in September about certain around the classroom usage and the plans for remote instruction, student contact with teachers and the follow-up that the administration and teachers are doing with students as well as other details around the remote instruction plan. So Dr. Janger or Mr. McCarthy, I'm not sure. Okay. I see him. We're both here. So thank you very much. Hang on while I pull that up on the screen. I think one of the funny, ongoing things of the world to Zoom is watching people's eyes drift over their screen while they try to find the right report. All right. So I shared with you this report, which I believe is somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 pages long, which was focused particularly on the expectations we have around building a robust process for monitoring, following up and engaging students. And then a particular focus, since we've gone to the all remote approach, we are obviously very committed to and interested in making sure that we are connecting with people in person. The issue for the high school in the fall was not that the building as a whole was unsafe, but that the spaces that we had were insufficient to run a full hybrid model with two cohorts and that the ventilation repairs were ongoing and uncertain. One of the reports that we submitted to this week as well was the ventilation report, which I'll just refer to now and then I'll go through the rest of the conversation. I think the good news on ventilation is, I think they've spent well over $100,000 right now, but we are being able, our facilities department is able to do many of the repairs they're going through and upgrading, replacing, repairing the existing equipment. That existing equipment means that we have old equipment that works. So some of it then subsequently breaks down. Sometimes it's three steps forward and one step back, but at this point they are on track to repair the vast majority of spaces in classrooms. So that's very hopeful and we're using more of those as we go forward. They've started to repair some of the larger spaces now, which is particularly helpful for the reverse field trips as we go into the cold weather. In the document you'll see for spaces that have now been evaluated but not fixed, they are talking about about $45,000. In additional repairs, there's probably some other repairs that will come up. There's one room that has a diagonal wall running through it as a result of the renovations back in the, I think, 70s. So the ventilation is on one side and then on the other side, and in order to make that a usable space, we need to remove that wall, which we think is worth it to get another large space that would allow us to accommodate larger groups of students. So all of that is the good news. The other good news is that with remote instruction and the increase of the class sizes to around 25 or more, we were able to get over 1,000 students into the classes who would not have been able to have those classes before and therefore to meet kids schedules. We are looking at schedules that are tight in the spring and looking at some staffing increases. And that, of course, if we were to go to a hybrid, we'll put more of a strain on the classroom spaces. But a lot of that's a conversation for the next report in November. So I won't go into that very much. At this point, we're a little over four weeks into the first quarter. And the good news is I'm getting very positive responses from the teachers and from many parents that the remote instruction for 80 minute periods a week of synchronous instruction, primarily online, is really being very effective. Many of the teachers are reporting actually that they're getting better work or able to in many ways engage different groups of students. And that's sort of a punchline that's pretty significant to us. One of the things that you'll see buried throughout all of this, and I'll get to it again in a minute, but one of the things that points to the overall success of teachers engaging in effective instruction and then our followup of being effective is that if you look over the four week or the three week period when I, at the beginning of the school last year as compared to this year, you would see that our attendance last year during the same period ran around 96%. And our attendance this time is running around 99%. So now I'll just begin to go quickly through how we believe that we are achieving those outcomes. And obviously it's a moving target. Kids may get tired, teachers may get tired, things may shift as the situation and the world changes, but that's where we are. So the expectations that we set out from the moment we went to the all remote as a result of the proposal that we made to the school committee were one, the teachers would do what they've always been expected to do, stay up to date on their grading. But since the classes are now half of the year and essentially are going in a kind of a double pace, the expectation has in the past been really that teachers are up to date in about two weeks and that's a real problem if they're four weeks behind. But now we're really talking about a one to two week window. We're now coming up on the interim. And so teachers as of the end of last week are cleaning up their grades so that parents can go in and see how their students were doing over the first week of the year. That also allows us to do an interim store for students who are applying to colleges at the November 1st deadline. It's not a final grade, but it gives colleges something to look at. Teachers are also expected to be monitoring students who are not attending class, which clearly they're doing a good job of following up on students who are not doing work or students who are not engaging in class. And one of the things that's really actually turned out to be kind of a positive of the remote environment is because there's a lot more of checking of email, checking of Google classrooms, a lot of that check-in on the part of teachers has been able to be sort of a lot more continuous than it has in the past. The next step in that process is the referral process. That's something I think we're still working on. And in the referral process, let me scroll down for a second. In the referral process, so the tracking and follow-up, the grading and monitoring and the attendance, which I'll get to in a minute, those are all tier one interventions. The tier two intervention is the teacher reaches out because they feel that the student is not responding or that they have concerns that they need additional support on. Our tier two processes allow teachers to reach out to the deans, sometimes to social work, sometimes to guidance counselors, in the case of special education students, to liaisons. The referral form currently is being used primarily for referrals to the deans. And if you'll look at that, what you'll see is that the issues that are mainly coming up are those ones we'd expect, work completion, engagement and attendance. There's some other smaller issues that they've led to referrals to deans, but those are most of them. Now the deans are following up on a really regular basis. They review, did I skip over grades? Let me jump back up. They review the grades, I'm sorry, the attendance on a daily basis. And so let me just talk a little bit about attendance and then I'll come back to the deans. So last year we introduced a central attendance office in order to improve and tighten up our attendance response. This year we're really lucky to have that in place. We have one of the secretaries with the assistance from a paraprofessional. And on a daily basis, every period of the day, they review the attendance in real time. So teachers are asked to complete the attendance in the first 15 minutes of the 80 minute period, which is not an easy thing to do as you're running, trying to get students engaged, trying to have them start doing the work, trying to start in your lectures, but the teachers have been doing this really pretty successfully. If you look usually at the 15 minute mark, about 98% of teachers have finished taking attendance and the rest finish up relatively quickly. That allows the attendance office to reach out to students in real time. So before that class has started is the class is just getting underway. Students are receiving emails, students are receiving contacts from the attendance office, which means that then they're hustled checking into their classes. And that's had, as we've said, a really positive impact in high levels of attendance. The deans then follow up with specific kids that are spiking as being more of a concern, whether they're referred by the teachers or whether they show up in their data. And they're doing that with emails to the teachers, phone calls, Zoom calls, in person meetings with students reaching out to the parents. In addition to that, teachers are expected to offer in person meetings. We have the X block time on Wednesday. And then people I know use the Wednesday mornings as well if they're not in meetings. And then teachers contractually are expected to have 60 minutes available outside the school day. And teachers are all put into their syllabus language explaining that they are available in person on request. They're not necessarily coming into the building, but if a student gives them advanced notice that they'd like to meet in person, they do. And we see many teachers who are coming into the building in order to do that. So the last and most new to us in terms of approaches is what we are calling reverse field trips. And the reverse field trips are turning out to be pretty effective. The idea of a reverse field trip is that since the students are working remotely, the teachers invite them into the school maybe for an 80 minute period, maybe for another activity. Most of these are happening at this point during the 80 minute period. The nice thing about the way our schedule was set up is that by missing about 10 or 15 minutes of class for travel time, using lunch or before or after school time, students are able to come down to the school, have a 60 minute period with the teacher and then return home again. And the really nice thing about that is you get that in person often with the whole class. Some teachers, if they're doing it inside or using facilities will do smaller groups. But what you get is the whole class without having the loss of time which comes from having the asynchronous and synchronous students split when you're doing some sort of a hybrid. At the time I initially sent this out, I think we had had about 27. I recently changed and we've now hosted 46 field trips over the 700 students. Eventually every class will have had at least two reverse field trips in the course of the semester. And so we will have served every one of 1400 students twice. Now students who would have chosen the remote academy may choose not to come down for those field trips. A lot of them have been outside. So I think many students who might have been nervous about being in the school are still attending. And then one of the things that we moved onto immediately upon discovering that we were gonna be doing this remote guidance as we realized that for the current semester cohorts were no longer necessary. It was no longer necessary to define one group that the teacher was with while another group was doing independent work. What that meant was that the teachers would focus on having four 80 minute synchronous classes with their full class and that they could organize as they wanted to breakouts and varied work. Now what we didn't want was 80 minutes of people doing what I'm doing right now, which is making them all stare at the screen while I talk. And so a group of teachers who had worked over the summer in the synchronous instruction group as well as other folks from the different departments got together and came up with sample schedules and sample guidance to talk about what are the recommendations in terms of how do you effectively deliver remote instruction? How do you keep it moving? How do you break it up? And how do you make effective use of it? The teachers from everything I have seen in the classes from what I'm hearing from the teachers and what I'm hearing from many, many parents actually are doing really remarkable job of engaging parents, kids of changing things up of making it so that there's time off screen time to move around during those 80 minutes. And it's a challenging thing to do. It requires technical capacity and it requires an enormous amount of preparation because instead of being able to walk around the class or simply move people around to get that kind of break up you need to master technology. You need to break out groups that pop you back in at the right time. You need to be able to go quickly through in order to organize that. We had an Ed Camp on technology for our last building meeting which the teacher feedback on was that it was very effective and it also then gathered tips from teachers who were doing this effectively. And I think in many ways they're their best their first best source of support. So then just quickly, and I'll try to keep quick because it's a long list. What are we also doing in terms of events and activities? How are we working to bring kids in? So we have brought in freshman orientation. We had about half the freshman class come down in groups to the Pierce field and working with upper classmen did activities getting to know you activities just to sort of get them connected to school. There's also been peers working with the freshmen as well as a number of online activities. Our clubs are getting up and running and we're on the normal schedule that we would be. There's about 60 clubs scheduled and club day is coming up very soon where students have opportunities to be remote to learn about clubs. Many of the clubs are meeting in person. So they're coming, they're meeting around town. They're meeting outdoors and other locations. Sometimes they're coming to school to use the spaces. We've set up materials distribution in curbside library. So we had to send out