 That's an edit that has been noted. Mr. Nakajima. I move the approval of the minutes of Bay 21st 2019 as amended. OK, we have a motion. Do I have a second? Second. OK, any further comments, edits, questions? All those in favor? OK, so we have a motion to amend and approve the minutes as discussed tonight. Thank you very much. Next item on the agenda is committee announcements. Mr. Demling. Just wanted to give a brief shout out of support to Springfield, the NAACP, and many other advocates across the state who this week filed a lawsuit against the state, charging that the education funding formula is unconstitutional, violating civil rights. It's pretty much based around income inequality and that students in low income cities and towns pay the price. So as the state endlessly dithers about solutions, as they are doing again this year, it's really nice to see this kind of action being taken. And I wish them all the best. Thank you, Mr. Demling. Any other announcements from the committee? OK, seeing none with that, we will open public comment. If anyone from the public would like to make a comment, please do so. You can come to the front over here. These mics, you have to press the button, make sure the bright green light is on. And just state your name and you have three minutes. OK, seeing no public comments for tonight, I will close public comments. Next item on the agenda is the superintendent's update. So Dr. Morris? I'll be brief. One thing not on the update that no doubt you all have heard is that the school year ended on Friday, which was one of our earliest start dates. So very excited students, hopefully very excited parents who work on childcare for a week they weren't expecting, perhaps, but we really want to thank our staff and students and families for a wonderful end of school year. There were sort of too many end of school year events to list specifically. So I just picked a couple that many of you were able to be at the high school graduation, which was wonderful. And I think what's notable to share at the Amherst Elementary level is that each of the elementary schools sends a representative to sit on stage and be acknowledged. And what was so nice is seeing seniors walk across the stage and see their, in some cases, kindergarten teacher or school nurse run over, give a hug, and then follow along on the other handshake line. And just that our graduates really do recognize the impact of their elementary school education that got them part of the way there to walk across the stage at the Mullen Center. I'd also like to recognize, these are two of my favorite events of the year, the employee recognition event we had about eight days ago. It's an opportunity to recognize both retirees. And we'll talk about one of those later, actually, as it relates to the gifts. But also to recognize staff members in any domain who have worked the district for 15, 20, 25, 30, 35. And we actually had a 40-year employee recognition, a 40-year employee recognized. And it's just a wonderful event. Employees bring their families. And it's also a reminder of the talented, wonderful staff we have, and how much more often we can try to acknowledge their great work. It's a wonderful job. No one goes into teaching for the acknowledgment or the praise, and yet it doesn't hurt to recognize the great work our educators do. And lastly, I just want to thank Ms. McDonald and Ms. Cunningham, who put together, which on the back, update on the work of the Middle School Grades Band Advisory Board. I'm not going to go into detail, but that also went out on the last newsletter and one of their, they're in a subcommittee on communication as it relates to that. So we have multiple groups focused on different areas, but the general consensus of the larger group was that there actually needed to be a subgroup, specifically focused on making sure that the meetings, the content, gets communicated out. And I think they did a smashing job on their first one. So thank you. Any questions or comments for the superintendent? OK, thank you, Dr. Morris. I just want to add, I didn't get a chance to attend any of the elementary school graduations and moving on ceremonies last week, but I did attend just because my sons happened to be there at the Fort River last day festivities. And it's just really incredible to see the incredible amount of work and love and support that our educators put into the school year, of course, but you see it kind of all come together on the very last week and last days of school because the kids just are so excited to be finished with the school year, but also celebrating everything that they've done during the course of the year. And so at Fort River, we, of course, have our principal and vice principal here tonight for other work. But we were just amazed to see all the different photographs taken of the kids and the experiences they had throughout the school year. So it was just really lovely. And I know that that happened at all the different elementary schools. So really great to see that and experience that firsthand. OK, so moving along. The next item on the agenda is under new and continuing business. We have the school improvement plans for Wildwood and Fort River. These are items on our agenda that have been previously discussed. And we had talked about bringing back our principals to talk about the sort of strategic planning that's been going on at the elementary schools now for almost a year. And this was based on conversations that we had had last year as a reminder to the committee and those who are watching at home based on just a continuing conversation about how we can continue to improve the work that's going on in our schools but also help to draw a finer point, if you will, on the work that's going on there. And with a little bit more focus and more attention to the direction that the schools want to go in to have that conversation here at school committee level and provide an opportunity for community to hear as well what is going on in the schools. So with that, we'll turn it over to Dr. Morris, who will introduce then our principals. I think we're starting with Fort River. And so with us tonight are Dr. Greenfield and Ms. Chamberlain, our vice principal and principal at Fort River. And consistent with the prior work, we're trying to limit the presentation part to about five minutes. They're going to give you the highlights. I know this was sent out yesterday. So hopefully you had a chance to review the school improvement plan, which as a reminder to both the committee and the community are approved by the superintendent. And we share these with the public for two reasons. One is that this collected input that drives the process. And the second is that that feedback from the school committee can be really valuable for final edits. So that's the purpose of this item. And I think with that, we'll invite our Fort River leadership team to come up. Just a reminder to make sure the button has been pressed down and it's a bright green light. Otherwise they can't hear you. Thank you. Good evening. And thank you for having us. Thank you for being here. It's our first appearance as a team. Yes. I really like our team. We've just made it through our first, our inaugural year. And we're looking forward to a round of things. So go team. Okay. So we wanted to start our presentation with the focus on kids. And just a great representation. These are two of our kindergarten students now rising first graders who just completed their first year at Fort River. And just to remind everybody that kids are our job, our heart, and we choose love at Fort River because we want to make sure that our kids feel it every single day. That's the first thing they see when they walk in our building and it really is the basis for all the work and the thought that goes into every decision that we make is that love, that families and students hopefully feel when they come in for us. Oh, yeah. Thanks. See, team. So three of our four goals. Interesting. Oh, that's the screen. Gotcha. Three of our four goals in our school improvement plan are not new. It's really an ongoing mission for us. A couple of years ago, we kind of introduced this overarching theme of engagement of students and staff and families as what everything needs to be based about. How are we improving the engagement of our community and everything that we do not only is about love but also about engagement too to make sure that