 We are reconvening meeting of the Amherst School Committee at 7.09 p.m. And for those of you who have been following tonight's process, we started out with a joint meeting at the Amherst Select Board at Town Hall and to recess and are now back at the library our usual haunts for our meetings. So first item on the agenda for our regular meeting, sorry, everything's all over the place here, is approving the minutes of October 9th. And I believe we have these in here. Yeah, just a separate agenda. So I will take a motion and then maybe we can have discussion after. Mr. Dillink? Approve the minutes of October 9th, 2018. Second. Thank you. Any comments, edits, questions? I trust everybody has read these super carefully. Okay, all those in favor of approving the minutes of October 9th, so if I raise your hand. Thank you. All those opposed? And any abstentions? Mr. Nakajima? Thank you very much. Okay, next order of business is the UMass Study Discussion. And this is a continuation of the conversation that was started earlier with our joint meeting. Excuse me, the select board. So I guess I think that, you know, there was obviously a very vibrant conversation, I'll say. A lot of questions that were posed to the members of the Donahue Institute who were in charge of putting together the report. I raised concerns about, and I know that a couple members of the select board raised concerns as well about some of the discrepancies between the charts that we were seeing and the reports that were published and sent to us and what was being presented tonight. So I'm sure they'll come back hopefully with some revised content. But I believe that now the purpose of this conversation is really just to provide some feedback to Dr. Morris who can then take this back to the authors of the study. And I think also perhaps provide some guidance maybe for future conversation and thinking about this. We've been waiting for this report for a very long time. And I know that people have already expressed some concerns about the fact that we've already been so delayed and haven't really gotten very substantive information that we were hoping for anyway. So perhaps that's one point of feedback. But if there are any other comments from the committee now, certainly take those. Mr. Nakajima. So during our other conversation with jointly with the select board, I know that I'd say two points of emphasis that I was hearing repeatedly, including my own obviously comments were one, about clarifying the data. And the second point was on whether or not the costs of the potential revenue from the housing was sort of accurately ascertained. And including in particular, whether the costs of ELL services were appropriately captured. And one of the things I'd want to say, which given the venue I didn't really have an opportunity to get into is I also, as much as I'd like to see more accurate information, I also don't want to get into a situation in which particular families or children in our district are feeling like they're being picked out as being unduly burdensome or costing too much. Cause one of the challenges we have in general with the conversation about whether UMass is picking up its fair share is, I don't think we want, I don't think it's appropriate to talk about it in a way that feels like it's picking on those families or even the characteristics of those families. So it's one thing to get, I mean the funny thing is when the ELL number was put into that report, I would have been more comfortable for there not to be any ELL number at all. If you're gonna bother putting it in though, this is the reason why I kind of poked on that issue. If you're gonna bother putting it in, then you should calculate it accurately in a way that really tells you something that's informative. But in a weird way, I almost would have been more comfortable with it not being in at all because I'd rather treat all of our kids equally and say look, any kid who comes in our door, we wanna meet their needs and their needs may be unusually low or they may be unusually high. We want to make sure that they get the services they need and they shouldn't feel like that they're providing any additional burden on our community. I think the issue with UMass and it's something why I also, going back to the other conversation, I kind of picked on the issue of how they calculated what UMass's fair property tax payments would have been and how you'd calculate that. And so what I know Ms. Spitzer did as well is this is really more about the landlord and property owner, not about the tenant. And that's what the issue is. And so the point to push on is whether or not we're figuring out what the fair, how you'd calculate a reasonable range of fair contributions that UMass would make, not necessarily picking on the kids and the families and saying, will you cost an extraordinary amount or not or whatever. That makes any sense. Yeah, Ms. Spitzer. So, and I apologize since this has been going on for two years, there may have been more appropriate times to air this concern, but as I'm new to the school committee, fairly early since this report was commissioned, and I've been on the side of being somebody tasked with doing these types of calculations. So, but I'd question their utility sort of in the same way that I think Mr. Nakajima is in the sense that I don't think this should really be a conversation about how much does each student cost us and how can we find a way to maximize the amount of money that the town's getting for each particular student. But I think it is more broadly speaking about there is a cost incurred by having the schools here and I think there's a benefit to our schools clearly of having UMass here. And how do we as a town kind of with the university have a conversation about how to make sure that given that the financial situation our schools are under right now, is there a way to have more support from the university? And I include the other colleges in the area as well. So, I guess I'm wondering two things that I'd like to understand better about where this is going is one, when do we sit down with UMass rather than just the authors of the Donahue Institute and who's having those conversations on behalf of the school committee or the town and how can we at all be involved in those and if it is appropriate. And then also just thinking through, I think trying, I mean, it doesn't really matter what the number is on the page for me so much as just kind of knowing that the university is invested in the schools here and in keeping them strong and to the extent that they are able would be willing to invest because I think what I don't want to see happen is that, what if the university decides, well, it's better than we just don't offer our grad students any housing for their families, which I think is a road that some schools potentially, I don't know what higher institutions do but I don't think it's a given that they're going to provide subsidized housing for their families with kids and having been in a position of being a graduate student with kids, I think it's important that they feel supported and that there's no disincentive for having them there. So, I'm a little worried too that this could backfire and have unintended consequences and what if the numbers go up or goes down, you know, if we tie it to this, like there are 52 students and this is what they cost us and as things change, are we going to lose or penalize people for this type of thing? Mr. Donald, did you? I can wait, I want to respond to one of Ms. Spitzer's, I took it as a question but I'm happy to, I have a type of, I'm good to wait. Well, I mean, why don't you go ahead? Okay, so in terms of where is this going with conversations with UMass, it was kind of a small point tonight but this was part of our strategic partnership agreement between the town of Amherst and the university. So, if we follow that partnership, the idea is that that partnership agreement runs out next year and this was intended to be used as part of the negotiation for the next strategic partnership. So, one of the things that I've raised with both UMass and the town managers, my role was much more in the data side of like providing how many students and those types of things. And this report is in the past the town has negotiated that, this is a neutral statement, this isn't a politically loaded statement but typically it's been the town and the university that's been the negotiating agents and that's appropriately makes sense and an open question for me is what's the role of the schools given that this report is particularly focused on impact on the public schools including a four town region which is, well, it's a smaller part, it is, it's not zero students at the regional level and that's not about the town of Amherst exclusively. So, I do think perhaps there's some conversation and advocacy that the committee want to play not for a particular solution but just what's the committee's role in the process from here on out given that we have now have a report that's highlighting the impact on the district. It's certainly impacting the town but it's impacting on the district and I think that, where do we go from here isn't clear in terms of what's the district or the school committee's role on that and perhaps that's worthy of future conversation. Mr. Donnelly. So it's interesting just in the space of sitting at the select board, the joint presentation and then listening to some of the conversations that we've been having. My mind has actually changed a little bit. I was going down the path of picking apart the cost calculations and getting to something that was more accurate for actual the cost but it's something that was sitting with me at that joint meeting and then sort of as your comments, Eric, about the idea of public education is a public good and everybody pays for it not just the people that are using it and so actually looking at the costs seems to be in my mind the wrong way to be going at this and really looking at what is the missing sort of revenue that we are getting and not just from the families in those 190 units that are sending children to our schools but overall those 190 units or however many beyond that because as soon as you're absolutely right as soon as we get into a discussion of the costs we start weighing different people against each other what happens if one year that there's 75, 90 children from those housing units that are coming into our schools what happens when it goes down to 25 so it's really more about calculating what the revenue is and then looking at the demographics as you said Mr. Demling about that particular group maybe the percentage of those units that are sending children as compared to the percentage overall in our town because it probably is going to be disproportionately higher there and so looking at our average tax property tax per household and then adjusting it accordingly based on the percentage or the proportion however you want to calculate it an average of our number of years and then figuring it out that way rather than going and sort of nitpicking over how much we're spending how much the state is kicking in all of that but really just look at it from a revenue perspective that would be my ask for the next round of data from them Mr. Demling so I was pretty surprised to hear the Vice-Chair of the Select Board say that this was almost two years in the making this is a really skimpy report for two years and it's not just the lack of breadth and depth of the report but the fact that it met with such a disconnect from one of the primary stakeholders which was the Select Board the other being UMass that this was to be part of our it makes me really concerned that the primary stakeholders who wanted this outcome weren't involved or were okay with this just dragging on for a long time and so what the next step politically is in terms of actually getting to an end game of what we're talking about here is an amount of money transferring from either UMass or the state to the town in some fashion but to get there and determine what that value is if we have one of these two parties UMass in the town not totally wanting to get there that's going to make it a hundred times harder so that's why my first kind of big process concern is that look I'm much less concerned about let's get the exact calculation here than let's be reasonable let's have two parties that want to get to a solution let's not perfectly be the enemy of the good let's mark it down and then let's move on the other more technical aspect that I found difficult in trying to parse out this report is that it seems to be trying to answer two questions at once one is what would the tax revenue be if this was not tax exempt housing forget about if there was no students or a hundred students for every unit and of those units tax cannot tax are they disproportionately contributing a larger percentage of students thus costing the school more than on any other average piece of property those are two separate problems I think trying to micro calculate the cost of the schools is a lot harder of a problem than trying to say well okay with assuming this was tax housing and free market what would the property tax be that seems like a much easier question I would hate to hold up that first more easily answerable question to try and get to some massive accurate calculation of the second so I want to proceed however level we're helpful I don't know how much help the school committee would be in not dragging down that conversation so that it just stays focused on the property tax which is not really our purview but those more at the end of the day concern let's just get this done and you know find out what if any of the political vote blocks are that took the state to here yeah so I'm not intending to be defensive about this product I didn't create it but I do think it's worth noting that I agree with the comments I agree with the vantage point I tried to express earlier and I'll say it again here some of the conversation is very uncomfortable for me like trying to figure out what the demographics of North Village versus the rest of it like it just didn't make me feel good and you know originally we're looking at multiple demographic criteria and I just drilled it down to okay if you're looking for demographic differences there's a significant one in this particular area in terms of English learners and let's not go for relatively minor differences in other ones didn't feel good I do think that in response to some of the comments about property tax versus the cost of educating children I agree with what I'm hearing from multiple committee members I also want to contextualize it that for years there's been a request for exactly the thing that I'm not hearing the group advocate for like let's iron out like specifically what the per pupil cost impact is so I do think the consultants were responding to feedback they received and the town received that wanted that information whether we think it's valuable or useful that's a different question altogether but I do I've been at multiple meetings where either elected official mostly the ones I'm thinking of are elected officials were pretty explicit about requesting that any study include the types of data sources that were included I'm not saying anything about their accuracy or implications being worthwhile so I do think that came from a place of receiving feedback and not because either the town or the schools of UMass thought it was like one is better than the other but I think they were trying to be responsive to feedback that was collected over time Oh I'm well aware that there are lots of people in town and just sort of in general who want to know and ask the question of whether or not there's a disparate level of disproportionate impact of the costs of the kids from UMass or North Village relative to the overall population that's why even though at the other meeting we were just in we were focusing very much on some of the maybe technical deficiencies of the report it's one of the reasons why my very first statement here when we're back to ourselves in the schools was saying if we don't advocate for a neutral environment that's supportive of all kids regardless of need regardless of background and knowing then everything we do we make everyone feel welcome and that we send a message both through our own actions as well as through all the staff and the leadership of the district that that is the before anything else knowing that every kid who walks through the door every family that walks through the door that they feel absolutely welcome cherished and supported and heard we don't say that no one else is going to right I mean so that's why it was the first thing out of my mouth is like that I get people want to know that stuff if we're going to walk down that road then I think the school committee needs to be defensive of that even if we even of that value even if you know having another four or five hundred thousand dollars in the budget would be awesome yeah yeah absolutely yeah I just wanted to offer yeah so I just want to you know thank you Dr. Morris for serving as he go between I guess between the committee and bringing back our feedback I'll add my feedback on this I think that I agree you know as I mentioned during the previous meeting there are so many holes in this report and I'm not quite sure why but it almost makes the report not useful in trying to answer the questions that were originally posed right which was to try to get to that brass tax and understand what the numbers are and you know kind of calculate some sort of formula at some point down the road for how the university how UMass would actually potentially reimburse the town for you know for education related costs and I also agree with the sentiments that have been expressed by the rest of the committee around the value of education and how we can't necessarily put a dollar amount to that that said I think you know we all are realistic enough to understand that that's just the way that we work right like you know state addresses need based on certain formulas you know and so that is going to happen here as well and I don't think we would expect anything different necessarily right I think we have the right to advocate for public education and have it be the shining palaces they always use that word from West Wing right it's you know it's extremely important for all the common good for our schools to be the absolute best that they can but I think when going back to the university there's going to be a level of calculation and decision making that happens that will involve certain details right from you know from the numbers and I actually don't think that that's our place to help figure out I think that you know it would be since this report is not necessarily what we had hoped it would be but at least we have agreement that there is a conversation to be had here right this is the question that we've been trying to answer for the longest time you know is there a certain level of responsibility that the university owes to the town of Amherst in terms of it's students that are being educated in our public schools and I think the answer we've all come to is yes now the question is how do we figure that out and so you know the report even you know refused to help figure that out in any way right they stated as much and I think that that's fine that's their prerogative and then again that's not necessarily our decision to make but I do think that if we can have that conversation you know with the university in a clear and processed way so that it becomes maybe a group of people that are sitting down and saying we agree that we're going to come up with some amount and I think Vice Chair Brewer's comments are still ringing in my ear about the fact that there is no agreement that actually currently exists right between the state and you know we need one right we actually do need an agreement so whatever it takes to get to an agreement I think we will take at this point we want to be able to get to that point and I think it's important for them to understand our interest in doing that and I think the town, the community has spoken loud and clear for a number of years in their interest in doing that so how do we get there and I think that's the