textbooks to the students and now there continues to be a weekly opportunity for students both to check out library materials but also potentially to pick up kits coming out maybe from family and consumer science or lab materials from the science departments or changes in books or readings from other classes. We've set up study hall in the learning center. So students can and this is something that is not widely known yet I think are being accessed. We've had a few students begin to use it but students can if they do not have a good work environment now request to come into the school. We have students doing this and in Fusco house we have classrooms set aside where we can put a few students and they can work from the school using our wifi and a quiet setting. The learning center which normally is staffed by two tutors to adult retired teachers or formerly retired teachers has set up so that students can come in in person for tutoring with them or receive online support. The advisory program is running on Wednesdays and peer mentors are working with students there. We're looking towards something called wellness month where we would have a number of in-person activities running through late November and December. Finding spaces and programming around that is still underway. Obviously our athletics is moving forward effectively and we're having a pretty good season even though the way they've organized that is that our games are only being played with a small group of other schools in the middle sex leagues so that allows the students to get together. Our cross country in particular grew so much this year we had to add an additional coach so we're very excited about that. Student government is currently holding elections and then programs, special education, ELL, Workplace, Harbor Shortstop, all of those programs invited their students into the building and we had a little over 120 students from what we're calling track D. Those are students who are coming in for at least one period of the day. Sometimes for academic support, sometimes for a particular class and many of them are spending the whole day in the school. So if people think that the high school is shut down it's not, we're running lunch and a full day of activities. Because the gym, I'm talking fast here I know because the gyms are now up and running. We saw the opportunity to open a window for offering the SAT to seniors who are not able to take it. And I just want to be clear around this. Many, many, many schools, most of the sites across Massachusetts shut down and were not able to offer the SAT. A few local schools have done it. About little less than half of our students had already taken the SAT and schools and colleges around the country know that this is an issue. So many, many schools, well in most schools at this point are at the very least SAT optional and many of the most competitive schools are not going to be looking at SATs at all. Nonetheless, we know that this is a service we usually offer our seniors. We know that college applications during the season is super stressful. And for students who really were committed to wanting to be able to take this exam we wanted to set it up. So we'll be taking it in large administrations in the red gym and the blue gym and it'll be next week. And it will be proctored largely by the administration in order to be able to supervise it. Guidance continues to meet, having seminars and scheduled meetings. And as you can see in the notes below, they've met with over a thousand individual students. And one of the things that we've discovered this year in terms of interventions, which I'm kind of excited about is that the typical approach, we've discussed this around school discipline, if you can't handle challenging behavior with an intervention or with collaborative problem solving or with a constructive approach, the disciplinary approach generally involves separating students from classes. What we've been able to do this year, we've had very few disciplinary incidents but in the issues where we have, we actually are able to bring those students into school and to support them and supervise them and connecting them to their classes more effectively. And so that's been a positive effort. So I think I will stop there and thank you very much for listening to me talk very fast. Great, questions or comments? So I guess I'll take my opportunity to start. So it sounds like I find, I understand that what we've asked you to do was come and report on opportunities for students to come in contact, which I think is great and follow up, which sounds like it's robust. And I guess what's hard is, is that like it all sounds like it's just going so great and many, many, many, many people are so very, very happy. And which, so I guess my question is, what is it going as well? Where are the challenges? Because I guess at some point down the road, at some time I hope we're gonna bring our school students back to in-person learning in some capacity. And so I guess I'm curious right now, what isn't going well and what are the challenges that you're seeing? I mean, so we all know, right? I mean, first of all, we want kids in front of us, right? Every time you go down and watch one of these reverse field trips, you see teachers who are, generally you can just see like, they're so happy to see kids, right? And often the kids are so happy to kind of get together. So there's no question that what we do, what we want to do is to have kids here. So the first issue that's challenging is just that we don't have kids in front of us. This kind of communication we're doing right now is useful and turns out to be, when you do it effectively, good for sort of the delivery and the academic component, right? I think we're doing some good work around covering and engaging students and academics, but it's exhausting. It's not socially connecting and students are isolated. And so the reverse field trips are, I think a good approach to building that social emotional connection and bringing kids in, but two reverse field trips, six in the course of a semester of school is not the level of contact we want students to have. So if you've got students who are athletes and they're active in clubs and they're coming down for their things and they're in the chorus, those students actually probably are making a lot of connections, but the students who are really concerned about, right? Are those who don't? We are following up with them. We're doing everything we can to connect, but we're working at about 200 miles an hour to do something that happens naturally in the context of school, right? So as we look towards the next semester, which obviously is a question we'll talk about next month, thinking about now that we've sort of figured out how to do this, what's the trade-off in terms of how we can increase those levels of contact in order to make, I mean, in order to make it more normal, more usual, more connected for kids to be coming through the building and connecting in that way, I think is something we're gonna have to talk about. It's a trade-off. If you, in our building, it seems unlikely that we will be able to do a two cohort model where half the school comes in. We have, if you look at the ventilation report, only about 30 classes, rooms that can hold 12 or more kids, and in order to fit everybody in, we have class sizes of 25 or more. So if you're talking about three cohorts in a remote academy, then every minute of in-person instruction, if it's done in a cohort manner, means three minutes of lost remote instruction. I have some models we can talk about the next week that mitigate that and give us different ways to solve that problem. But one of the options is to sort of expand that concept of reverse field trip. As I said, where students actually can come down more regularly for a class, where if actually for one 60 minute in-person class, they lose 20 minutes of instruction. Now the problem is to do that, if you're seeing the whole class, we only have about eight interior spaces that can accommodate that and students can meet outside. So there's things I think we can do flexibly around sort of building across the course of a semester to get more of that routine and more of that contact. We've delivered materials. And if you look at the numbers, it says a very big number, but the number falls short of 1400. There are kids who have not come to school and gotten their books. Teachers are compensating, they're getting work out to those kids. There's other ways those kids are getting their work done. In some case, we've driven over to drop the books off. We've figured out other ways to get people materials. If those materials are crucial, we get them to them, but those are kids that are less connected and more likely to fall through the cracks. And so that's really I think our biggest concern and there's two big concerns, right? It's kids disconnecting and falling through the cracks. It's the overall sense, I think that everybody has right now under the pandemic, which is we're okay if we're okay, we're okay, but we're not great, right? There's this social pressure, there's a lack of connection, there's a sense of isolation. That's very hard on teenagers, it's hard on all of us. And then the third is, which I think we is coming up during the last conversation you had, which is the loss of learning. Now, I don't know, we're gonna send out a survey, I promised that last week and just haven't figured out quite how to ask the question that you asked of the teachers and the community in a way that gives us good information. Because if you ask people, how do you like remote instruction? People will say it's working, I get a lot of letters saying, it's working a lot better than I thought. The teachers are doing a really good job. But if you say, do you wanna do remote instruction or would you rather be a person? I don't think there's anybody out here who would say I'd rather, I wouldn't wanna be in school if I can, right? And so then the question has to be, how do we ask questions of ourselves to figure out what the trade-off is for how much time we get kids in versus how much time we have with teachers with kids? So I don't know if that fully answers your question, but, and it's hard right now for me to tell, like every year, every Wednesday, I meet with the deans, well, then we have our SST, our student study team, and that's where our social workers, our guidance counselors discuss kids who've referred, they've referred or kids the teachers have referred or kids that have been identified when we run the DNF report. By the end of Wednesday morning, I usually feel like we're doing a terrible job because we're running through all the kids that we're worried about. It's difficult to tell at this point whether that list is longer or shorter than it has been in the past. It appears that it's not a lot longer, but the concerns that we have about kids are different. I, you know, I'm looking for as much candor as possible that we can have here. So I do, I do appreciate that. And, you know, I think that whatever can be done to, you know, I don't wanna, I, you know, I understand that we're gonna get another report in November and I'm grateful for that. But, you know, to the extent that we can continue to move toward wherever we're going. And I know we're not gonna reschedule kids or change classes or anything, but, you know, to the extent that we can continue to work toward where we want to be, which is to have students have more connections, more in-person time, more ability to meet with students. Let's not wait until second semester to do that. With, you know, for, with, you know, within the parameters that we have and it needs to be safe and all of those things, but, you know, to continue to push toward bringing students as many as possible in whatever permutation works to, you know, to work toward second semester as opposed to waiting and then dealing with, you know, whatever it is second semester. So I just, I hope that, you know, the administration and the deans and are working towards continuing to iterate towards bringing as many students as possible in and especially that cohort of kids, Dr. Jinger that you're talking about who are not engaged in sports, who are not doing, you know, extracurricular activities. I'm tremendously concerned about those kids and that, you know, if they haven't come to pick up their materials, that's not good and it's deeply concerning. So- I do want to be clear, you asked me what our concerns are, right? Absolutely, no, I, and I appreciate your answer. The concern is what you also have to understand is that we are going kid by kid every day, right? Contacting, connecting and teachers, many of them are coming in now on a real regular basis depending on what their classes are and what their capacity is. I think everybody in high school shares your desire to write, to make sure that there's not a single kid phone between the cracks. And if there's a kid who is missing an action in one way or another, they're getting contacted by multiple teachers, by the deans, by their counselors, by their liaisons. People are driving out to meet with people, people are having those kids into school and we're also, you know, clubs are setting up activities to meet. I mean, all of those things are ramping up with you. There's an enormous desire to figure out as much as possible. And one of the questions I think we had was asked for the facilities meeting was, you know, if you're not going to use these classes, should we fix them? And the answer is yes, we need every room we can get working because every room that we have gives us more capacity to run more activities in the building. And so I agree with you 100%, we want to keep getting kids in. And I also think that maybe I'm going to recommend, I think that maybe we have a facilities or maybe a curriculum committee meeting. I don't know which it is, but a subcommittee meeting sometime between now, put that on the calendar and the November meeting because I think processing the conversation that we're having