we're bringing everybody along with us in our work. In saying that, we also wanted to frame the work around not adding another thing on and widening our breath but instead diving deeper and making sure all of our work is really integrated in the solid practices that are happening and diving deeper into those practices and making sure that everything has that connection, that it's not random things that are piled on top of one another really making meaning about how do we move through the work together with common goals for a common purpose. We also tried to base things on the idea that without that engagement of student and families and without feeling safe at school, our instructional practices can never improve or without that engagement, we're not gonna be able to make the progress with our kids and with our teachers that we want to make. So family engagement and social emotional health is the backbone of all of our work and thinking about strategic planning, we did our strategic planning in-house, right? We worked on the dual language planning committee and a large amount of our faculty time this year was in professional learning communities. So we gave our staff autonomy and voice in choosing what area they wanted to work in. We had these general themes of dual language and our three other goal areas that we're gonna dig into a little bit that teachers got to choose what PLC they joined and their outcomes were recommendations that really was the driving force behind the development of our school improvement plan. So that leads us to where we are now and we have four major goal areas, thank you, welcome. Four major goal areas, the first one you've heard a lot about, dual language education. So in thinking about dual language education, we've done a lot of work in professional development to really think about not just a dual language program but that our school is a language learning facility. Everybody there comes as a language learner no matter what language that you're learning or what language is your home language that you should be prideful of that language and know that we are gonna work together to bolster up everybody's language skills. Now both in Spanish and English but many other areas as well. So we're digging deep into curriculum, we've identified and started this week, you'll hear a little bit more about later, really doing some significant curriculum development from National Geographic, Panorama, and Canciones y Cuentos, our phonics and general curriculum that we've gotten and went through a long process to determine those through our professional learning community and some feedback from our community constituents. We're working to develop assessment and again, more about dual language updates, just did our first kindergarten screening bi-lingually which was very exciting and I think pretty successful, it's really exciting. And we're gonna continue that professional development to make sure that we're representing diversity in our curriculum, to make sure that all languages and all cultures are represented and that our entire building also represents an underserved population and really elevates the status of Spanish language and Spanish-speaking cultures. That's one goal area. We're also thinking a lot about family and community engagement, that's ongoing work and again, if we don't have families on board and engage with us, our students are not gonna be with us as well as to the greatest extent we want. So it's really important to work on our feedback cycle. We've developed some communication surveys already that are going out soon that you'll see. Trying to hear from families about what works for them so they can fully participate in our community in the ways that works for their family and the time that is allotted for their family because everybody has their own host of challenges and we wanna make sure we're serving our family's needs and not expecting people to be where they don't feel they need to be but also providing a wider range of opportunities to be with us in ways that we may not have thought of already. So we want engagement from families to the fullest extent possible that works for them. Great, and our third goal is around enhancing the instructional practices that we already have in place. So we're using a multi-tiered systems of support to think about the structures and systems in schools that we use to support all kids, bilingual kids, kids with disabilities and this frame is used to be able to think about the different kind of levels of support that kids need. So that's the frame and a lot of the instructional practices and models that we've been using, like co-teaching, small group instruction, the use of project-based learning and thinking maps are all practices we've been using but what our hope is that when we visit classrooms which we do very often, we wanna be certainly seeing kids more engaged and we wanna see the increased use of these practices. And so we already know what works and we just need to know who it's working for and who it's not and make tweaks accordingly. So we're looking for kids to be talking with one another, smiling, happy, more kids talking than teachers talking. So the focus there is pretty in-depth, goal three but we feel confident about those practices. And then the fourth goal is around the social and emotional development for students. So what we know is that if kids are not available for learning it makes teaching and learning difficult, right? So we need to be thinking about how we're gonna align our social and emotional curriculum and how we're gonna think about shared language in our building. So we have some pieces in place already using PBIS structures and school-wide use of evidence-based practices. But we've decided again out of this PLC to use CASEL which is the collaborative for academic, social and emotional learning to guide this framework to guide our work. So there's much more work to be done in the coming years about the kind of curriculum that works best for kids at which age and the kind of shared language that's developmentally appropriate for kids ranging K through six. And I think that's it on those four goals. So there's a lot in there. This is clearly an overview. So just to kind of wrap it up, one of the things that we've deliberately chosen is language around providing opportunities to our kids and making sure that our overarching goal is to reduce the opportunity gap and provide access to education for all of our students. So many people have heard about the achievement gap, right? And in 2007, Gloria Lazen Billings kind of shifted the paradigm there and really made the onus, the focus back on educators that we need to be thinking about the resources, just like you were speaking about before, the resources we provide to our kids to provide them opportunities rather than focusing on the outcomes that they may not largely be responsible for sometimes because they might not have the resources. So our onus is on providing those opportunities for students to make sure they can reach their highest potential. So in three years, we wanna make sure we see students learning and growing into languages. We wanna make sure our families know about the resources that we can offer them, know about how to access those resources at school, know how to participate in the community if they so choose and know how to make sure they get all the information and questions that they want answered. We wanna make sure that we're seeing those observable high leverage practices that Renee was speaking to and she named all those specifically, co-teaching, small group instruction, project-based learning, all to the end of increased student engagement. And again, you trust us with your babies. Two of you specifically trust us with your babies. And we wanna make sure that they report feeling safe and happy and that they want to be at school. That's our story. Thank you, thank you. I'm gonna take a pause there for a second just to see if the committee has any questions or comments. Either for Dr. Morris or for our principals. Dr. Morris, is there anything that you wanted to add or comment on for this? Yeah. So two things actually, if that's okay. I just wanna acknowledge and appreciate the work that this school has taken on this year. So the implementation of the dual language program has taken significant amount of resources and energy for staff and I'm not just, I am referring to the