question that we actually have to pose to the university point blank how do we get there, help us get there and let's get this done sooner rather than later because at this point we are we understand that we are losing money in the sense that we have students that are being educated and there's actually not contributions being made to the tax base and there could be so what does it take to actually make that happen? That's a lot in there I'm sure you wouldn't know No, I'm actually just thinking and perhaps we could put it on a future agenda because I do think what I would like to have a future conversation and I'm not trying to open this up because I know we're behind on the agenda is just thinking through what's the committee's role what's my role, historically or at least in the past two rounds it's been the town manager who's been negotiating each and not select board so I wouldn't just think through how I can capture not just your thoughts in the report because I think I've got that but actually more on the process moving forward and so that the voice of the school committee can be considered in that process so I need to do a little thinking about that but perhaps when we get to the end we can figure out a good time to have a broader conversation that's not so much about the report and more about the process going forward I mean I think those blended tonight but I think perhaps having an explicit conversation about that might be helpful for me it would be helpful for me, I'll just say that I think that makes a lot of sense and I think that we're sort of all on the same page with that, Ms. Spitzer? Can I just add one thing because I probably won't be here for that next week and I think the thing that I find most uncomfortable about this is the focus on the North Village apartments and I know that is probably coming out of a historical focus on that is the place where families live but I think what I'd like to see if I can make a suggestion is there's so much land that UMass occupies that is therefore not taxable both in terms of where they house undergrads and also where they're housing single grad students and where they're housing families and I don't know if they have any housing for faculty but I assume like Amherst College does like potentially there's housing so all I'm saying is that but in no other way do we only focus on family housing when we're talking about raising or the tax revenue that goes towards our schools so is there a way because the other thing I point out is that if we just focus on that tax number which feels more comfortable to me then our goal of maximizing the amount of money we get from the, I think everybody would agree we wanna maximize the amount of money that schools get it's 10 times less almost than or even more than 10 times less than what you'd get if you were calculating it based on the actual cost of the students so if there's a way that we could increase the amount of land that they're looking at as potentially of where we're losing potential revenue I think that would achieve the goal of maximizing the amount of money the schools get and also kind of disentangling the physical like the actual students from the impact of the university so sorry for going on but it's okay so I can just send that last point I'll bring that feedback back that the strategic agreement was before my time in this role but it was pretty explicit on that particular point that's not to say it should be going forward so as opposed to some of the other feedback I mean I just wanna go back and talk to the town manager about I've looked at the language in the strategic agreement but just there may be places that are things being studied that aren't about the schools and the strategic agreement that agreement that and the partnership that might encompass some of what you're talking about that I would not be so connected to because it's not just about this particular clause and that agreement that is connected to that I'm more connected to so I can do that homework for you thank you thank you okay so with the committee's permission I'm gonna move us along to the next item so we have announcements are there any announcements from the committee? Mr. Demling? Tribuby Thursday everybody come out AEF Tribuby and the time of that? 6 p.m. for the youth challenge is that? yes and then 7 p.m. for the adults okay so if you wanna see the adults making fools of themselves that is the time to go much foolishness will ensue that can be guaranteed we have a team here excellent any other announcements from the committee? okay seeing none move us along to public comment so thank you to members of the public that are here I'm assuming we have at least one or two that are here for public comment maybe not we'll see if you have a public comment please come up to the microphone state your name and you have three minutes good evening I'm Lanny Blackman and I'm here tonight with lots of different roles as I'm sure most people are so in my newish role as an executive board member of the Amherst Palm Education Association I'm excited to help facilitate relationships and communication between our bodies and so I probably hopefully won't be here at every school committee meeting because they're a little late for me but we are excited to build those relationships and then I'm also the librarian at Fort River Elementary School and have been on the working group as part of the dual language program so I can say there's lots of excitement and curiosity and some anxiety and interest from teachers at Fort River and as tonight is the resources discussion I'm really excited for if the program is decided on that it is fully resourced and that we can all be successful so thanks for having me thank you any other public comments? Okay, seeing none move us along to Superintendent's update thank you Morris and I'll be brief there's a couple that didn't make it on this page so I'll share them morally but at this point update from like three o'clock this afternoon I'm looking at Mr. Mangano but we have officially I think we're just about at a contract place with KMA who's gonna do our ADA audits for all three districts but tonight I'll speak to Amherst and fully in time for us to be considering that in the capital budget process so Farm to School Institute I talked a little bit about it region but it was a more Amherst focused event so a group of our staff members and families went to the Massachusetts Farm to School Institute out in the Berkshires and there's a lot of enthusiasm and energy they continued to meet they're gonna plan to meet with me I think in the next week or two with some of their next steps but it involved teachers in our schools our elementary science coordinator curriculum coordinator, food service and two families two parent guardians in the district and they came out with a lot of energy a lot of excitement about having more farm fresh foods in front of our students so more to come on that and we'll try to figure out a way as I learn more of where they are to bring that to the committee as well because I know it would be of high interest to you and to the public the dual language communication update which so we're doing one we're doing the next round of public meetings on this so this Thursday will be all in Spanish and that's at the Woodbury room at the Jones Library unfortunately that space wasn't available for the two English language sessions so we'll do them at the PD Center in the middle school you know again trying to pick some morning time some afternoon times and we've advertised this on Facebook we've sent it to all the preschools both paper copies and electronic copies and we're hoping for we've emailed our listserv that we've had and we're hoping for an excellent turnout and we'll see how it goes but you know the more opportunities we have for public feedback and input the better so we hope people continue to come because I know some people at the last were like do I need to know more and you know and we're like keep coming because we're still in development we're not a finished product and so you're all obviously invited to all of those the two that weren't on the page one is the next two Amherst media window into ARPs programs have been scheduled the next one's actually about our gardening program so Farmer Layla and Ms. Reese will be coming on and the following one is about our ELL program that was actually based on apparent feedback from one of our weekly newsletters one of the ones that included the it was one of the ones included the link to Mr. Yaffe and Ms. Estes interviews they said you know I really enjoy watching these but you know ELL programs made a huge impact and it'd be great to have them so we thought that was a great idea we took that family up on it and those two are scheduled all in the next three weeks and the last thing is Ms. Spitzer and I were able to connect I think at the last meeting there was we were talking about the lottery there was a question of making sure our math agreed more or less which actually was more about our definitional things and our actual math contrasted perhaps earlier tonight's conversation and I think we came to an agreement that there would be a limited number of seats likely available for monolingual English speaking families through a lottery system it wouldn't be zero but it you know certainly wouldn't be double digits unless we had a very unusual enrollment pattern so we were able to reach consensus I felt like hopefully I'm on the phone just as we worked on some definitional challenges we were able to kind of resolve that and I know we talked about that at the last school committee meeting I wanted to loop back to it to make sure that there was clarity. Can you want to add to that Ms. Spitzer? No. Any comments or questions for the superintendent? Mr. Chairman? I'm happy to say this to committee planning although I don't see committee planning on agenda so should I stretch? You can cut me off if it's off the microscope. But I was just sort of just wondering because we have a big dual language item on agenda when we might be hearing about the Crocker and Wildwood identity sort of exploration. I've had some really excellent offside conversations with the principals and it's sound like some really great ideas that even if they're not even close to fully formed it would be awesome to start hearing about so I don't know what kind of time I'm in. Sure, so the next meeting they have that group has that's working on that is November 2nd so I think shortly after that perhaps in the November 5th meeting we could include a more thorough update. Okay, thank you Dr. Morris. So moving us to the next item on the agenda which is the fiscal year 19 first quarter budget update. Is that Mr. Mangano? It is. Mr. Mangano? So Mike mentioned the KMA contract and he missed a signature earlier today so I'm gonna. Thank you, you didn't have the red sticker. I knew it was him. So when he signs it then we have a contract. So the first quarter report is one of the least useful but because it's so early in the year but it does give you a sense of the trajectory that we're seeing with the budget. A lot of the big cost categories we don't have all the information yet to really make a good projection of expenses but we've got some information so it'll give you a sense of which way we're going. So through the first three months of the year the Amherst Public Schools budget is tracking under budget due to savings in payroll and health insurance. Payroll is currently projected under budget by $119,900 due to the following. One unfilled instructional coach position. This position had somebody depart last year and we intentionally left it vacant because we were seeing the health insurance issues and we weren't quite sure where that was gonna come down. We're getting more information around that but that one was left vacant on purpose in both districts. We also have two unfilled special education paraeducator positions. That's just due to student need. Right now there's not a need for those two positions to be filled but that might pop up in the future. Staff turnover savings from retirements and other staff transitions. We had quite a few retirements at the end of last year and in addition we had a contingency and control accounts for new staff and we haven't needed that to date. In contracted payroll there is $18,335 unencumbered which will be used for professional development and overtime needs so those are just budget line items that we don't project because they're kind of used throughout the year evenly. In expense accounts, accounts are tracking as expected. We've, teachers have spent a little bit more than usual but that's because we've had a budget freeze for most of last year. So it makes sense that they were a little behind on some of their regular purchasing that they would do but it's not anything out of control. As you can see the amounts are still available. Utilities are on track but most of that will be driven by the winter and how much heating fuel we need to purchase. Transportation is on track. Most of those costs are known at the time of contracting process so there's not usually too much variation there. The big one is risk and benefits. We're expecting to finish the surplus due to some savings in liability insurance and also retiree health insurance. Liability insurance is down due to a quote process that the regional schools, the elementary schools in the town did together. We put out all our buildings to get quotes from bigger carriers for liability insurance and we got the town got a much lower quote this time around from somebody who's not our, who wasn't our provider last year so we have a new, I think it's official, we'll have a new provider going forward with lower rates. In health insurance, we're seeing a couple things going on so our retiree insurance rates went down. We kind of had a feeling they were gonna go down based on the shift to Maya but we were expecting a much bigger increase for active employees. We're seeing a couple things. We're seeing a big shift from PPO's to HMO's. PPO's are quite a bit more expensive than HMO's and so during the health insurance transition one thing we did was a complete re-enrollment of everybody who's an active employee so that gave everybody a chance to really consider do they wanna be in a PPO versus an HMO? So we're seeing a big shift from PPO to HMO based on last year's enrollment pattern. We're seeing lower enrollments overall and we're also seeing the town has an opt out program so you get $3,000 if you had insurance with a family plan, you get $3,000 if you go with your spouse's carrier basically. In both districts we're going from two or three last year to 10 or 11 this year. So those things are combining to put, create some savings in health insurance. So heading into the second quarter of the year, the district budget is in good shape. It's still early so we'll manage the budget carefully and report back to the committee any signs that is changing course. May I add to your statement? So just to put a finer point on the question that came up last spring and certainly the beginning of this fall is that there was the $15,000 that was granted to the district that was accepted by the district I should say from town meeting last spring focused on after school programming. And so at this point given the fiscal condition as we see it under first quarter we've applied that to, we've kept that in that area. So we've applied that to the after school programs as town meeting requested if we weren't required to do that but I think when we held that it was part of holding it was uncertainty about our budget situation and our budget situation. At this point is looking like we were able to do that. And the second point I wanna raise is that when we're spending which I'll get to in facilities update additional funds in terms of additional custodial support both normal staffing but also on the weekends which again I'll describe later on tonight we were concerned that we would have to pull potentially from school choice funds being that I never have said this in three years but all the variables at this point are pointing in the positive direction. We're not, right I know it's like a famous last word. It's like 180 from last year. Yeah. But you know I said that I don't believe in jinks this. You know, right so it's not my way. So we're not looking to ask to pull more from choice because it looks like our conservative approach is paying dividends not on the health insurance especially exclusively. And I think the last thing I wanna comment on in terms of the staff turnover savings is we tried to really be conscious knowing that we're kind of consistently in fiscal challenges conscious in our hiring process of consistently hiring the best people but also being conscious of where people are in terms of their experience that they'd bring and what the cost would be. And you know, Amherst is a funny place because we have so many people who move here as career changers who may have 20 years under the belt that sometimes it's harder to get to take a fresh-eyed look at someone who may be a year or two into their career and both from a diversity equity perspective as well as a financial perspective. We had lots of ongoing conversations last spring as a leadership team about how do we do that? How do we have the process to not only look at one year impact where a person is now but really where they're gonna be five, 10 years from now and the larger impact on the district both in terms of diversity as well as their professional growth. And we did see some staff turnover savings above and beyond what we've seen at some years in the past with a very intentional focus with both those lenses. So sorry to add to your presentation but I thought it was relevant and I would just add the same thing applies to the building accessibility audit. We were thinking of maybe having to pull that from our facility a revolving fund but if the budget's in good shape there's no need to pull from those funds. I have a couple of questions. Yeah please. But I don't know. Do you want to do one? Yeah I did have one. I don't know if it's a question or more of a statement. If individuals who work in the district re-evaluated PPOs and HMOs and they wanted to serve for their HMOs and we have a resulting cost savings, awesome. They're happy, we're happy, everyone's happy. When it comes to the population that have moved from the health insurance that we offer on dispousal benefits to the extent that that number spikes I think we talked about last spring, benchmarking the cost and benefits to employees of our plans relative to plans that prevail elsewhere in our region in the state. I mean I think that keeping an eye on that question and keeping an eye on that question relative to the feedback we get from staff when you're thinking about retention is important because even though obviously it's great we're saving money, we don't want to unintentionally or accidentally end up in a situation where we're a little less competitive of a district relative to our neighbors. Yeah, I can speak to that a little bit and probably bring back more information to answer fully. My understanding is, so we're still very competitive in particular to UMass, which is sort of the big or most, a lot of people would switch to is to that plan and the GIC plan. We're still competitive with that. I think we're on the plan that UMass was one version ago, so I think they've moved to the next GIC version. So we're still competitive at the gap in terms of how much better our plan is versus UMass's has closed quite a bit because there were significant structural changes to the health insurance last year. That was actually one of my questions as well was just asking, I think we just have to ask this out loud, right, that compared to other plans nearby and if people are making a decision to leave our plans does that somehow reflect on decisions that they may or may not make in the future based on employment, right? Like if a healthcare plan is not a great plan does that affect whether or not they wanna work here? So I think we're sort of on the same page with that. So I had a couple of other questions. So the after school funding, it's great to hear that you were able to find a place for it. I think town meeting was very well intentioned