 Seeing the presence of a quorum, I'm gonna call the meeting of the Amherst School Committee to order at 6.01 PM. Welcome everyone. And just so you know for folks who are here in the room, but also folks who might be watching, the session is being live streamed tonight. And being recorded by our staff, by our Amherst Regional and Public School staff, not by Amherst Media, but it will be uploaded to Amherst Media website later today, or at some later point. Okay. So thank you Dr. Morse for setting that up for us and allowing that to happen. Really appreciate it. So if everyone has a copy of the agenda for tonight, basically what we were thinking was we would have a, almost a continuation I guess of the conversation that was started about a week ago regarding the MSBA statement of interest process and application. And for folks who've been following this issue with at home and here, the committee has been having quite a lot of discussion I guess around this application process upon hearing the news from the MSBA that they would be looking for some kind of consensus from our community in order to more strongly consider an application. I guess would probably be the best way to put that. So we've heard from a lot of community members in the past few weeks, which is great. There's been a lot of discussion taking place here and we had asked Dr. Morris to come back to us tonight with some further thinking on this and allow for the committee to have a discussion around that. What I'm gonna do with the committee's permission is actually ask Dr. Morris, turn this over to Dr. Morris, have him do a short presentation, and then unless there's some technical questions just ask all of us to hold comments because we wanna do give the community some time to respond to Dr. Morris's proposal and presentation and also allow us to hear what the committee, the community has to say before we actually engage in discussions. So does that sound reasonable for folks? Okay, great. And if folks haven't seen, there is a sign up sheet for public comment so we are gonna use that tonight. We're just expecting a lot of interest and wanna make sure that everyone has a chance and I'll run through that again later on. So with that, Dr. Morris, I'm sorry. Thanks, of course. I can do that. Yeah. Thank you, Dr. Morris. So just one note, it was a half day at the high school which means a different schedule for the custodians. So if you do leave after eight o'clock, we just wanna make sure that you use the entrance and exit that most people use, which is out the side entrance. If you go to the front entrance, sort of bad things happen. So we'd appreciate using the side entrance. Possibly setting off alarms. Yeah, not really bad things, but bad things like people might have to leave the building and all that kind of stuff. I don't have a magic trick to shut off alarms that involves other people who have to come in trucks. So yeah, so thank you and thanks for the time and I'll try to be the right size of the presentation with giving enough information, but not feeling too rushed for the committee and the community. So just a general outline of what I'll share is the problem. We've talked about it a lot. I'm gonna go over it again. I know for some people who follow these meetings closely, some of the first slides will be repetitive and for the committee, certainly, but I noticed that there's people who, in the audience who haven't been here for some of the last couple meetings, I wanna make sure that everybody has sort of leveled the playing field of information that's been presented previously, but I apologize for those of you, like yourselves and some of the audience who keep coming, you know, can feel repetitive. For me, you know, it's an opportunity. How do we build consensus? Challenges, we have a rather short timeframe to do it in and I think I'll make a proposal tonight and I think the key word there is framework. It's not, it's trying to right size again, use that phrase again, right size what the MSBA needs, what we can offer, what we can come to consensus to, knowing that if we're fortunate enough to get into feasibility, there'd be a lot of, most of the decisions would happen at that time. And then a process around how do we gather feedback on what I'm presenting tonight and assess how we're doing with that. I also wanna thank Jerry Champagne before I get really rolling who is doing all the tech tonight, so thank you, Jerry. Early with me with the weather tomorrow, so I appreciate the double duty. So again, some of these slides have been discussed before but at a core we have three kind of themes of problems at Wildwood and Fort River. So one is the building conditions. Things are not going wonderfully at the buildings that you know, they were, we've talked many times before even with previous school committees about the challenges of the buildings and as they're getting close to 50 years which is the end of the expected lifespan of a school building without significant renovation or reconstruction, it's not just the open classrooms, certainly those are a lot of them but just all the building systems are starting to wear down and become not only inefficient but inoperable at times. From a safety perspective that there's many parts of the buildings where we do worry about that, you know, mainly the office and how far the office is from the front entrance, the doors getting out, our staff tell us frequently when we do drills. It's good to do the drills and yet there are some aspects of the building that create safety hazards regardless of how often we practice ensuring the safety of our students and staff. And the last is the educational challenges, the open classroom designs, a lack of acoustic privacy which essentially means that there's noise coming from multiple dimensions and these accessibility issues affect the most vulnerable students and others. For instance, English language learners are more affected than other students by having noises from multiple sides, some special education students. It does affect all students but it doesn't affect all students equally. And I like, I'm gonna put Jean Fay or adapt Jean Fay's comment from last time who's a staff member which is these are becoming barriers to learning. It's truly not just problems or issues, they're really at this point barriers for our students. This is a slide that shows a survey from a couple of years ago, five years ago, less than that, that asked the question, it was something called a tell survey. It asked a number of questions. This is just picked the one about the physical environment of staff members all across Massachusetts, the MTA, DESI and administration all worked to try to get out the vote so to speak so people could actively engage in this question and then there was an apples to apples comparison between schools and school districts. And you could see that the statement, the physical environment of classrooms in the school supports teaching and learning. 83% of teachers in Massachusetts agreed, 93 at Crocker Farm, 93% at Crocker Farm, a wild one in Fort River, both those were under a quarter of teachers agreed with that statement. So these were problems five years from now and it's compounding with the age of the buildings. So there's been a lot of talk and press coverage of kind of short-term capital investments and I think it's worth going over what problems we can solve fully, solve partially and not solve with short-term capital investments. By short-term I don't mean this low cost but just money that can be spent absent a more significant building or renovation project. So the roofs, each of those will be over $2 million for wildwood and Fort River, those are on the capital plan. It's a significant investment and that can be solved but the price tag is quite high. The exterior doors were in the process of fixing those. We'll have about two thirds of them fixed at the end of this year and then in the capital plan for next year is to resolve that truly, it's truly a safety issue on an ongoing basis for staff and for students. The unit vents and the HVAC, the heating and cooling systems we can mostly fix. The challenges that the duct work, the wiring, all those elements are probably outdated so we can mostly fix those but it's not going to produce the cooling a truly comfortable environment. There's no dehumidifying agent that's powerful that can solve the problem. So we've essentially like a very good fan system but it's not truly a cooling system when we have days like we did at the beginning of the school year separate from wildwood systems failing even at the other schools we had major problems with that. And ADA access so for those of you who wanna come back Tuesday night we'll be receiving a report from ADA Americans Disabilities Act consultant who looked at all of our buildings actually in all districts, pre-K to 12 and we'll have a report and some of those can be fixed and we'll find out more about that next week. However, there are some of the challenges that cannot be addressed even with significant capital funding and so the open classroom design, the acoustic privacy, that's one that we can't fix. The classroom size, what are the really interesting things that come from the Fort River Feasibility Study was sort of a nice analysis of how much usable space there are in classrooms at Wilderness Fort River. So if you take the quads and divide them by four space actually isn't terrible compared to MSBA averages but because there has to be hallways for students to get in and out of rooms, go through rooms to get to the bathroom, go through rooms to get to the back quads. It's under 700 feet for most classrooms whereas the MSBA would recommend about 950 square feet for a classroom. So that can't be resolved without a major project. High cost and energy efficient use, so it's in addition to not being, so this describes inefficiency two ways. One is inefficient, we're spending a lot of money to heat and cool the buildings. Some of that's just based on the age of the system, some of that's based on the kind of, we have a lot of square footage for our number of students that we currently have. Oh, that was weird. And, but it's also inefficient in terms of the implications. We're spending all that money and it's still not the most comfortable environment for students and staff. The safety of the main entry, a reference before, I think it's something like 93 feet, it's about the basketball length from the front entry to the office while we have cameras. From a safety perspective, we want a more gating mechanism when anyone, visitors are entering the building because once you get in the front door, there's a lot of those, the art room is right on your right in both spaces. There's classrooms both ways before you would ever hit the office. ADA and access, so there's the America Disability Act audit that I talked about, but because of the open classroom design, it's just quite literally impossible for students or staff and wheelchairs to travel through a quad to get to the interior bathroom. They generally have to go across the building to get to the central bathroom area. And so even if it's not literally an ADA compliance issue, the spirit of it is hugely challenging for many students and faculty members. Lack of natural light, so the interior quads have very little natural light getting into classrooms. There's lots of evidence of the impact on that on students and adults, especially this time of year, frankly. And cooling, as I mentioned earlier, even if we can improve the unit events, the cooling really isn't sufficient for the days that we have in August and May and June. So it's some slightly newer slides. So sorry for those of you who've heard that before. So town officials, including town manager, have indicated that MSBA funding is needed to complete any school building project. There's a lot of other capital needs in the town. Roads, bridges, certainly it's a hot button topic in the community right now. Fire station, libraries, DPW, there are a lot of capital needs. And I'll just say, I want to say publicly, I do not want to pit schools against any of the other projects. I'm going to very clearly describe the school's needs, but I don't want, you know, I work closely with Chief Nelson, Library Director Sherry, Guilford-Moring, all of them can describe their needs clearly. I'm not going to do that, but I think the fact that there are needs in other areas is very real. One of the other challenges that two sequential, so one after the other building projects would face escalating construction costs. So I think what would be a best case scenario of five years between sequential projects that's an inflation, with escalation of 22%, 4% a year and then it compounds. Right, and that's the best case scenario. That's millions and millions of dollars for taxpayers. They require major interim repairs, roofs and parking lot. You know, some things that if we were able to take a project and do that sooner, we perhaps could push off a little bit. Some of the capital needs we can't push off, but there may be some that we can, if we knew a new building was coming or a renovated building was coming, we could push off a bit. It would delay operational savings from energy efficiency. You know, something I've said before is it drives me absolutely crazy that we spend money on things instead of people. That we spend money on inefficient heating and cooling systems that aren't working well instead of on staff members who can be supporting students. It feels very uncomfortable for me that we do that and when we go into the budget process every year, doesn't make me feel good from a green perspective but also from a supporting student perspective. And it would certainly cost a lot more than one building project again because of the escalation and because of the interim repairs that have been needed in between. So some of the history is that we submitted multiple statements of interest from 2007 to 2012. After six years of doing that, MSPA accepted the statement of interest for Wildwood School in 2013. The next three to four years were spent on a building project that did not receive the local approvals to proceed. Last year in 2018, we submitted statements of interest for both Fort River and Wildwood. Neither was accepted and MSPA confirmed for me that MSPA acceptance is competitive every year is a new year and that it addresses one building at a time. So for us, if we wanted to go down a road of two buildings, they wouldn't have been simultaneous. They would be one after the other. So the feedback I received and I've had lots of conversations at MSPA, not just because it's convenient to say, it's actually worth saying that they've been great about engaging me and understanding the community from their past experience working in Hammers, that they're looking for consensus from the community and they actually want that formally in the statement of interest that gets sent. You know, and they basically told me they're requiring it. They don't, if they see a statement of interest without some level of consensus statement, then they're gonna really question our readiness and they said very bluntly to me, it may be that if you can't do that this year, you need to wait till 2020 to submit a statement of interest. And I want to talk a little bit about consensus. So you see the definition up there, but it's what an acceptable resolution is, one that could be supported even if it's not the favorite of every individual and it doesn't equal unanimity. Frankly, I don't think we'll get to a place in the community and unanimity on this project. No community gets to a place of unanimity or very few. I haven't seen too many unanimous votes in communities for any construction project on any topic, but can we get to a consensus place where key stakeholders, both formal and informal, can support a statement of interest? That's really the effort that I'll speak to as I transition to the next slide. So just again, clarifying information from the MSBA, new statements of interest are accepted until April 12th, 2019. They need to be formally voted by the Amherst School Committee and Amherstown Council and then voted by the chair of the Amherst School Committee myself and the town manager. And statements of interest just to clarify because I've gotten a lot of questions and comments on what you see below at the bottom of the second half of that slide. It does not include decisions about whether new construction or addition renovation is preferred or defined site, who the architect should be, complete educational plan or detailed building specifications. All that's worked out with a building committee that's defined by members of the community who participate