now, I can give you four or five different types of schedules. And then from one of those schedules, I think there has to be a parameter choice. And then fairly quickly, we want to actually work towards what it's going to look like because if there's any adjustments in this schedule, whatever it might be, we really need to let the teachers know and the special education teachers know really by early December. Because if there's any change in the structure of the schedule, they have to conduct every single special education family, which they've already done once this year in order to amend or I can't remember what the term is for, but in order to write up a plan for how their special education services are going to be delivered. So if it's two 80s and it turns into three, it was 180 and it turns into two 40s, they have to meet with every single class to do that. So it's something I think we all need to move quickly. Okay. And I just, I think we just need to keep talking about getting as many kids back as we possibly can because what we eventually, we keep saying it and we say it and we talk about it and eventually that becomes where we are, which is, you know, which I think everybody wants. Okay. I jumped the line here on my commentary. So anybody else? Mr. Thielman. Thank you very much. Thank you, Dr. Janger. So I am pleased to hear that there was a process of followup. There was a comment made in a school committee meeting earlier this year that, you know, every year, no matter what model we use, we lose some kids and we, and that's the mindset that created the academic achievement cap in the United States of America. So I'm glad that you and your staff are following up and are concerned about kids. It's a high, if there's 53 high or moderate risk, there's another 232 kids showing some risk. If you add that up together, it's about 18% of the schools. So I'm glad that you guys are on it and that makes me feel good. I am, so I have a couple of questions. One is the report talks about each teacher's expected to identify, monitor and track their course expectations around work habits, Zoom, classroom, blah, blah, blah. What, you know, you sent out an email on yesterday after Tuesday evening's parent conferences referencing some technology issues. Some people emailed me about those technology issues and I told them to email you. So, and I suspect other members of the school committee got similar emails. So the, I'm wondering to what extent you are providing guidance to faculty members to make sure that they have the support they need to operate the technology that's needed to do remote learning. What's the quality control process that you as an administrative team have to make sure that every teacher's got what they need, the training they need, the capacity and the skills they need to deliver curriculum remotely. So there was a fair amount of training done at the beginning of school, but I'll be honest, we're all reinventing the wheel to be honest, the issue around registering was actually really probably my failure in terms of technology capacity. Zoom bombing has become an issue because we have 1,500 kids and that's a lot of links and it's not very hard for one of those links to get into the hand of some kids who thinks it's funny to jump in. We've done trainings around most of the key activities, teachers are working with other teachers, teachers experimenting with other things. The main quality control approach is the observation process, right? So we have a list of everybody's links that I have and the department heads have and people are popping into those teachers' classes and making sure that they understand what it is they need to do. We've had teachers who have decided that they did not have their teachers who have gone on leave. It's not a hundred percent that people are comfortable in this environment. There are some teachers that really need support, they're less technologically savvy, but we are fortunate in the high school that the Google classroom environment and the BYOD environment is something that we've been training people in for a while. We have a sizable number of teachers who went through the teachers 21 graduate programs and those folks are known to others and act as a resource pool for folks within the school. And so it's an ongoing thing. The funny, not funny ha ha really, but every year at Open House, we have parents who come and can't find the classrooms and those people are also frustrated. It's a big process to get everybody into the right place. I don't know whether we had more or fewer. My impression is actually you may wanna keep doing an online open house in the future because many teachers reported higher turnout than usual. It's a lot easier for a parent to leave dinner for an hour, step into the other room and come into these classrooms for 10 minutes and to find a babysitter and get out of the house. So, I mean, the main options are we've done a fair amount of training, we're ongoing training, we had an EdCamp last week as part of the family department groups who are talking about their technology and working with the department heads with observations in the classrooms. Okay, all right. Can I add to that, Dr. Janger? I also, we have a help desk ticketing system that we have in place. So, when teachers have some type of technology issue, they can fill out a ticket and that's also a way that we can identify what are the problems? Is it something that's system-wide or are they isolated? So, I work very closely with our chief technology officer, David Goode. We have tech team meetings every two weeks and we talk about the various things that they're finding out from that ticketing system. So, that's another metric that we can utilize in order to determine what are the technology issues and how, in order for us to provide a response. And then, while Rod has reminded me also of the district level, there's also the digital learning team which has regular office hours where staff can drop in in order to get assistance with technological issues. But I think I'm gonna go back to Jane's recommended about candor. This is a lot to learn very fast, right? If you're reorganizing your entire class around a different teaching structure and a different teaching modality, you're changing the flow of your standards over a different schedule and at the same time, you're learning how to do all of that on a different platform. There are gonna be glitches and so people are moving fast and they're trying interesting things and the more they try interesting things also, sometimes they're also gonna have errors. I also heard you say, thank you. I also heard you say that a 50-50 hybrid is unlikely during the 2021 school year. And so, and I know we're gonna get a report in November and then you said that if we're gonna make a decision about any kind of a hybrid model of any sort, we'd have to do it by early December, the first meeting in December at the very latest or possibly the last meeting in November. And so that gives the school committee a short amount of time to receive the report, think about it, reflect on it and potentially make a motion on it. So, I mean, I think parents need to hear that a 50-50 hybrid model is a challenge given the size of classrooms, but not because of the systems that we have in the classrooms. As you said, we're repairing them all. We're trying to repair every single one of them. We're on route to doing that. My question is, if the school committee decided to adopt the motion directing the high school to create a hybrid model in which as many seniors as possible were in that building as quickly as possible. And if we're adopted by a majority vote, I'm not making that motion now, but if that were adopted by a majority vote and that were the policy that we adopted, would that be something that you could implement and what would be the obstacles to it? Well, first one of the obstacles, I think would be whether it was the right place to put our resources in that our seniors, two things would happen to the seniors as a result of this, but also that our freshmen are often the ones who for whom this is the most unfamiliar environment and for which a hybrid or more regular presence might be a better use of resources. But the main effort, the main challenge I think we would have with making it be about the seniors is that our classes for seniors and juniors are largely mixed. Most of our AP classes or many of our AP classes will be taken in different sequences. And so you would be bringing in, you'd have to divide those classes up or if you were trying to do it, you'd have to focus just on senior classes. If it was just a focus on bringing the seniors in for senior only classes, off the top of my head, I think we're a clever bunch, we could probably figure that out. We have about 30 classes, as I said, that can hold 12 kids or more. Those classes that we're talking about that are all seniors tend to be large classes. So there are going to be 25 kids in the class. I can't guess off the top of my head whether 30 classrooms would hold all of them, but I'm going to guess maybe. But understand that I think one of the questions we have to ask ourselves is what the focus is of having the students come in. I know that for the seniors, what they would like, a lot of what I read in here is that people want to have a full senior year. And so is it to switch to in the senior classes, being like, for an example, if I'm in senior English, one of the senior English classes like memoir, poetry and fiction. And I'm, instead of having class every day with my classmates, 80 minutes, I'm gonna have half of my class in person and then I won't see the other half of the class and that those people will alternate. So I'll go from having 320 minutes a week to having 160 minutes a week and we will come in in order to be in person. In the school, we're not going to be, and this is different from, I think, the feeling in an elementary school, where really the kids in your class would be socialized, we're not going to be socializing those kids with anybody outside the 12 kids in their classroom. And so that most of the focus of the presence in school is gonna be on keeping them separate. So one of the questions I asked is, in last spring, there was a lot of concern about whether we were gonna be able to have a good send off at the end of the year for the seniors. And once we got up and running, we had the photograph days, we had the parade, we had those activities and people realized that we were able to actually set up many of those. So I think one of the questions, again, is thinking about whether there are other ways, whether that would be the best place to put our focus. I mean, I think if we were gonna go to a remote, if we're going to some version of hybrid, I think if we're trying to serve the needs of all kids, and I'm just saying this off the top of my head, so you've got me with where I've done the report, and I really do wanna hear from the students, I really wanna hear from the staff, and I really wanna hear from the parents, and where they are on the trade-offs and what is they want out of those experiences. But off the top of my head, I think giving everybody an opportunity to normalize coming into the school for some time to get to meet each of their teachers and see their classes and do some in-person learning on a more routine basis is probably a better use of our time than sort of giving over the 30 classrooms to the seniors, which would then make it much harder to work with the other kids. Okay, fair enough. I mean, I, this is a potential scenario that many families are concerned about. And, you know, there is, trials have not begun yet for vaccine testing for people under the age of 18, and the window is closing to have those trials done for the start of next school year. So it's a possibility that we're gonna have a restriction of deaths six feet apart, the possibility of a vaccine that may or may not be taken by adults in the, in sometime in 2021, no vaccine for children under 18 at the start of the school year. And so some people, given that data, given that reality, are concerned that we're gonna be in this state until the new building is opened in February of 2022. And so I don't have an answer now, but that's a concern. That's a concern I have. It's a concern a lot of parents that I've spoken to have. And so that reality, and I don't have an answer. I'm not doing this schedule. The report that comes to us on November 17th is too vague, it's gonna make it difficult for us to make a motion, or maybe not, I don't know. But I just want you to, I just think it's important for the community to realize that we may be talking about three semesters in this form before the new building is done based on reality. And so I think that we just have to be conscious in that timeframe of students' mental health. And I'm all for more learning time. I'm all for more instruction time. But if young people are not seeing their peers, interacting their peers in a different environment, we could have some challenges that will be long lasting. Right, and I agree with you, I think. But I think we have to be careful about thinking that the idea of doing hybrid shifts is the only way for us to achieve that goal. I mean, as I explained, you were to set up a process by which, and I don't know that I figured out the logistics, but say instead of every eight weeks, every four weeks, you were doing what we call reverse field trip. You can bring in then the entire class, but the loss of instructional time is 20 minutes. If you meet outside, if you meet in the gym, it's particularly, you can move around, you can be much less constrained to the sort of rigid activity in the school. So I think that there are some ways that we can be creative about thinking about how can we do this sustainably in a way we might, I don't know that we would ever choose to do this the way we're doing, but imagine that we didn't have a building at all. Right, and you're a creative guy who runs an educational institution. They're educational institutions