in adding the $15,000 to the budget. We weren't sure at the time whether or not that could actually stay in after school given the sort of our forecasting for the budget. So I'm just curious if you could lay out what that looks like. I mean, even in sort of rough outline, is that helping the program with material purchases, is it staff, what is it? It's contributing and you can jump into but it's contributing to stipends that support students who otherwise might struggle to pay for the program. So it's around kind of tuition waiver aspects. Yeah, so we've asked the family center and the other school district coordinator to basically prepare two budgets this year. One, how many vouchers can you provide for students under the $30,000 level? And then if this turned out to be the positive situation where we could do the extra 15 to prepare that scenario too. So they've got a plan for both so they can go with the better plan. And basically it determines how many kids can get a subsidy and how much that subsidy is for the students. So we can bring back more information on that plan if it'd be useful to see sort of how far that goes versus what the previous level was. I mean, I think at some point it'd be great to hear a little bit more about our after school program more generally. I don't think it has to be any time of the meeting. It could be a strategic program review. Keep those in your mind. Okay, so that makes sense. And then my other question was just, you had mentioned a comment regarding the two unfilled special education paraeducators and how there just isn't a need for them right now. And so I wanted to highlight that I also asked a question about sort of an awkward question. How far in advance do you get a sense of that? So right now you said you don't anticipate having that need right now, but is this something that could potentially change mid-year if students- It could change tomorrow, right? Okay. Yeah, so those were two that were budgeted because of students that we were anticipating being in our district. When we talk about the control accounts, the contingency for new staff and control accounts, that's really the controls for unexpected costs, which would come to Mr. Morgana's point of students who come to us and we didn't know they were coming and that doesn't always happen August 29th, right? That happens throughout the year. That's the nature of it. So these two are based on students whose families moved out of our town or out of the district, but we haven't touched the contingency that we have for those things. So that's again, an unusual situation. We've not heard me say that in the three years, some of you who have heard me talking about budgets. So we don't know if it'll continue. We don't know whose students will come, but more often than not, we've not been in the situation where we have more than where we've had this. It's usually, our experience has been the opposite. And it's not uncommon for needs of students to change during the year and a determination is made that they do need a one-to-one pair. So that's why we're not necessarily spending that money on anything. It's just they're vacant for right now until we feel confident that they're not needed. Okay, thank you. Any other questions or comments on the committee? On this item? Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Magano. Okay, next item on the agenda is resources for dual language. Sure, so I'll do a quick introduction and then turn the microphone over. If you'd like to sit down, then you're welcome to. If you'd like to stand up, that's up to you. So I think as part of the presentation, one of the challenges is that for some of these items, and again, I'll be more explicit probably towards the end of the presentation where I jump back into it, there are, you know, we have title three funds which are for ELL students. We have ELL programming, I should say, English language programming, English language learner programming. We have title two A funds, which are for professional development. We have title one funds that are specific for students who fit in certain demographic categories. So when we were trying to itemize costs, one of the challenges that we have is at this point of our budget, FY20 budget process and grant application process, we aren't able to articulate exactly where what funds we'd be asked for in terms of appropriated budget or which of these would be priorities and we could pay for out of, you know, for instance, title two and professional development is paid for a lot of mobby's work with us to date. That has not been coming from the appropriated budget. So we wanted to do our best guess on what the cost would be without associating where the funds necessarily would come from. We do want to put you in an awkward situation. We didn't want to, you know, pretend that we know the grant application that will be filed next August for some of these items would be, but just try to say where's the cost, what's the total cost for that and you'll see there's a range on a lot of the slides and I think Ms. Richardson will talk about why there's a range for this work as well. Sorry, it'll be coming up in a moment. Thank you for the queueing though. I always forget that one I remember, which I'll turn on in a second. That one I forget. And so I just wanted to preface that piece of it, but to the public comment, I totally agree with. If we're gonna do it, we have to do it with the right resources and not set up a situation where the programming's right and the resources don't match the needs of the program. So that's where we are. And I think Ms. Richardson works. She's been previewing materials, reading lots of things, talking to publishers, getting samples. And I think if the committee decides to support the adoption of this program the next year, that'll also accelerate our process on staffing. And we have a staff group working on this, but once we identify officially who would be the staff member as part of it, they also need to be part of that decision-making queue and process. So with that, would you like to stand there? Or would you like to come sit? I can stand. Okay. And I think I'll do your slides because I think the clicker's working. Okay, great. Good evening. Thanks for having me. Good evening. So let's see, we'll dive in. So for this group, you've heard a lot of the background and the mission and things before. We included it for folks who maybe haven't had that background. So just briefly to mention that there's been a long process since the recommendation from the Enrollment Working Group to engage in this exploration, including the research, the planning committee, site visits, our ongoing work with MABE and a lot of communication with various folks in all the stakeholders, right? Our families, our teachers, our potential, our folks in preschool now that are potential enrollees. And then the mission is there as well, which all of that, in order to do this well, we continue to try to center that mission and really look at what is this gonna do for students and what do we need to do that effectively? So in sort of the five big buckets that we identified for the things that we need are instructional materials and assessment, Spanish classroom supplies. So in this model, we're adding a Spanish classroom in addition to the two English classrooms that we have. So that'll require a good deal of supplies there. There's a bucket around staff, time and PD and there's a bunch of pieces in that. Looking at school signage, making sure that the building's really welcoming and clear that we're in a dual language program and then a big piece around family engagement. So I'll go into each of those a little more. So instructional materials, there are two examples of what we've been looking at but there are many more. We will need a core Spanish language arts program. The way that we have an English language arts program, we need something to anchor that curriculum. So that will include the core materials, sort of the anthology type materials as well as leveled readers, teachers manuals, that sort of thing. So that's a big component in terms of the instructional materials. We likely would need a Spanish phonics program and it's really important that we have that, that it's not just a translation of an English phonics program because that doesn't make sense. It's a different progression of skills and types of skills that you go through when you're learning to read in Spanish. So there are two examples that we've been looking at there. We will definitely need classroom libraries and read alouds and just a lot of text, right? A lot of interesting, authentic, engaging texts for students and teachers to work with. Some of that will be at the classroom level. Some of it will be at the library level. Hopefully some of it will blend into family engagement but just making sure that 50-50 balance that we talked about before we wanna make sure that there are enough materials in Spanish so that kids are excited to read what we have in Spanish, right? If the texts in English are, you know, if there's more options and more variety then we're gonna be losing our interest from the students in reading in Spanish. So that's really important. We do know that our math curriculum has a Spanish version. We're not looking at using that in kindergarten but it's likely to be in every other year. So if we do math in Spanish every other year we would need to purchase those materials. And tech resources, so things like BrainPop in Spanish or various apps and things that would support our work. So we're looking at probably 10 to $15,000 for all of that per year as we roll this out one grade level at a time. Question? So I'm curious, what does it mean to do math in Spanish every other year? I know this sounds like a really stupid question but what are you thinking about? Well that makes it sound like you're doing it every other year. So you do it in first grade and then third grade and fifth grade. Yep. So you mean specifically just the fact that it's in Spanish or just or the math happening? Yeah, but it's in Spanish. I mean I'm sorry, I'm sorry to... No, it's okay. You know this isn't a question about like what materials we need to buy. Yeah, yeah. It's more like a substantive question of like I would have thought it would have made sense to, I mean untutored and not knowing anything about how to do this. I would have thought you'd want to teach math in Spanish every year because there'd be certain ways of maintaining fluency in that language and concepts and the language that you just want to repeat each year. Yeah, so that's a great question. There are a bunch of different models that we've seen, right? And some are switching on a daily basis or a weekly basis or a monthly basis. What we're looking at is that there's more continuity if we do some of our core instruction in one language for a longer period of time in terms of instructional materials and planning. But we would always be bridging to some extent. So we'd be looking for opportunities for example in kindergarten, if the math is happening in English, we'd be looking for opportunities in our oral language time, in our content time to talk about math topics, to do the calendar, to engage with that language so that we're bridging across even if the core content time isn't in both languages. So yeah, it's a great question. And it's still evolving. I mean, this is our thinking right now. In May we might say, you know what, actually we really do need to shift that a little bit. So yeah. I actually wanna follow up on that too because I was trying to think of the right question to ask with something like this. And I'm not sure if I'm just not understanding what is actually being proposed. So is this a curriculum program that means that you get math in Spanish for one year and don't get it the next year? Or is this just that it's a curriculum shift or a change so that you're still getting the math but it's just a different set of books or a different instructional method? So. Can I try? Yeah. So I think one of the, I'm gonna take a step back and then I want Katie to answer your question. But I think one of the challenges that we all face and I've been in some of these meetings is you're trying to teach the content areas. You want students to gain fluency in both English and Spanish in all content areas. We have the same amount of time. So that creates the conundrum of, do you say in some schools do where like math is in English, K to six, right? And we're just not teaching in Spanish. Other schools, as Ms. Richardson said, alternate on a more recent, you know what sooner or quick basis like daily or weekly. And in some schools do what, you know, and again to this point, this decision is made due in every other year so that math, students are taught math for the same amount of time as in a modeling language class but the language of instruction changes year to year so that the idea is like students gain fluency in mathematical thinking and skills along with the bridging. By the end of sixth grade, they can be equally fluent in math speaking in English and in Spanish. And so the conundrum is, you know, at what point do you say, you know, it's just, it's too much to be flipping that and in certain subject areas you want to flip every subject every year and some you want to have more consistent and particularly in the lower grades where you have so much focus on literacy skills for all sorts of good reasons, you're sort of heavy dosing literacy, you know, in both languages because they're five and six years old and that's what makes sense. So I think that's one of the challenges is, as we think about it, one of the other schools we visited, they had math and English for K to two and then they started alternating in third grade. And so we are looking at multiple different models of that but I think the challenge is how do we promote, you know, bilingual students in content areas when they have the same amount of time at school as all the other students who are learning in one language. And I think the attempts that districts are making is how do we do that in a way that makes sense? That's logical, that's not confusing to children or families or staff. Sorry, that was a long-winded qualification to what we were gonna say. So I think, I don't know if that answers part of the question, but then the piece about the math in particular, we know that that same curriculum has a version in Spanish. So we would be able to maintain the sort of flow of that same curriculum, but do it in whichever language we choose. Does that answer your question? It does. It's still sitting uneasy with me for some reason. So, you know, I do wanna hear more about that, but you know, we can move on unless the committee has any other questions or comments on that. It's just, yeah, Mr. Narvejima. No, I just, I'm looking, is your question continuing to think about it? I'll just be, I'd love to hear more about how you end up thinking about it. Just in, again, this is one of those things where you walk off the street and you don't know anything else, and you watch somebody who's a master baker making breads and you're like, are you doing that right? And of course they do it every year, right? And they do it every day and they make the world's greatest baguettes. So who am I to judge? But when I'm sitting here thinking about it, my immediate thought is that you'd think you'd switch it up every semester or like if you think of the year in abs or... And we've talked about that too, so. You know, like just more frequently so that you wouldn't literally like not... Wait a whole year. Exactly, yeah. Yeah, so it's a consideration and it is an ongoing conversation and you're welcome to join us at any point. There's a lot of these, so, yeah. Yeah, I don't mean to interrupt, but research is established on both sides. Can you come to the mic, please? I'm sorry, because we can't hear you. The other thing is we are trying to steep our conversations in research spaces and they're all over the place as far as outcomes in every method. So there's nothing that says this is the right way. Yeah. And that's helpful to hear also, right? I think to know that there are different models being used currently and it's not that we're gonna say we're gonna kind of pin ourselves to this one model and that's what we're doing no matter what, but to know that a couple of other things have been tried and that maybe the outcomes are not that different. Even that being articulated and shared I think that the committee would be helpful, right? Right. With the community. Yeah. It's a learning process, don't you? Yeah, I think the only thing I'd add is just a practical reality that if the vote is affirmative to move this forward and then we have an open process to hire the teachers, you know, we've had teachers involved. We want their input as well because one could imagine a situation where you have either language, a teacher who excels at teaching mathematics and you can't make a whole program about one teacher but you might actually wanna think through who the people are, their comfort level, their training, their skill level and not that that informed seven grade levels but to start you might wanna pick people, you know, I always feel like when you're making a significant change capitalizing on strengths that are already existing to get things, the ball rolling would be a way to think about it. So that's just another, yet another variable to throw into the pie that we're baking to stay with the flag team. Yes. I was a little more dessert than you but that's okay. Yeah, sorry. That's okay. Yeah, continue. All right, so for assessment and data, reading assessment will be a big deal for the Spanish side. We have our systems in place for English, obviously, but we need to add in those components. So again, we're looking at some different options. There's the benchmark assessment that we do for reading now. There's a version in Spanish. We need to get more into that to see if we really like that assessment. If it really honors the progression of Spanish reading development. We've heard really great things about the second one, the Aneel which is connected to one of the programs that we've been looking at as a core reading program. So that's one big piece. We'll also wanna have some way of assessing Spanish language development more globally. So looking at all four language domains, including listening and speaking, not just the reading and writing. And that is more sort of similar to what we do with English learners in terms of trying to see how their language develops across four domains. So there are some different options for that. And then we're gonna need some professional development and collaboration time to figure out some of the more specifics. So there's some pieces where we may buy an assessment tool and there may be some pieces that the team says we wanna develop our own method of doing a portfolio, doing a language sample, that sort of thing. So we'll have to see where all of that sits once the team is together. And just an ongoing work with our information systems to make sure that we are capturing the data that we wanna capture over time and have ways set up to do that. So some of those second two pieces are less about a purchase, but just acknowledging that there's a human resource and time resource needed for those. Our Spanish classrooms have to look like Spanish classrooms. So that's a big change. We need signage, we need visuals, we need supports, we need games, we need everything that will make the room look just like a first grade kindergarten room would look, but in Spanish. So that's pretty straightforward, but super, super important. And every year, right? So kindergarten, it'll be this much then first and a lot of these are expenses that will be as we grow. Okay, so I'm gonna let Dr. Morris take this one. So, yeah, so staff time and professional development. So I think for staff, I'm gonna harp on the second one which is program coordination. So Ms. Chamberlain does a great job and she's been intricately involved and she has this whole other job which is running an elementary school. So every program we speak to, there's been a point person at central office who is the key coordination piece working in collaboration with the principal. Oftentimes in the districts