in an MSBA feasibility process and they work through all of those challenges then. It'd be inappropriate to be trying to address those challenges, statement of interest and MSBA would not look kindly upon us kind of forwarding ourselves beyond where we should be in the process. So I'm going to pause because then I start talking more specific about my thoughts on it. So I didn't know if the committee had any questions before I. Any questions or comments for Dr. Morris at this point? Okay, sorry, you've probably seen all those before. So it's probably, it's not surprising that you've done it because I thought it was good to get the pause. So here's a vision, right? Cause that's really what the MSBA is looking for. What vision does the community build consensus on for a school? So for me, providing a high quality learning environment with all students and ADA accessible rooms, walls and natural light, too long first slide but I actually really like the seven non-negotiables that the Fortwood feasibility came up with. So I'll just read those aloud. They go in a little more details but I didn't want to go text light on the slide. Natural light in all classrooms, good air quality, ventilation, circulation, good acoustics, elimination of open classroom design, compliance with towns net zero bylaw, sustainable design. I'm sorry, Dr. Morris, would you mind just slowing down just a little tiny bit since people aren't following reading that, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, absolutely, yeah. I apologize and there's more than seven so it gave me an opportunity to correct myself. Thank you. Natural light in all classrooms, good air quality, ventilation, circulation, good acoustics, elimination of open classroom design, compliance with the towns net zero bylaw, sustainable design, flexibility in case of increased enrollments in the future, adequate space for program needs and cost and environmental analysis that includes construction, demolition, swing space and operations. And those were design options that the Fort River Feasibility Committee came up with. Thank you. So that'd be the first part of the vision statement. The second is that it provides reasonably maintainable buildings so a little wordy or awkwardly wording maybe but what we have now is two buildings that are not easily maintained. Not only because the systems are outdated but quite literally we have more custodians and more support that we need to clean the buildings because it's really hard to clean open design classroom buildings. When we have walls that aren't really walls and you wanna make sure that things aren't building up on them and how do you attach things to them? It really creates a challenge about how to maintain those buildings and we want buildings that work for students but also ones that from our maintenance and custodial crew will work well for them to. There's no surprise in this third point I've said it multiple times over the last month or so which is that addresses both buildings before our current kindergarten students leave elementary school so that's within the next six years. I think it's worth noting that I do feel urgency in the buildings that the barriers comment that is fair used is I fully concur with that and any solution that would take a decade and more really is inconsistent with how I view the urgency of the needs of those buildings. We're doing our best to keep them running but our best isn't keeping up with what students and staff members need and it's fiscally responsible town of Amherst. We are aware I'm aware that we have a relatively high tax rate in this community and I don't wanna do the cheapest solution so to speak our students and staff members need that but we also need to be conscious that there are other needs of the town has they're incredibly supportive of our schools it's not lost on me that they are and that fiscal responsibility is something that I take very seriously. So the goal is to have a statement of interest that has a formal declaration of consensus in the next couple months. So how do we get there? So addressing both buildings as soon as possible means one MSBA project. You know the average it's just on the phone with them the other day and they said the average MSBA project right now is five to seven years. That's really the range that they're seeing. So in the absolute best case scenario we got in one after the other we're still talking a decade or more because you don't even as you'll find on the last slide we don't even hear about this till just about the new year so we're just about at 2020, December 2019. And so it really pushes us into a potential one building solution. I wanna acknowledge that there was contention in the past on that point on consolidation. There were other points of contention the number of students in a building in the site and would the students have enough play space and open space on the site. Great configuration was certainly an area where there was strong disagreement. Busting of special needs students and students living on East Hadley Road there were people with really strong beliefs on that. And socioeconomic balance between schools. So we have about 10 weeks to get to the consensus place and how do we get there. I wanna note that I really wanna value that I'm acknowledging the differences not to highlight them but actually because I wanna be really candid with you and with the committee and then the community. Those things are real. I'm not taking, there's no, it's a very neutral statement. I think it's factual that there was contention in the past and really my goal is to present perhaps a third way that breaks down some of the contention that keeps with the majority of people's core values and that we can come away with again with that consensus of it may not be people's first options because I know the strong feelings on that matter but that people feel valued, people feel heard and that the comments that we're receiving, we've received a lot of emails. And last one, a lot of conversations and phone calls as well that I know you've received and I've received. That's all went into my thinking as I flip the slide to the next, flip to the next slide. So the MSBA has really asked us for two things. Are we replacing two buildings or one in the rough size of school? And that's again, as Mr. Nakajima pointed out the last meeting, probably more articulately than I'll do at the moment, it's really, they have to know that they're slotting and it's a financial piece for them. They're not asking for all the other things that are on here but I feel like to get consensus here we actually need to be really clear and formal about them. So even if MSBA isn't asking, I do feel like it's incumbent on me to propose something that goes beyond what the MSBA is asking for because I think we'll need there to get a potential for a consensus. So as I said before, one MSBA project, one warm child-centered building, thinking about this the other day of, visited a school a couple of years ago in another state and it was really interesting. It was built relatively recently within the last 10 years and there were a couple things that stood out to me. One was even though they were safety conscious and you walked in and then you were in the office, they had like a metal post, kind of like what's behind the spitzer and it almost, it was built around it like a tree and just for an elementary school, how nice to walk in, be in an office, have a security protocol, but the first thing you see is not a beam but what looks like a tree. The school committed to having all natural materials in the hallway so there was no plastic anywhere you looked and I know that sounds simple and it really changed. I have a feeling there's a lot of natural wood all around in very visible spots. The sight lines were designed for children so I felt like eight feet tall walking around which was kind of enjoyable but I was imagining myself from a student perspective and how different that makes the experience. All the displays that were built into the wall were built at the student level. So as adults we had to actually, you'd have to adjust yourself which was, again, a good reminder about that. The displays were set up where the only things in the hallway were things that student produced so there weren't wonderful Georgio Keefs and we could have, I'm not proposing this, I'm just describing my experience, just want to say I happen to like Georgio Keef a lot. I do too. I saw the straw, I guess. It was a lovely digression. Yes. I know this is sort of a technical feature, right? I'll light it up a little bit. All right, I apologize. No, the school was divided sort of into four wings or pods and the color scheme changed as you went from pod to pod so if you're going towards the yellow, the orange pod, as you walked, you'd literally see the orange tiles and then they would get more and more and more until you were there and when you went between pods, the colors were mixed so if you were going from the orange pod to the green pod, they're mixed and what was amazing is just how students where young students, they had a preschool, they had older students at preschool, completely cognizant of where they were and as the adults, it was really helpful actually, frankly, to get around on this tour but just so child centered and bright colors and each of the pods, the four pods had a central meeting area so where multiple classes or one class could get together for multi-class or whole-class activities and so I think the commitment here without getting beyond my narrative is that we would create and have the community as well as the building committee focus on what does it mean to be a child centered school regardless of size? We've all been in schools that were small that were not child centered and we've all been in schools that were large, I mean, many of us have been in schools that are much larger than this that are incredibly child centered and so it's really a design principle and I think something that this, with the talent and interest in this project, I think it's, I feel very confident is something that we can achieve. So approximately 600 students. I've said before that the research I've read has said, in terms of cohort sizes, having roughly 450, maybe 500 students, there's a lot of evidence that that's really positive and that's around building relationships between students, relationships between staff members. The reality in this particular instance is that because we'll have a dual language program that will have to be sort of embedded in the school and right now we're planning that to be two classes which will integrate with the others in terms of a placement process because it's really two classes that have to stay together because of the nature of the program. So that would be, you know, someone in the neighborhood of a third of the school and then two thirds would be in classes that mix which two thirds of this is essentially the size of our schools right now. So when I think of school size, I really think of what's that experience and I believe that we can do this in a way that preserves that small school community experience particularly as we go into this dual language approach. I think it's also worth noting that Fort River involved would have both been over 600 students in really dysfunctional school buildings. You know, when I first started in the district, Fort River was like 575 or something, you know, in that realm and people loved it and they loved the community of Fort River. Again, I would still push for, you know, these smaller learning communities but this size is not unfamiliar to this community at all. K5 or K6, so when I acknowledged that in the next slide you'll hear a little more about my thinking but the MSP is not asking for our statement on grade configuration yet I don't think we can come to consensus of the community unless this question's answered and formalized. Just don't say it happening. And the last one is that community surveys will be completed during the feasibility process prior to binding decisions. That's a pretty normal part of the feasibility process that as architects and owner project managers are communicating and facilitating the information coming in from the building committee with the community that we want to actively consider the community and a whole number of fronts. You know, not just kind of great configuration of what happens to sixth grade which people are probably wondering about given the information in this slide but actually new versus ad reno, that's going to be a huge decision for our community especially as given the net zero by-law. I mean, Mr. Nakajima and I are in the Fort River Feasibility Committee. Fortunately, that committee doesn't have to make a decision. If it did, I think it would take considerable dialogue in the strong viewpoints both ways and so having an active exchange between the building committee and the community is something that I think we need to commit to formally. Keep going? Yes, please. Okay, sure. Just gonna take a drink, I'm sorry, I'm fighting a cold. So I spoke about this a little bit but I believe there's educationally viable ways that we can get to 600. I already talked about the dual language program. I won't repeat myself necessarily there except to say that if you think of two classes in a dual language program and a grade level that leaves three to four classes in the rest of the school and the non-dual language classes which is exactly what Wildwood has right now. That's mostly classes, grade levels with three classes per grade level and one grade level with four. It's not atypical, Fort River has between two and four right now. So these are kind of cohort sizes that are very familiar to us and very familiar to the community. And there's multiple ways to get to 600. So one is consider moving the sixth grade to the middle school. We're starting a study, we have started loosely, a study to see what that would be really just at an architectural financial level but engaging that on the educational level as well once that results are found. I wanna note that there were past efforts along this and I wanna comment a little bit on that. So I started in this district as a sixth grade teacher at Fort River in 2001. And if you ask me, my 2001 self if this was a good idea or educationally viable I have a certain opinion about that. My 2019 self notices that sixth graders perhaps are a little bit different than sixth graders were in 2001. What we heard, frankly from sixth graders at Fort River when the commissioner was here was high interest in thinking about why are they in elementary school? I had a parent tell me, came in for a different reason was saying their sixth grader wasn't excited to come back to school after the December break. And I said, why? And they said, well, they didn't wanna explain to first graders about Santa Claus, right? And so I think there's some element of sixth grade that, you know, better or worse. I have lots of opinions on that. I'm not relevant now. The pace at which students are growing up and the experiences they're looking for I think I've shifted in 20 years. I think it's worth exploring and seeing what's possible. The second would be building an addition at Crocker Farm to make both schools roughly similar size and that could be done with or without the sixth grade move to the middle school, right? If you did both of those then you'd have even smaller cohorts. And certainly it's possible have to be studied and explored and the implications and costs would have to be analyzed. You know, part of the current study is looking at the seventh to 12th graders be here at the high school which would open up the middle school for an elementary school site with some renovations needed as well as playgrounds and some other things. And then Mr. Demling is a chair of a committee that's looking at Pelham and regionalization and that could perhaps yield some changes to our enrollment patterns. I wanna say really clearly, really publicly I don't have a favorite, right? So for me, even if I'm asked these are ideas that fit within a framework of how do we have one building of 600 students to replace both Fort River and Wildwood. That's what a feasibility process is. And I point over this with MSBA explicitly. These are things that an architect and owner project manager and the community would explore come back to the community with information so that informed choices can be made. I think that all these are interesting and viable at a meta level. The details would be worked out once we have an active team working on them. And so for me, I believe, I feel so strongly that one or more of these are viable that we can get to a place and