administrative but I'm actually referring to the entire Fort River staff and to maintain the focus on the things that aren't dual language has been a challenge but really I appreciate the leadership team and how they've structured faculty meeting time and other times during the school day so that dual language which rightfully could have taken over not rightfully but easily could have taken over all the work to implement it kindergarten next year did it and so I really think it's notable and I wanna acknowledge that and also as Ms. Chamberlain said it chose to do this work or chose, I mean we collectively made the decision that there were so many external vendors and consultant supporting the dual language piece that adding an additional layer of someone else leading strategic planning work didn't make sense. So that made sense from a kind of timeline resources time perspective but it also put a larger onus in the leadership team both the formal leadership team here but also the school instructional leadership team that operates at Fort River to do that and I think that's important context because almost every meeting I had with Ms. Chamberlain this year it started like we'll talk about dual language but we've got to talk about the rest of the school too and so I think I appreciate that focus the ability to focus on multiple things at once which is certainly part principle principles day to day existence but in this case when there's a major initiative going on in your school and to recognize that the majority of students aren't directly affected right away by that and to maintain that energy and that focus on the rest of the school both the monolingual class next year in kindergarten but also the school wide focus instructional practice, social motion learning everything you saw is particularly notable. Great, thank you. I just wanna say also thank you to both of you for not just for this presentation but for the incredible work that's obviously gone into a lot of the planning and I think for me personally sitting on this committee I am always looking for when we have these kinds of presentations about what's going on in a school is to see that continuity of thought and not just adding new things but really trying to continue the goals that have been set previously and maybe you fine tune them maybe you set some new objectives but in order for there to be progress there has to be sort of an anchor that's been put in place and then movement from there. So I really appreciate that I really appreciate also the incredible amount of detail that went into this document in your presentation it shows again a lot of thought and bringing in staff which is incredibly important for something like this. So seeing no other comments oh Mr. Dumling I guess you have a comment. Thanks, so it just occurred to me as Dr. Morris was talking. So from a Fort River perspective you know one opportunity you have is that you have two of our elementary schools specialized specialized programs like building blocks and aims. And so I'm thinking about those four goals and how that affects family engagement how it affects instructional practices and the school identity and you could just share just from a high level how that affected your thought process going through and like where you are now as you add you know yet another aspect of the community. So I think both Dr. Greenfield and I look at neurodiversity as a huge asset right? And we also look at the resources that having those programs in our building offer us to the betterment of our staff and our whole community. So it's an asset based model just like we want students to think about their assets and use those to allow their personal growth. We use that as an asset in our building as well but there's certainly, it's all tied into those four goals as well because you wanna make sure those students have every opportunity provided to them because they are carrying something that makes life even a little bit more challenging perhaps. So it's an asset for us and we infuse the work and thinking about social and emotional development of our students. The expertise that's offered to us as well is something that we can integrate into our professional development. And we use our psychologists, we use our BCBA to a huge extent to the benefit of our entire staff. So I'm very glad they're here and part of our community and welcome you to add. I mean the only thing I would say is that we have like internal consultants at all time. So the folks that work in those particular programs many of which gravitated to the social emotional PLC which is not surprising right? So their expertise is sort of commingled with their colleagues and then from their work is the goal that we're suggesting that we work on. So it only strengthens our programming. So I think about it also in relationship to the dual language program, right? We now have three specialized programs in our building to the asset of our entire community. Mr. Nakajima. Thanks, so I mean I'm impressed with the depth of the work represented in the plan and particularly because we've been following in a lot of depth the dual language thing all year and I know that that has also represented a huge work stream as well. I guess one question I have in here is that when I'm looking through a lot of the detail and sort of signs of success knowing that the objectives you have are, I don't wanna call them lofty because they're right, but the point is they're also, they're, you know, they're a lot to accomplish particularly in an integrative way in a really broad and diverse community. And so I'm thinking as you're looking out over the next year or even the next couple of years, apart from sort of the activity metrics that you have, how do you think about developmentally? Knowing in other words that if you're doing something over a period of, you do it four months, then you do it eight months, and then you do it 12 months, and then you do it 16. And not every moment is a milestone where you say, hey, look, we did it, right? Which in some weird way, even like when you go through the dual language thing, after a year, you'll have a group of kindergartens you're advancing to first grade. And so you're gonna learn just through that process, sequential process, you're gonna learn something about how you're doing. But for the broader goals, I'm just curious how you're thinking about measuring or assessing your progress along those four goals in that sort of integrative way about improving the overall environment of the school. Well, sure, some of the measures are noted in here too. We wanna take informal assessments along the way. We wanna survey our families. We wanna survey our students. Our academic data certainly will drive our feedback cycle to see if we're doing well. Also, observational data for our faculty. We wanna make sure that we're using our time well to support their development. And then when we're spending time on developing those things, we wanna make sure we're seeing it in the classroom. And if we're not seeing it in the classroom, investigating on what resources do you need to make sure you can execute these things in the classroom. And then going back to that data on the student outcome to see what's happening with their success and so on and so forth. And again, we need families along the way to give us the measure about what they're hearing at home, what they're seeing at home, and how they're feeling in our building as well. And the other thing I would add, because I think lofties, actually we used that word today. We were like, wow, this is lofty. But there's three years and I think part of our thinking that doesn't sort of come out in here tangibly is that in order to do this work, we think a lot about distributive leadership, right? So it's not just us. So when we think about these four goals, we have to have instructional leaders in our building that we work tightly with that will help guide us to think about how to really unpack data that informs our work and shifts our thinking. Because what we know is that we can't think through this, just the two of us, that the data that we're gathering won't just be us and that this distributive leadership model is really the only way to sort of get after a very lofty improvement plan. And I think with that support, we have very skilled educators in our building. So I'd like to give a shout out to them when we're here, very skilled educators. And with