that don't have buildings. We have teachers here who teach at SNHU, right? They're people. And so how do you then, if we had that version, would we say, well, forget about kids' social, emotional health, forget about sense of community? We wouldn't. We would think about other ways to connect kids. There are the students who are in the PE classes, there are the walking classes, they walk together. There are other ways, I think, to connect kids into the school. And so, and I'm not, I want us as a group and as a community to think about the range of options. And I'm hoping I can lay out sort of a menu that lets people see what those trade-offs are. And I sort of looking at the spaces, looking at what our teachers' experiences are in terms of what they can and can't achieve. I want to be realistic about that, but I think that there's a good chance, right? We know, I think it's likely this is going to be all sear, certainly. And as you said, you know, I heard Dr. Fauci say, you know, things might be better in the summer, but things are unlikely to be done until the end of 2021. And so, if we're under those circumstances, how do we use the building we have and the space we have? Because, you know, we're not going to have the new spaces to move into until the beginning of 2022. So, I think figuring out a process that's sustainable and engaging and enriching for kids that balances the academics and the social emotional is going to be important. Okay, I mean, I don't want to, I've taken up a lot of people's time. And I mean, it's hard for me to imagine us switching from this model to 1600 students in the new building and in the old facilities in February of 2022, because I think a lot of people won't be psychologically emotionally ready for it if they haven't experienced more students in the school. Maybe I'm wrong, I could be very wrong and that'd be great if I know. So, I'm concerned that if we continue on this trajectory for three straight semesters, we're going to have trouble with the switch when the time comes. But I don't know, who knows what the life will be like in 14, 15 months from now. Are we going to get, are we also going to, we're going to talk about the facility reporter and this is kind of it. I don't want to take up chains. I can talk a little bit more. I don't know, I think we're in the meeting, I'm sorry. Yeah. So that's, I mean, did you have specific questions about that? No, I just think it, I think that at a high level, Dr. Jenner can talk about it, is that we had a facilities meeting, the report, we went through these numbers and most of the rooms are repairable and we'll have ventilation. Dr. Jenner can correct me or Mr. McCarthy can correct me if I'm wrong. Yeah, so I think I said it was probably so quick at the beginning and I was talking so fast. You lost me there, but the facilities department has been working through repairs to the units and ventilation systems throughout the building. They have been able to get the old equipment back into functional order in almost all of the rooms, not quite all at this point, but it seems likely that they're able to fix or get operating all of those equipment. So there's a small number of rooms that don't actually have equipment and those are out of service. There's an example in Fusco House of a room that was divided diagonally back in the 70s. I think it was the 70s and we're gonna remove, we proposed to remove the wall. It's one of the more expensive repairs. It's about $7,500, but I think it'll be worth it to us to have, then gives us a very big room. One of the rooms that can hold 15 people. So I think that's a trade-off that's worth it. They've spent, Jim has not written it down exactly for me and the number keeps changing, but over $100,000 already in repairs. In the spreadsheet that we gave you for the rooms where they have identified numbers, there's $45,000 in repairs to get the rest of it up and running. I think it's conceivable that there would be another amount comparable to that. So I'm strongly in favor of fixing the spaces. At this point, the red gym, and this is exciting, the red gym, the blue gym, old hall, the pit, much to my amazement. And the theater all have functioning ventilation that is exchanging air. And so those are spaces in which we can have 25 kids, which means that I can bring a whole classroom into that space. The cafeteria and unit events are currently all open and are hoping, we're hoping to have them fixed by the end of this week, so we can use them for the SAT next week. But if not, they'll be up and running soon. So we will have all of those larger spaces operating again. So that's really amazing work on their part. Okay, I've taken up a lot of time. Thank you. Mr. Cardin. Thank you. So just a couple of things because we're sort of gone into what we want for the next presentation, which is good because it's important. I mean, I like your idea of having a CIA subcommittee meeting before that because we want to make sure that we're all on the same page with what you're working towards. So what you've discussed so far is good. The one piece that I would add to it is to talk to the other high schools that have been successful with getting their hybrid running, Wellesley and NADIC and some others to see how that's going and to get some feedback from them. I don't know if they've done their own parent surveys or whatever, but they're definitely, I mean, lots of high schools are struggling with the same issue, but some aren't, some have managed to do it. I don't know if the loss in learning time is really as terrible as we've heard it here. So there's definitely a trade-off, but I'd like to hear a little bit about how the schools are doing. Can I just respond for a quick second there? Sure, yeah. So I mean, one, I have been meeting every week or two with the middle sex league principals and the principal from Concord Carlisle has joined us and we all share what is we're doing so I can speak to that. We're also collecting information on all of those plans. You mentioned, if there are particular schools that you think you've heard are doing particularly interesting work, Wellesley and NADIC, for example, please let me know because then I can add them because one of the problems we have is that people here, Lincoln Sudbury is doing X and then when you go and you review what Lincoln Sudbury is actually doing. The plans are complicated and so it's useful for us to be able to see what is it working and I'm happy to talk to their principals if I can. Yeah, no, it's just more that the schools that are running a hybrid program, as we had designed it, as you had designed it initially, the two days in, the two days fully synchronous, that is a model that others are using, I believe Wellesley, NADIC, Winchester are the ones that I'm aware of that have actually put that model into action. So I just want to hear from some of them, do they regret doing it? What sort of, how is that going, right? So thank you for doing that. And then I mean, I think you're right that we do need to hear from the community and figure out a way to have those conversations where we're presenting the trade-offs. I mean, if we could all meet in person, there's different techniques you could use to say, all right, well, if you want to lower social distance to four feet, then we can do the 50-50 hybrid if you want to do away with structure Wednesdays differently then we can use that day as a class day, for example, different models that you've been considering and the trade-offs, but it's hard to have that conversation over Zoom, filming one person can talk at a time, but we do need to find a way to get that input because as you said, there are different priorities. We can't return to a regular school day, which is what everybody wants. So we need to pick apart with the community as to what aspects of that day is the priority? Is it that learning is more challenging because for some kids it is, even though the teachers are doing an extremely good job, it's still very challenging for some kids to learn through a screen. Or is it the social-emotional stuff that you've been talking about? Or is it both and how do we sort of pick that apart? So I think you're on the right track and I look forward to working with you cooperatively into sorting that out. We don't have a lot of time, but we certainly have more time than we did at the last week of August to sort through that. So that's great. Just as an aside, I mentioned it at the facilities committee and I'm serious, I don't know if it takes a motion, but we want you to have the school committee room to use. I want you to have the school committee room to use. I can't speak for my colleagues, but we're not using it. So I- I'll send it to my own list of 25. That's another large room that fits the 15 kids. So please take it and if the ventilation's working or not, if not, get it fixed. So I think that's all that I had for now. Thank you, Ms. Morgan. Thank you, Mr. Cardin. And just a note on that, Mr. Feeney did clear that room as far as I know. So I do think it's good to go, Dr. Jinger. Dr. Allison Ampe. Thank you. I want to echo Mr. Cardin and somewhat Mr. Thielman about finding out what families, what are families priorities and concerns? And I look forward to seeing how that's going to be worked out in terms of a survey or what. And I hope you'll discuss it maybe with CIA before it's given just to get feedback so that we get really useful information going forward. Then I had two small questions. One is, is there any plan, not now, but later to offer SATs to juniors? Because I'm thinking about how they're used in the college planning, pre-planning process in Naviance and everything. And just wondering if we can do some, could we do more later? So my assumption is that there's a discussion of the PSAT potentially in, I can't remember, it's November or January. It's a larger cohort than we have of the seniors. So we'd have to look at the spaces and we'd have to look at getting the right number of proctors. And then there are spring administrations of the SAT and we assume we will try to do one of those. Thank you. And then the second question. I just wanna say this, a little pitch against the college board, they are not making it easy. Yeah. Yeah. They are not making it easy at all. Yeah. The current administration of the SAT actually involved a letter to the CEO of the college board in order to get us freed up to be able to do what we're doing. Wow. Okay. Then the other thing was just sort of brainstorming. I don't know what the staffing issues are, but if this could happen and we could find the staff, I would be happy to try and hunt the money down. But one other thing I haven't heard discussed is having some students come in, basically a study group from a given class come in, work together in a room without the teacher. Teachers still doing remote. Teachers, the kids do remote instruction at school, but they're able to be with their peers. They're not with their teacher, but, and I think you probably want some kind of adult support, but it could be a TA, it could be somebody, I don't know who, and they need to be trained to maintain social distance, but they might have the opportunity to work on a project together in a socially distance format, but it enables you to use the smaller rooms. It, you know, you can be very flexible about how many kids are coming in or not, and base it on what the room size is. But anyway, that was just a thought I had while I was listening to all of these. That's all, thank you. Great, anybody else? Mr. Schlickman. Yeah, I mean, we're talking around a whole thing and the thing that I really haven't been able to define in my head, and I think that's something we should be talking about is what is the best possible education for a high school student in the midst of this pandemic? What do students need? What do they need academically? What do they need social, emotional? And how do we package that all together? So we're not looking at things we want, but we have sort of a structure of needs statements that we're looking to address. Okay. James, I just wanted to say. Yes, yes. Go ahead. You know, I just, I think the important thing that, what Mr. Schlickman just said to follow up on that, which is a very important point obviously, is who's gonna inform that analysis? And I think that what Mr. Cardin- That's my job, right? Well, I think I think I'm gonna collate all of the opinions and sift through it and then use your educational background and judgment to make a determination. But I do think it's important to hear from kids and families about what they're experiencing and then based on that to make some judgments because a judgment may be that, maybe, I don't know, that learning time, which I'm obviously advocated for for a long time, more learning time, but learning time may not be as important as in-person time. I don't know if that's the case. That's a judgment that's gonna have to be made by professionals sifting through data and commentary from students, parents, your own teachers, other research you see. So I don't think it's as simple as, great, we're getting more learning time. The kids are getting more instruction time with remote. That's the best way to go. That's just too simplistic. It's just not that. It's more, the question is much more nuanced in that and it requires more thought. Agreed. Yep. Ms. Eckstin. Just to build on that and thinking about what Mr. Cardin said with getting some information from other districts. I'm wondering if there was a way to get feedback from students and teachers who are in a hybrid model. Like, are they getting to socialize? Are they having opportunities to engage? Cause I think it's easy to be in a remote model and think that hybrid is going to be a better situation or be more social. And I don't know, I feel like we need to hear from students who are actually in that setting where they're in a room six feet apart to know if they, if they're getting what they think they'd be getting from being in a classroom. And I don't know how we do that, but. Can I just