feel confident that we can hit that 600 number, which is consistent with what I'm hearing from many community members who feel desperate urgency to replace buildings and have real concerns about 750 students, which would be roughly the size if we combine those two Wildwood and Fort River right now in one site. And again, it's for me about building consensus. And I think this has the best chance of building the consensus we need to take care of the buildings that we have and we want to either replace or renovate. So I think it's also important to note in this model we'd be valuing the social equity parts that are part and parcel of what we do in our district. They're part of our mission statement. They're part of our vision statement and they're part of our daily decision-making. So we think of reducing that to two, our district to two enrollment zones instead of three. That means our number of students bust the specialized special education programs, goes from two-thirds of those students to one-third. Be not perfect for everybody when I acknowledge that, but two-thirds is a lot better than one-third, right? It's twice as good numerically, but it also has some implications. As you're aware, we had a group of staff members and community members work on the potential of moving a specialized program. And no one in that group was comfortable with the amount of busing. And really what it came down to and why the recommendation, as you might remember, was to stay put was splitting staff between buildings is gonna change the expertise that students needed. This model operationalizes a way where students wouldn't have to be, fewer students have to be bused and the expertise wouldn't have to travel between buildings, which was a huge barrier for us in that discussion. Also reducing to two enrollment zones would make it much easier if we think about the islands, enrollment islands that don't fit with the rest of the enrollment map. We've looked at this many times and it's really hard to take account socioeconomic balance without those if we have three enrollment zones. The map just doesn't work. With two enrollment zones, we could explore reducing, we may not be able to eliminate those islands, but we can look at having an enrollment map that's more consistent with, I'll just speak my values and what it looks like to have that map. So I think in addition to the core principle, which is replacing outdated dysfunctional buildings, this has major implications beyond just the buildings to support some of our more vulnerable learners in the district. So I want to explicitly talk about great configuration briefly. So I know there's really strong feelings on both sides of issue from the past project and both are valid. I want to acknowledge and honor both and just to say that if we're truly building consensus, I don't see consensus being built without K-to-5 or K-to-6 being our great configuration and I think we need to put that formally in the statement of interest so there's no uncertainty of anyone in the community what the intentions would be. So the process, what we're asking the community or I'm asking you to think about asking the community to support, one project, one building, about 600 students, K-to-5 or K-to-6. I know Ms. Ordon has a lot more to say on this later because I know she's been working on this dutifully since our last meeting, which was just last week, but we have listening sessions that we're looking to schedule for staff, families, the larger community, actually for staff that are already scheduled at the end of this month, one in each of the three elementary schools to self-facilitate. Outreach by an Amherst Media segment, so I'm gonna redo this presentation at Amherst Media next Wednesday and thank you Amherst Media and they'll try to get it out so we have a live link to that. We'll have this and I'll just do a voiceover essentially. Feedback requested electronically to increase access for more people to gather the thoughts, outreach to PGOs and the weekly district update. And I think there's been a lot of discussion about engagement processes and again, later Ms. Ordon has a talk a little more about specifically if the listening and work sessions that are being worked on or at least thought about. So I know people would wish we had more time. My view is there's a somewhat arbitrary constraint that's been set by an external agency and not meeting that has lots of implications, right? So not meeting that has implications of having the community and the staff and the students have another year in any scenario where they're not in renovated or new buildings but also as financial implications. So whatever the project is waiting years, it's gonna cost the taxpayers over a million dollars more just based on standard escalation. So that's hard to swallow that as a community I'd like to see us move forward for students and families but also from a fiscal responsibility perspective as well. And finally, so if we get good, or almost finally, if we get good news and we get into the MSVA, we continue that engagement, right? It doesn't end. It's actually formally in most communities the beginning of that engagement process. The community and the building committee would look at all the various options. Some I mentioned previous slides and maybe other ones that creative people come up with and gather more as part of the process, make a decision on the educational plan which comes back to the school committee for public comment and a way to move forward. And we'll have professional owner project managers and architects would be hired to help us along the way. Certainly the MSVA sort of seriously sort of jokingly said, you know, we probably can ask a lot of questions about engagement for your owner project manager and interviews aren't you? And I said, of course, you know, but we all know that that's gonna be a critical component. There's a lot of public interest and that's what their job is essentially is a protection for the town because they're architects as well but they really are hired to run that engagement process because they're knowledgeable from architectural point of view but also about engaging in a larger community including surveys. We'll also have other reports back from the community that'll help guide that work as well. So my last slide is just about the schedule. So we talked about, you know, coming back to this in February 26th, we may come back next week, we have another meeting on Tuesday where that's a long agenda, so. But we, you know, try to have the school committee vote on something formally sometime in early March after more engagement has occurred. I could propose town council dates and I could propose an italics because I'm not connected to the town council in a formal way, so it's a deference italics, not because they don't need to talk about it. We would need, if we could go forward as a community to talk about a statement of interest or submit a statement of interest by April and just so people know that then the timeline after that, December 11th of 2019 is when the board votes on which districts are invited into the core program. So the challenge of waiting, one of the many challenges of waiting a year is that it would be December of 2020 if we wait a year before we even are able to hear that and that's basically 2021 and those years start feeling really uncomfortable. So I wanna close by just making a couple brief comments more generally. So one is that the way I would describe this is this is around the parameters, right? It's not a detailed plan. I'm not saying sixth grade should move to the middle school. I'm not saying that we should build an additional clock or farm. It's about parameters and that's what MSBA is looking for and that's what I'm hoping to build consensus on and then continue to engage with the community on what the best plan is moving forward. And certainly that would have to be worked out and I think lots of surveying and engagement easily happen before binding decisions are made as part of the MSBA process. Actually, I think we can do that. I know there's some concerns of the express about the timeline. I think the community can do it. I think there's a pure honest commitment of all parties we want what's in the best interest of students and right now the current situation is, I think no one would agree is in the best interest of students. I also wanna acknowledge that there's, I'm asking many people on multiple sides of issues to bend a bit and that's not lost on me. And for me, the students, staff and community of the schools, they can't afford another break. And so I wanna be conscious that there's many people here who may have liked some things, not like others, but I think it's for the good of the common order that we try to figure out a way to build consensus and move forward because our students and staff are relying on us to do so. So that's what I submit to you tonight. Thank you, Dr. Morris. That was a really informative presentation and very helpful, especially in light of the conversation that we had last week. So I really appreciate it. Before we move on, I'm gonna ask just a reminder to folks who've come in since the beginning of the meeting, there is a sign up sheet for public comments. So if anyone wants to make a public comment, please sign up. We have a lot of folks here in the room tonight and just wanna make sure that we get a chance for people to be heard. And I think that, you know, again, I know that the committee has been receiving a lot of emails and communications as has Dr. Morris. There's been a lot of conversation in the community around this question and this topic. I really appreciate your laying out the dates and sort of your thinking and the way that you have. And I'm hopeful that we can actually have a robust conversation about this. As I had mentioned at the start of the meeting, what I'd like to do now is actually move to public comment before we have a discussion here in the committee, if that's okay. If there's any questions, Mr. Jemling. Yeah, just Dr. Morris. Is this gonna be posted on app.org and when do people get that? Tomorrow morning, yeah. Great, thank you. Okay, so with that, let's see if I can get a, I don't know if it's possible to get a sign up sheet up here. Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much. So Dr. Morris is going to set up a timer now. And just as a reminder for folks who haven't done this before, if you'd like to speak, I'll be reading the names. It doesn't mean that if your name isn't on here, we will not accept your public comment, but I'm just gonna try to go down this list, make sure that everyone gets a chance. As he's setting up the timer, you basically have three minutes to speak, but please come up to the microphone and state your name. And there it is. So the first person we have on the list here is Michael Hankey. Hi, I'm Mike Hankey and I live, you can throw a stone and hit my house. I have two children who went through Wildwood, so I spent about 10 years. I was in one of those dusty old committees that was evaluating Fort River many years ago, so I got to tour the innards of both schools. I worked with Ron Bonowitz, who was great. The other thing, the other problem I have is that I'm a designer. So when I first moved to Amherst, I was horrified. I thought these were great school communities, but the buildings were atrocious. And I still think, so when they were built, designed in the late 70s, it was a bad design to begin with, not for the open classroom, but just as an aesthetic exercise. Wasn't designed for kids, could have been designed for anything. Could have been a lab, could have been a commercial building of some sort. So one of my big concerns is creating environments for children, and Dr. Morse talked about that a bit, and I would even take it further than that, that the buildings should engender pride in the students that go there. And that's something that's been lost in Amherst, and I don't think that Amherst has made a good decision about school design since Wildwood, Fort River. So that's a long time. So I'm interested in three things. And some of them I know are unattainable. One is design. So a space that's not only warm, but is friendly to children, and creates a positive vibe. Now, for example, I'll give you a pretty good example. When you walk into this high school, the main entrance, you don't get a positive vibe. The ceiling's right on your head. There's nothing to be proud about. It's not inspiring. It's just a space. So that can help. The other thing I'm interested in is equity, which is funny. I never really thought about it much until recently. And one of the problems I've had, and the only solution I can see, which will be distasteful to some, the only way to truly achieve equity is a one-point solution, meaning all students go to the same point in town. There's no two schools, there's no three schools. It's on one location, and as a designer, I would say three unique buildings on one site with connected mechanicals and some shared facilities. Three different identities. Kids can identify with each one of those schools. Staffing won't be as much of an issue. So that's one idea I have. The other is, all right, let's take 20 years down the line. What's this school gonna look like? How efficient is it gonna be? Is it still gonna look as shiny and new? Durability is something Dr. Moore spoke about. And I'll leave you with this. Fort Worth Wildwood are an exemplar of a building technology that existed for 300 years or more. From then till now, it's a whole new baller game. So thank you. Thank you very much. Jean Fay. My name's Jean Fay. I'm a special education paraeducator in my 21st year in the Emmer school system. I'm also a town resident and I'd like to present you with a letter that has been signed by many educators. We're continuing to collect signatures so you'll be getting more. As educators in the Emmer's public school system, we are dedicated to providing the best possible education experience for our students. This has become increasingly difficult due to the unsafe, unhealthy, and in many cases, inaccessible conditions of our buildings. The aging ventilation systems are clogged with dust. Our bathrooms are not accessible for all our students. Our bulletin boards are moldy. Problems with rodents found their way into our classrooms and our library making discoveries of rodent droppings a common occurrence. Our ceilings are leaking. Our doors are rusted to the point they need brute force to open. And our classrooms are either so cold we need to wear coats or so high into the 80s that floors become dangerously slippery. We want the Emmer's community to know that our working conditions are the learning conditions of our students. These conditions are no longer challenges, but in many cases have become barriers to providing a quality education that the students deserve. Schools need to be safe, healthy, and nurturing environments. Our schools are no longer safe or healthy. And what we're doing right now is we're putting Band-Aids on infrastructure issues. And we're running out of Band-Aids. And the Band-Aids are getting larger. And they're going to continue to get larger and more expensive. And our students and the staff, the educators that work in our buildings deserve better. I want you to look at this picture. School committee members have seen this picture before. This is the air that your students are breathing. This is the air that the educators in our schools are breathing. The mission statement of our school district is that our schools are going to provide all students with a high-quality education that enables them to be contributing members of a multi-ethnic, multicultural, pluralistic society. We seek to create an environment that achieves equity for all students and ensures that each student is a successful learner. Gold number eight under that is to equip and maintain school buildings to provide healthy, accessible, modern learning environments that support the achievement of our mission. Nowhere does it have any fine print that says this is dependent on the address where you live in the town. I'm urging the school committee and the community to understand that this is a dire situation. Is this what you want your children to breathe? Thank you. Next on the list is Catherine Oppie. Hi, I'm Catherine Oppie, former school committee member, parent to children who went through the Amherst and Amherst Pellum Regional School District and co-chair of Amherst Forward. And I had prepared a completely different statement for tonight, which was about the process and surveys versus listening sessions and so on and so forth. I'm not going to give that statement, but I will send you a copy