like Princeton and Harrisonburg, it's the ELL coordinator takes on that responsibility, but not in addition to their role. I mean, in addition to the role in terms of you have to budget time and there's an FTE component of that. So we're actively exploring this and one of the reasons just to be very blunt about it. I'm not asking Ms. Richardson just to talk about this is that she's already playing some of these roles this year and I don't wanna any potential perception of conflict. This is just what every district has. They have a principal who's dedicated and involved in it and they have someone who's coordinating some of the district wide components and some of the curriculum pieces that are just above and beyond what can be expected of a building leader. So there is going to be a component of that. Often that person, if they have the right skill set can also provide coaching to the teachers involved and not just on the Spanish side but on the English side as well. I wanna really position that kind of resonating with the conversation earlier, but this is a large change in terms of the fact that Spanish is being spoken and taught explicitly. So that's a large change on the English side. So English being spoken for 50% of the day every district I've spoken to said it's just as much as a change for the teacher teaching English to think about, will I only have them for half of the day? Which is not the norm for most of the staff members who enter it and what does that mean and what does that collaboration mean and where does that bridging make sense and where do you not want non-native speakers or non-fluent speakers of Spanish? Should we not having them? Right, there's all these decisions that have to get made. So when we're thinking about program coordination and coaching, I don't wanna frame it as in that's for the Spanish side. Some of the costs definitely are into the curriculum. This is really for the program in general. And we've thought through Spanish speaking substitutes and an example at our high school we do have a permanent substitute position which is relatively cost neutral, maybe a little bit more than that. That's probably not fair, Mr. Mangano if he was still here would call me on that. But it's not a huge cost but that way it guarantees that if a staff member in the program's out that there's someone who's readily available and every day we need subs. I don't think Miss Chamberlain has had a day this year where subs perhaps were not even maybe the first day of school but that's likely about it. So it is something that we know that we'll have when we need subs but having a permanent position, particularly someone who feels comfortable teaching in Spanish is something that it's a great idea that came out of the leadership group that Miss Richardson, Miss Chamberlain facilitate that I don't think it's a huge budget driver but is I think a great idea to promote consistency in the program because people get sick and people are gonna be doing professional development. You can meet to the third point over there which is continuing to work with Mabe to a language specific PD, right? You don't start the program and say we're good. We've solved this problem like any other program. The program review component of it is essential and everyone again said this sound like a broken record but maybe new people are listening on TV is that 35 years in Cambridge is still making major adjustments to their programming just like we do on the English side where we say yeah, things are going well. How's our math program going in general? We have actively have those conversations routinely and there's no reason that you would think you could play out differently, do a language program. And the last one is time. So called planning time so that we would want, this is a different model. We wanna make sure that the English and Spanish teachers in the program have time to talk about children in particular and some on curriculum but since they're sharing children in a way that hasn't been typically done before at the primary grade levels, we wanna make sure that there's active conversations with all adults who are working with the children in the program. Certainly the team model at the middle school is probably the best analogy that we have on that where there's a number of adults working with children but the difference is these are five and six year olds who are gonna change more rapidly than students at a middle school level so we wanna make sure that we're building in time for those active conversations to happen. So on the bottom, we didn't cost it out. You know, what we did say is Title IIA funds would be used for a lot of the professional development because we have those and it's earmarked for that and this is a priority of the district if it goes forward. But on the staff side, you know, I think in coming weeks, it's not gonna be a full time position that we're talking about adding. I think the challenge is to think about what this looks like in seven years because program coordination for kindergarten and getting it up and running is significant but doing that time seven is a different thing. So I think it's not gonna be a huge cost driver for next year. It is something to be aware of over time that the responsibilities will grow as the grade levels do as well. Mr. Dr. Jimmel. So I'm curious when you're looking at how that we either internal conversations are happening right now within the district or when you're looking at other schools, what are the implications of having more time for teacher planning, collaboration and communication? My assumption is that teachers are already heavily burdened with a lot of responsibilities that they have to take care of that readily fill up their day in the same sense that we've heard previously about the co-teaching model that one of the desires is to see have more time for planning and collaboration and there just isn't enough of it. What does it look, I mean, I don't know if you have a sense yet but what does it look like? Is it a staffing issue? Is it an issue of how responsibilities are assigned or the day's apportioned or do you have a sense of what that looks like? Yeah, I mean loosely, I think it's a great question to ask and certainly anyone else can help come up and help respond to it. I think it's trying to think about what professional responsibilities do we ask of our teachers and shifting priorities perhaps for teachers who are new into this program away from some other things that are happening and to this, I mean, some of it's about time, some of it's about general capacity. There's only so many things that you can ask any staff member to do and if we're asking staff to do a new program as enthusiastic as they are, that may mean not doing some other things because it's zero sum game, right? Our teachers work, our staff works extremely hard and so I think it's, some of it's about time and creative solutions, some of it's just about prioritization and prioritization in the way that it de-prioritizes other aspects of the work and some of it perhaps is around using some of our grant funding for stipends to extend some of the time where teachers can get together. I think all of those are sort of the types of things that we're thinking about as support staff, okay? Seeing heads nodding, so. Mr. Dumley. So what are the general PD kind of areas I've been wondering about? I don't see specifically called out here but that doesn't mean you're not thinking about it. Is this kind of for, I guess the soft skill of cultural integration and interacting with these really, really young humans? Yeah. Right? Because I mean, it's awesome to be thinking about the curriculum and the books and the assessment and getting training on that and hiring people that are aligned with that and have experience. But at the end of the day, you have these really young kids and one of the big factors here is that because you have a larger percentage of Spanish speakers, there's another layer of cultural relationship and empathy and sensitivity that comes on and knowing that it's not just all Spanish speakers that within Spanish speaking culture, there's so many different layers and these will be little kids that like you said, I hadn't even thought of it until now that, oh yeah, you're a kindergarten teacher. I mean, I can still remember my kindergarten teacher's name, right? I think for a lot of kids, they imprint really strongly, especially at that pre-K to one, two level and that in the middle of the day, that's gonna completely change and so how does that affect? And so, yeah, I guess if I could just hear a little bit about that and to what degree that's informing our PD and also our hiring driver in terms of those decisions that will be made. Yeah, I'm gonna start and then I think other people will jump in who are a little closer to the ongoing kind of every other week meetings work. So one of the things I noticed in all three visits when I went into kindergarten classrooms was that and this was said to me orally, but I saw it firsthand as well as for students who are entering, it perhaps, I'm trying to think of the right way to frame it. I'm gonna frame it the way it was told to me. This wasn't anyone from Amherst, right? These are in other districts. Kindergarten looks a little more like it did perhaps 10, 15 years ago than it does today in some of the other classrooms. So there's much more focus on oral skills and social-emotional skills and not that there aren't academic skills, there certainly are, but because students are learning in both languages, the staff are really attentive to that social-emotional aspect. And so, I can remember a couple of the specific things I saw and the intensive focus on making sure that the oral language and what I'll call friendship and social relationship aspect was stressed in a way that sometimes, and I'm not saying there's something in Amherst, but in many communities we've gotten away from as there's been more intensive focus on early reading skills, all things that are good, but that are more academic in nature. And I think that's been intentional for two reasons. One is that the fact that students are learning two languages and we wanna be conscious of the cognitive demand that we're placing on students given that additional variable. And I think the second is for the things, the reasons, exactly the reasons you cite that students are in two different classrooms, they're making a transition often. It's like down five steps of a hallway. I've seen literal footsteps between the two classrooms that are probably more for management than they are for anything else, but moving little bodies short places sometimes can take a while as those of you with young children would know. And, but I think they're very intentional about creating an atmosphere that's inclusive and accepting and supportive at the beginning knowing what students are going through. I think consistently one of the things that districts when they're getting ready to launch a program where they're doing not even that and they're doing their parent orientations, parent guardian orientations, they say, your students are gonna come home tired, right? They're accessing two languages. No matter what their first language is, your students are gonna come home tired. And I think being conscious of the cognitive demand and cognitive load that we place on students is really important, especially given that they're working with two different adults. And then some of the cultural pieces I know Ms. Chamberlain feels really, as we all do, but feels passionate and articulate about them. So I'll- We had a conversation just today actually before we were about this and thinking about the cultural trainings that our staff really needs to appreciate and appreciate in one another. So our, we know our community is very acculturated in a white Anglo way of educating kids, right? So really making sure that we empower the Spanish speaking partner in this that brings a different perspective that the English teaching teacher may not have ever experienced. And making sure that there is deep consideration for both cultures in the school, both cultures in the classrooms. And we try to do as much cultural responsive work as we possibly can right now, but we have to take it even that deeper level and allow students to own their identity within the classroom, because we know we are targeting the Spanish speaking population here, but we're also talking that that's one population and that's not one population. That's vastly different from all different corners of the world. So how do we make sure that there is that, that connection to social emotional learning and identity connection for all of those kids to really have that level of empowerment that we need them to have and want them to have. So that acculturation part is a huge part of the conversation right now, because if we don't marry that well, we're setting up potential discordant dynamics in the adults, which certainly the children will feel. I guess. This has definitely been thought about in all of the processes that I've been part of too. And if you go back to our mission statement, which we developed together, we specifically talk about including the cultures of all of our staff and students and families, because we know, one, I mean, it's very artificial to say like white culture versus Latinx culture. And we know that's many cultures there and that our students in this program too will not just be from those two artificial boxes either. So we all bring our cultures to the classroom and it won't just be about Spanish language culture and English language culture. So I actually have, thank you for that. I have a couple of questions. I think that the visit that I made to the Holyoke School, we could go two weeks ago now, I can't remember, was fantastic and I was incredibly excited to see second, third graders speaking Spanish fluently in a classroom setting and these are not Latino children, these are other children from other parts of the world and from American children, English speaking children. And so it's definitely exciting to see that in action and I think some of the conversations we had that day sort of drove home for me about how important the teachers actually are, the educators are, they can make or break a program, right? And so finding the right people, training the right people, making sure that they are retained and are contributing to the fabric of the school is incredibly important. That said, I also heard some challenges and one of the things that the principal had mentioned was the challenge of actually recruiting, qualified Spanish speaking teachers and there's probably a lot of different things at play there and depending on the school, the context, the town, a whole bunch of different things. That said, I think we heard some feedback from that particular school of having to go through some pretty significant lengths in order to find qualified teachers. So I'm thinking just about the cost of that because I think they were talking about even recruiting from other countries and going through consulates and all of that. So there's definitely costs involved in that piece. So I want you to hold that for a second because I think that that's important to this conversation. And then I think the other thing is really just about thinking about our staff and how we're shifting and moving them potentially and kind of what that does. Like the impact that that might have on that sense of stability or that sense of mastery that they might have in their own classrooms if they've been teaching for a long time. So I'm wondering if I don't know if it's you Dr. Morris or Principal Chamberlain to just address that piece of it, both the recruitment and then the retention of qualified educators in the district currently and how we think about that in terms of cost and all sorts of different things. Yeah, so I can start that conversation. So I think one thing, yeah, we heard a lot of from other districts we've so could do about where they recruit from and I think the thing I'd say and Ms. Cunningham's not here tonight is that those were things that the HR department was thinking of doing anyway. This program doesn't happen. The need for more bilingual educators in our school district is something that we've talked about all the time and so is there a cost in the HR budget, right? So they do have some travel lines and so if this program doesn't happen, I don't think it's gonna wildly change the recruitment efforts because we're all recognizing with the change in our student population we have to catch up with the change in our faculty. So I'm not suggesting there isn't a cost but for us that was a cost we were gonna bear. We are going to bear one way or the other. In terms of the second part of it with staff I think the hope is that, or my hope is right now in most grade levels at Fort River there's two classes per grade level. This would be increasing into three classes per grade level. So making an assumption that most, not all but most of the classroom teachers at Fort River are not fluent in Spanish. There would be the potential for one of the two current staff members if they wanted to apply and become part of the English side of the program. I think the things that we're looking for are staff members who are excited, who are motivated, who are energized by the model, who see the benefits of it and who are really gonna work on the sheltering. I think I shared it in earlier school committee meeting that one of Ms. Richardson's concerns from one of our trips, I think Ms. Richardson shared it, excuse me, was that we want the sheltering in the English classroom to look as good as the sheltering in the Spanish classroom because it's kind of our intended audiences, at least part of our intended audiences, Spanish speaking English learners and we wanna make sure that the English side of the room is as deep and rich for their English acquisition as the Spanish side is for, right. So that's the hope, our commitment or my commitment is never to force any staff member to participate in the program. That's a bad model. And my lingering hope is that it provides, we find one of the current Fort River staff members who has the skill set and the motivation to participate for exactly the reasons you cite. I think it will promote stability in the school as per their entry. But I can't, again, I'm not gonna be, I can't force someone to do something that they don't wanna do, right? Or if I do, it's gonna have a poor outcome for its children. And so that's, I think, the tension point is making sure that we have that that's aligned. And if not, then we may have to make more complicated kind of who goes where decisions. But that's the frame of mind and the kind of structure that I'm coming into it with. I don't know if there's anything either of you would like to add. Thank you. Thanks. Sorry, that was a long way. That's okay. They're great questions. Yeah, I feel like the culture piece we could go on for a really long time, but we're trying to be 10 minutes here. And we're not gonna make that. So, okay, this one's easy, ready? We need bilingual signs all over the school. Everything needs to be labeled in English and in Spanish if we're gonna have dual language program. And that's a one-time cost, luckily, whereas many of the others are not. At least the bulk of it, you know, they'll always be updating and things like that. Mr. Nakajima. Is there like a style guide you're going? I mean, is there like a template we're working off of now, or is there something? Does it tend to look fun? Is it looking to be bright? Is it gonna be... We actually had this conversation because I'm an artist also. And I was like, I wanna make all the signs. But there's this thing about the institutional look of a sign that we also need to consider. It has this, whether you like it or not, this sort of legitimacy, right? So I think we need to have a balance of that sort of institutional and then also some really creative and excited signage. What you're thinking about that, though? Yes. Because I understand that. You don't want a police station that looks like a clown car. Yeah. Fun sort of construction. You know what I'm saying? It's got all the things. It's got all the things. Oh, goodness, no. No, no, no, no, no. You look