that collaboration, I think we're on the right track. Great. Thank you again. I don't wanna say one more thing too because I'm really glad we get to present and have Wildwood here with us because I think, and I know Nick and I just talked about this today as well, that we're not silos in our schools, right? We learn from one another and have a very, I think collaborative approach to learning from one another and making sure that if something's working well in one school, that we kinda check that out and see how we can incorporate that into our work. So I really appreciate the learning community that Amherst schools provides us all. Great. Thank you for having us. Thank you for having us. I really appreciate it. Before we move on to the next item, I just realized looking at the agenda that we have here tonight, it's not exactly the same agenda that we had sent out to the committee and that was posted. So I just need to call attention to that, I think publicly and I can read it aloud. This is the committee, this is the agenda that the committee would have received in the packet. So we're on schedule for, so our conversation tonight is actually starting with the strategic plans for Wildwood and Fort River, which is where we are right now. And then followed by a dual language update at 6.50 PM, the capital facilities update at approximately seven o'clock, school choice update at 7.15. And then the superintendent evaluation with possible vote at 7.20. And then the FY 20 school committee planning at 7.50 followed by gifts at eight o'clock and then a possible or hopeful adjournment at 8.05, not 8.30 as the agenda shows here. So I just wanted to make sure that we're correcting that for the record. Again, the agenda that the committee received and the agenda that was posted is the one that I just read right now. So the one that we just have printed here appears to have been an error. With that, I will turn it back to Dr. Morris to welcome our next guest. So as they set up, I'll describe that we have Principal Nick Yaffe and Assistant Principal Allison Estes here from Wildwood and I think a number of interested parties from Wildwood who participated in the development of the plan and in terms of the school council also have opted to come and participate in tonight's or at least observed tonight's presentation. So thank you all for being here, appreciate it. And I think the new environment is wonderful, but the changing of computers and flash drives and the like is a little new to us. So I apologize for the delay. No worries. Yeah. Keep tap dancing, Mike. What's that? Keep tap dancing. You got to say that. I could keep going if you want me to. Go ahead, it seems like I was looking to see if maybe it was just a simple plug, but it seems like maybe they need some sort of adapter. Yes, so I think two things that I want to follow up on Ms. Chamberlain's comment, which is that there are many through lines between these two plans, both with each other, but also with Crocker Farms, which was presented in May. And so that was not by design. There was no directive saying that these three plans have to align. But I think it shows that our work, both collectively as a leadership team does infuse into what happens at the school level. And it also sets a much better path for us in terms of the work that we at central office need to do to support building leaders because there's so much overlap between the three schools and what their plans are. And it really helps us be efficient in how to support them, both from a professional development perspective as well as a financial resource perspective. And then I think- Thank you. So Mr. Yaffe, I'm just gonna ask you to make sure that your mic is turned on, the bright green light is on, otherwise we can't hear you. And folks at home can't hear you. It's not very well, so there's a light on, there should be a bright green light on. That doesn't seem to be on. Oh, there it is. Now it is. Okay, we're off. Thank you, Dr. Morris. I'm sorry. It's between green and bright green. Yes, exactly. I think we can see it here, but we can't see it up there. It'll be okay. Okay, thank goodness for that. Is there anything I have to do? Well, that's my good timing. Oh, good timing. Yes. All right, so we can see it here. Is there something I need to do here? So maybe I'll suggest that I think if you could start orally and then as figure I was working on this system to try to get it rejected, but everyone, the school committee has the full draft plan in front of them. So that's okay with both of you. So you should feel free to get started. You can just start orally and we'll catch up. All right, so what I'm looking at is an image, but I can describe it to you. It's really an image of the Wildwood community in a circle on the first day of school. And so we see this process has been one that's important for us at this time as we talked about in March and at the beginning of the year for us at Wildwood to say, this is what we believe in as a community. This is what we have come together to say, this is what we value, that the work as Diane and the Crocker Farm staff said is work that we're building on that we started really nine years ago with the redistricting. So the next thing is to talk about really what an amazing community is. So the demographics of Wildwood and Fort River and Crocker Farm are similar. Hi everybody. That you just have to go to an event at Wildwood or an event or just greeting the buses to say that this is an amazing community and what an awesome responsibility we have to serve it well. So I'm going to move into the next phase which is why this is important at this time. Besides talking about, yeah. Hi Sean, how are you? Do we need to take a recess for a couple of minutes until we fix this? Is that, why don't we take a five minute recess while we fix the technology? So we're going to take a five minute recess. So picture, it's a thousand words. Sorry, I'm sorry Mr. Yaffee, I got to say that again. Because otherwise it's not being recorded. So calling the meeting back to order at 6.40 p.m. Now you may continue. Thank you everyone for bearing with us. Thank you. So here's the picture of the Wildwood community gathering on the first day of school with all the hopes and aspirations of our students and our families and making wishes for the new year. And here's our demographics and the demographics really don't tell the story. Like I said, there's every day when Alison and I and other staff are out greeting the buses, the thrill that I have that we have in just greeting the students and who we are as a community or every school event when we look out, recently we had the end of the year picnic and you look out on the hillside of families who have gathered, you just realized how lucky we all are to serve such a community. So I wanted to start in that way. I was telling Diana, I'm so glad that she used the word love as the centerpiece. So the love that we have, and that's really what we want to have our every child, every staff member, every student feel and family. And so this is why the work is important at this time. The other thing that we hear from families is that we want to have a, they want, we want to have more of a K to six alignment and more consistency in every aspect of this plan. So this gave us an opportunity as staff to come together and say, okay, work out. What do we believe in? What can we all commit ourselves to? Over the past few years, we've hired a lot of amazing new staff members in their 20s. And we want them to understand what Wildwood is about, what they're entering and families to know our vision. And as Diane said, the alignment with Crocker Farm at Fort River is there. It's for all of us to see and to work together and to provide the direction for the future. So we engaged in this process over the past year in which all the people of our community came together to jointly design a vision for the entire community with family and staff and students working together. We had inquiry groups and we modeled the inquiry process that we expect our students to use where we were making sure that our different stakeholders are represented. As we were doing this, we synthesized our thoughts into different pillars that uphold the vision that we developed jointly. And then we developed one smart goal for each pillar of our community. And so we also developed a vision statement. And as I was looking through the vision statement today, I