make a comment on Ms. Morgan when it's appropriate? Go ahead, Dr. McBeal. So I'm writing down notes here and I agree that we need to find a way to have a thoughtful way of collecting the data. And I don't necessarily think that this is the type of data we're going to get from a survey because it's very nuanced. And I agree with Dr. Janger when he was talking about the different types of questions and the things that we need to find out as it relates to quality. I would quality of programming and what students need. So I think everybody's bringing up very valid points and I'm just gonna let you know that I'm gonna think very deeply about the type of methodology we're going to utilize in order to collect the data because I don't necessarily think that the survey in this particular it could give us some very surface data but as it gets into what the experiences are from students I would suggest that we develop questions for a focus group and because you can have a deeper conversation and it's more back and forth. It's a reciprocal exchange of ideas. So that's what I, we can start with the survey but I think that we need to follow up with focus groups. Okay, anything else on this topic? All right, the next item, Dr. Janger is that unfortunately titled AHS mascot, which I did not catch because it is not a mascot. It is that an update on where you are at with the planning around the AHS iconography, seal. I'm not even sure really what it is. I know it's not a mascot but this, I think because we had you here there was just some desire to understand where you were at in the process of working with students on that. I believe this was a request from Mr. Schupman from our last meeting with the expectation that it might be headed towards the policy subcommittee or I could just be totally making that up. So Dr. Janger. Yeah, so the anti-racism working group, working with the Arlington Human Rights Commission and then a subcommittee of our student body actually wish, Louisa Baldwin who has been helping a lot with this was here to answer your question. She does it better than I do but their diversity and equity group have reached out to a number of Native American organizations in Massachusetts, Massachusetts Center for Native American Awareness, the United American Indians of New England. And gotten some input and some conversations around how do we address the use of the image of the Dalin sculpture in the high school? And it's really a town-wide conversation. So there was, I attended a sharing panel with the MCNAA a few weeks ago and then there was a panel led by the Arlington Human Rights Commission that I attended a couple of community members who I believe were members of the Algonquin a nation from Canada. Tras Gray who is Sagamore of the Poncapag tribe participated the curator of the Dalin Museum participated and then Louisa participated in myself. And the conversation was about sort of the history of the use of Native American symbols connected to schools and towns and other sorts of things. And then some very interesting conversation about the symbolism of the Dalin sculpture itself. And so the group of students is working with the administration of the Human Rights Commission and these Native American groups to develop a statement that they would like to bring to the school committee to discuss both I think they're interested in looking at both the land acknowledgement, acknowledging that this community is built on land that formerly was controlled by the Massachusetts tribe and sort of discussing the use of Native American imagery in connection to schools and organizations and recommending that we not use the Native American symbolism in connection with the schools. And that's the recommendation that the students are gonna make and then we'd like to bring it to the school committee. Interesting history that emerged over this the current symbol with the sort of stylized A in the water and then the picture of the sculpture dates back to 1983 and was initially developed by the select board in Arlington and the student actually artist drew it and then was given to the schools to control but is then used town-wide. So one of the things that their students also then wanna do is to move on to the town and have the town do some reflection and conversation about that. And then I know the students are working with the Native American groups as well as the Dowling Museum to help with sort of interpretation of how we view and use Native American imagery and the history of Dowling. I do not do it justice. If you're interested, you should go back and find on the human rights commission site the curator's discussion of Dowling's use of those images and sort of how in modern context we interpret both positively in challenging ways. So there will be a proposal. They're working on it right now, they're a part of work. If you guys are in a rush, I will reach out to them and give them some timeline but otherwise they'll reach out to you after they've had some opportunity. And they wanna look at other schools, other towns as well as working on language, which has the impact of being both educational and community and healing to the Native American community in terms of the conversation. Great, thank you. That's, I think really the, I know you looked surprised that it was on the agenda and I apologize that we didn't notify you. I actually, I think you worked very well there. So that was what I was expecting in terms of an update. So questions or comments from the committee? I see Mr. Schlickman and Dr. Allison Abbey. So Mr. Schlickman. Yeah, thank you very much. I think that this is something that's important that we do and you can't replace something with nothing. So I think that in addition to reconciling our use of a Native American imagery and the history behind this community with moving forward as a high school and a school district in terms of something that we could gather and join the entire community and feel good about, I would just ask that on a parallel track, we also be thinking about what direction we want to go. Once we acknowledge that we do need to make a change. Go ahead, Dr. Jinger. I do have a small proposal in that regard and I kind of wanted to keep the two tracks a little separate. So we are the spy ponders. The spy ponder term dates back to 1867 and refers to the inhabitants of spy pond at the time that West Cambridge turned into Arlington. That's actually the history of the term. If you ask most students in the school, they'd say the spy ponder is the Native American symbol but the spy ponder term does not refer to the Native American symbol. So we had sort of in the works, this what's a spy ponder contest and I'm happy to say that I've gotten many fun and interesting candidates for that and I would love to run a what's a spy ponder sort of survey process with the school committee but I'd like to kind of keep them a little bit separate because I think that there's a lot of misapprehension and I wouldn't like the spy ponder. I'd like to process first the conversation around the Native American image. So because I think if the two happen at the same time, there will be a certain bitterness connected to whatever it is we come up with. Because some people, many, right? The symbol is something that people were proud of. The sculpture itself is something that the community is proud of and it has a lot of fond memories for people. So I think going through the process of understanding the impact of that separate from deciding that we're going to have an image of a mastodon, for example, because there was a tusk found in spy pond, if you didn't know that, would be sort of good done sequentially not right at the same time. That would be my recommendation. Just keep us informed of where we're going. Absolutely. Dr. Alcinampi. I was just going to say, maybe you can take back to your group that while I understand there are a lot of positive sentiments about the symbol and the history and fond memories and all, I don't think given the current time and place that we're in now that you will find lots of foot dragging around a change in symbol at this point in time. And so I'm saying, I don't think they have to buff up their argument to lawyer league levels or anything. I think we all understand the underlying concerns and while we respect, we want to hear what they're doing, but maybe I'm only speaking for myself, but I think we're already going that way anyway. So that's all. Mr. Carvin? Yeah. So I mean, I'm not sure what the status of that symbol is and what the proposal will be. Like it is going to be, it isn't currently a formal adopted symbol of anything, right? So I don't know that anyone, I mean, it's not, I think a common, I don't think I could find anywhere any document that ever said we were the spy ponders. It's just in our MIAA documentation and we write it on things. In 1983, the board of select men adopted that and gave it to the high school. So there is some history there and I don't know where that lies in documents. It is, although we have, so starting last spring, the administration of the high school simply called for a moratorium and we took it out of use in places where it was digitally present or in display and stopped using it on anything. It's not, it hasn't been used, connected officially to athletics by the high school since I came, but it continues to reappear on T-shirts and jerseys and sweaters. And, you know, and I think there's a both and for the community to remember. It doesn't have to have been intended as a disrespectful activity or thought of as a disrespectful activity for it to do harm, right? And our effort right now in terms of trying to be inclusive and engage in healing and do restorative justice is to recognize the harm we're doing and to process as a community how we can undo that harm. It's a, the process will take time. So I think for us, I can bring what we want to hear from the school committee. I don't think it should be Dr. Janger's enthusiasm by which we make a decision to take this out of use. It's on our diplomas. It's on our transcripts. It's in the middle of our football field. It's on the wall of our gym. There was no plan in the building committee. A decision was made long ago that it would not be a fixed anywhere on the new building as we were sort of becoming more sensitive to its use. But I think if we're going to engage in healing, I think the students would agree that an affirmative statement of why we are doing this is important. And I think that that statement be developed with Native American voices. So we don't perpetrate the same thing over again, which is that we, with the best of intentions, sort of redo the error of kind of trivializing the issue is important. And then there will be a process. I mean, I already am getting from coaches. So we have warm up jerseys that were given to us by the boosters, can we not wear them? And so I think thinking about respectfully, how do we do that? Interestingly, the Annie E. Casey Foundation just announced a $100 million program for rethinking of monuments and mascots. So I wouldn't mind getting in on that. And one of the things I thought about was whether we could issue with whatever it is we come up with for the new seal or new imagery or new t-shirts, we could do a sweatshirt and t-shirt buyback so that we could adopt new symbolism quickly and help us to get rid of our old t-shirts. I have learned a lot in the conversation. I think we often think we know, but when we actually listen to folks who are being directly affected by it, we really discover how much we don't know. So I think that it's really a learning opportunity for the community, but how do you engage in this conversation? Right, so the point I wanted to make is that we don't have to wait for this whole process to complete, to continue to de-emphasize it, to start removing it from the diplomas, to start removing it from the transcripts. It's in Naviance still. We replaced it on the transcripts yesterday. It is now, I don't see it. All right, so that was just my point, is that we don't, I mean, I see Dr. O's and Ampey's point, but there's nothing stopping, we're gonna approve the, we're likely to approve whatever they recommend, but I also don't see the need to quite rush it because we're already de-emphasizing it. Thank you. And I think, I guess my feedback to that would be, I mean, it was on the cover of the Addison yearbook last year, right? So, I mean, I think there is some continued urgency to keep this conversation so that, and again, I don't think there was any negative reason to do it. Somebody just was like, oh, this is a seal. Let's put it on the yearbook, right? And as we continue to have these conversations more publicly and we do de-emphasize it from the places that we can do, then it will increase the likelihood that somebody says, oh, hey, are we still using that? Is that still a thing? Because that will help too. So, I appreciate the update. Is there any more feedback from the committee on this? So, what are next steps on this, Dr. Janger? We're gonna hear from the students at some point when they're... So, I'm taking away from this a couple of steps. One is that we have a sort of an affirmative blessing from the school committee to sort of more actively continue to take it out of use as quickly as possible in places we can. You'll hear from me and the students with a proposal and a timeline sort of strategy for decommissioning, as it were. And it also sounds like I should send an email or maybe Dr. Bode or Dr. McNeil would wanna send an email to other schools advising them because they may not read my outgoing emails about moratoriums, that this is something that as a district-wide effort, we probably wanna phase out. And part of why I think it's important is because as we phase it out, we also want youth athletics and other groups in the districts to work on it as well. So, it's a counter-wide conversation. Does that make sense? It does. So, Dr. McNeil, is that something that you can communicate to Dr. Bode that, well, there was no motion or no decision was made, but the general direction is to start, to not be finding certainly new locations to use that iconography. Absolutely. Great, thank you. And I just wanna emphasize one thing which I think is powerful in the conversation. And it was something that both Sagamora, Therese Gray said and then also the director of the Dallin Museum said, this is not out of disrespect or attack on the work of Cyrus Dallin. That Cyrus Dallin's work needs to be put in context, images made by white men in the turn of the century whenever we're doing that. And there's made, have issues that need to be understood contextually, but that can be contextualized. But the issue becomes, and this was something that the curator said that Cyrus Dallin would not want his image used this way because he would feel that it trivialized the experience of Native Americans in this community. So thank you very much for your blessing and we will move forward. All right, APS hiring update, Mr. Shbebo. Yes, thank you. This will be quick. We just, you know, since the last meeting in the last two weeks, we've started to onboard 13 new hires. 