professional. Yeah, exactly. But it's got like fun, engaging, professional. And the other thing, which I actually haven't shared with you, but I thought about on Friday when I was visiting Fort River is there's some missing signage as it is at Fort River. I don't know if you've had this experience, this appearance. So I think the challenge will be not just the Spanish signage is actually rethinking how the signage currently exists. I don't know if you feel that way, Ms. Chamberlain, but just having been in a school that had bilingual signage and walking around Fort River and thinking about, oh, what would we need to add? Because clearly that school had pretty good signage. It was built in 2008. So the signage was pretty good throughout. And then looking at Fort River, I think there are some gaps to when you come into Fort River, do you know where to go? Like even the sign about the gym, the cafeteria, the nurse's office. I don't, you know, that's not present at Fort River. So the funds that we're looking at wouldn't address just the bilingual signage. Well, it would, if you think about the word bilingual. It would address the bilingual signage, but there's some English needs as well. Yeah, which is a real opportunity. Yeah, absolutely. But that said, I mean, I'm often in charge of better for worse, defense, different places, signage. And some of it is signage like this kind of stuff that's kind of laser printed, hard materials, others, some just regular. The $10,000 feels a little high, but I don't know. At some point, it sounds to me like you'll want to do is just do like a inventory of all the different signs. So this is not a real number. This is just a ballpark number, right? Okay, yeah. I would say that we did talk to Mr. Rick Fiersen about just signage in general and the needs of Fort River. So some of this perhaps is addressing some missing signage as it currently exists. And the signage that we need, if we wanted to be permanent signage that gets affixed is not, it's expensive. I mean, the only way to say it, it's, you know, I mean, with all due respect, I've seen this in our work, it's beautiful. Like I think it should be included, but if we want like hard welded things to walls, you know, the cost of that, as you know, from your professional work is higher than one would expect. And we want it to look professional, right? I mean, we all want professional looking schools. And to the point that you raised earlier, we want the English and the Spanish to both look at that. So that was his estimate of looking at the school and what you would do if you were really doing new signage across the school. Yeah, to get an inventory will be key, right? I mean, it's 100%. Yeah, but I just wanted to put the number that he came up with. Let's see him. So the last sort of bucket of resources, expenses that we're thinking about is all of the work that needs to happen around family engagement and family communication. A lot of these are things that we are already doing or are working towards doing anyway. But again, there's just more of a focus. Making sure that families are really integrated, really invited and welcomed, that their cultures are pulled into the programming. So some kind of role over time for community or family outreach. Trying to ramp that up a little bit will be important having some additional events, bilingual events. So reading together, we've been talking about finding ways to integrate more foods that represent cultures that currently are represented or will be represented in our schools, in the gardens. And we have some community experts on that that are interested in partnering. Talking about storytelling, a parent brought up that historically the Latinx community has been underserved in terms of learning their own history and culture and that intergenerational gatherings where we address that and invite families in to learn altogether could be a really rich opportunity. So all of that kind of stuff should be happening anyway, but this elevates that need. Lots of partnering with community organizations in terms of bringing in resources and our translation and interpretation needs. Again, we do continue to improve that process, but we just need to make sure that everything that goes out that's related to this program, that's coming out of the school, all the information that is provided in both languages. So that's an access and equity issue that we're already dealing with, but it shifts with this model, and that's it. Yeah, so, and this slide is just to say we're excited about this. We know that it's gonna be a process and there's gonna be significant resources that are needed each year as we grow the program, but that's what will make it successful. All right, Mr. Dunwin? So I guess this is a question for Dr. Morseau. We've been talking about the ideally, the desire to do this in a cost-neutral way given the fiscal reality. So I'm not seeing a total ballpark number at the end of this. So given that we're gonna vote on this in a couple of weeks, what is your current feeling about cost neutrality next year, the years ahead, and it's not cost-neutral, what are we looking at, and do you still feel like that's achievable? Yeah, so I think what makes it hard to give you a real finite number is because many of the things in here can be partially paid or fully paid from grants that we already have. It's really those grants ask us to prioritize items. So when we write our grants for instance, title two A, we have to list what are the priorities of the district, and then we have to apply the grants, the grant funds to that. So like Mabe being a good example, which was not, you know, wasn't free that they come in to support us. So I think that's where it gets a little bit tricky. Do I think we'll need to add staff, like we'll have to add another teacher, we'll have to add huge amounts of FTEs I don't. Do I think some of these things, if it's the will of the committee and the community to go forward with them, we have to find ways in our current budget to fit them in. So I think I can come to the next meeting probably with a little more finite information, but I think my hesitation isn't because I don't think these aren't real costs, it's just how they get, where they come from, especially the professional development and some of the resources. We do have budget lines now. So do we have to buy materials in Spanish that we didn't usually have to buy? Yes, but would we have to buy some materials in English if the program wasn't happening? Yes, so there's a bit of a cost increase, but it's not like replacing something that we'd never have to buy. You know, I think that's why it's hard to get a real cost estimate on it. I know that's not a great answer for a very reasonable question. I do think, well, you were raising your hand for a follow up perhaps, so I wanna. Mr. Demling. So I mean, I don't need a full answer now. I just think that I sort of look at this for the cost variable in two ways. One, we're talking about implementing a program that has the strongest research-based support for closing the achievement gap for English language learners. That's a pretty huge and amazing thing, and so if the cost is above zero, I'm okay with that, because we should be talking about closing the achievement gap probably all the time. We just can't fit it into every skill agenda, but it's one of those huge problems that if we have a way to actually make a leap forward, we should go for that. That being said, this isn't the whole school budget, and so I feel like the school committee needs to have some level of ballpark understanding so that we don't approve something that we then are committed to supporting for onwards that is going to have a larger grasp on the budget than we had initially felt. Yeah, I don't need to. Yeah, yeah. No, I'd basically just echo that is that because we're gonna have to take a near-term vote to say we wanna move forward, and to me what that means is it means wanting to put all the resources, attention, and enthusiasm into Fort River as well as also into Wildwood and Crocker that we can't. So it's a real statement of purpose, but it's also then leading directly to work plan, directly to budget impact and attention for the committee, and for all of you obviously much more. And so the real key is getting a sense of the order of magnitude, net impact, and understanding, I wouldn't want to have to explain to someone next March, was why did we just choose to make a quarter of a million or a half million dollar? I know it's not anything, it's not that much, but I'm just saying for the sake of argument, if we were suddenly saying we're making a third of a million dollar commitment with no sense of where the money was gonna come from, but it's a really important thing to do, and now let's put pressure on everyone else in town to fund it, that would sound less responsible than if it's less than that, a lot less than that, but still maybe not zero. Yeah, I certainly can provide that on November 5th before it so you can consider it, but we can talk through that on November 5th. I think the other thing that I wanna share in terms of this particular year, this fiscal year that we're currently in and getting the ball rolling, is as Mr. Mangano presented before, we're in an unusually after first quarter, which is only first of four quarters, we're in a place I haven't been before in three years, where we may have excess resources that we're able to use to purchase some of these materials this year, and in particular the curriculum materials, we wanna make sure that once we have teachers on board that we're not waiting till summer to purchase some of the curriculum that they plan to use, right? Like when you're doing curriculum adoption, you don't wait till two months before you're teaching to get that materials. So one of the things that Mr. Mangano and I spoke about literally today is if this trend holds in terms of our fiscal situation, what things can we start purchasing out of this year's budget for the following year, because we may have that opportunity. And so that's not necessarily the same thing as it doesn't take away from the question or the request to have a ballpark number, because if this year goes that way, that's one out of three years, right over the last three years, we've been able to do that. So I don't wanna bank on that, but I think particularly getting a program off the ground, there's a lot of interest that we all have in seeing if we can purchase at least some of the core products earlier out of this year's budget so that teachers have more time to get acquainted and actually access them before next year. And just to add to that, I think the, again, thinking about the other two schools that we are currently also considering having other programs and we're not sure what those are gonna be yet. What I'm most interested in is not just cost neutrality or cost breakdown for Fort River, but it's just in relation to the rest of the budget, right? Yes. So these savings that we've seen this year, which are great and we've all, we're all knocking on wood, thanking whatever heavenly sources there might be. For that, it's still an understanding that that doesn't happen very often and that if next year were to suddenly change and we would go back to the trends that we've been seeing, that we would have to make some hard decisions again, right? And so, and I know you're completely aware of them, more so probably than any of us at this point having to deal with it on a daily basis, but I think it's just creating some sort of accounting in relation to the wider budget, understanding where our budget goals are and where we really wanna think about those resources. That's where I'm most interested in seeing. Absolutely, and if I could add to that, I mean, one of the things that's hard when we think about the between school comparison, this comes up with our specialized special ed programs as well is that there are students, for instance, who attend Fort River and Wildwood who are not known to those schools. So when we think about a school-based budget, there are significant numbers of students at Fort River who attend Fort River because they have the program that meets their needs and how does that play out when we're talking about materials and resources? It gets a little complicated and I think this program as we're currently slating it with the lottery also falls within that where it's based at Fort River but there may be students who are zoned to other schools to do that. So I think that's part of what we have to also say publicly about why there may be an increase in cost at least temporarily at Fort River. It's a new program, but it's actually serving primarily the Fort River community, but not exclusively. But I know this comes up with the specialized programs at the two schools as well as well as at the preschool at Crocker Farm. How do we account for the, not the teachers, the staff is easier, but how much materials they need? Because preschool teachers, the kids are so young, they need tremendous number of materials that don't come back year after year. They're not, oh, it's a math textbook. I'll give it to the next year's three-year-old. That's not the way we think about it. So it is sort of careful negotiation and planning that we have to go through when we, any time we're kind of tapping away or utilizing a system that doesn't involve the quote-unquote neighborhood school model. So thank you for coming yet again and presenting, we really appreciate it. And I'm assuming there's no other questions or comments from the committee and can move on. So thank you very much. Thank you. So the next item on the agenda is the Fort River Feasibility Study Building Committee update. And before we get into this, I just felt it important to say something publicly actually, and this is following on the heels of our last conversation that we had around this topic at this meeting where a topic of conversation came up regarding the scope of the current Fort River Feasibility Study Building study that's being done. And there was a question about whether preschool was appropriate or not. And I have to say it was very late in that meeting. We were going into our fourth hour of the meeting. And I personally did not remember that we had discussed at some point last year actually, following town meetings decision and following our presentation, which had only been K through six, that the school committee decided at that point that they wanted to add preschool as part of the scope. And so I feel that I had reacted because I did not remember that piece. And I think we, at that point during the meeting had looked up the mission statement, which was on the website, which actually said K through six and did not include preschool. And so I had reacted and said, I don't remember that being a comment. And I feel that I owe an apology actually to the community because that is something that I should have had in front of mind. I think for a conversation like that, it's incredibly important for us to remember those kinds of details. There's a lot of details that we have to remember, but that's a very important one. And that said, I had spoken with Dr. Morris. I spoke with Ms. Nakajima, who's been sort of our liaison for the school committee to the Fort River Feasibility Study Building Committee and expressed my concerns. I feel that there's been a lot of details that have been missed with this work that's been going on. It's not to anyone's blame. I think it's really just that there's a lot of moving parts and there's been pieces here and there. And so what I'm interested in is figuring out how we prevent this from happening moving forward because this is a critically important project for the community. People have expressed a lot of concern and interest to see what happens with this building in particular, but the site more generally, and if there's gonna be any kind of project that happens in the future, either at the Fort River site or anywhere else, this is definitely something that the community has been tuned into for a really long time. And so we frankly need to be more buttoned up about it. We need to be better about these details. We need to be able to be able to have consistent reports coming back from that building committee to this committee. I think we have to have a better process in place for communicating anything, any decisions that are made here that that gets taken back to the building committee. And vice versa, right? And so I think we're trying to set up a meeting right now with the chair of that committee for this week. And hopefully we can, working together can come up with a better process, but I just wanted to provide that introduction because I think that the, again, we keep putting consistently this agenda item on these agendas, right, which is an update from this building committee. And so I think moving forward, we want to have to look very differently. It needs to be a better process to report this back. And so, yeah, I don't know if Mr. Jumling, if there was something else that you wanted to add. Yeah, so I mean, so I was at the same meeting as you in that fourth hour, and I expressed the same level of concern of the feasibility committee considering things that were out of scope in the mission statement. And that was my mistake. And I also want to apologize for assuming that the committee was acting out of scope. I was also referring to the online mission statement. And it was, you know, and as the minutes from 10, 17, 17, clearly show, it was a year ago, but I was at the meeting. And I, you know, Ms. Havid brought up the, would the committee by consent update the scope to pre-K to six? And I had mentioned, yes, I would not want to restrict the committee's work and I'm comfortable adding that. So not something I remembered at the time, you know. So yeah, I want to note that as my mistake. I think it was, you know, probably a broader discussion maybe for our next meeting, if you determine, I guess. But, you know, I think I was reacting to a couple of different things. One is just I keep hearing confusion in the community about the scope of what the feasibility committee is studying and what it's going to deliver and what it's going to lead to. And I get, I love that people are excited about it because people should be excited about the future of our schools and see it as a priority. And yet we don't have a financial path forward and so we are, in that respect, no closer to a new building. And so I need to, I feel like it's our job and school committee to sort of temper and clarify the expectations. And also so that we don't set the results of the feasibility committee up for failure. We want to make sure that all this volunteer work, all these hundreds of hours that people are dedicating is honored and appreciated and that people, the public doesn't feel let down when the result is a site and building feasibility analysis with cost estimations that sunsets at that point and that is not then followed by an MSBA process, which we do not have yet. So there's a couple of other issues, but we can maybe talk about a different scope to topic. Dr. Morris. Yeah, so it would be helpful if I updated just in the last meeting I attended and some of the key, trying to think what would be helpful for the committee. I'm happy to share an update of some of the key things that were discussed. Or were that obvious? Yeah, I think that would be great. Okay, so some of the things that happened, there was a consultant who is an energy consultant who described a number of different net zero who's done not zero buildings and he went through multiple schemes and he also was going to connect with Mr. McPherson about the very rightfully concerned, they want to make sure that whatever energy management system HRAX system they use is the custodians and maintenance crew are comfortable with because they don't want to set up a system that anytime something goes wrong, you have to call somebody externally to help and they're very conscious of having an energy efficient system that also folks in the district can manage. They went through multiple different options. I'm not going to detail them here and I'd be the last person who could do that very well about how to get cooling and heating and energy into the building. The committee is looking at multiple options