because you just need more email. But what I did want to say after hearing Dr. Morris's presentation is that I share your urgency and I am so grateful for your thoughtfulness and continued commitment to our teachers, to our students, and to our staff. And your focus on what is really important here. I know it was really difficult for you, Dr. Morris, and for the school committee to get to this point in this process and to get to this proposal. And I'm so grateful that you did. And you're exactly right. It doesn't meet everything that I might personally have wanted in the proposal. But given the situation that we're in, I completely support it. And I am so, so grateful. Thank you. Stephanie Joyce? Is that right? I'm Stephanie Joyce. I'm an intervention teacher at Crocker Farm. I'm a resident of Amherst. My children went through the Fort River Schools in the 80s and the 90s. I have grandchildren that attended Wildland are attending the Amherst schools now. I'm in a unique position. I've taught in all three buildings in our district. As educators in our district, we pride ourselves in not working from a deficit model when we consider the teaching and learning approach is important for each student. Rather, we work from a strategic or preventative model to understand their strengths, how to build on them, and to determine evidence-based strategies to meet their needs, prevent, or mediate learning challenges, and impact their achievement. And as much as I'd like to be able to approach our building issues from a similar perspective, our district has tried some preventative measures. We've conducted studies in the past to try to determine strategies to impact ongoing and recurring issues. The time for applying preventative measures has long passed. We're drowning in a deficit model, one into which we can no longer overlook issues that impinge daily on the teaching and learning conditions in our schools. Some of those deficits include open quad classrooms with noise, traffic, lack of space, and insufficient air flow, accessibility, compliance to make our learning environments equally accessible and safe to all learners and their family members, air quality that ensures healthy, mold-free learning and working conditions. Adequate year-round ventilation for heating and cooling, design of teaching and learning spaces with walls that reduce noise pollution and create options for fixtures to be installed to adapt to technology used in this day and age. Can't do that on cloth walls. Adequate lighting, circulation, storage, flexible grouping areas for co-teaching and inclusive push-in services for other teachers who integrate into classrooms to meet student needs in our regular classrooms. At Fort River, I was a teacher of the deaf, and acoustics in a classroom were paramount in my mind for students with hearing impairments. At Wildwood, I was a first-grade teacher whose students were still learning letters and letter sounds who needed to be able to easily discriminate sounds to develop phonological skills for learning. Learning in a quad is less than effective. When one building feasibility study returned results that we couldn't put up walls because the HVAC system couldn't support the airflow in those spaces, they said, we can only have two rooms in those spaces, not four. Cloth walls were put up with a track. Those tracks became little tracks for rodents to run in. To combat noise pollution from one quad to another, some years later, the decision was made to install drywall at the top of those cloth ceilings. And while a slight improvement to being a sound barrier, we paid a price because the ventilation in the quad suffered and air quality issues got a grip on executive functioning skills and attention spans and health. So I'm one of those educators that signed that letter that Mrs. Fay just shared with you. I'm here to support you, perhaps implore the school committee actually to pursue funding for new school buildings. I ask you to lean on the educators in the district to help the community understand and to build consensus. Our students and educators deserve the learning and working conditions enable us to concentrate on our jobs and not be concerned that air, light, warmth, space, safety, and acoustical challenges. Thank you. Thank you very much. Deb Leonard. Hi, I'm Deb Leonard. I've been a Port River parent since 2006. And also came here with my mind around different issues to talk to about, but one of my ideas that has just kept coming back is the issue of how committed we are, excuse me, as a district to equity. And so I see that in this proposal and I see the bending and I see the need and I feel like it's a big step in the right direction. So that aside, thank you for your efforts. And the other thought that I had, which I would like to stress is the need as Dr. Morris did, that there are different people coming to the conversation at different points in time. So continuing to present a perspective, an overall perspective of where we've been, where we're going. And the particular task in front of us and what is not in front of us is something we're just gonna have to keep doing. We're gonna have to keep saying and asking you to just keep the train on the track. Thank you. Thank you. Kristen Riley. Hi, I've been a special education teacher at Wildwood Elementary School. This is my 21st year there. And I really just wanted to express that I've been in this building for a long time and I've watched it deteriorate a long time. And while when I first got there, it wasn't really conducive for learning for all the reasons that have been mentioned. I'm getting increasingly scared for my own health and for the health of everyone else who goes to that building every day. Mold, mildew, mice feces. I'm looking at the containment around the asbestos in the building and I'm wondering how long is it gonna hold up? It's really scary. We filled out surveys on our health and it was compared to other teachers' health across the state and we're significantly less healthy. We get more headaches, more colds, coughing, sore throats, all these things we're dealing with. And I just wonder, these little children, their bodies are developing. What's happening to them? What's happening to us? So really, there's a point at which I'm scared. I still have another 10 years and I'm like, can I do this? What's going to happen to my health? Am I even going to survive after I retire? Just because I don't know what this is all going to do to me. The building, it's really bad and our custodians are working their tails off to clean it for us. But they can't keep up with all the mold and the mildew and the feces. So that's really all I just wanted to say and I really, really, really hope we can come to some kind of consensus because this is really serious. If we can't get this in this year, how long is it going to be? I mean, how many more years are all these people going to be breathing stuff that's unhealthy? We saw that picture. Thank you. Thank you very much. That was the last name on the sign-up sheet, but if there's anyone else that wants to make a public comment, please feel free to do so and just come up to the mic and state your name. You'll have three minutes. Hi, my name is William Cazan, Bill Cazan. I think you got one of my emails in recent days. I think I would just want to address Dr. Morris. If the exercise here is to create consensus, I think, I mean, I was excited with the presentation, but I think that one of the big device of issues was three schools versus two schools and I don't think it was adequately addressed in your presentation. I think that the other device of issue was breaking out pre-K to first versus second through fifth and you did address that. But I think if you want to build consensus, you're going to have to address the issues that really split people in the past and it was a neighborhood school issue that was a big one of many, but a very big one I think. So I would just say that it's important for us to think about how we get to consensus in this process and not to present this one thing as the perfect solution but really allow people to come to that decision together. That's it. Thank you. Any other public comments? Please come up, Mike. My name is Janet McGowan. I had two kids that went through Fort River when it was probably 100 or 150 more kids. I think this is a great moment with the MSBA being a very interested partner and I watched Dr. Morris at this meeting last week and also on the town council and it seems like the question the MSBA wants to know is do you want to replace both buildings? And I think there's consensus on that. I haven't heard anyone say like, let's keep it, let's keep the open classroom. So I think there's a town-wide consensus on that and at the town council meeting, he said the MSBA also wanted to know how big. And as I understand it, small schools work better for kids, particularly kids at risk. I know my kids weren't at risk but that worked well for them to be in a school community where like kind of Mayberry, everybody knew your name kind of thing. And so I think that question and for kids at risk where your kids are struggling, a small school is a better community. And so I would support that and it could be a two-school model, it could be a three-school model. I think that's an issue that people could coalesce around 600 feels kind of big to me. I think the studies might suggest it might be harder for other struggling kids to hear in. But I don't think, I think the community could agree now like we want to replace both schools, we want smaller schools. As part of the MSBA process once we get in, we could be looking at two small schools, three small schools, and then compare it with the 600 model because you have three options. And so let's get into the process. Let's look at the evidence on what is best for the kids. We're building schools for 50 years. We have probably growth in our population. Let's build schools and have adequate play space for kids. Let's do that together. In terms of process, you need to build some kind of consensus. And I suggested in my email and now you can build a consensus that, yes, we want to replace these buildings. You don't have to keep talking about that. No one's arguing for that. But we want the best learning environments for the kids, particularly kids who struggle because in my 15 years on MS, we have not closed the achievement gap. We have not achieved that for so many groups and let's not build a school that's too big for them. It's going to work against them. So let's get together in the process and look at these options. Thank you. Thank you very much. And I want to say thank you. I really feel heard tonight and I'm very appreciative to the compromise that you've all shown. I feel like you've really, you're trying to meet a little bit of everyone's needs and to me this is the sweet spot and we can fine tune it later, possibly to make it smaller and maybe to appease the people that are tied to three sites that the third site could be used for something that's not irreversible so that if enrollment were to go up in the future, maybe it could be reused for a school. The other thing I wanted to encourage you to consider is this is potentially the consensus solution but to show it to the MSBA, I'm concerned how they want to see it if they want numbers from, you said you're going to do the survey during the feasibility process. I'm wondering if they needed some data before then to show that enough people in the town would actually vote for this at the ballot and perhaps you can get the information out town-wide in the next few weeks to let everyone know rather than just the presentations actually possibly do a mailing to the whole town and demonstrate what you're planning and then try to get some measure of consensus. I'm concerned if it's just 50 people showing up at a listening session that the MSBA might not find that sufficient but I really appreciate this. Thank you so much, I'm very happy. Thank you. Anyone else? Hi, I'm Nicky Effie, I'm the principal of the Wildwood School so there's a lot of consensus and that's what I'm hearing here. There's a consensus that there's a sense of urgency that both buildings need to be replaced. Consensus I think that has to be done now that's simultaneous versus sequential. So it's good. I think the next part as Mike's already laid out is like what's our core values? So what do we want to create? And then building consensus around that and I'm hearing as we've heard through the years that people appreciate the communities that we're creating at the school and I'm gonna quote my colleague over there, Mr. Shea who has said that we do that well and I think the previous redistricting where there were similar concerns and then we created fabulous communities in each of the schools demonstrates that we can do it and I think Mike laid out some aspects to me. I'm going, yeah, that's a great idea. The idea of creating the little communities within whether it's a larger school that these are the types of ideas that we as educators can do together and collaborate. So I'm leaving the hopeful because it really has to be done. I know people have talked about this but for me going into the building of Wildwood and seeing the amazing things that are happening and the young teachers that we have hired who are bringing their spirit to children every day they just deserve better. So I feel very optimistic today. Thank you. Any other comments? If not, we're gonna close public comment for tonight. Okay, so thank you all for coming. Really appreciate it. This is just really important for this entire process to hear your thoughts and to get your input and feedback on all of this and with that I'm gonna turn to the committee now for questions, comments, just to share your thinking on where we are right now. I'm gonna hold on bringing you up to speed, I think, on the conversations that both Ms. McDonald, Dr. Morris and I had around the listening sessions because I think it's probably more important just for this process, if that's okay, to go through what we've been talking about and hearing about tonight. We'll talk about that more five days from now. We'll be able to talk about, I'm sorry to interrupt but we have another meeting on Tuesday and that's on the agenda so we can talk about the engagement pieces. Yeah, but we were gonna preview tonight just to share with the committee. Absolutely, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Mr. Dunway. So thank you, Dr. Morris. I really appreciate the way in which you framed this. I appreciate the directness and the detail on the proposal. I think it shows the kind of leadership that I would expect from our superintendent at this moment. You're the leader of our school as you're not a divine right king dictator but you are the leader. And I think that means taking ownership for offering us a path forward to discuss whether we can get on board with that. So I appreciate that. So I do have kind of a long statement to I wanted to share. I'll hold off any thoughts about survey and engagement process until we get to that topic but I'm gonna share a lot of the positivity and enthusiasm from some of the speakers. But this is a meeting that I've been hoping we could have for the last two years. I think we had it as soon as we could but I think it took us two years to get here. There's been a lot of good work that's been done that this builds upon, not the least of which is the good work of the Fort River Feasibility Committee. A lot of information that we have to be able to get to this. So I won't bury the lead. I think your vision statement and proposed framework for consensus are both things that I can fully support. Really, the way I frame this entire problem of the buildings is it comes down to one core principle for me and that's that there is a clear and urgent need to address both of these buildings as soon as possible and everything flows from that. And it's part of the vision statement and it's part of the proposal. So I just wanna share some of the reasons about why that is and why I think this is a good framework for consensus as you mentioned the work framework. So in turn, I look at it in terms of there's three constraints that we're operating in that are kind of immovable things that we have to consider. And from that, logical possibilities follow the limit that scope of what's possible. So the first is what has been said a lot in the last couple of hours which is there's an educational urgency to address both of these buildings and you and the teachers have made this case repeatedly and consistently. So I won't repeat all the arguments but it's something that I fully agree with and that I think that as a public representative