was telling Allison, well, you can pick out key things. One is that everybody at Wildwood agreed that welcoming is the foundation of our community. That's one thing that we feel like is so important. And that as Fort River talked about, similarly we want students to be actively engaged in their own learning. And this conversation started many years ago. They developed skills through inquiry, leading to real world learning. And then the other thing that we came together as a staff to just say that equity and a commitment to social justice drivable that we do. Here they are, this is Allison's visual. The five pillars. Yeah. You wanna say anything more about that? Well, I mean each pillar is an example of the five areas that people felt were pivotal to the Wildwood community. The fact that equity happens to be in alphabetical order is also in the center. It was interesting how that was just so important for every single group to ensure that there was equity represented in every single pillar. So that's really one of the things that ties through with all the pillars. And of course, none of them work without the other. So that was one of the things that became evident to us. Do you wanna talk about character? Yeah, the other thing that, well, we really saw this even though they look separate, they're not. So first, one thing of that, and strengthening character. So what's our goal for every Wildwood student to become strong in their own character and their sense of self, that's woven into everything else. So you walk into a classroom, you'll see a book group discussion, and then within that students are reflecting on, well, how was I as a participant? Did I listen to every voice? So that's just a small example of how character can be a part of everything. And our goal in character focuses on restorative circles. That is a pivotal process to making sure that we are teaching students that common language in order to hear every voice and provide that ability for each person within the group to feel important. So circles became a part of what we started to do as the adult community, and we're gonna talk a little bit about what we call, what we're calling unifying principles across Wildwood. So one unifying principle is this idea that all the adults are participating in what we're asking kids to learn. And so that's one example where we as an adult community started to use restorative circles for us to deepen our relational trust with each other. And so that's the smart goal for the equity pillar. In curriculum, what you'll see is this overlap between curriculum design and student engagement. So as a staff, we wanna go deeper into project-based learning and what we're doing in that is going deeper into how we design curriculum. So we're using a template for us in terms of making sure that these key essential elements of project-based learning are in every curriculum unit that we design. Similarly with engagement, the idea of going deeper into students' ownership of their own learning. So we're gonna show you a little bit at the end because we want students to be seen of an example of a digital portfolio. So the smart goal in that area is that all students will reflect on their own learning through a portfolio process. Down the families partnership, yes. So our main goal in family partnerships is making sure that we are not only getting information out to families in a unified way, K through six, but also having a process for collecting feedback from them in a very structured way to make sure we're hearing all families. This is one of the things that we felt is not being done well enough yet. We hear from some families more than others and it's vital that we are working towards making sure that all families are being heard and if we are not hearing from them, making sure we have processes in place to ensure that their voice is there. So the last thing before we show this short video is really thinking about these unifying principles. So as you read this, what I pulled out, what we pulled out is things that are connecting all of this whole vision together. So one is about the adult community and the student community coming together. The other you'll see is a strong emphasis on relational trust and how do you build that in schools and research has actually shown that that's one of the strongest indicators of school success. That learning is a social phenomena that we as adults and students are teaching, we're teaching our students how to collaborate. The sense that a spirit of inquiry is in everything that we do and recognizing the importance of a growth mindset both for adults and for kids and that in our community, the adult community and the student community are open to feedback and reflect on our own learning. And that deeper learning is valued as opposed to superficial learning. So we're gonna end just, that's okay. I hope we can hear it. Okay. Oh, right. So before we start, sorry Allison, before we start, so this is an example of the power of film and students filming. These are sixth graders. They were told by their teacher we're gonna do this presentation about the digital portfolios. We're just gonna show one minute. They had trouble as filmmakers do in cutting it down to... So it's just one minute. It's an ongoing struggle. Yes. Yeah. See how it goes. We have sound. So we might not get sound. Oh, well. Oh, sorry. The sound design is not very good. Okay. It's okay. So with all of this, hopefully we'll get posted as Google sites and so you'll be able to see it and truly honor the rest. I'm looking at Dr. Morris and he's nodding his head saying yes, so these will be posted. So we can certainly take a look later on and maybe even share it. Great. So that's the overview. Thank you so much. Again, wanna pause for the committee to see if there's any questions or comments for Dr. Morris or for our principals, Mr. Demling. Yeah, I'll skip the... This work is all amazing and I love all that you do, the kind of speech and the interest of time. You've mentioned project-based learning before. I've heard you speak pretty passionately about that before you just talked about that. Could you just talk a little bit more about like, just for me like the general public, what's a useful definition of what that is and how do you envision that, when it goes well, what does that look like? What is your vision of like really good project-based? That's a great question. So I think we have examples of this happening. First of all, I think it would be a sense that students, so the elements that I would want to see is that there is some kind of a driving question that students are engaged actively in, in a question that's been raised that they feel is connected to the real world, that they're doing inquiry, they don't know the answer at the beginning, that there's some level of reflection on the process where they're being given feedback, they're understanding and they're reflected on their own learning, and then there's a public presentation to an authentic audience. So integrating the arts is a part of this. We have examples, so recently the third grade team now has done this for a couple of years, working with our librarian and our science coordinator to develop animal adaptations. So that's been a unit that we had, so some of it can be developing or expanding on what we're already doing as a school. So they chose the animal, they did research on it, they had scientists from the Fish and Wildlife facility nearby, our librarian taught them key research skills in the inquiry cycle process, and then they did a presentation. This year we even added one of our parents is in the dance education department, so they actually came in and taught the kids how to do some improvisational dance around their animal. So we wanna do more training, I mean, we definitely, you know, the sabbatical is about, for Chris Agamier is a big part of that, and having people start to train in this area, the colleges in this area now are very interested about Holyoke College, and now UMass is sponsoring a summer project-based learning workshop for teachers. I wanna say that when I know that project-based learning is not happening is when you have a student say, how many pages do I have to write? Because that is exactly the opposite of where you want people to delve into a question they have and not feeling hampered by constraints of how many words and things like that. This is your own curiosity and you're trying to