and we have a meeting on Wednesday these will be in even a more detail but new construction, add reno, code upgrade and there's variations within those and the code upgrade option is I will say, talked about at the last meeting and there's not a lot of support. We have to do it because we know we'd have to do it if we're in an MSBA process. I don't believe there's anyone in the committee and this came up as a sort of topic who actually thinks a code upgrade is sufficient for the needs of Fort River but because this is all leading to perhaps being information that's usable, the architects are working with us. There was a request I think from a committee member like not spend a tremendous amount of time on the code upgrade because we know we need to have it but no one would seriously consider that to resolve the deficiencies of the current building. There was some discussion about the special education specialized program spaces particularly where the spaces would be located in the school and there was a follow-up meeting that was scheduled and anyone on the building committee was invited but the CPAC president was there, the two special administrators, the central office were there as well as the staff person who coordinates the three specialized programs across our districts to look at special education programs more generally and offer feedback on that. So that happened Thursday, I believe Thursday afternoon of last week I was unfortunately unable to attend but there was a lot of staff members present. I think there's some dialogue that's happening about the square footage of the program. I don't think there is dialogue happening about the square footage of the program particularly as it relates to MSBA standards and how does your guidelines and how does that work? So there are some spaces that we have that if you compare them to MSBA guidelines would be more, some that would be less and so there was some active dialogue about specific spaces and what the needs of our district were versus our versus what the MSBA would sort of suggest in the space summary. I'm sorry. So I'm gonna focus on what you were just talking about but then pull it back a step or move about what the deliverable is intended to be and the challenge of developing the deliverable. So the deliverable, and this is really like a genuine challenge, right? If you're actually building a building then you'd have lots of arguments over how you program the space but everyone would know at the end of it they're actually gonna build what come out of it and so like the arguments would become really like, you know, feral, right? Would be really trying to make sure they got the space they needed because they know they're gonna live with it. The challenge here is really that what you're getting out of space allocation decision-making is a model, right? Or a range of models and those models have to stand withstand scrutiny from every stakeholder of interest who's gonna be engaged in the project. So one of the challenges we have is the, in some cases, so what we've been doing, you may already know this, I don't know, I wasn't at the last meeting and I'm very sorry I wasn't now because I actually did remember the vote from last year. I didn't remember the date, I just remember we took it. And in fact what I would have said if I'd been there two weeks ago I'd be like, you gotta trust me, I know we took a vote, I just don't remember when. Or whatever that was a couple weeks ago. But anyway, but, so my point is I don't know what else was discussed at the meeting, but what the committee's been doing is been going through sort of a space program allocation based on what the, based on a couple different models of enrollment. So there's a, one is like 360 and the other one's like 460. 320 and 415 and 420. 420, 420, forgive me. 320, 420 and that breaks down to an assumption of a certain number of classrooms by grade. A lot of the activities you'd see conform with exactly what you think would be in an elementary school. So there's a gymnasium, there's a kitchen, there's a cafeteria, there's media rooms, there's breakout spaces, there's classroom spaces, there's administrative spaces, there's nursing spaces, there are hallways. I'm not trying to be stupid, but I'm saying almost all the activities you'd imagine would be there are the activities you'd think would be there. But then the question ends up being is how much space do you allocate to each activity? And then how do you, how do you make a decision about what size spaces should be there? And some of it is based on, so some of the advice we've been getting back is based on looking at, okay, well what's there now in Fort River and what's the size of the classrooms and does that make sense? What do the teachers and professional staff and educators think make sense? Then what does MSBA think? What do they recommend as their recommended spaces? And in some cases, and special education is a perfect example of this, the amount of space that MSBA would say you need in an elementary school for special ed is not remotely close to what we have in our district. And so one of the discussion points that came up with the designer that went on for quite a while was they kept trying to shove down our, and I don't mean it's like they're judging it, they're just looking at this and saying, we think you have way too much special needs space, you don't need this much space. And they had to learn a lot more about how we organize our special needs programming throughout the entire district to understand why even if the square footage doesn't have to be as big as it is now, it would need to be bigger than what is in MSBA guidelines because we're frankly concentrating the delivery of special needs services across the district. Other things that come up are things like the size of our media room and well, how are we using it? Or the size of our gymnasium and what is our gymnasium used for? Our gymnasium is smaller than MSBA guidelines would recommend. It's also smaller. Anyways, and it also, based on practical experience people have used it, say it's not really as big as you'd like it to be, maybe not even as safe as it should be. I mean, it's safe, but it could be safer if you had more separation between uses in the gymnasium. Why am I going into this level of detail? The reason I am is because everything costs money. And so if you're on a committee and you're trying to model out possible costs of a 315 and 415 or 5020 and 420 enrollment elementary school, you find that based on how you choose to program the spaces and activities within the school, you may end up getting a wildly different range of end costs from a partial demolition renovation, a new addition, or a new construction. And so one of the, I could say it's arguments, but it's sort of a debate or attention point on the committee is because the designer will tell you square footage costs money. There's a pressure on the committee to try to conform the spaces to something that's on the smaller end, because that means a lower price tag. In some cases, in other cases saying, no, no, no, no, I know about this program. This is really important. It should be, the size you're getting is right. And I'm pushing on this right now for the purpose of discussion, because in the end, regardless of the generally, I think, good and well-intended effort of the people of this committee, I don't mean myself, I mean the other people. And I mean, seriously, there are folks on there who are project managers and architects and stuff who have good experience in the field and are bringing it to the work they're doing, that in the end, it doesn't really matter. I mean, it matters to me a lot whether Principal Chamberlain thinks the special needs space in the gym and the classroom spaces are appropriate. That matters to me, but in general, I don't really care whether the members of the committee want a larger or smaller gym on one level. What I care about is when the deliverable comes out to the public, comes back to the committee and lives as a document in the community, which is supposed to inform the work that goes on next, whatever that next step is, it has to have credibility. And it has to resonate that the price tag, the decision-making, the dollars that are on there, everyone could say, okay, I get why it was programmed, the building was programmed in this way. So when I see the decisions and I see the dollar signs associated with it and I see the positives and negatives of various scenarios based on the feasibility of construction, it makes sense to me. And so one of the things that we're gonna, where we are in terms of the work of the committee, which is where some of these, I don't call them final decisions, because they're not yet, because really the recommendations are gonna go out to the public and come back to this committee. But when that, as that format is being refined, to me one of the things that I would love to see this committee provide as back as positive sort of direction or support is that, and I think this echoed in comments that I believe I heard were said at the last meeting of what the purpose of this committee is, the feasibility committee, where it sits within this broader process of getting to a point where we have a new elementary school, but what's the role of, and I'm saying what's the role of this committee and of deliverable of this deliverable in that process? So I think that creates one, I think having clarity around that from us and that committee, and I think even from the select board of the town managers, the town actually funded this, not the select, not school committee, is really advisable but also I think it's a good really sort of norming effort for the committee to say when they're making decisions, when we're making decisions on the committee, the decision should be oriented towards the credibility of the end product in terms of the quality of the data, the information and the ability it has to communicate to any stakeholder within our community who can look at it and say, ah, here's what I learned from this. And the reason I go back to the fact that it's modeling, which is why I started off with, because it's modeling almost, not literally any, but almost any decision you make in this process could be viewed as somewhat random. Why 315 or 320 instead of 420? Why a 500 square foot or whatever it would be? Gymnasium instead of 600 square foot or whatever. We include preschool or don't preclude preschool. You could do either one or you could in fact have one version that has the preschool, another one that doesn't, so you could look at both sets of information. Any decision you make means you're making a decision to not do something else that you're then modeling and presenting, which means the assumptions that are going into it have to be done incredibly transparently and they have to be done towards an eye towards what is the end recipient of this view in terms of the credibility of the product? Because in my mind, the goal of this was to generate really useful information that was credible and could be portable into any other project or process. And the second one was that because we're, for good or for ill, because there had been previously a lot of debate in our community around the quality of analytical work that at least this product, not that I'm not casting stones at any other product. I'm just saying that this product would at least contribute to advancing consensus dialogue to the extent that it was able to. And I think that's really, really important. That's very brief. So I think just to follow up on Mr. Nakajima's comment, so where the committee is, is looking and trying to narrow down the list to a finite set of options to look at and so it can go to a cost estimator. So to share an ad to what Mr. Nakajima said, this meeting that we're having is trying to focus and narrow the choices so that it's a finite enough list where models can go and cost estimates can be made and that's why it's so important in this space and in the conversation that was earlier. And you can have an infinite number of variations that a cost estimator can look at and that architects can draw up. So it's trying to narrow the list not to be one, but to not be 30. And so that's some of the work of the committee is some of these choices that are being made. And the modeling is so that it's not just for the sake of modeling, it's a different amount. So that we can get cost estimates so the community can better understand the implications of the variations in a dollars and cents way. So, and I appreciate everything that's been laid out over here. You know, this I think is where my confusion and I would imagine a lot of the community's confusion might come from as well. So yes, I think it's important to be detailed and get as much information as you can during this process and absolutely space equals money and you're trying to be precise. At the same time, we actually don't have a project that we're moving forward yet, right? This is just basic information. And we know for a fact that any project that were to come even if it were to be approved by the MSBA next year or we would decide to take on a project ourselves, the cost would go up, the scope would change, there would be a very different project probably on our hands, not maybe not extremely different but different enough, right? So I think ultimately what we had talked about with the community and agreed to was to get very basic information that would help us just kind of wrap our minds around what's possible. Is this site possible? Is this the same kind of building that we want do we want something smaller? Do we want something bigger? Whatever it is. And so I think that maybe some of the confusion that I'm hearing is it sounds like the committee is getting into so much detail that it becomes almost like this project that is actually getting developed that Ibori is gonna be extremely disappointing when it doesn't actually work out that way, right? And maybe you've had that conversation within this committee to help to manage expectations a little bit. But that's what I'm hearing is such a level of detail and I've been in those meetings where you're building and you're building and you are walking through all these different projects and it takes a year and a half to come up with, that wasn't from what we had talked about supposed to be the intent of this committee to get to that degree of specificity. And maybe that scope has changed or maybe it's the expectation, I think we just need to clarify that, right? Because right now that seems to be the biggest point of confusion. So, two things. One, one of the challenges is the reason we've gotten into that level of specificity, to the extent that it is by the way, because I'm not sure it's, I mean I'm not sure a lot of it's a lot deeper than what size cafeteria do you want? You currently have one that's, I'm making this up, 400 square feet. MSBA would say it should be 500 square feet. What do you want to do? Do you want 500 or 400? Is it too little space or too much now? And so it's not super detailed. The reason it gets even to that level of detail at all is not actually because, and correct me if I'm wrong, I look so I'm wrong, I'm wrong. I haven't heard the committee sitting around saying I really want to micromanage programming every little inch of this building. Almost all of that pressure has come from the designer side where they're saying I can't model a blank, I mean if you limp it this way. I think if they had been hired to literally either replicate For River as is now, only with the new building, if that had been their brief, or alternately if they were hired to say ignore everything that's going on at For River right now and build an off the shelf MSBA spec, you know, 315 kid pre-K through six or K through six and just ignore what's going on there now and just model something and give us back something. They could have done that. I think for better for worse. I think they viewed their assignment and their assignment was to come in and look at the actual building, look at the actual uses in the building and then respond to it, both in terms of the feasibility of the current structure and site, but also in terms of if they were modeling different buildings, what would they be modeling? And so they've repeatedly asked questions around, hey, we need to get at a square footage. Hey, look, your current uses are different to what MSBA says. What's your guidance about what we do? When I think this has been true and if it's not again, it's important. Where it's come up with that there's been from a better term an argument or debate on the committee, the committee is always punted to the educators and say, look, we need to talk to the educators should be guiding if there's some reason why our space allocation looks different than what MSBA would say, you should be guiding it. So the point I'm getting at is, I think at least from the way the designers have pushed the process, answering a lot of questions around the building and programming the building has been considered a necessary evil or good depending on you look at it to get at a cost estimation or analysis that would be worth reading. The flip side of that is something I would agree with you about is that that means there's a lot of pressure on all the stakeholders involved in the process, in this case, me and the school committee and the feasibility committee and the educational leaders and probably the town manager and other stakeholders to articulate very clearly, reiterate really clearly what this deliverable is and isn't and what it's intended to do and accomplish and where it sits within the broader process of MSBA and any future consideration. I think that is absolutely critical. You know this, we've talked about this offline between meetings. I agree it's completely critical to do that. I'm going to turn to Mr. Dilling and then Ms. Spitzer. So yeah, I saw, very much agree with what Mr. Nakajima said that I think that my sort of communication advice to the feasibility committee would be that at almost every meeting you have to say even though people aren't going to be excited to hear it that we're not building a building, that we sunset at a presentation of a range of models that are cost estimated, hopefully when we get our statement of interest accepted by the MSBA, which is apparently the only way we're going to fund a new building according to the town manager's estimate, hopefully we'll be able to leverage the work that has been done such that it accelerates or makes that process more efficient. But that we're not building a building and that that's not what this is doing. I think if that's properly understood and communicated, the rest of the things fall into place and they're much easier to talk about with a lot less Ajna. Like we talked about at the last meeting about preschool and well, it's kind of interesting because we all know where the school committee I think is as pro preschool as we could possibly be ideologically, but we'll see in superintendent schools that we are all on board with preschool but we understand that because of the special needs students that we serve and the economically disadvantaged students that we serve, preschool is not a profit-making center. It costs and so to see a large amount of preschool classrooms is interesting but it doesn't really concern me so long as we're all on the same page or by we, I mean both the committees and the public that this is a means to an end to presenting a cost estimation of a range of models. It's not building, building. Same thing with the size of the building. 