on school committee, I feel like I have a responsibility as well to collect all the information to look at things in a detailed way over a long period of time and come to that termination. So that for me is something that I include as well and that's really my only one inflexible, non-negotiable. When I look at it, I have a lot of opinions and preferences otherwise and things that I value but that's my one core non-negotiable that both buildings have to be addressed as soon as possible. So that's the first constraint. The second constraint is that we have to go through the MSBA. You know, I would certainly defer specific financial guidance to the town council that's absolutely their wheelhouse. I would not jump the gun on that but we have every indication from the town that this is the case and when I look at the costs from the feasibility committee and the capital needs of the town, it makes clear sense to me. So that's sort of the other constraint. And then the third constraint is that sequential MSBA projects one after the other would take longer and they could potentially take considerably longer. You know, setting aside for the moment of the additional financial costs of what the sequential projects would entail, you know, there are several time hurdles that every single one has to be jumped in order to execute and even in a best case scenario, right, it's the SOI acceptance that we know even if we have a strong consensus statement and everybody hopes that we get in, there's still no guarantee that we get in. There's the MSBA has funded constraints and then there's the feasibility study and building committee work that would have to go on. The two thirds bond authorization by the town council, the majority debt exclusion override vote by the public and then the building would have to be built and all the bills paid off and then the next year you start the SOI process for the second building and you go on and you know, so my best estimate when I look back to back projects in an absolute best case scenario and I'm not the town's most knowledgeable expert on the MSBA process, but I feel fairly well informed. The most lightning speed scenario is 10 years and that I think is really pushing it. I've heard it argued it might be even shorter than that and I can't personally see that, but that's fine because I don't think that's an argument we need to make because whether it's eight or nine or 10 or more that assumes best case scenario and we can't make that assumption because of the inherent risk of getting into the state of the metro. And I just think about the equity piece and we talk about equity tonight which is obviously a shared consensus value in the community. I can't imagine even if we went in eight years being at that moment of cutting the ribbon on the New Fort River in this happy moment with the balloons and juice boxes and press and a beautiful building and then at being at the New Fort River and having the Wildwood students and teachers ask us so when do we get our new building? When do we get reasonable facilities? And us having to honestly say we don't know we'll do the best we can, it will be years from now. That's just not a situation that I can endorse the possibility of. So when I think those three things together that has to be as soon as possible, we have to go MSBA and we can't do sequential projects. It's the first two points on your proposal there that one MSBA project and we know, correct me if I'm wrong, because this, I've heard different opinion but one MSBA project means one building, correct? That's clear direction from the MSBA. Yes, it's definitive. Right, and so, okay and so where does that leave us in terms of building consensus? So I want to acknowledge that accepting that a two building solution is simply not possible anymore given the educational urgency that we've talked about is hard to accept if you sincerely value and have advocated for a two building solution and as someone who did not advocate for that I want to publicly acknowledge I don't think that it was crazy. I don't think that it is that there are not good, valid educational reasons to want two buildings and I also want to acknowledge the legitimate frustration of those who have advocated for that solution but we did want to have this option and because we had one, if had the previous building project submitted a one K to six building then right now we would be talking about building the next one and so to ask acceptance of one MSBA project and one building solution now is asking for real compromise. It's asking people to give up something real that they value. This is actually my only sort of critique of your presentation is that we in your definition of definition of consensus use the word not everybody gets their favorite. I think that's a little lightly stated. I think what we're asking people is to let go of things they actually sincerely value for good honest reasons and so I want to acknowledge that. So given that I think someone could ask me okay if I'm inflexible on the urgency to address both buildings as soon as possible and that means one project, one building, what am I flexible on? And I've thought a lot about this over the last two years probably a little too much and I want to be very clear tonight that my clear public formal declaration is I am flexible on everything else and willing to compromise on everything else and that includes building size, that includes supporting whatever grade configuration the public expresses consensus on. If that's K to five or K to six, so be it. I'm not looking for a battle royale of camps of what you prefer but I could certainly support that grade configuration. I don't want to jump the gun too much about what follows after those first two constraints because the one project, one building are really the things that aren't preference options in my mind if we sort of accept the constraints. The other two, I want to hear what the public has to say about size and grade cohorts and grade configuration and whatnot but I'm absolutely willing to be flexible on any other aspect and I would encourage the rest of the community to consider expressing that as well and just to think about, we want small anecdote I wanted to share about what the sort of positive possibility this opens up is that, so you talked about maybe moving sixth grade to the middle school which is way far before the horse. We haven't talked about the educational visibility but let's say we do that, just using the current data that leaves us 907 K to five students to put somewhere and so Crocker Farm currently has 343 space for 343 students so that leaves 564 students to put into a new building. That's already significantly down in the 740 from the previous project and then of those 564, 240 like you mentioned in the example would be part of the dual language cohort which it's built into that program that they are bonded together, they see the same teachers, they go to the same specials and so that leaves in the rest of the building and say the three classrooms are so per grade, 324 students. So then you have three cohorts, right? You're 343, 324 and 240, those are small cohorts and then like you said, if it works out that we have two enrollment zones, if say the dual language program is all choice in, then that makes it much simpler to do the socioeconomic balance which was one of the side benefits of co-location. It makes it easier to reduce the number of kids that are bused in for special ed programs. Now of course, the devil's in the details, right? So we can't just say do hand waving about oh we value small schools and then you know and so you know, we need to have really good discussions. Once we get into the MSBA about what does this mean? What does this mean about what shared facilities can happen in that structure so that it feels like the small school experience like those students get to bond? But that's an exciting creative discussion we can have and we've already gotten many emails from excited members of the community with different ideas about what this means. So that's one big piece. The other big piece is I also wanna say that I don't make this kind of a commitment to a size cap and a grade configuration lightly. I was a very strong and vocal advocate for years for the educational value of the previous project. I believed in both the financial and the educational value of the co-located grade reconfigured building of 750 students and the early childhood education center that would have expanded pre-K and the educational value of increased teacher collaboration and solving forever the socioeconomic imbalance between our schools and never busing children with significant special needs out of their home district. I mean, and I just wanna add one little note on that just to drive home the point of what we're trying to do with compromise. Now I live in the Crocker Farm District and I have three kids and my oldest son who has significant special needs was Busta Wildwood. And now he got a wonderful education with amazing teachers as did my other kids at Crocker Farm, but he knew nobody at Wildwood and we did not feel a connection to parents at Wildwood. Not that they weren't nice, we just did not have that natural connection and all of my kids missed out on a major childhood opportunity that most families have to bond with each other because they went to different schools. That was a real and a definite loss to my family. So the benefits of that past project are real to me. I still value them, but I'm willing to give that up as a compromise to achieve consensus because I believe that the core social equity value should bind our community is that there's a clear educational urgency to address both of these buildings. And so to that I also want to acknowledge that it's hard to let go of that past project design if you did personally value and advocate for that previous project. But if you accept the demonstrating broad consensus now to get over this hurdle that the MSBA says we have to get over is necessary, then it's simply not possible anymore to advocate for that past project. And knowing the countless hours that people put into that project, all the efforts that went into that, I'm sorry that that's where we're at, but that's where we're at and that's the reality. And I want to acknowledge the same legitimate frustration that those individuals could express that we had an opportunity that had we passed that past project, we would be moving into that school this fall and we would be done. And so we are asking people who supported that to give up something real that they value in this compromise in order to achieve this greater shared value of getting these buildings done as soon as possible. So, I think this compromise that we're offering, whether it's the specific details that you propose or something else, this broad consensus, it works both ways, I think that we're asking both sides to give up something of real value to come together. It's asking a lot. So, just the final thought I want to leave people with and really asking the public is to take a good look at this, look at, review the slides tomorrow morning when they're posted, think it over, really think about it, talk to each other and then give us your sincere feedback with all the different mechanisms that the chair will go over and then we'll discuss because we really do want to hear everyone's honest feedback to make sure that this is reflective of the community's core consensus and reach out to us too. This is a time, we're busy with the things as well, where the superintendent, the school committee should be available to you. So, we'll be as public and accessible as possible, but you should feel free to reach out to us individually and I'm personally willing to meet with any individual or group who just wants to chat this out. Just two last thoughts about optimism on this and I'm so happy to hear the hope and enthusiasm from people from both sides of the past project expressing tonight is that I'll admit to lurking online occasionally and on the Facebook chats about topics, this particular topic in the various groups and I've been pleasantly surprised just recently to see productive conversation from members, from the different past groups talking about ways that we could solve this problem. Such a stark contrast to what was happening during the height of the past pitched battles as we were going vote to vote to vote and I think that that kind of dialogue is that's the fundamental difference. This is not a zero-sum game and how can we identify our shared consensus and I look forward to the opportunity, the possibility and I'm encouraged by the public comments tonight. This is a realistic possibility that we could see in the coming weeks people coming in this microphone or sending letters to the editor or at the listening sessions coming from both sides together to express their mutual support. I mean, what, after all. I'm sorry to, but I just wanna make sure that we get a chance to get the other committee members also to, I'm so sorry to just cut short, but. I'm less than a minute, but I don't feel, I actually, I'm gonna say no, I don't feel sorry for going on because I've waited two years for the first time. I can tell, yes. And I'm really excited for us to move forward. So the only other thing is, yeah, just what a wonderful thing that would be for our community. I'll stop there. Thank you. Thank you. Are there any other comments or questions from the committee? Ms. Bitzer? So I spent this morning kind of getting, watching the three hour, watching on Amherst Media, the three hour meeting that I missed last week because I had a sick family member and I've been receiving everybody's emails and I just wanna say that I have been paying attention even though I haven't physically, wasn't here last week. And I had a whole host of responses and then I got Mike's presentation a little bit earlier and that kind of revised everything I was going to say in a way that I think happened to a lot of people who were here tonight and also were hearing Mike's presentation for the first time. And I think what I'd like to say is just that I'd echo a lot of what Peter just said and I don't think it's a mystery to anybody but I was a supporter of the co-located schools, the project that we had and it's the first time in a long time that I really felt optimistic about moving forward with new schools because I feel the urgency, it's the reason I ran for school committee and I've got kids at Wildwood and I have also an alum of Parker Farms. I have deep connection to these schools, like everybody in this room and I'm finally feeling optimistic in a way I hadn't in a really, really long time. So I wanna say thank you to, Superintendent's not here, but also to everybody in this room for coming and just dedicating themselves to this process because we're all really tired, I think, of dealing with this and wanna see progress and I'm optimistic but I'm also cautiously so just because this is the very, very beginning, we haven't even gotten a positive response on our statement of interest but at least we're, I think, making progress and I wanna make sure that we continue to have positive movement forward. So, and I think part of the reason I'm feeling optimistic is I think we're finally open and starting to communicate about how people felt about the past project in a way that hasn't happened openly in the past, at least not in a public setting like this. So I think it's important that we continue to move forward but I think part of the reason we're moving forward is because we did take the time to kind of look back and have some honest conversations about what it means to be either letting go of the potential of having three separate sites or letting go of the idea of having a pre-K through first and a two through six model. So I think this proposal demonstrates compromise and I think it's gonna be important as we move forward that we keep in mind that there are a lot of people who are gonna be involved in this process if we're gonna be successful. So after, hopefully we get a successful statement of interest and there are all these other steps we need to go through. So I just wanna make sure we continue to think about how we're gonna engage and I have comments on that and it sounded like you guys wanted to hold off on talking about engagement. I am also, I have a eight week old at home who I'd like to, this is my first time out really without her except for at least lengthy time out. So I may have to leave early so do you have a sense of when we're gonna talk about the engagement process? I was hoping to just get comments from the committee and immediate reactions to what was just discussed. Okay, so