figure out how to explore that from different frameworks. And we're trying to open it up so it's not about, you need one non-fiction book, you know, it's not about that. It's about how do you use the resources we have in order to explore something you really are curious about. And there's some aspect of student voice and choice. I think that came out in the inquiry group around curriculum design and student engagement that we're looking for ways for student voice and choice to be included. I have a question. I think this is wonderful and thank you. It's been great to see that evolution happen of this work that's going on at Wildwood. So really appreciate you taking the time to do that. My question is actually focused on buy-in, I guess, for staff and educators in the building. You know, again, some of this is work that you've started previously. Some of it is new, at least to us, I'm assuming maybe to the team that you have in the building as well. How are you ensuring that staff and educators are picking up on these goals and buying into that? Is there a process in place for that? Oh, sure. Well, I think one of the things that's so important is that every single group was a part of developing each of the goals and making sure that this was connected to previous work that was already happening in parts of the building, maybe not across the building K through six. So there is not one part of this plan that you'll say, oh, I've never seen that before. That's not something that we have ever said. So aligning things across the grade levels is so important, but knowing that we have examples of excellent work happening in different areas that we can pull on to give as exemplars to all staff, I think is really important. And that is part of the using staff leaders in the building to help make sure that this is not coming from one area. This is coming from the community. This is coming from different areas within our building, and we can rely on the experts within our building to help forward the work. Took a long time. I mean, to do that is one of the reasons we weren't ready in May is because the collaborative process took a while because what we did is each group developed this and then we had a whole sort of carousel type of the experience of staff where everybody wrote down feedback and then the feedback had to be analyzed. And at the same time, I have to say that it wasn't 100% agreement, but I think in school change, you also nudge people towards like doing what you feel is best for kids and for the school. I think the other part about buying that is real is that if teachers see like, wow, this is more fun or I'm happier as a teacher, like the student-led open house is an example of that. Not everyone bought into that before we did it in October, but we had heard it was great in Crocker Farm. But once we did it, like many of the feedback forms we got were like, wow, this was great. I really enjoyed this much more. The teachers were saying that. That's great, that's great. So it is a good question to ask. And just very quickly also, you mentioned collecting feedback from all families, which I think is great and something that we all struggle with. And so I was wondering if you could describe just what your process, what you envision doing differently. So one of the processes is making sure that we brainstorm at the beginning of the year with the groups of volunteer staff members who wanna be a part of that group. And so we're gonna collect different ideas. It's gonna go mainly from the classroom teachers, but also using different related services staff and different areas so that that's not all only on their plate. But because the teachers are in contact with families, making sure that if they're having trouble reaching a family, how do we support them? Cause that's the part where we don't want that to be a crack that people are falling through. I had trouble talking or I had trouble reaching. I had, you know, whatever the reason is, how do we make sure that that family's understood in terms of what they see as the strengths of the community, the things that they're seeing their child struggle with and having opportunities at. We're thinking that we'll start at the report card cycle because we are expecting something back at the report card, but right now we don't have a system in place to make sure and ensure that every family has seen that report card. And so then we'll have that as our first benchmark period. And then in the spring we'll have one more which doesn't rely on a report card cycle. It's gonna be an extra cycle of how do we get that information? We can't rely just on surveys and technology because not all of our families have access to that. So that's where we're gonna have to use our PLC, the inquiry group that is designed around this to figure out a design that's not going to overwhelm people, but will helpfully give them information that they truly need. Because every teacher really wants to see what is my family's, what do they think that I'm doing? Well, what needs reinforcement? And if we can get them better information at more frequent times of the year, I think that that could help them feel a sense of effectiveness in their jobs. Great. Well, thank you again very much for coming tonight and for all this work that you've put into this, looking forward to seeing your progress, continued progress. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, so moving us on, the next item of the agenda is our dual language update. So we may be welcoming. No more visuals, so. No more visuals. We invited ourselves to participate in this one. Welcome back. Thank you. So I've kind of got five things to say. I'll start with a narrative that I think is helpful and then talk about hiring, professional development. See, you know what? You guys are great. Mike, see, it wasn't our imagination. It wasn't. I asked if the light was on, but it wasn't our imagination. Right. It did not sound on. Okay, so we're back. There you go. There's a... So what would you like me to do? If you don't mind repeating that story again, maybe just the introduction, because I actually think it was a very powerful story and I want everyone to be able to hear that and I apologize, Dr. Morris, for the failings of technology. We have a very fancy room, but we are still learning how to work everything, so. So what I shared before was an anecdote of being, you know, I framed as being in the right place at the right time with three children, one entering the dual language program and two who are current Fort River students and one of the older students saying to the younger student, you know, it's so neat you're gonna be learning in English and Spanish, turning to another third grade student saying, you know, you could tutor this child because your first language is Spanish and the soon to be kindergarten student excitedly saying, yeah, you'll tell me all the words, you're gonna help me as I'm learning this and to the affective reaction of the third grade student whose first language is English, English is still, that student's still acquiring, her first language was Spanish, excuse me, student who's acquiring English and the elevation of the language and honoring of the culture that's going to be happening and the piece that's so important to me in addition to the curriculum and the instruction and all the research is that's the kind of, when we think about opportunity gaps, we think about how we wanna honor cultures in our school district, I got a small snapshot of what that looks like and you know, I feel very fortunate to be present, to observe it and I feel very fortunate that we have the staff and you're all commitment as well as the staff at Fort River's commitment to follow through on that promise because absent that experience doesn't happen for that third grade student, he doesn't experience Spanish language and culture being elevated in that same way, if we were doing a wonderful world language program that was an accessory to the core academic, that conversation wouldn't have happened in the same way, the fact that it actually is part of the core academic curriculum of what students will start experiencing is it influencing students who are not even going to be directly affected in their educational experience by the program and so I wanted to show that anecdote to start in terms of update because I think it's probably better than anything else I share shows some of the power