12 of them are paraprofessionals and one is a teacher. Some of them have started already this past week and some are starting next week. And a couple that we've met, I've met with already are starting, they can't start till November 2nd. So that includes remote Academy kindergarten TAs, two of them we've hired who we're starting next week and the week after, a special ed TA in the remote Academy, a couple of building subs at Audison, math tutors, math instructional support tutors at the elementary level, a Hardy building sub teaching assistant, Stratton teaching assistants, Bracket, a couple of building sub teaching assistants, two of them and an elementary literacy tutor and then we've hired another special education teacher at Audison who will start November 2nd. So we're still looking for some positions still trying to fill some paraprofessional positions throughout the district. It's been slow, slower going now, but we're sort of keeping at it and persistent and trying to post, continuing to post and repost in different places. So that's where we are. Great, questions or comments? Seeing none. Thank you, Mr. Spiegel. Homeschooling report, Dr. McNeil. Yes, I'm gonna pull up the report that's a novice. I lost my connection. Okay, I wanna share my screen. Can everybody see my screen? Okay, so looking at the homeschool, we basically it's just pretty straightforward data. Right now we have 81 homeschoolers and that's the number of kids and that represents 55 families. And here's a breakdown of the grade levels that are participate by grade level. And then we always include in the report how many of those homeschoolers, those homeschooling students were being homeschooled in the previous year. So here's a breakdown looking at there was 18 out of the 81 homeschoolers were homeschooled for the 2019-2020 school year. And again, the breakdown of what that looked like. So we have approximately 63 new homeschoolers and I have some individuals who are awaiting my approval. So they're pending, they do come in and I try to get them as to them as quickly as possible but they might be missing a piece of information or something and so I am in the process of approving more homeschool applications. So I can take questions, but this is basically the report and this is what it looks like. This is the data for our homeschooling students. Great, thank you. This is really clear and is exactly what I think people were looking for. So questions from the committee or comments. Dr. Allison Ampe. I appreciate this. I guess I'm wondering, when are we getting the October numbers? There'll be an update in the next agenda item. I'm sorry? The next agenda item, there will be an update about the enrollment report from Dr. for Mr. Mason. Oh. Your question is probably by November 1st. Okay. He's going to let us know that. Okay. I was wondering how many people have transferred to private schools also. So thank you. Mr. Cardin. Thanks. Do we, Dr. McGill, do you have a lot of applications pending or any applications pending at this point? No, I do. I do have, I don't have the exact number because they come in like a couple of came in this week. So it's like a rolling kind of application process. So, but I can get those numbers for you to see how many are pending. I didn't know if people were still, I imagine it will continue for a couple more months, but yeah, thanks. So I think my only comment on it is, is that, you know, as a parent of a second grader, I'm not that surprised that the first and second grade homeschooling numbers are much higher than the other grades because those represent families that probably many of them were in kindergarten and first grade in the spring and had that experience, which was hard. And so they opted to make a different decision for this year. So. I will say that there were some, I received some applications after, and I, what I should have done is I can also look at how many of those applications came in after the school year and try to ascertain. That's kind of difficult. Once you approve it, I've, you know, I've archived the email, but some of the families waited to see how their students respond to the instruction and some of them, once they had a couple of weeks in the program opted to submit a homeschool application for whatever reason. But I will say the promising thing about this is that many of the families or parents who submitted a homeschool application did let me know in their communication or in their email that they would, they're planning on returning once the pandemic or once the vaccine is available and we're able to go back to in school, you know, our pre-pandemic in school schedule. So, you know, it's definitely is attributed to our current conditions. Great, Mr. Schickman. Yeah, the number I'd like to know is of these students who have gone to homeschool, how many left our roles as an enrolled Arlington student before October 1 and after October 1? So that's sort of a critical number in my mind as well. Okay, I will research that question. So that segues us nicely, Mr. Schickman, to the enrollment report that Mr. Mason is going to give us an update on where they are at with the production of the enrollment report and give us a sense of when we will receive that, which will be between now and our next meeting. I'm kind of stealing your thunder, Mr. Mason. Yeah. But it will be presented at, we don't meet for three weeks actually. So it will be presented at our mid-November meeting. So, Mr. Mason. Yeah, just to keep it simple, because Jane, you did explain a lot. You know, we do have until the end of the month to get the October 1 numbers submitted to DESI and the team is still on target to meet that timeline. Unfortunately, you know, as they're sifting through the data, they do not feel comfortable giving me some preliminary numbers for the total enrollment. What I did receive was enrollment for K through five, I mean, K through 12. That does not include special education, but I did see some errors that I bring to concern before I would present that to you today. So what I would say is though, is that looking at these preliminary numbers in total was that from grades kindergarten through grade 12 in October 1st of 2018, we were had a total of 5,958 students in district. Very durable. I love the one. Yeah, I like it. Oh, I like it. Yeah, I thought that was a good one. I mean, you're here, okay. So yeah, we had 5,958 students last year October, on October 1 report for grades K through 12 and based on the numbers that are not validated completely yet, it looks like we're at 5,759 students, which shows a reduction of 199 students. So I imagine that some of that is the homeschooling and some of that is the private school. Do not have those exact numbers. So I think that's something that we can definitely work on as we get clear idea of the data that we have. But that's what I have. We'll hope to have a more detailed report in November meeting. Actually, we'll send out a report prior to that November meeting for you to review to the school committee members. Great questions or comments. Mr. Cardin. Just briefly, we also usually get the class sections for elementary school. So if we could get somebody to work on that, that would be good. And then I had asked for, we haven't gotten this in the past, but given the issues at the high school, I had asked for a class size report at the high school. I understand that for some reason, power school doesn't produce that, but it would be great to see that as well. Thank you. Dr. McNeill, I believe that the classroom level report is something that Dr. Bodie's office produces because that's not you, Mr. Mason, I don't think. So Dr. McNeill, will you let her know that as well that that's something that we're looking for? Yes, it's usually a monthly report that we, that is generated by our data team. And that will give you a breakdown of at the elementary level of the number of students in each class, at each grade level, at each school. And then you'll be able to see the total population by breakdown by grade level at the high school and the middle school. So if that's the report you're looking for, yes, we can definitely get that for our next meeting. Yeah, that's the report. I imagine it's gonna take a little bit of, you know, messing with it to deal with the remote classrooms and stuff that I'm sure you guys can figure that out. My dog agrees. All right. I can't also share after this meeting that preliminary October one report that you guys are asking that I was using the pull some data from, but it won't have the remote numbers as such that you just stated. Thank you, Mr. Mason. Anybody else? Monthly financial report, Mr. Mason. All right. So as usual, these are the monthly reports in the same format. There are a few changes. I wanna kind of speed through this, but I don't think you guys want me to put it on the screen, but under unless you stay, Jen, do you think I should put it on the screen or no? We have it in Novus. Yes, okay, that's fine. So there are some minor changes to the report. We'll start with the general fund report, which is this period is reflecting and what we'll do for the remainder of the year, which is under transfers in carry forward. It reflects what was carried forward from fiscal 20 to 21. These are the encumbrances that just weren't paid prior to end of year. So there's not actually extra money, our actual total budget for FY21, it's still the approved amount of 75 million, $570,000 and $531. So I just wanted to let you guys know that and try to be a little bit more transparent on what's showing into the financial system. And this will give a total view of what's happening in that snapshot. Currently, I also wanna explain that we do projecting a $1.9 million balance as an uncommon balance. That includes that $1.3 million that we paid using FY20 funds for FY21 tuition. So, I mean, if we were really to look at a net of what our unencumbered balance is, is around $500,000 to $600,000. And if the budget it was to hold, I mean, we could possibly use this unencumbered balance to be able to prepay FY22 out of district placement costs in FY21 upon with the school committee's approval. This would be beneficial to help with the uncertainty of the FY22 budget. And then also just going in, talking about the grants and the report, we do talk about some of the changes that were made between the different grant activities. So typically when we develop the budget, we level fund grant budgets with the understanding that the grants will change once we get the current allocation. So just to understand that we did see a decrease in Metco funding about $22,500. We do anticipate that the reduction in transportation will cover that decrease. But we may also, we're also considering if the high school opens up then that there may be a different, we may need to have to add more money to allow for transportation or add additional bus for those students to maintain the social distancing. We also seen a decrease in Title I and Title IIA. Those were not that substantial, but and then we've seen some increases to the special education grants and Title III. I would recommend that at some point that the school committee does approve that as you guys approved the original school committee budget for FY21 to include these updated amounts. And then also included for your review was the revolving report. I believe in the November revolving report, report me and Jose will work in more detail to get better estimates for any revenue changes because there will be some revenue changes due to some changes in activities or maybe changes over a certain programs. And then finally, the report that is included is the COVID-19 reports, which includes a total expenditure report which we're projecting to be at close to $2.9 million, I mean over $2.9 million when it's all set and then currently of all the known expenses that we know as of today, actually that number is going to increase. I can say that with certainty as I've got some new additional I've been made aware of some new expenses that are gonna be needed to be covered. And so this report explains all the different funding sources that we currently have opportunity to get access to. Also, I noted on the last page of the memo, which is page four, that there are a CDBG and AEF listed as to be determined as both groups have also indicated some interest in trying to support the schools during these times. I know the CDBG request may be around $75,000, but it does have to meet certain targets of have a certain ratio of meeting low to economically disadvantaged students or individuals, it doesn't necessarily mean students could be staff as well, but specifically because it's like a HUD funding requirement and that's what it's funding that resource. So other things I just want to make aware in the COVID report is that all the expenses reported or that we're projecting are to cover for additional teaching devices. I know we reported that we purchased about 