then we can go into process. And then I do have some thoughts on process, so. Great. Okay. That's my talent here. Yeah. Well, I'll keep it short. And I actually have been, my optimism has actually been building over time even sort of reading all of the email that we've been inundated with and the conversations that I've been having with community members. And so I'm not even sure I would put cautiously because I think one of the things that I've noted in all of it is we all want high quality learning environments. That's not a debate anymore. I don't think that's, somebody else said we have consensus on that, that we all want that I think what's become more clear over this school year is the urgency of that. And I have sensed from all of the communications that I've been having that we've been hearing here is that there is alignment and agreement on that. And I find that actually inspiring and that's a great foundation for us to build and move forward. And despite being close to this and hearing all of the past presentations here, seeing your presentation, Mr. Superintendent was just really, really inspiring. And I wrote to you, I was like, wow, that was just reading it even without your voiceover was just reinforce that sense of optimism that we can get there and we can do this. And I think for me, like Carrie, many of you know that I was an advocate for the prior project. And I like the concept of bending a bit because for some people, compromise isn't a bad word or an evil word and bending sounds like something that we all can do and can all do pretty easily. And what I love about the proposal and also the conversations that we've been having is it really focuses on that high quality learning environment for all of our kids regardless of the address. And it addresses this urgency of getting it right soon and getting all of our kids there within the next five to six or seven years. And that it meets the needs of being fiscally responsible for our town given regardless of all the other capital projects that are on our plate, that it is something that I think we can stand behind and from a fiscal perspective as well. So I am hopeful, I'm optimistic and frankly, I'm inspired. So I do have comments on the process too, but I will hope that. Okay, thank you. I have no idea what comments I have on process until we get there. Although I do think that other people do, so I thought I'd say I don't. But I don't. With the exception that I do think the question that came up earlier about how do we demonstrate, it's an interesting question about what do we do use to document or demonstrate to the MSBA that there is broad consensus? That's, I mean, it is an interesting question and you may have ideas on how to do that. I don't know. So I think what is it, almost a month ago we talked about this first and at the time being I said my belief that, and I think deepening with all the experience we've had over the last couple of years of learning more about the building conditions and Wildwood River, that I felt strongly and urgently that we needed to deal with both buildings at once. Obviously still believe that and I think that core approach that's saying, which one of the things that you didn't dwell upon, superintendent, is that at the bottom of a number of these slides, you talked about what was in the slide, you reflected on it, but then you also reflected back that you understood that there were essentially important either trade-offs or prioritization or a hierarchy of values that you were wrestling with and trying to wrestle with sensitively and appropriately for the community, but that you were putting that high quality with educationally sound, but also safe and appropriate learning environment for students and staff at Wildwood River at the top of that list and saying, look, if this is something that I feel is going to be a barrier to getting that done, then I'm going to find a way to either shape something that bends essentially. And to me, that core principle is number one for me, number one, number two, and number three. I absolutely firmly believe we need to do that. I think the thing is, and this is something that I've been trying to test out for a while and listening actively, also to people who've rung me up as well as also all the emails I've gotten, is what are the core principles that were attracted to or that were based or basing our views upon? And to me, I still view even the proposal you put forward as offering more opportunities for consensus, more opportunities for continued dialogue and creativity that don't actually require, so on the face of things, the point I'm getting, on the face of things, this compromise unquestionably is asking people to give up positions that they've held before, particularly for basing it on the previous project. When I listen to people and think about what their core principles are, what's important to them, what are they bringing to the table? I actually do not think that this approach is asking people to give up those core values. And so one of the most important things to do is to be able to articulate those values and to be able to work creatively together in ways that improve the quality of a future project. So what do we mean by that? I mean, one, I think we've said this before, others have said reflected in the public in here that if you don't believe we need to fix both Wildwood and Fort River and do so as soon as possible, then that's hard, right? That's a really hard one to find agreement on, but there does appear to be broad agreement that that's true. If you do believe that, then I don't really care if we get into MSBA twice in 10 years or 15 years. The bottom line is that we can solve the problem now, we should try to solve the problem now because we've agreed that we need to fix the buildings, replace them, whatever we need to do. So that's one. Two, in the principles you laid out, I wanna highlight and re-emphasize a couple of them. You talked about how because the school committee is already voted to adopt and there's been significant planning on the part of the superintendent and your staff and principles for dual language program. And so this isn't hypothetical, it's something we're doing. That means there's already structurally and programmatically built into a new single building, a learning community that's effectively shaped in ways that we could also shape the facility to do. I think Principal Yatig did a really nice job earlier of talking about how this notion of building and fostering community isn't something new to us. It's also something that's gonna be a new process this fall as the dual language school starts, but it's something our district has faced before. What, why is that important? It's important because at core, the district educational leadership, and I believe also the school committee, would embrace the idea, and we haven't done it officially, so I'm trying to get ahead of the potential though or something, but we would embrace the idea that we value coherent, integral, child-centered learning communities. That the idea that you have a child-centered space that's supportive of the staff that creates a positive environment for bringing in parents, and parents of all backgrounds and circumstances, is in fact a core principle that we already agree to and wanna do. And in this concept, you already have learning communities established or identified which allow you to buy their sort of DNA, their structure and program, to build that coherent, smaller learning community. Two, you're described earlier, your experience looking at different schools. One of the things that, I heard a story the other day about, I don't know if any of you have been to children's hospitals, but I was hearing a story the other day about how hospitals, even for children, are frequently designed in such a way that they're really more centered on the nurses and doctors and administrators and other people, the receptionists and other important EMTs and other important people that go into the building. And so, a number of years ago, the Packard Family Foundation was trying to develop a new children's hospital out in California. But one of the things that the, Lucille Packard, the chair of the, co-chair of the foundation, wanted to do is say, look, it's not good enough to say you're child centered programmatically. What's important to do is to figure out how do you integrate that, not only programmatically, but also in terms of design into every aspect of the building design, something echoed actually earlier by one of her first speakers. And there are two things about this, and I won't belabor it. One of them is that they sort of bird-dogged and were very creative about elements that could create in many ways the kinds of things Dr. Morse is talking about, around what it would mean to have a child-centric environment and scaled in ways that were friendly and open to children. Another thing I think would be important to do is do the same thing with families, families of different backgrounds so that they have an approachable and welcoming environment. The second point of the story though, which I thought was really critical and I took away from it, was that you had the chair of this foundation who was putting a lot of money to do it, who was absolutely committed to the value of creating both in terms of design and programming, a child-friendly, child-centered learning community. In every aspect of the design, and come hell or high, what are they were gonna do it? To put it more bluntly than was meant to be. And to me, what I want to talk about doing and what I want to hear from people is how we do that in this project. Why? Because I think the comments that have been made publicly about the scale and appropriateness of a learning environment in schools for kids is entirely appropriate, entirely valid. I mean, actually I'm sorry, because you've been saying these kinds of things like, I believe your opinion is valued, I think. I'm saying I agree with you. I agree with you completely. And so what we can do as a school committee, and what we can do as a district, as a superintendent can do, is we can actually, essentially more formalize a commitment that we want to work actively with you to shape what that design of that building looks like in a way that realizes a design that's family, that's neighborhood-friendly, family-friendly, child-friendly, as well as workable for the staff. I believe that can be done. I think there are more creative approaches one can do that if it followed could surprise people. Now, why do I say that also? As people have heard this before, so it's boring. But I went to Fort River as a kid, actually went to Wildland in Fort River. That's for second grade and then the rest of it Fort River. So I know both buildings. And my mom taught in Fort River for a number of years back when it was for a dozen, 14 years. Anyways, so I'm familiar with the buildings. The buildings were designed for, I think, 800 kids. If you take into account new federal regulations around sides of special needs spaces and other spaces, it probably has around a capacity of somewhere 700 plus now, right? The most, I think, has been like 630, 640. That's the most it's been, but its capacity is a little slower. It's pretty packed. 630 then, still 630. But there's also, it's not the most efficient use of space. It's terribly inefficient. Exactly. And so the point I'm getting at about this is that, and I get people who told me before, it's like, I'm not saying I love the building. I'm saying I love my school. Well, we're talking about building a building, right? And people have said that they've found elements of the existing experience within Wildland and Fort River that they cherish, that they love, right? So the point, and that's great. That's true. So my point I'm getting at is if you're scared to give up what you have now and yet the reality is what you have now is a building that's scaled at the size of 700 kids or something like that, then we could probably create an even more humane, lovable, and workable space for kids. It's going to feel really good. It's programmatically going to work. And probably the scale of the building will be smaller than it is now in practical effect. So it's not going to be some monstrosity. But the core point I want to end with, because I know I'm very curious to think about process and how we engage people, is they're what we're asking is on there, which I agree with completely. And I think it does give up things that different people are in favor of. But the reason I went through that slightly long conversation that I went to just a moment ago is I was trying to go through just how many things still need to be decided and just how you can, in fact, anyone, whether it's on the social equity side and thinking about redistricting, whether it's on the allocation of special ed programming, or whether it's the design and the feel or the idling time of buses or something like that. There are a million things that we can actually work on together in which the concerns you bring to the table are not only valid but welcome. There are also things that we can't decide until later, most of them. So in many ways, what people can do, I'm hoping, is embrace a yes. And yes, I realize people are giving up some things, but really it's a yes that feels awfully good in terms of the outcomes that we can have for our students and our families and our staff. It's something we can achieve in the next few years. So I'm excited about it because I think the creative opportunities that we have to create a world-class learning environment for all of our children and a world-class place for us teachers and staff to work is right in front of us. And it's something we all get to do together. Thank you. So I'm just going to say a couple of words as well, just in response to Dr. Morris and your proposal. I really appreciate the effort that you've put into listening to the community here. And I think that your ability to capture so many different perspectives and voices into something that, as you said before, is about parameters and not about detail. It's about establishing parameters. What can we get behind? And I actually, to Mr. Akajima's last point, had just written down over here, this is our opportunity to say yes to something. It's our opportunity to say yes to the things that we agree on. And I can't imagine any person being against any of the goals that you laid out previously. And I know that those are some of the goals that the Fort River Building Committee had also worked with, which are fantastic. But quite frankly, they've pre-existed even the Fort River Feasibility Study Building Committee. I think these are goals that we've been articulating for a very long time, but the need for natural light-filled environment, for educationally sound buildings that actually help people or inspire them to learn, really. For healthy environments that our staff and our educators and our students can go to on a regular basis, and that feel welcoming, and that feel like a place that they can actually be in that are play-filled and fun. These are all things that we have been talking about for a very long time, which are actually sort of the genesis of even the previous project, but that have continued through all of our conversations as that underlying wave, if you will, or ripple underneath everything. And I think that this is an opportunity for us to say yes to something and to move forward together. Thinking about this optimistically and with hope. And so I can absolutely embrace this proposal as it's put forth. And I think there are gonna be a lot of details that we will work out. And I think that the community will have a very big role to play in figuring out all of those details. And as you said before, I think articulating that we will have a feasibility study, assuming that we were able to get into the MSB8 process, right? Into that pipeline, that there is a feasibility study that actually will be a formal part of that process and a feasibility committee will be formed. But I think that one of the things that I've taken away from all of the conversations that we've been having with the community these past few weeks is the need to feel heard and the need to feel that they are invited into that conversation very early on, right? And that it's not just something that gets tacked on at the end where people feel like a sort of a plow is moving forward and they're getting kind of pushed aside. But I think there is an opportunity here for us to invite them into that conversation to say yes to them too early on and to think about all the different ways that we can be engaging them. And thinking to this, what we've gone through now