that the implementation is having on students who are not actually yet kindergarten students. That's great and if I may, Dr. Morris, I just wanted to say I think that is one of the main goals of starting this dual language program, right, was one of the goals was recognizing benefits of bilingualism period to normal development and education and trying to find a formal way of doing that in our district but the other goal was actually also an equity goal and it was to ensure that all of our students feel valued and understand what they bring to the table and it's not just them acquiring skills that other people have but that they can actually share back and create this feedback loop among their peers and among others and teach others too because that's the important thing about peer learning so I really appreciate hearing that and having that brought out so starkly because it is something that we've been talking about for a while and it's a beautiful way to hear that and have that expressed in that way so thank you. Thank you, yeah, I know the first time I told it was better so I apologize. But I think the other thing is you hear a lot just and I know these folks do it more than me, they're hanging out on playgrounds and seeing what kids are actually saying sometimes it gives you the window that of how kids are experiencing things in a different way than how adults are experiencing them so it's a good thing for all of us to do. On the hiring update we've, I think I've updated the committee prior but we have hired the kindergarten teacher for next year we're really excited about her and her presence and we are just about hired someone who will be working particularly supporting intervention for students and someone who's fully bilingual has worked in dual language programs before in Massachusetts as well as in other state and that process is wrapping up hopefully this week and so we feel like from a rostering perspective we're in a very good position of what we hope to be. We do have our kindergarten parent educator secured too so she's been doing work this week to develop some of the curriculum she's on board in our team building events as well and hopefully fingers crossed that we're gonna bring somebody on to her instructional leadership team as well that's bilingual and bicultural if all things go well. Thank you. On the second front in terms of professional development I think it was in the electronic packet and didn't make it in here but it was just a quick summary of the professional development that actually started today so just because it didn't make in the packet I'll say it out loud. So today and tomorrow science with our science coordinator, Jen Reese on, that's Friday, there's continued work with Dr. Wilma Ortiz who's a former staff member at the middle school now works at Westfield State in higher education specific to team building and culture and climate. Again, it's not just about the books and the reading. That's Thursday and then Friday is more work with National Geographic Panorama which Chamberlain spoke about earlier. The following week is curriculum framework with Amy Finn-Smith she was one of the facilitators of La Siembra from that we did last summer who is an instructional coach in the dual language program in a district in Connecticut and then three days on curriculum mapping. So we have a lot of work in the next two weeks and I want to compliment both the leadership team but also the staff who are dedicating a lot of their early summer start so to speak to making sure that we have dedicated work in place. It's sometimes it's really hard frankly to do this level of dedicated work while the school year is going on. It's not only just getting subs but it's the dedicated to really focus on this level of this detail of work not having to thinking about what's happening in the building is critical. So great job to the team and Katie Richardson deserves a shout out for her organizing of these events because of that and how much she's working I gave her the night off but I do want to acknowledge her hard work on this. The thing I think worth noting is that it's not just kindergarten the kindergarten team that's doing this because we are looking forward to the team that will be in first grade next year. They're on board doing this work with us as well. So it's not just a one year at a time. We're really trying to think ahead as best we can. So moving to enrollment we had our lottery for remember the groups one and two were students coming from at least some Spanish speaking background and groups three or four or English speaking background group three was from Fort River students that were zoned to Fort River group four was students zoned to Crocker Farmer Wildwood who were interested. So we had our lottery I can't remember the date but it was over a month ago it was a public lottery. We did help people that they didn't need to show up it wouldn't advance their chances but we communicated with everybody with that and we also let them know that depending whether the Spanish side fills up there may be a second level of lottery I mean it's the same lottery but the second level of second tier of students accepted in early August. Right now we have all 14 of students who have registered across the district who indicated having some of our full Spanish language background have registered for the program. We talked about this throughout the fall that that was one of our concerns that we wanted to make sure we were attracting that population to date through the good work of many people. We've been successful. Jujira Torres our elementary registrar also deserves an acknowledgement for her talking not convincing but talking and laying out options for families so they knew what the program would look like regardless of their first language. And we now are in this if we look at last year which we had 19 students in our kindergarten our current graduated kindergarten I guess we could say who would fit the profile of having significant Spanish language background. We had about 14 registered at this moment in time so we look like we're roughly on pace for similar sized population. We continue to do outreach and into communities to make sure that families are registering that they're aware of the need to register. And so I think it's highly likely that we will come close to 20 that the last six slots in the Spanish speaking side will likely we may not get to 20 but we'll be above 14 if history is any precedent. And we continue that outreach effort throughout our community to increase the number of that registration. At some point in August we have to let people on the lottery know we can't leave it to the last day or last week. So we continue. I'm sorry to interrupt Dr. Morris but just I think this is a really important piece of this outreach. If you could just describe what kind of outreach is taking place during the next few weeks because August is going to be on us before you know it. So we've continued through the family center and Ms. Richardson and others. We had multiple events at different locations through town and particularly different locations where our data indicates that families are more likely to register later in the registration period. So we've had six or seven events I want to say. And what we continue to do, the outreach at this point is mostly through siblings who are currently in the schools that we have heard rumors that their kindergarten siblings would be coming and encouraging them to register. And we've had some success with that. Our number wasn't 14 two weeks ago but we've continued to have outreach with current families that we know of. That again, students are often reliable reporters but age of siblings can be a little bit off but we've reached out specifically to families to encourage them and we have continued to reach out to families who we haven't heard back from or say they're going to come in if there's other things that you want to. I encourage word of mouth too. So if anybody's aware of the program and the opportunities, if we know of students out there that might be a great fit, we would welcome them to call me to set up an appointment. We do Spanish speaking staff on board through the summer so we can answer questions. So we would love to push registration for anybody that you think might be out there. I'm also just wondering if maybe just a flyer to some of the neighborhoods or apartment buildings or centers or maybe