315 seems a little light to me for building a building in terms of enrollment but it doesn't really bother me that much if long as it's presented again in that context. You know, it's like we haven't had 30 seconds of discussion on the committee since the failure of the last building project in May 2017, March 2017 about do we even want to build on Fort River? Do we want one building or two? Grade reconfiguration, all these eight million things that we could have 57 meetings on. We haven't touched because we said, you know what? We don't have a path forward yet for funding we don't have a project but we do know that we want the information about the site and the building feasibility so let's go out and get that, right? And I think, I think just, just, you know and that's all in the mission statement. I think the mission statement is pretty good except for updating the P on the PK that we neglected to do. I do think too, maybe the school committee writ large she has a little bit of responsibility in terms of the confusion about maybe not, one not talking about it as frequently but even calling it a building committee. I think just in the public understanding makes it feel like it's a committee that's delivering a building and what was the last committee that was called a building committee? It was the Wildwood Building Committee and that was trying to deliver building. This is trying to do something different so feasibility study committee is more of a mouthful than a building committee but I think maybe that would have been more helpful but you know, either here or there. So I feel like there's still an opportunity to clarify that and I agree with all that I'm hearing about wanting to do that. And again, a reminder, Mr. Demling that it is actually the feasibility study building committee. That is the full name. Okay. I just don't see that on publications. I agree, I think and then again this is where it comes down to, you know sort of buttoning up and paying attention to those kinds of details. And Ms. Spitzer, you wanted to say something? Yeah, I don't have a lot to add but I think it would be worth, you know, reiterating that feasibility as part of the title and part of the reason I think I'm worried about all of the focus on the details. I understand you need them for the cost estimates but if these cost estimates end up getting interests are tied to all of these decisions that are made and so as they go into a report and become official and there's a document out there if people are feeling either excluded from the process because they didn't like, oh I thought this was the feasibility not the building committee so I never volunteered to put in my time to weigh in on, you know, this size of the cafeteria which I really deeply care about then they'll feel excluded. On the other hand, the people who were there put in the hours really argued for that bigger cafeteria are gonna feel like, oh but I wasn't listened to and I put in all these hours. And so I feel like there's not only this worry that people are going to become invested in whatever building happens to be the one that gets the cost estimate tied to it but there are also gonna be people who when they see that as the official report coming out are gonna be like, oh I had no idea that we were actually making a decision about how big X, Y, or Z should be. So I feel like it could cut both ways potentially and I wonder if there's a way to get it back on focus on kind of the relative cost of these things and the relative feasibility of these. So it's not necessarily so important how much a specific building is going to cost as much as it's how much it's gonna cost to renovate versus replace. And how feasible is it that this building will be able to adapt to the changing, maybe not changing but the site that we have a site climate change is happening, it's gonna get wetter. Is that gonna be an ongoing issue? Like those are some of the questions that I'm really hoping will get the relative cost and then also just moving forward, doesn't make sense to continue to have this and it very well could be that it's just need some updates to the drainage or we changed the parking lot to accommodate flow of students and things like that for things that have changed in that since 1972 or 73. Yes, please. Yeah, so I think the overall direction of the tenor of the conversation I think is exactly right in terms of what we end up, the feedback back to the committee, including our role in being clear about what the intended of the liberal is and where it sits in the process I think is really important. I think my bias and if Dr. Morris disagrees I'd love to know is around the committee too is that and I've said this before at meetings is that if something like we have more space programmed for special needs than MSBA would say, then to me that was a really important thing for the designers to engage with our special needs staff so that if we add a couple thousand or a few thousand square feet there's a rationale for why that is that could be explained including in the report. But also then it means it's not a black box. It's like yeah, there's more space than MSBA would say because this is how the school district organizes special needs programming and if it chooses to change in the future it will but that's why this looks like that. So somebody couldn't look at the report afterwards and say, well you have a fraction of the special needs space that we know is needed what's the deal with that, right? But beyond that, my bias is actually that I would like to see the feasibility study. By the way what I like to do is call it feasibility committee and just cut out the rest of the words or Fort River feasibility committee because then you don't have the word building in there and it's just the word feasibilities front and center and it's also shorter so it's easier to say. So I think the problem with calling it building committee is that if you're gonna only use two words the question is which two words do you pick and since you know committee is gonna be one of them the question is what's the second word? I would rather it be feasibility than building but anyways, sorry, this is how you get into problems the way of the night, right? It's a long meeting and you start digressing. The point I'm making Dr. Morris and I'd like to know your opinion is that my bias would be that the feasibility committee choose the MSBA guidelines for a space wherever as a default position because A, you don't have to argue about it and B, why he chose it is like not really, who cares? The future building could be larger or smaller that decisionally made in the future in terms of how the space is allocated now we just took off the shelf what MSBA says it's not a big deal, right? That's what I would prefer to do unless there's a good reason like with special needs. Yeah, I don't wanna belabor and then maybe let's wrap this up because I think we should have beaten this one, yeah. Sure, I'd say mostly but not completely agree with that statement I think the special needs piece we've already been through this with MSBA we have way more specialized programming special ed programming than most districts we know that we have data on that we're already presented to MSBA that information they already approved us to be significantly over the space allocation for special needs so on that particular one I feel like we already actually have been through this exact dilemma and when we said, well, we have building blocks and we have aims and at that point we were including I'll see. But you know I said accepted. Oh yeah, absolutely. I was agreeing with you that would be larger. Absolutely, but I wanna say one other thing which is that I do think I think once, so I think the only other caution I have and that wasn't a disagreement, I agree that you pointed that out is that MSBA so it's an analogy to the special needs that's less clean than the special needs but most districts in Massachusetts don't have the huge opportunity that we have to have a full-time librarian full-time library paraeducator. And so we think about media center and library space that's another one where our community is collectively committed to having a much more robust elementary library program than is typical. And so I know that some of the discussions at the committee, the feasibility committee I'm gonna go with that, I like it have centered around MSBA space and so similarly we have lower class size than the average district of Massachusetts. This community is committed to having and a class size that's generally around 19 or 20 which is lower than the average elementary school. Again, we've been through this before with MSBA so I think in general I agree with it but there are some nuances that when you talk to educators and they see this they're like well the community's already spoken they've already identified values in this area and I think it can be a caution. The last thing I want is these designs to become public and staff to feel like it's inconsistent with the values of the community. And I know I'm being probably overly hyperbolic I don't know that's not a right word, hyperbolic that's it better, I was late with that but I think I want to have some sensitivity to that. So I agree 98% with Mr. Nakajima just with that additional caveat. Okay so I'm gonna move us on from this conversation I think maybe just the final takeaway is from this is that we are meeting with the chair of this committee this week to discuss a better process to bring back to the school committee so that we can have a better conversation about any decision making moving forward and maybe you might take back some of the feedback you've heard today whatever makes the most sense just in terms of thinking through scope of project and also thinking through the best approach for leaving room for the future if there's gonna be any changes or anything like that and I think we can all agree that there's likely to be changes so we don't want to set anybody up for any failure or misunderstandings that way. Can I just clarify when you say we are meeting is it the superintendent? Yes I'm sorry so superintendent Mr. Nakajima and myself are meeting with the chair we'll report back to this committee just to let you know kind of what we come up with and as I mentioned before it really is just about coming up with a better process so that we can ensure that we're working together better in the future. Okay thank you very much. Okay so the next item on the agenda is superintendent goals and Dr. Morris has refined these based on the feedback that he got from the committee. The past couple of meetings actually that we've had. I think these look great and reflect a lot but I think if you know the committee has, this is a vote tonight if the committee desires it. If there's any comments or feedback that you would like to make feel free to do that. Dr. Morris is there anything else you wanna say? Yeah just very briefly what I want you to be looking at is the handout with the paper piece. What's in the packet unfortunately was a mistake that I made when I started at the Ms. Westmoreland but actually conveniently it shows last time's version and the edit so if you wanna compare contrast you have both copies in front of you. That's all I was. Thank you. I wanted to say yes. It was a happy accident. Sorry about this. So any, we'll give the committee just a few minutes to review this again. I just have a question on the wording of the first one. I'm struggling with the sentence for all staff members and? Why don't I read that out loud so provide social justice professional development with a focus on historically marginalized groups for all staff members and provide an intensive focus on racial equity training for administrators. If you have a suggestion on the syntax I'm happy to receive it. I was struggling with the for all staff members and provide so I think the way you read it so I'm wondering if maybe the removal of the commas would help but. So remove the first comma? Oh I see what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah it's a comment. It's the basement of the column actually. The way you read it was without, so provide social justice professional development with a focus on historically marginalized groups for all staff members. Comma. And provide an intensive focus on racial equity training. For administrators. Yep. We can make that change it's pretty yeah. I like which term the goals. It's a lot of goals and knowing that we don't have 100% of your time I'm just wondering how you're feeling about how this is all shaping together with your other committees and all their goals that they're giving you is how's your goal load looking? Is it manageable or are you at second blush concern that it's too long? I think all of these things are things I would do if they weren't on my goal list. So the question is for me is what's the level of evidence that I'm going to need to provide for all the goals for all the committees and that's a different conversation but in terms of the actual goals none of these things if you were all like yeah I don't you know I don't really not into them we're going to skip the goal process this year. These are still the things that I would be doing because I think they're the right things to do for our community. So I don't know if that's an acceptable answer but that's your answer. Sounds acceptable. On number three I am as you know a big fan of doing school improvement programs, strategic planning, getting everyone involved getting them on board and making progress on it. So that's awesome and actually interestingly enough we haven't we've only intermittently explicitly talked about doing that at the elementary level. We've talked about it more explicitly at the secondary level. I know the chair has brought it up a couple times but my point is we haven't you know I'm seeing here for the first time this an explicit goal and so one of my questions is given everything else is it realistic and I'm just mean for you I mean even for the school district is it realistic to say you're going to what does it develop mean? You're saying you're going to complete a multi-year school improvement program for each school that articulates the direction and identity of each school by the end of this year and it's going to be done or is it going to be a substantial work in progress? Our aim is that Fort River is a little bit in a different category. I mean they are but it's going to be articulated differently because of you know hopefully we'll move forward with your language program. This is trying to articulate the work of Wildwood and Crocker Farm and the hope is that and the aim is and the expectation is that the process they're undergoing around their identity leads to a multi-year plan that describes the work of their schools not just for next year but for a couple of years into the future. I understand that makes sense to me. What I mean it may sound funny but I'm kind of going where from where Mr. Demling was coming from is that if you got that work substantially done but not all buttoned up by the time you had to give this evidence I'd actually be perfectly happy to be making enormous progress in something that's super important. Writing into your superintendent goals and you're actually going to get it done and provide evidence sounds. I mean if you were on board with that and you're going to get it done awesome I'm actually I'm sort of saying really that's going to be really hard to do along with all I mean okay never mind I'll back off. Yeah well I mean the way I view goals and perhaps this is my flaw is that you know a number two it explicitly says multi-year but this is what we aim to do when we have ambitious goals and you know perhaps that setting a bar that's not in the right place but if we get close but don't finish on that particular goal I think I'll still have lots of evidence of where we are and where we were and the gap between those two and be you know my aim is to be proud of where we are even if it's not at the eyes dotted T's cross level but you're right it does state that I guess it's perhaps maybe I'm too comfortable with that piece but I do think our aim is that by spring there's presentations of school improvement plans that do look to the future so but I appreciate that. Bless you. That was for her. Yes. Bless you. But I appreciate the set up anyway I think it's nice of you. It was in tight to make it more clear. Any other comments or questions for the superintendent? Mr. Timley? Trying to think if this is in the right scope or not. Cut me off if it's not. But I guess it just relates to the definition of goals so I'll press on. We had an interesting discussion towards the end of the superintendent evaluation process last year where we talked about what could slash should be considered when doing the superintendent evaluation and there were different opinions, points of views expressed about whether it should be all just about what's exactly in the goals or whether it's like a broader sort of evaluation that is primarily themed by the goals. And so if it has to be more strongly restricted then I would want to make sure that we sort of hit every single thing here that you might possibly do. So for example, there was one about last year about maintaining the fiscal resources, yada yada. You know what I'm talking about? Awesome budgeting. We expect awesome budgeting again but if you do awesome budgeting and you knock it out of the park I don't want to feel like I can't mention that when I'm evaluating you because that's certainly important to me when I'm evaluating superintendent. So therefore in the according to Hoyle manner of evaluating superintendent must it be an articulated goal? My feeling is no, but I didn't want to have that same disagreement in the future. So I'm not disagreeing, but you know, discussion. I don't think that's mine to answer. Yeah, I mean, it is. I think anyone is welcome to, I think I think that that is a slippery slope where you start to evaluate an employee based on any host of things. And I could see it going really well and I could also see it going really poorly, really negatively, where it feels like there's a goalpost that keeps getting moved, right? And you know, it's unclear. So I think the attempt to articulate a set of goals by which the committee agrees they're going to evaluate the superintendent and the superintendent also agrees is to help keep that goalpost right in front and center. And so you understand exactly what you're working towards. And there's, I think definitely a question about incorporating other aspects of the work that goes on throughout the year. And we've talked about that. You know, there's, it's not just what's presented at the end of the evaluation process, right? You know, the artifacts are not the only things that we use to evaluate a superintendent, but the goals help us kind of keep things straightened, you know, and narrow so that we're not veering off. So, you know, I think it'd be interesting to have a conversation like that at some point further down the road about what, you know, what that entails. Maybe we come up with a totally different evaluation process. It's not this. I don't know, it can be super radical and change everything. But, you know, for now, I think this is kind of where we've landed, right, for multiple years, Ms. McDowell? I actually tend to lean more towards, I think, where you were going, Mr. Demling. I think there's, I mean, you have a job description and there's requirements and responsibilities detailed in your job description that aren't part of your goals and you're expected to be doing those, even if we haven't spelled them out in the goals. So I do think, to a certain extent, the, you know, meeting the requirements of the position are absolutely part of the evaluation because if at the end of the year you've done all of these things, but you've really failed on all of your job requirements, we're not, you know, I don't think it would be expected of us to give a glowing evaluation simply because the goals were all met, right? And I'm not saying that that is gonna be the case. I mean, that's how most of us in our work life are held accountable, too, is that we have job requirements and we have goals and they're all included in our evaluation. So I agree, I think, having a conversation about sort of what those guardrails are and what can be included. But I do agree that we should be able to comment or at least bring in some of that just basic duties into the evaluation. And just to clarify, I don't think that that's what I was saying was that we wouldn't bring those things in. I think that there's been a lot of conversation about incorporating other elements that are not necessarily in the basic job description, but that are other things of areas of concern. And it's important to come up probably with a process that makes sense to both the committee and the superintendent in terms of how to incorporate those things. But like I said, artifacts are not just what's