650 laptops for our teachers. I believe it's going very well using these devices. These are kind of the new state of the art Apple devices and we're intending to buy maybe up to 100 additional to provide other staff. And as we increase instructional staff or some different types of staff may need those devices. So those requests, we're looking at those as well as looking at the opportunity to provide monitors to all of our remote teaching staff and to provide monitors possibly in a later phase to staff that are in the buildings that can hook up to these new teaching devices, as well as maybe looking at procuring document cameras and other equipment to enhance remote instruction. We're also looking at the continuing the testing for COVID-19 for staff. And so we have some initial allocation in these dollars. Unfortunately, we do have to spend these dollars before December 30th, unless for some reason it does get extended beyond that, which we do hope for. But beyond that, I don't have anything to add to this, to the statement. I mean, most of the data was there in the report. If you have any questions, I can answer any that may that you may have right now. Thank you, Mr. Mason. Questions or comments? Mr. Cardin. Thank you. So on the coronavirus relief funds, those aren't, the memo says those aren't in the base budget, but they are shown on this coronavirus table at the end. Correct. So the spending that you show here, like for example, for tent rental, 31,000, where is that, what's paying for that in the big budget now, or is that spending not in the budget? So yes, and it's currently, so most of the expenses are parked on the general fund. So as you see in this report, thank you for asking this question, Lynn, actually, to clarify, under projected expenses and revenue, they also are anticipated cost transfers. So how we did this was that we knew we had expenses that we had to pay for. We knew that there was a possibility that we were gonna get these funds. There was an allocation that was provided $225 per student for our FY21 Foundation Enrollment, which came to that $1.3 million that we got for the CVRF. And what you're seeing there is a lot of negatives for the general fund, which is reflecting of the cost transfers that are going to then hit CVRF. Some of the account codes do not exactly match because of how the accounts are set up in the financial system for the grant, but those are what's coming down from, the general fund is gonna be seeing expense transfers to either the CVRF or to the municipal cares funds, which is what you'll see below that. All right, so we're having a budget subcunity meeting next week. Thank you, Dr. Alsampi for scheduling that so we can get into it some more, but it looks to me like there's still a lot of money rolling around. So we have this CVRF 1.3 million that we haven't really spent yet. We have the 1.3 million from the prepaid lab out of district tuition that you said we're holding for coronavirus stuff that maybe that's temporarily covering. I don't quite understand, but in either event, there's over a million dollars that's not spent, right? And I'm frankly not interested in holding money to roll over into FY22. I wanna, we have some dire needs in this district. I mean, if teachers need monitors and their supply is available, we should have purchased them with this money. So, we can discuss it more at budget subcommittee, but I'd like to see more urgency on meeting the needs that we can meet with the funds that we have. Yeah, if I could respond, I absolutely agree with you, Len. I'm not gonna disagree with you. To explain on the terms of the, we just got this week approved for the CBRF. So, we put in for that at the end of August. We applied for it, just because we had an allocation didn't mean that Desi was gonna approve it all. So, they finally just approved it. We just got the account set up. So, we're gonna do those cost transfers. But the 1.3 million dollars that we prepaid, yes, is basically what I'm using as the holding point for a lot of these costs. The town has about $4 million that was allocated using the CARES funds. So, we're trying to tap those funds before we actually tap our own 1.3 million dollars. And yeah, due to the complexities of it all, it's quite the challenge to try to spend a lot of this money, especially when you're being thrown at all and you may not have the capacity to get all the organization to get it to actually spend it. So, for example, David Goody's great. His team has done amazing work, getting all the devices ready for everybody. But at the same time, it's like, oh, I have that one more thing. I've never been thrown this much money at me at once before kind of thing. So, it's like building that capacity to be able to do that and be able to then distribute the devices. I think that's one of the challenging aspects of it. But we're working as fast as we can in regards to trying to identify the needs, identify what can be considered as spending. I think there's also this misconception that we have these funds that we can just spend when there are caveats to it where it has to be things that we didn't budget for. And one could say that you didn't budget for that teaching, that remote teaching position, but you had these other teaching positions that you never filled. And so that's some of the challenges that we're seeing with this. And also, I just kind of didn't discuss about it, but me and Rob are really working closely to determine what we're gonna do with our vacancies. And so in the budget, in the report that I show, I kind of proverate what I expect if we hire somebody in those vacancies, that's a projected expense. As we determine that a vacancy actually doesn't exist, I will update this report, I will obviously update the school committee and you'll see actually updated balances. And I have an idea that you may have some options that you would like to see. So I just wanted to provide that as a response. Okay, thanks. My other question was some of the expenses that we have incurred, like the additional cluster at the Gibbs and the Audison, is that reflected in this? Correct, it is. Yeah, I did notice a minor mistake that, as I keep looking at this, there's so many moving parts that it doesn't reflect a cost transfer into CVRF to spend the total 1.3, which is a proration of some additional salaries. But yeah, those are all included in this report as of through my tracking mechanism. Okay, thank you. Dr. Allison Ampe. Thank you. Yeah, so Michael, I have one question, Mr. McEsin, about the COVID testing that maybe you can discuss next week at budget so committee for us. What I remember from whatever meeting it was where it was discussed, I thought I remembered hearing like $50 a test. And when I do the numbers that you mentioned, I came up with roughly $125 a test. And I'm just wondering why the discrepancy and so maybe we can talk about that next week. Yes, I wouldn't be able to further answer that right now. Thank you. Great. Anybody else? So my comment is just echoes what Mr. Cardin said that to the extent I understand that it can be, it is really challenging to deploy technology and but whatever we can do to help improve, remote setups for teachers who are working from their home or from their classroom, that seems to be something that can fairly easily be slid into some of this COVID funding. And I think it sometimes doesn't take a lot of money. We, I get a stipend from my work and we spent that last one on a new cable modem and it has changed Magic Wednesdays for our family for the better. So it doesn't take much sometimes. Some new tech and an upgrade can actually really improve an experience. So I hope that we can keep working to do that. I do recognize that it can be really tough to deploy it. And we're certainly not stacked to be running a whole lot of satellite classrooms all over the greater Boston area. But to the extent that we can do it, I think it's really, really important. So anybody else on this topic? All right, the MASC Delegate Assembly Representative. This doesn't have anybody's name next to it, but I believe Mr. Schiffman asked for this last week. I'm hoping while I didn't check with him previously that this is something that he can speak to. I believe this is coming up. Yes, thank you, Madam Chair. Normally this is done at the annual conference, but there's no annual conference. So it's going to be done remotely. I think it's November 7th is the date, but the usual flock of resolutions are before the Delegate Assembly and we need a representative. Great. So I guess I will put this to the committee. Is there anybody who is interested in serving as this representative? Dr. Allison Ampe. I wanted to nominate Mr. Schiffman. Well, I was going to give him the opportunity to volunteer first, but so- I second that, I second that. Super. Mr. Schiffman, would you accept this nomination if we- I would. I like leaving it open if others want to play, but if you asked me to go and make the hard trip to my laptop, I can do that. All right. Well, seeing no others who are eager to take this on, I would entertain a motion nominating Mr. Schiffman as our MASC Delegate Assembly representative. I already did that. Okay. All right. Well, do you guys want to talk about it more or should we vote on it? All right. Ms. Ekson. Yes, Mr. Cardin. Yes. Dr. Allison Ampe. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Mr. Schiffman. Yes. And I am also, yes. Congratulations, Mr. Schiffman. All right. Superintendent search process update, Mr. Schiffman. Okay. We're moving right along through the search. We interviewed two candidates last night. We have nine candidates in all. We will finish interviewing next Thursday. We will have a meeting on Monday the second in which we deliberate and decide who the finalists are going to be. We are asking to have a meeting of the full school committee on the fourth, which is Wednesday, seeing that election day would not be a good day to hold a meeting in which we will present the finalists. Their documentation and we will then need to schedule meetings to conduct interviews. Now, normally in a lot, in a real world live situation, this way we've done it in the past, is we've had candidates come in and visit the district and meet people and conclude the day by coming before the school committee. Obviously we're in a pandemic and life is different. We need to think about how we as a committee want to interview the finalists. And I pose this question to Ms. Morgan as to how we might conduct a hybrid session so that we might want to actually meet and see this person live and in person at some point and not hire somebody we've only seen on the screen. So that's one thing and we're gonna need to schedule that. We can split the schedule of having the candidates meeting with the community and stakeholders, teachers, administrators into two different days. In fact, that might be a preferable way to do that because we can get feedback forms and have that information available to us as we meet the candidates. I figure that we'll need at least two hours per candidate to go through the interviews and the process surrounding it. Depending on how many candidates we advance, we're talking three to five. It's three is the most likely could be four if we're really stuck, we might have five. And we'd like to do that as swiftly as possible. Also note that we are going to be tripping over town meeting so that there's another obstruction sitting in the way. We might want to reserve two hours in one of our November meetings for this purpose. We also need to devise questions. So please be thinking about what you might want to ask potential candidates. And we'll be back with more decisions to be made in scheduling dates of interviews, which we hope to resolve on the 4th of November. Great, thank you, Mr. Schlickman. And I, in speaking with Mr. Schlickman about the scheduling of this, I have reached out to Ms. Giorno, who is the Director of Health and Human Services for the town and the Health Department has not been on board with the committee meeting in person. I did sort of throw myself at her mercy to ask that we have an opportunity to meet these candidates in person. So she is, she's thinking through the options and appropriate plans for that with her team as well and is going to, is open to working with us to come up with parameters for how we can do this appropriately and safely. Obviously we wouldn't have a, we won't be going, this will give members of the committee an opportunity to meet candidates in person. I don't, we're not gonna have a situation where there are a lot of teachers obviously, meeting at Thompson School in the cafeteria, that's not gonna be a thing, right? But we'll be able to do much of that remotely. And I think the vast majority of the process will be done on Zoom. Yeah, we can do the rest of it on Zoom, but I think that as a committee, I don't know that we'd feel comfortable hiring somebody we haven't met. And that's the message that I gave to Ms. Giorno when she was open to working with us. So questions, comments, feedback on that. Mr. Cardin. Sorry, Paul, just a clarification. You're talking about two hours per candidate or two hours to do all three and four candidates? Two hours per candidate because I figured that we're gonna have a lot of questions to do. And there's a depth of the questioning that we're gonna have. We're running an hour and a half on this preliminary round. And I think that for the public interviews that we're gonna wanna have enough time that we can reach the in-depth that we need to in order to really understand who these folks are and gain enough data that we can make a reasonable decision. Great, thank you. Dr. Allison Ampe. Just in terms of scheduling for the fourth, my availability is 630 to eight. Okay, good to know. I believe Mr. Hanner's availability is on the very early end. So I think it'll be, I think it'll certainly be, are you available before 630, Dr. Allison Ampe, or no? Before 530. Okay. All right. Ms. Exton. Mr. Slippin, can you say more about how the, I know there's