here in our community with the charter process and how we have now a mechanism in place for regular community input and solicitation of feedback, that I think we can take advantage of that and we can use that to bring in those conversations when the time is right. And so this feels to me like just the right kind of detail that I hope we can get behind. As you said, consensus is not unanimity. It doesn't mean that we're all gonna agree on every single aspect of any future project. But it means that, again, we're saying yes to those parameters and that we're able to at least get behind these central concepts. And I think the majority of us can get there and as Mr. Yaffe had said, it sounds like a yes already. So I'm excited about that. I know there's a lot of work that we have still ahead of us in these next few weeks. And with that, I think maybe we can get to process. We can start talking through some of the conversations. So I invite Ms. McDonald and Dr. Morris to jump in. But the one thing that we wanted to bring to the committee was we were charged by the committee at our last meeting to kind of huddle and think about what the forum's listing sessions might be like and really try to come up with something to bring back to the committee for discussion and for approval. So as a reminder, Dr. Morris had suggested nine sessions overall, three of which would be for staff and educators, three which would be for parents and caregivers in the district and the community, and then three sort of for the much broader at-large community, right, interested voters. And then I think the question that we've also been grappling with is how to extend beyond those listening sessions. How do we get more voices involved in the mix without getting bogged down in details or starting to go down rabbit holes that we're not quite ready to deal with yet but still to have that conversation and invite that feedback and input into this thinking, into this process and ultimately to show that there is consensus, right? So the conversation that we started having was about what these listening sessions might be like and we had heard from the committee, from several members of the committee, an interest in having facilitated discussions and facilitated conversations. So we have reached out to a couple of firms and we have one proposal actually in hand which we've shared, we'll be sharing anyway very soon and that will be for discussion at Tuesday's meeting. But I think that given the interest that we would have in these listening sessions, having a facilitator to help lead those conversations and maintain that feeling of neutrality is extremely important. And our challenge was to see if we might be able to do something like that within the timeline that we have laid out for ourselves which is not a lot of time. I mean, typically for these kinds of listening sessions you need time to both decide, sort of create the format and the template for the actual discussion and then to promote it and push it out into the community and then to actually hold the sessions and if there's snow days or anything like that that ends up delaying it even more and then to have the sessions and synthesize the information that comes back, right? And report it back to the community in a way that is articulate and clear but actually makes it feel like it was a real process and that the people were actually heard and that those ideas were captured. So I think we're gonna hear more about that on Tuesday again. One of the other things that we were talking about which Dr. Morris actually mentioned in the bullet points over here was in thinking about how to do that wider outreach was to use the networks that currently exist in the community. And so those networks are email networks, they're social media, they're a lot of different ways and share Dr. Morris's proposal, whatever that would be, now we have one, share that out via a tape segment of some kind. So that's what that refers to, the Amherst media segment. So it's basically Dr. Morris presenting on tape what we just heard tonight and then providing that link along with an email message and the PowerPoint presentation to a much wider group of community members. So that allows people the chance to review the document, to think about it and talk about it with their family and friends. If they can attend the listening sessions, they can actually provide feedback. We would create a very simple little form that allows them to basically express their support for this proposal if there's any other additional ideas that they might have. Also include that in there. And if they don't like it, they can also say that too, right? I mean, that's the whole point of that. And that we would push it out using every single platform that we can. So that is an attempt again to try to capture some of those voices that we typically wouldn't be able to capture otherwise. Is there anything that either of you would wanna add to that piece right now? No, it's a great summary. Okay, good. And so I think that that's kind of where our thinking is right now, again, very cognizant of the fact that it's a legitimate concern, right? That listening sessions only capture a small amount of voices, right? Even if we manage to get 100 people at each one of those sessions, that's 600 folks, which is a lot of people. It's still not the several thousand that we would expect to be interested in something like this. We're reading the paper on a regular basis and all of that. So it's really just using as many different communications as we can to make sure that people are hearing about this. And then also reaching out to the PGOs, so all of the other things that were listed on there. So I'm gonna pause there, because I know the committee members said that they have some thoughts on process and some questions. Ms. McDonald. Did you wanna mention about translation? Oh, yes. So we had talked about translation at the sessions and also just in the materials that are being sent out. And so I think Dr. Morris felt pretty confident, right? That given the amount of translation that is typically done at a lot of the school-led functions and events, that we can actually get translations for the materials, for the emails and all of that, which makes me very happy just to be able to share that out with a much broader community that is not necessarily English or even Spanish speaking. So any thoughts? Questions? Ms. Spitzer, I think you had mentioned before. So one of the things that I think all of us have been hearing really loudly is this desire for a survey. And so I wanted to clarify, and I think you've done that somewhat, but this feedback requested electronically to increase access. One way to interpret that might be a survey. I don't know. It sounded like potentially, so this feedback would be directly tied to a circulation of the slides and the YouTube link or whatever of you presenting this. So it seems like how we do that feedback is gonna be really important. And so who is the firm that you've, so it sounds like you've reached out to a firm to facilitate these feedback and listening sessions? So are we gonna, who's gonna be creating this feedback instrument for lack of a better word? And if I could get some more clarity on that, because just because it's been coming out really loudly, that people are not 100% satisfied with just having a listening session. And I hear that, but I also think that however we collect data, potentially this could be quantitative data. That's where I'm asking for this clarification. It's really important just to understand who and what we're gonna be asking. Yeah, so we talked quite a bit about that. And I think surveys take many different forms. And I think the concern that I know I've had, and I think Dr. Morris and Ms. McDonald to share not to speak for you guys, but is that surveys are typically a standalone kind of tool, right? And can be, unless they're done right, we don't have a lot of time to do it right. And we don't have experts, survey experts kind of sitting here on this committee that can actually craft a survey. I've done it before, not that I've... Well, great, I have two, but I don't consider myself a survey expert, right? But maybe you have more experience, I don't know. In any case, I mean, I think, given just what we're functioning with, with limited capacity, that the idea is that we don't try to create something that will become the definitive tool that ends up trying to collect feedback in a way that may or may not hit the mark, right? So the idea is just to serve as a prompt for folks to be able to let them know that this is happening, A, B, that there is an opportunity for input and feedback on the proposals that Dr. Morris has been putting together and to hear any thoughts that they may have related to that. But it's not a series of questions that go through a whole list of possible details or configurations or ideas that then, given the lack of context and the lack of information that people might have right now, could be more confusing unless done really, really well, right? Yeah, and I'll just build on that too. Because I think the key thing is more about the phase of where we're at, right? So thinking about the, I can't remember which side it was, Dr. Morris, but it was, we're talking about, when we get into the MSBA process, when we start the feasibility study, that's when we will be spending a lot of time on surveys and deep, deep engagement. Right now, we're at sort of, if you think about, from a research methodology, which I've done a lot of consumer research and exactly this type of project, we're talking about sort of what might be called a qual quant, right? So it's qualitative feedback that we're looking for. We're not looking for sort of the quantitative type feedback that you would get through a survey. And it really, when a lot of, at least the folks that I've been talking to, talking about the survey, the desire really is to ensure that we're hearing from a broad swap of the community. It's not necessarily, some people, yes it is, but it's not necessarily to try to get like 60% say this or 43% don't agree. It's really to make sure that we are hearing from as many people as we can, and not just the people that are able to show up and give two hours or an hour and a half of their time to attend a listening session. So that's the focus of sort of how we came and proposed this approach to it. The questions haven't been devised and I would imagine that we would ask for some support from the facilitator to help us design that. It would be qualitative. Well, I guess all I wanna say is that I agree that we have too short a timeframe to do a survey well. I also hear the desire in the community to make sure that we are having an alternative method of engagement. So I'm happy with the outline. I don't wanna say that I think we should do a survey right now. I think we do maybe wanna say and it looks like you are doing that in the statement of interest that we will be engaging in some sort of outreach through a survey methodology. And maybe we should also say that not only, I mean, if we're calling out the survey, I'm assuming that's in response to the community is asking for a survey. But I think we should also, if we're gonna commit to some sort of process of engagement of the community survey, we should, maybe we don't need to say it explicitly, but we should be saying explicitly, I think, is that qualitative data and listening sessions or whatever we wanna do to get that qualitative data should also be there. Cause I don't, I mean, one of my kind of reactions when people are asking that we should do the survey is that I think we need both methods. We need the qualitative and the quantitative. And so calling out the quantitative here, but we should probably also call out the qualitative ways that we're gonna seek engagement with the community. That's a good point. So for moving forward, I support these listening sessions. And one thing I am wondering is if we're asking for this feedback when we do the, sorry, when we share this electronically, I think we should also be collecting feedback in a written way or some way at the listening sessions too. So especially for engaging with the facilitator, then we're gonna have the, hopefully, the ability to do that and delegate that task to somebody. And I think it would be important that we don't just count how many people show up at those sessions, but if we can have some way of gauging their support or lack of support for what's being outlined in this proposal. Cause I think that could go a long way towards demonstrating to the MSBA our consensus building. Thank you. Mr. Dumlin? So yeah, I like the general concept of utilizing the, for lack of a better word, the loose confederation of social networks that are all across town. And you know, I mean, if the level of enthusiasm and positivity that we heard from public comment is any rough indication, I think it won't be hard to get people excited about sharing this. I do like the idea of having some sort of dedicated prompt feedback because I do agree that is the core principle that I hear coming and I agree with this, you know, it's a really hard problem to solve. How do you get full feedback from everybody? It's difficult, particularly given the timeframe, but given the stage that we're at where we don't need the like, you know, 57 point survey, I think that makes sense that exactly how that's done. I'm not sure devil's in the details a little bit there, but you know, some sort of, you know, here's the link to one or a very small number of open-ended sort of questions. I think continually, and a couple of public commenters made this point, but one of our biggest roles and tasks is to endlessly repeat until we're boring ourselves the background information that sort of constrains what we're deciding about, because I think the most difficult thing to articulate is that any person you just walk up to the street on who's intelligent enough to understand you is what we're not asking for and what we are asking for. Right, it's like, oh, we're talking about buildings? Oh, I want this and I want, oh, I'm not, I'm against six to the middle school or, you know, this kind of art room and those things are great, we're just not there yet. And once you start talking about MSBA and feasibility for, you know, it can get wonky. So I just worry about that a little bit in terms, but you know, as long as we are articulating the questions as well as we can, we might, you know, if we collect that feedback, that's good feedback, you know, we can shelve it, we can hold on to it, right? And say like, oh, hey, we got a lot of feedback about how the playground should be designed. That's awesome, which is not gonna be part of the statement of interest consensus statement, but we can utilize that. So yeah, so I think reaching out to the PGOs is more way to do that. I also thought, you know, when we're at the point, whether it's either the superintendent or the school committee or combined, asking the Amherst Bulletin if we can write a column, this is like, I think, a perfect opportunity for that. Stan Rosenberg just started up his byline engagement and talking to people about things. This is certainly a major thing that's going on in town. I think, sure, he would love to talk to the superintendent about that, if that's an opportunity. The finding when is an appropriate time, given their other commitments that the town councilors might want to engage and know that, I know they have their own sort of district sort of outreach things and they've already reached out, I think, to asking us to, you know, what they can do to help, so I think that would be, they're obviously a key constituent in terms of the number of the social networks. So yeah, I think that's, I have an agreement with that, all the spirit of what everybody has said. Great, thank you. Dr. Morris? So just to jump in on the MSPA side, I mean, I did share after we had our conversation this week, the three of us. You know, the loose outline of what we were thinking about and they felt like that was, from their perspective, a good plan of gathering community input and feedback that they will always care about elected officials votes and you know, and then so this is one of the two bodies that votes on it and I want to be conscious that there's another whole body that isn't here tonight that, you know, will have to consider this. And they also wanted, you know, they spoke with the informal leaders in the community that people weren't necessarily elected officials but are highly engaged in this process and making sure that there was support on multiple sides because, you know, they've experienced with us but there was a project that was, that