presented for the evaluation process, but actually things that are brought in throughout the year. Other further. Mr. Pajima. Yeah, this is, if people feel comfortable with this, great. This requires more conversation. We're gonna have to dig into this more and we should dig into this more on this committee and another one we're all sitting on, because it's related. I mean, I think I would like to get better clarity and understanding about how we appropriately incorporate an overall view into the job performance into the evaluation instrument and feedback. I think, so just as an example, last, because actually I mentioned this at a recent meeting and I forgot what meeting it was. Meaning it could have been not an Amherst meeting, it might have been a regional meeting. I mentioned the fact that last year we had a budgeting finance goal. And we don't this year. And it's obviously still important, but I brought it up because if we choose not to have it on here, then guess what? We're not evaluating them specifically on that goal when we come to next spring. So how we incorporate that into general feedback? I don't know, we need to figure out what the proper guidance is. But you can't just create a goal. I'm not saying anyway, I'm saying this, but I'm saying it's a slippery slope point that Mr. Jony said, the chair said. You can't find yourself in May in a situation in which you really think a goal or a central task is now really important in your evaluation of the superintendent. It wasn't agreed upon. It wasn't part of the process. It isn't necessarily one of the core artifacts being presented. And honestly, I hate to say this, but it doesn't take all that, we all live in town. It doesn't take that much gazette or amorous bulletin file diving to go back a couple of years where you could find a tangible example where there were things that were being done in the district that were not written into the goals that people felt they had every right to give a bad evaluation to the superintendent based on their belief that that performance-related task was so critical and important that it should in fact be injected directly into the evaluation process. And then that became a matter of significant contract dispute, right? I mean, so this is a real thing. So, and even if we're not having that dispute with you, God willing, as a matter of precedent and a matter of prudential practice, we need to have clarity around that because we can't, we cannot have different members of the committee exercising their own discretion around that. We need to be on the same, we need to be on the same page and on the same page with you and get whatever legal guidance when you know what happened. I'm sorry to speak very strongly about this, but since this is something that literally destroyed a previous committee and I think a previous superintendency, like it's super important that we get, not tonight, literally we should get outside help and we should get an answer, a better answer that everyone feels comfortable with around how we're gonna handle it this spring. Dr. Morris. Yeah, so perfect segue. So I was thinking, I was gonna less articulately say similar to what Eric said in terms of getting outside support and whether MASC is the right organization that would come in and offer that support or someone else, but I do think having someone external be able to provide that decontextualized support would be really helpful. And I think the other thing is, as you potentially are about to vote, if there are things that are not on this list and as some people didn't complete the evaluation because you were new to the committee last year, but I tried to actively, as I was coming up with this look back at the feedback I received last year, integrate that feedback in and that's the way from my, from the superintendent point of view, the feedback's supposed to work, right? The evaluation process finishes and then it immediately restarts with goal setting that's based on the feedback given in the prior year. So I know not everyone had that opportunity to be part of that and I wanna be really conscious of that. But if there are major topics in the district that aren't articulated here that are known, right? There's always unknown things that come up. That's part of this process for my vantage point is that before goals are voted and theoretically I'm starting to work, although I'd say that theoretically on these, because these are things that again I believe in, that that would be articulated up front, right? So I think that's just another way from the superintendent depersonalizing it to me is that superintendents really wanna know that the goals are consistent with what the committee cares about. If there's things that the committee cares deeply about that aren't articulated in the goals, superintendents don't like being surprised by that and they feel like there's some unfairness in that process. And this isn't talking about like wild fiscal mismanagement or like things that are heavy, just poor management kind of things that are hard to predict. These are things that the committee has certain values that aren't articulated in goals that superintendents like knowing that ahead of time. So they're actively working on the things or if there's critiques of past performance that are areas of needs improvement that are not articulated in next year's goals. That's also where superintendents really like to have that information. So they're working on things and that in unison with the committee, they're all in agreement on the high leverage values and things to work on over the course of the year. Mr. Demlin. I really appreciate this conversation. I think it's an awesome idea to get MISC or someone else to further that conversation. It's something I think it would benefit us all to just ponder without a preformed conclusion. I mean, I have my own sort of bias towards it, but I completely hear where Mr. Nakini is coming from. I witnessed those school committee meetings not from this side of the table, from the other side. So I know exactly what you're talking about and how unfair that could be. On the other hand, I can completely imagine a scenario. I'm sure this would never happen with Dr. Morris where all the goals are hit out of the park and yet the core responsibilities of the job description are completely failed and it feels just silly to give a high rating on that. And yet this all happens within the relationship between the school committee and the superintendent. And ultimately, the school committee holds the power of hiring and firing, so it's about a means of facilitating expectations. And so I do love the idea of continuing the discussion. Yeah, and I think, and also just a reminder that we have, I don't know how many meetings during the course of a year, right? And I think there's multiple points where we could let the superintendent know if superintendent wasn't meeting their basic requirements, right? It would be obvious and we would know this. And so, yeah, it's just, you know, keeping that balance in mind is critically important. So, Mr. Nakajima. Correct, I'd like to move to approve the superintendent goals for the Amherst School Committee as submitted or presented this evening. Okay, it's been moved. Do we have a second? Second. Mr. Demling, any more discussion? Mr. Demling. Please do awesome budgets but I'm not gonna append it as an eighth goal. Okay, all those in favor of the goals as presented with a minor edit of the comma change there. That was the only edit we had, yeah. Okay, it's unanimous. Thank you very much. Thank you, Dr. Morris for working on this. Thank you. And we will look to a future agenda to bring in just a discussion, more robust discussion around the broader process. I appreciate your working on this. Next item on the agenda is the Crocker Farm Space Needs. This is gonna be brief, I think, which is that the question that I was worked with Mr. Shada answer is if there's three kindergarten classrooms at Crocker Farm next year, would the students fit? Because we currently have two graduating sixth grade classes. And so the concern was if we don't do some, do we need to do something now because of the space needs? And the short answer is no, we don't need to do anything now. And the reason is because there's currently a full classroom that's this year based on a staffing change that Mr. Shea made and reminded me of being used as a response intervention intervention space, particularly for one grade level that we've put a lot of resources to based on the needs of students. And so since that won't be the case next year, even if there's another classroom that moves in, there'll be that space that's freed up. So in essence, we're sort of banking, there's someone in a more intervention support role next year who would be moving back to a classroom anyway, both in terms of job description as well as space. So, and then the next couple grade levels and third, fourth and fifth grade currently have three classes per grade level. So are there space needs at Crocker Farm? Absolutely. Are they going to change appreciably in the next four years? It's unlikely that they would get worse based on the number of classrooms we have and the kind of current personnel and future personnel we expect. So I mean, if Mr. Shea was here, he could itemize the current space problems, but the key point I want to make is there's not going to be, they're not going to get worse based on how many kindergarten classes they are. They're kind of going to be at the stagnating point. And that's not a great place to be, but it's also not the, we need to redraw lines because we won't be able to, you know, we'll literally have a space for the kindergartners, we will. It just means our current space challenges will continue, but they're not such that I feel like drastic action is needed at the current time. Okay, thank you. Moving on to the next item, regionalization update. Mr. Demling. Yeah, so I'll just continue with the reclaiming time on the agenda, because this will be brief because the last time we met was the morning before this committee last met, and the next time we meet is tomorrow morning. So we have not met in the interim, so there's not a substantive update. Other than, we did meet with the Pelham Finance Committee, so we had a good conversation with them. We were meeting with the Pelham Select Board soon. We have a bunch of invites out to PGOs and school councils and other groups. There seems to be a lot of busyness and activity at the beginning of the school year, so people have not quite set their schedules, but hopefully soon, I think after November 6th, passes, people may move a little more. Freed up. We're also planning product to reach out to, as soon as the election is over, the new town councilors would like to get on their radar as soon as possible, so for their awareness. So. Great. Thank you. Next item is facilities update. Dr. Morris. Keep this brief as well. So Wildwood, where we're increasing custodial support, that has happened, that started a week ago today. Went up to 4.0 custodians from 3.5. The last two Saturdays, the 13th and the 20th, we've had teams go to Wildwood, and I wanna thank the head custodian who organized a really nice way for people to share where the major concerns in the building were, so that the team of custodians came through on the Saturday. It wasn't just first an identification process and then a work process, they were able to really scope and tasks their projects ahead of time, so when they walked in the building, they knew where to go. So that work has been really helpful. And then also a different team, some different people, some of the same people. So it was like a little bit hybrid. We're at Fort River on Saturday as well, and Fort River, the major need was taking apart the Univents, cleaning them out and putting the tops back on. There were a lot of issues with Univents. My conversation with Mr. Shea when I was at Crocker Farm two weeks ago on the same question was from a cleaning perspective, there wasn't a need, but really the needs were in the computer lab and the library, I think I've shared the roof issue so we now have side PO people coming in to resolve that. And in the computer lab, we're having condensation issues, but they're not from the roof, it's not a leak, it's actually condensation from a pipe. So we're working on how to resolve that pipe issue. So it's not like, you know, the other one's clearly from the roof, we know it's from the roof, we gotta fix this one a little bit of a more challenging one, but we have people actively looking at that and working on that one as well. So what we're continually doing is getting feedback from the head custodians and the staff on where the needs are and then trying to address them. So I did get feedback from Wildwood in particular that the staff who got in touch with me, their perception was that the cleaning was noticeable, it wasn't just one of these behind the scenes things that some random spaces are noticed or that people wouldn't be visible and tangible, that there was a tangible impact on the work that occurred and that work is gonna continue to occur. As long as we need to do it. Is there any, maybe you already provided it previously, but is there any update on the Minuteman stuff? Yep, so. Minuteman stuff meaning? Yeah, pass control. Pass control. No, for the other folks, random shorthand. Sure, so what I shared last time is I was in touch with them, they were at the four week point of treatment and the three things they said, one is schools the size of Wildwood, they serve most of schools in the area, they're one of the only licensed integrated pest management control systems firms who are licensed to work in schools and that generally can take about eight weeks to fully resolve, but what they were seeing was a reduction in the note in the things they see for mice in terms of what they put out and what gets eaten in their systems. They were seeing reduction, it wasn't resolved, but it was seeing reduction and they recommended three things, one is to reduce the number of food and non food areas, which I know the Wildwood staff has taken very seriously. The second was a certain cleaning product for the drains, which we started using immediately and the third was to temporarily pause our composting program because the problem with the composting is a wonderful thing, we believe in it and yet it was creating opportunities for their work to get competed with in terms of attracting mice to certain areas and so we did all three of those, I've received fewer and fewer reports of challenges, one of the work of the weekend, the first weekend was a couple of the areas that were just do a lot more, I mean, everything is getting cleaned by custodial staff, but just doing a full sweep and deep cleaning of those areas that were affected, which is another strategy that Minuteman has recommended. So they're in regular communication through what's called an IPM log, which is in all of our schools and we've also increased our kind of oversight and management of that log to make sure that when Minuteman comes, they know exactly where there's been mouse sightings, mouse droppings, so that's where we are. And I have just a follow up question, I know that one of the concerns I've been raised was just communicating the process and like cleaning schedule and all that kind of thing, so last time we had spoken about this, there was a plan to do that, maybe had happened in one of the schools, but not necessarily, so I'm just wondering if you can update us on that. Sure, so I mean that these weekend cleanings actually were a great opportunity to also get a pulse of where things are because the custodians and the principals were asking staff to respond to, if you're having some issue, where is it, what is it? And so we were able to collect really meaningful data and then people saw the results of that data, right? I'm sorry, Dr. Morris, is this all three schools or just the Wildwood? Wildwood and Fort River. I mean, Crackle Farm, I was there, when I witnessed what Principal Shea reported was the needs were all above the building and not in the building, so to speak. For the other schools, they were a combination of those, so it was primarily Wildwood and Fort River. There was explicit reach-outs and data collected from staff of where the problem areas are so that the deep cleaning could occur, really hitting up the areas that staff were reporting as problematic, so it was a way to highlight and staff to have input into that process wasn't just relying on custodians or principals, it was directly sent out to all staff members. Great, thank you. Ms. Bisser? Just quickly, I'm just curious about the ongoing nature of this work, so I mean, do you anticipate, hopefully the mice and roto will be resolved in the week time for that? We've been given maybe a little bit longer, but I mean, I know we've hired more staff, I'm assuming they're gonna stay on long-term, but how much of this is gonna go forward, and then I know we said earlier in the budget presentation that this was all gonna be, we're able to accommodate it now, is that something that's potentially a long-term? Just the budget, the length of time this is gonna be going on for, and then budget implications of any. So we committed at Wildwood for the rest of the year to go up to four at Fort River, both the head custodian and principal Chamberlain felt like there wasn't a need for that, that they were pretty well caught up and with the weekend cleaning they would see, but they felt that there wasn't a need for us to go up to that level, so based on that feedback we haven't at the moment. In terms of deep cleaning, which is basically over time for custodians, again as needs emerge we'll continue to do that, I do think we made a major dent, again there was more people and more time spent at Wildwood because the needs there were greater because that work didn't happen over the summer, whereas at Fort River, and Quarga Farm for that matter, that work was able to happen, but our commitment is that if the needs continue that we continue to do that. I think particularly for Wildwood having an extra four hours of someone every single day allows for a little more of that routine maintenance and catch up work to happen even beyond a weekend because there's four hours of someone's time that didn't exist before, so we'll have to again wait and see, but we're looking for continual feedback and really the head custodians have been fantastic of reaching out to the staff and they know their buildings really well and they know the areas they're getting to and are in good shape and they know where the catch up needs to occur. Great, thank you, thanks. Okay, last on agenda is a proving gift. Do we have any gifts? We do. Mr. Makajima. I move that the committee accept the following donation. Lucía Spiro, check number 6916, Crocker Farm and Principles Discretion and the amount of $400. Okay, do we have a second? Second. Mr. Dr. Moore, sorry. So I know it's late, but I just want to note that Ms. Spiro was a long time English learner teacher in our district and still lives in the area and just how wonderful that she's a retired teacher still giving back in many ways to our community. So I just want to note that. Thank you. All those in favor? Okay, thank you very much, Ms. Spiro. We really appreciate it. And we have another motion unless there's any other comments or questions. Ms. Spitzer? Sorry. I was just looking at my calendar and also the school committee website calendar and noted that the November 5th meeting was not on the school committee website. And I wanted to confirm that are we? Okay. We're still happy. I was a little optimistic. Maybe that was just a weird much. Yeah, so I just think we should make sure, especially because it's going to be the vote on the dual language that it's on that. Maybe I'm looking, I'm still getting used to the new website as I'm sure other people are, but when I go to the school committee. So Ms. Spiro can take care of that. Yeah, anyway, so I just want to confirm that we've got the, thank you. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. It's not there. Can I move to adjourn? Second. Ms. Spitzer, all those in favor? Okay. This meeting is adjourned. Thank you very much. I don't want to rush anyone, but I just figured.