teachers and admin, how's the community involved in the finalists? Yeah, generally what happens is you have a meet and greet with the community and we can do that on Zoom. Certainly we want the community to be a part of it. And what we probably end up doing is set up something and survey monkey that would serve as a reaction form. So anybody who's watching the interviews and rather the little meeting where you have the community or the parents or the principals or the teachers be able to give a feedback form. We usually do this on paper, but let's say that we have a community and parent event, say at seven o'clock on any given night. It's a conclusion to that. We announced the URL for the reaction form and we can ask people to go fill that out so we can collect data from them. One of the reasons for having these meetings with teachers and parents and community is to then get their feedback and reactions so that we have that in our hands as we're looking at the candidates and thinking about them. And so do the community members have an opportunity to like submit questions ahead of time? And then is there like a, somebody facilitates that? No matter how. We haven't resolved that. I mean, this is fairly new ground. Normally what would happen, we'd have the candidate in the room and anybody who shows up could ask questions and put questions in the pot so that that's obviously something we'd want to do. That's the intent because we're not gonna use our questions. We're gonna, the way of work is that a candidate would give an initial statement, introduce themselves and then field questions for the rest of the for the session. So, that's sort of the thinking of how we do it. If Madam Chair, Mr. Spiegel has his hand up, yeah. Mr. Spiegel. So we hired two principals this year and all the interviews were done on Zoom, including the meetings with teachers and families and administrators. And you know, obviously it wasn't, it's not the same as coming into the school and seeing people in person, but I think people got a sense of who the candidates were and we're able to provide feedback. We did that through Google forms. I mean, there's ways to do it. I know it's, we're not an ideal situation at all but we've hired people this way now. Mr. Gilman. So I would say on my own professional experiences that we have done all Zoom, all Zoom, all Zoom and then these are for senior hires and then a final onsite experience of some sort. Seeing sites meeting with people with lots of social distance. So I don't know, I think there may be a way to do this where you have the majority of this by Zoom and then some experience, I mean, I think someone who wants to be the superintendent is going to want to see a school and see the district somehow. So I think, you know, in the old years of, you know before pre-COVID, the setup would be they were in the district all day. They had, you know, something to eat with us and then we did an interview in person four separate nights and that was nice. I don't think we can do that anymore but I do think we would could do, we might have to have more time where we have an all Zoom day for everybody and then we invite them in to see the district and then either we meet like this with them or we meet in person briefly and I don't know but we probably are gonna have to expect a longer process than normal. That's been my experience in hiring is that the process takes longer to give a senior person the chance to see sites and see people, I might play sites but see buildings and kids in action and that sort of thing. They might have to commit to two days. You know, they may have to and we're early enough in the process where, you know, they should be willing to do it. And Mr. Thielman, all that I can say to that and I will have more of an update in at our November meeting is that Ms. Bungernot and subsequently Dr. Bode are not enthusiastic about bringing anybody into the buildings. I know it seems like, which is understandable, right? For very, very good reason and it was not something that I didn't go to bat on that. Certainly it was, I also agree that it's, but I agree that in normal times we would obviously wanna do it. I don't know how that would work but we can continue to keep the conversation open about it. I'm not super optimistic about that. I took a tour to see facilities at the City of the Arlington High School facilities with Jim Feeney and looked at all the things with him after three. So I mean, you know, there's ways to make it work without, there were no kids in the, well, there might have been a few kids in the building but not many, so it was just mostly adults. There's ways to do it. I think once we know who the finalists are and how many we have, we'd be able to have a more thoughtful conversation about this, but at this point I wanted to lay out where we are and what we need to be thinking about because we will need to start making scheduling decisions on the 4th of November. Mr. Carded. Thanks. So I mean, obviously, we wanna be cooperative with our Board of Health partners but at the end of the day, we're our own legal authority. There's nothing we're talking about. Jane disappeared. Nothing we're talking about. Oh, there you are over there. Nothing we're talking about violates any order, any legal order, any guidance from the state DPH. You know, there's nothing preventing us from meeting in person as long as we're under 10 people. So, you know, I think at the end of the day we need to be comfortable with the process and we wanna utilize their guidance to the extent we can but I would take a little bit of a harder line with her if we have to. I'm optimistic that it's going to happen. I'm not super concerned about it at this point. Dr. Allison Amby. Mr. Schlickman, could you write up what you told us and send it to all of us or via Karen? Sure, I could, yeah, absolutely. Glenn wrote up a sort of a sample but I just wanted to get this out as to something that we all need to be thinking about. That's all. And we wanna, you know, once we hit that November 4th, I mean, we wanna give plenty of time to schedule our meetings with faculty and staff, certainly give them as much lead time. You know, we have an opportunity to have really phenomenal attendance doing it over Zoom. So that's, you know, that's a good opportunity for us. So, you know, as soon as, the sooner that we can get those dates sort of sorted out, I think we'll get more people involved, which is what we want. The advantage of Zooming it is we can stagger it so that we could be doing the site visit kind of thing where the candidate be interacting with teachers and community on one day and then doing the school committee interview on a subsequent day, whereas in a normal circumstance that visit dinner interview would all be one night. So it actually gives us a little more flexibility on some levels. Great, anybody else? So that will actually be our next meeting, right? On the 4th, and I'll sort out the timing so that we can get as many of us, and we need everybody here to do it, right? So I will send something out to get a sense of, just quickly though, is 5.30 problematic for anybody? Jeff, Kersi, Len, you could do, you need to be done by 5.30, Kersi. Okay, five o'clock, right? I mean, five o'clock. This should be a quick meeting. Yeah, but we all need to be here. So I know Mr. Hainor has a conflict later on. So, okay, super. So Ms. Exit is five to early for you, or it's okay, Ish? No, I can do that, that's fine. Okay, all right. So we'll try and aim for that, but I'll confirm hopefully tomorrow. Okay. I move that we authorize the Chair to call a meeting for Wednesday, November 4th, for the purpose of receiving the names of the finalists for superintendent. Bye, Ken. Okay. So we have a discussion about Ms. Exit, yes? Mr. Cardin. Yes. Dr. Allison Ampey. Yes. Ruth Yeoman. Yes. Mr. Schlickman. Yes. And I am also yes. Okay. Did you have anything else, Dr. McNeil, as part of the superintendent's report, or did you, that was all sort of part of the reopening? So I did want to comment on one thing in closing is that today I sent out a kindergarten through fifth grade curriculum parent presentation. And I want to emphasize the fact that this is not in lieu of curriculum nights for the various elementary schools, but leading up to this point in time in the year, I wanted to be proactive and give parents an opportunity to hear from our literacy coaches, math coaches, our curriculum leaders and directors as they discuss the various standards that will be covered in each content area for each grade level, kindergarten through fifth grade. So the presentation is actually it has slide decks, but it also has like voiceovers and recordings from the literacy coaches as they talk through the various pieces of information in the slide deck. So I'm very proud of this product. I think that it gets at the heart of what everybody's thinking about what is going to be covered this year and gives an overview. And it also will provide a foundation for parents for when they do have the curriculum night so where they can develop questions based upon that information in the presentation so they can get specific about how certain things are taking place within the classroom. So I don't know if anyone has reviewed that presentation but I'm also going to put it on our website so that anybody can see it and access it. So that's just the one of the things I wanted to add in closing. Great, thank you. And Dr. McNeil, I received that presentation as a parent because I have a K through five student but it would be great if you could send it to Karen so that it could go out to the rest of the committee because we have plenty here with no K through fibers. Sure, I will do that. You can get it to Karen, she can get it to us. Absolutely, and it'll be on our website as well. All right, consent agenda. All items listed with an asterisk are considered to be a routine and will be enacted by one motion. There will be no separate discussion of these items unless a member of the committee so requests in which event the item will be considered in its normal sequence. Vote approval of warrant, warrant number two, one, zero, eight, one, data 10, 13, 20, 20 total amount, 513,286 dollars and 82 cents. Thank you. Yep, so move and do we have a second? Yep. Good, Ms. Exton? Yes. Mr. Cardin? Yes. Dr. Allison Ampe? Yes. Mr. Thielman? Yes. Mr. Schliffman? Yes. And I am also yes. All right, as to not rush our subcommittee and liaison reports and announcements, I was almost going to get it in. I do need somebody to move the 10 o'clock rule. So moved. I move the 10 o'clock rule to 1015. Second. Actually, will that be enough, Mr. Spiegel? That'll get us out of this and then we can move it again in executive session but that'll let some of these folks go. All right, Ms. Exton voting on the 10 o'clock, 10 to 1015. Yes. Mr. Cardin? Yes. Dr. Allison Ampe? Yes. Mr. Thielman? Yes. Mr. Schliffman? Yes, sort of. And I'm also yes. Budget, Dr. Allison Ampe? We have a budget meeting scheduled next week on Thursday, the 29th at 930. Community relations, Mr. Heiner isn't here. CIA, Mr. Cardin? We met Monday, as I mentioned about the goals for the purpose of the official goals, we're gonna stick with the high-level goals. We'll of course work with Dr. McNeil on whatever goals he's developing but there isn't a deadline to get that done. I thought we were behind but Dr. Bodie said we were right on schedule for her evaluation. She is going to do a self-evaluation but we're gonna truncate the collection of all the documents, the presentations that we're seeing from the curriculum chairs is designed instead of that. So I guess we need to figure out, Ms. Morgan, I can work with you on a schedule for getting those completed so then we can complete the evaluation of Dr. Bodie. We also met with the representatives from the Human Rights Commission regarding the letter they sent us over the summer and we're gonna continue to work with them on the issues they identified with a particular focus initially on the discipline data which we typically review, I believe in November or December. So we will work on that and committee first and a goal of getting the data in a better shape as a group before it comes to the school committee. Thank you. Great, thank you, Mr. Cardin. Facilities, Mr. Youngman. You all heard, we met last week on the 15th to review the report before Dr. Janger and Mr. McCarthy presented it to all of you on Friday. And so basically what you saw is what we talked about the majority of the most of the rooms now at the high school have functioning HVAC. The issue is not the HVAC, the issue in terms of getting students back in the building is the size of the classrooms. Thank you. Policy, Mr. Schlickman. No report. And superintendent search process. We've reported. Arlington High School Building Committee, Mr. Thielman. We have no report. We are organizing tours and trying to organize a steel, a beam raising ceremony in early November. We'll have details probably later at a early meeting in November. Great, liaison reports, announcements, future agenda items. All right. I need a move to go to executive session. So moved. Second. Ms. Dexton. Yes. Mr. Cardin. Yes. Have to read. Oh my God, thank you. To conduct strategy sessions in preparation for negotiations with union and non-union personnel or contract negotiations with union and non-union in which it held in an open meeting may have a detrimental effect. To conduct strategy with respect to collective bargaining or litigation in which it held in an open meeting may have a detrimental effect. To collective bargaining may also be conducted. Traffic supervises MOA, food service MOA and to comply with an act under the authority of any general or special law or federal grant and aid requirement HIPAA. So we had a motion by Mr. Thielman, seconded by Dr. Allison Ampe for executive session. Ms. Dexton. Yeah. Mr. Cardin. Yes. Dr. Allison Ampe. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Mr. Schluckman. Yes. And I am also yes. All right. Thank you very much. Thank you for coming.