wasn't the case. But, you know, describing the kind of output and feedback that this plan that you describe very particularly, they said, no, that's exactly the type of kind of model and process that would give them confidence, you know, if there is consensus, which we don't know, but if there is consensus that'd be though a way to show that and they really liked the idea of external facilitator leading that, they found that to be very consistent with MSBA's kind of focus on neutrality that it wouldn't be necessarily be run by someone with a, you know, the expression of skin in the game or, you know, things like that, that, you know, showed an extra step that they responded very positively to, so I thought that'd just be a relevant piece of information to share. But I apologize, I'm occasionally taking breaks because I'm not feeling well, so I'll head out and get back in, so, yeah. So I think that it brings to me, you know, to my mind the question of town council because I think, you know, we definitely have had an outreach from counselors. I've had a couple of conversations with a few different counselors and there's definitely an interest and energy there to, you know, to bring this out to their districts and to get, to provide support in any way that they can to make sure that we're hearing from as many different folks as possible. And so I think the question, you know, for us, my thinking at this point is because we have these three, you know, community-wide, we've got the three for parent and caregivers, which, you know, we haven't quite figured out where those would be, but we have the three more community-wide sessions that might be a great opportunity. It's not five districts, you know, but maybe it's, you know, we try to find three that are more central that will most likely to be able to get people to because of facilities that are there or whatever. And then invite all five districts to come out and, you know, attend one of these sessions. That might be a good way to get the town council involved. I think also at a certain point, as Dr. Morris mentioned, the town council will have to vote on this. And so presenting information to them that helps them understand, you know, kind of what our process looks like and what we're thinking. And this question about consensus for this application, because I'm sure they're going to want to hear this too, right, that the community is actually, you know, more or less in agreement with the parameters that have been outlined before they're willing to endorse an application, understanding that, you know, the MSBA may reject it outright if, you know, if it doesn't feel like it's coming from the community. So, Mr. Demling? Yeah, so I'm glad you brought the town council up and it's great to hear the, so I've heard this as well. It's just the enthusiasm. What can we do to help? Which is pretty amazing, given there are other responsibilities that they have to go out now. So I really appreciate that. But they're brand new. But they're brand new. Exactly. They'll learn. I'm wondering if the, you know, since the superintendent presenting this presentation articulates so many of the questions clearly, I mean, it's positively received this evening. I'm wondering if at a date as soon as feasible, the superintendent presenting this to the town council would be, you know, getting on their agenda in order to do that, I think would be good just from an educational perspective. In honoring the fact that we see them as key stakeholders, we want to get them in the loop as soon as possible, not just to sign off on the end product. Good timing, Dr. Morris. Yeah. I'm not sure it's working, by the way. I was like, I wonder if I'd like to go outside. Yeah, I was just, we were talking about town council integration. No, no, he heard. Okay. Yeah. So, Mr. Bachman and I, the town manager, we're in communication this afternoon, and I think the plan is for Mr. Doniz, the chair of the town council, the town manager and myself to get together in short order, relatively short order, and try to map out what that might look like, and then, you know, kind of superimpose that on school committee. You know, I had that kind of rough calendar that I put out and I emphasized, perhaps overemphasized the italics on the word town council, but I think the four of us need to get our heads together and think about what the right timing is from their perspective, because I'll be honest, I've met with them once, it was a good meeting, but I don't know what else is on their plate, and we want to make sure we're slotting it in time where they have enough time to deeply consider it, and so that's, I think, the next step on that, if you would agree. Yeah, I think so. So, could you have any comments, or? I want to hear more details. And we said you have a proposal that we're going to have more of you next week. I mean, to me, a lot of guys, I mean, I guess everyone's supposed to stay with or they like the idea. I like what we're proposing to do. We might have been obvious. I don't have to, I know, it might have been obvious, but to me, also, getting into the details of, for example, the proposal that the facilitator has or how they're starting to shape their view of how they can best facilitate the meetings, what kind of, how they're framing that discussion, what kind of information they're looking for, or, you know, from the audience. And I recognize on one level, we want to hear what anyone has to offer, but on another level, the sessions should be shaped in a way that not only reinforce the history information and goals as we described earlier, but should literally say, if we're looking for feedback, for example, on some of the core principles that are here, or if we want to see whether people agree with them, whether they would add to them or whatever, then, you know, just hearing how that's going to be done and how the information's going to be collected out of that would, I think, be very valuable. And then I think the same thing for any kind of electronic instrument. I think it's just, it's helpful to start seeing it in more specifics what the thinking is. Obviously, not necessarily the instrument. And, you know, as I've said earlier, I think to me, if there's a consensus to be forged, it comes to me in two parts. One, I think, and I guess we're open, obviously, to feedback and changes, but to me, some of the trade-offs that were built into the superintendent's presentation are, I think, actually intrinsic, not, to me, they're intrinsic. And I don't want to pick on them because it'll belabor it. So to me, the question is, can people buy into the framework? And then the second thing for me is what I talked about earlier, but I probably just went on too long so I was not as focused as it should have been, is what kind of educational principles people are valuing? And I say that because I think that what I would love to see us get good information about, what I'd love to see us be able to ratify together with the town council is a commitment to the set of those shared educational principles that could then be imbued within the mission of the feasibility committee, in which, as we said, there are a million details and variations in creative thoughts that'll be worked out at that point. But I think at the level of those educational principles and values, that's where I think we can find consensus. And I think, by the way, I genuinely believe we can. But to me, that point is the framing of how we engage people, what we're asking for, and how we document it that becomes critical to that outcome in my view. So I like Mr. Nakadima's recommendation to sort of frame it like that. I kind of see the superintendent's vision statement slide as kind of like the first rough draft of that. And in terms of where like, if we're thinking of like what the final product is, like on the consensus document dot doc x, like what is actually on this page? The first sentence I'm sort of thinking of is the vision statement. And then the set, so it's like, what do you, those are the values, right? What's driving you? And then the second is are the articulated points. Okay, what does this then mean that you have agreed to? Applying those values to the constraints that we have in the agreements. So I like that combination. The other thing I think about in terms of like the end product, so obviously voted on and just formally by the school committee and the town council. In terms of, you know, other informal leaders and key stakeholders, I mean, I think we have a pretty good idea of like who those people are. I think I would want to, we could talk about this a little more, but like open it up to anybody who wanted to sort of sign on to it, right? Obviously, you know, we would certainly hope that those who had advocated and for or against past possibilities would want to weigh in and then articulate, you know, in order to share with the MSBA, you know, I was part of this group or whatever. But also anybody else who wanted to hold in, you know, I don't see any harm in opening it up to sort of a general kind of a petition-y sort of sense. I was gonna ask her if you were talking about a petition. Yeah, it is kind of like that. Otherwise, I mean, we have to decide, do we not let people sign on to it if they happily would? And or does that open up a can of worms where if we only get, you know, 150 people signing on to it, that that indicates some low percentage, right? You know, so I guess it's, what's the most effective communication in the MSBA? That's right, Jim. It's funny, at the end you said exactly where my thinking was going. I think getting letters from folks or some other means of people saying, whether they're part of some previous effort or not, saying, I like this or even the Dr. Morris' point earlier, I basically agree with that. In other words, I'm not saying I commit to everything, but I basically agree with it. I think that's great and we should welcome that. I think the funny thing is about a petition is it's in for a penny, in for a pound. I mean, if you're gonna bother trying to get 50 signatures, then you've gotta try to put in an effort to get like 5,000, right? Because otherwise it doesn't look, I mean, what you said at the end is exactly right. If your goal is to have like a citizen's signature petition, then it means you gotta get a million signatures. And I'm not putting that down, but I think the funny thing is, what part of the reason I've talked about, and I'm sorry to go back to it, the reason I've talked about it, I get them shared values and shared values that shares shared discussion and decision-making going forward, which by the way, the Roman Rooking Group is a model for this. And I point that out because we already have an existing model that we've already been using that's done this successfully. And I don't mean perfectly because it doesn't have to be perfect, but the point is the idea of sitting out shared areas of commitment and then doing a data or empirically driven and shared exercise around a common value is something we've already done. And so my point is, I'm very interested, to me part of the consensus is gonna come out of the quality of the dialogue we have around what it is we wanna see out of our schools. Not a specific number, but what is the experience that we're valuing? And I think we can get, and my point is, if we wanted to do a vision drive, we better get cracking. We better get drafted by like the 10th of February so we can start getting signatures. And I think they could be enemies of each other in that regard. Any other comments from the committee members? I think I just wanted to, I was gonna leave with this and then I ended up launching into the conversation about the survey, but I just wanna say that I think the process is how we start to rebuild trust. And so I just, I think it's just as important as what we end up with at the end of the day in terms of the framework and everything. So I think part of the reason I was asking the questions about the surveys that I feel like that is part of the reason folks have been asking so strongly for it is this fear that we might move forward with something with that out really strongly engaging with the community and would ignore a big portion of the community. So I just wanna put that forward that I'm hoping that we can keep that in mind as we're going forward with this because I think it's really important for us moving past the stage of the SOI, moving into that stage of actually going to the feasibility, going through all those votes we need and it's just, it's a long road ahead and so I think it's really important. And then the fact is that most of us are not gonna, I don't know who's gonna be on the school council when we actually get the feedback from the MSBA. I mean, the fact is we're all up for election in November. So anyways, just something to think about that we wanna lay that groundwork as it is successful going forward. So good points. Okay, so I think just given where we are and the fact that it's about an hour almost past our end time, I wanna make sure that sort of restating for the committee and then also for the community that we will have more information about this, you know, proposal and sort of next steps that are meeting on Tuesday. And the meeting on Tuesday is actually gonna take place at Amherst town hall for the very first time. We're doing a test run just to see if the equipment there and the location and everything works for the committee. And so encourage folks to come out to that town hall meeting, come check it out, see how it feels. This is true for everybody, I think. And then I think also just thinking about timeline, you know, we obviously are gonna wanna move very quickly on next steps if we are gonna move forward with the listening sessions and everything. And our next meeting after Tuesday's meeting is actually the 26th of February, I believe, which feel like a very long time from now. So, you know, I guess I wanted to sort of take the committee's temperature on, you know, maybe scheduling another meeting. I know that Dr. Morris, you've got quite a few meetings a month of February already scheduled. We all do actually for the regional school committee. But maybe we wanna do another one of these single issue meetings, you know, during the February. Does that make sense to folks? I see a couple nodding heads. Mr. Nafir, do you mind? It makes sense to me. I think what we should do is not belabor it now. I mean, we're gonna have to go through next Tuesday and hopefully get a facilitator on board. We're gonna get more shape around the community outreach sessions and deliverables. And I think once we have greater definition around that, look better sense of when we need it. I think we will need one. But the question will be able to figure out how do we slot it in and where. Okay. Mr. Dunlin? Yeah, in terms of like just trying to make the most efficient use of our time, I kinda see where we're at now is trying to prepare all of the resources and the schedule so that we can blast it out to the universe, right? Like, we wanna get to a point where you have an email that says, hey, everybody, we're gonna have these listening sessions. Their schedule dates are here. Here's a link to Dr. Morris's video. Here's the presentation and here's the feedback, the general qualitative feedback mechanism. Like, we have all those resources and then we can go forward, forward, forward, forward, forward. So to get to that point, in terms of like logistics is what I'm thinking of drawing in. And it's a minor point on the video. There's no way that you can present this in less than, you know, in a few minutes. So you're gonna have some video that's like 25 minutes long, maybe. But you almost wanna also do like some kind of a three minute one as well, you know, just as a teaser or a summary. Because not everybody's gonna watch a 25 minute video as much people are engaged in this. Not everyone's gonna watch that. So it might help as well just to get the word out. That's a good idea, thank you. Okay, so is everyone, then, I mean, we absolutely can come back to, you know, actually scheduling a meeting in February at a later time. I am conscious of people's schedules filling up quickly, especially Dr. Morris. But we can wait. I think, you know, it's certainly something we can talk about on Tuesday. Also, let's get a little more definition over more checking at deliverables. All right, sounds good. Okay, so with that, can I get a motion? Move to adjourn. Do I have a second? Second. All those in favor? All right, we are adjourned. Thank you, everybody. All right, thank you, Mr. Champagne, one more time for getting a live stream going. So thank you for being here. Thank you, Mr. Champagne.