all of the above. Over the summer, people tend to kind of be out congregating and doing different things and different activities. So maybe if we have some sort of last concerted effort to recruit those last six kids, that'd be amazing. That's a great idea and we'll do that. Thank you for suggesting that. And lastly, family engagements. You saw a flyer that was in the electronic packet that was sent with an event, hopefully weather permitting perhaps. Oh, it's rain or shine. We'll do it inside. Okay, so my apologies tomorrow at Fort River with kindergarten kickoff. And I think it's important to note that while this is a dual language update, all families who were registered for kindergarten or Fort River invited because we wanna be really conscious that families in dual language program may have specific questions, but we wanna start from the beginning, make sure that all families feel included in the kindergarten experience at Fort River. There's a number of other events that were scheduled throughout the summer that are more informal, but opportunities for families and that cohort of families to get together and have that community. And it's a good opportunity to thank the PGO for all the work they do and they're having a welcome back popsicle celebration as they have, but certainly, I think there'll be a more intentional focus this year given that we have more kindergartners coming to Fort River than we've had in some time. Partially because of the dual language program, partially just we had a lot of kindergarten students registered. I mean, since they're redistricting, this is the most students that we had registered for Fort River separate from any zoning or students entering the dual language program. And I know Fort River and district staff really wanna make sure that this is a big welcome for all students coming to Fort River next year. And someone said this earlier that we already did screening for the existing kids. So they're real, they're curious, they're hilarious, their families have a mix of excitement and nervousness, but the thing that we were most proud of is that we were able to welcome kindergarten families in both languages. We were able to systematically look at kids' language levels in English and in Spanish, their literacy levels in English and in Spanish math. And so I feel like we are really equipped to know their learning profile so that when they come in September, we don't know them, like we'll know them a year from now, but we really have a good sense of the assets that they're coming to school with. So I think that that's really, really valuable in terms of our ability to hit the ground running in late August. There's also little things happening like this year. We've made some signage changes, which is wonderful because we haven't had a strong representation of signage and directionality in our building, but now there's Spanish language that you see painted on the walls and we're getting Rupert supporting us to get some custom made signage so people will know where to go and that certain areas of the building are labeled bi-lingually. So it's just throughout the building, throughout our culture, we see a higher representation of the Spanish language in print as well as spoken. We have staff members that are learning. Estoy aprendiendo. We're being... We're trying a little bit. Can't do much more than that right now. Anxiety, cognition down, so. But another thing, we've been saying dual language, dual language, dual language, and at tomorrow night's event, we are going to take the list that has been generated by our staff and students of potential names and finally naming the program. Families are gonna have the final say, kind of through an informal ballot and they'll, as the pioneers of the program, we'll get to label it for us so we can stop saying dual language and have a very friendly term. And that's been y'all to talk about our program. We're being... Yes. So I wanna pause here for a second just to see if the committee has any comments or question. Ms. Spitzer. First off, it's really nice to be here at the end of the school year and see how far, how much progress has been made and so I just wanna say thank you. And I think you guys have obviously been working incredibly hard and to pass on that to everybody and the staff. I just had a question about enrollment because you did present the numbers for the folks who were on the Spanish, some Spanish language skills. I'm assuming we've totally filled up the 20 others thoughts and I was kind of curious just about how that ended up breaking down and are we, how much demand was there out there after all of the speculating that was going on? Yeah, so I think as we started with unexpected things happen and two unexpected things happen this year, I would say for me. So one was we had as a reference a much higher than expected enrollment at Fort River. So separate from students who were Spanish language speaking students who would have typically attended Crocker Farmer Fort River, just the catchment area of registration at Fort River was about 50% higher than it's been in the last four or five years. So as your mind probably is going, I have lots of thoughts about that. I have no hard data and it is something that we have to look at over time because that does shift some of the dynamic as we think about enrollment in this program. Was this a one year blip or is actually this a result of families being interested who might have made other choices otherwise? It's really hard to know. So I think that was one unexpected thing and I would say the interest from Wildwood and Crocker Farm was significant but I wouldn't say that it was perhaps overwhelming. I think a lot of people had questions at the event we had. We had a kindergarten registration event in April. There were a lot of families not connected to Fort River English speaking families who chose to stay and ask good questions and we stayed, we had an event afterwards. But right now we'll actually only accepted one student who was in the group four. If you think of group four that was English speaking zone to Crocker Farmer, Wildwood, we have 13 students currently on the wait list for that program. I think the odds are probably one or two more will come as a nature of like if this year is like last year and we have 19 students who come with some Spanish language background that'll open up another slot. So we would have anticipated, I think the number I shared was four or five but what was the largest variable was the the unexpectedly large size of Fort River zone students registering and we've seen some of our other schools like Crocker Farm is lower than we've seen in many years. I attribute that that I think that's likely just an enrollment, unexpected enrollment development. We'll have to look if that's a trend over time. So our overall kindergarten enrollment's pretty average but the distribution between the school and Wildwood's about as expected. So our overall enrollment distribution did not follow the trends of the last five years. So is that the type of information you were looking? Yeah and I just think it's important we keep track of it going forward because ideally I think in all of our conversations about this if it works really well and we'd love to see it grow and I'm wondering if it seems like there's definitely demand on the side from the monolingual English speaking side but I don't know if we have the numbers of Spanish speaking models to allow that so anyways just. And I think that's the right question. I'm sorry you don't need this acknowledgement for me but that's the right question to ask is if we're trying to maintain as close to a 50-50 model and right now our Spanish speaking population this year is 100% registering at Fort River, what would that model look like if we expanded to another school? I think that would be a very different model. I mean there are districts and I think we've spoken about this in the past that have dual language programs with essentially no language models. That's actually a substantively different program. The planning would be different, how you'd structure would be different and they're not to say bad but it would be, it wouldn't be what we've been talking about. Mr. Nakajima? You also might have to look for a different language. Any other questions or comments from the committee? If not we're just gonna move on. Thank you Dr. Morris. Thank you so much again. No, thank you for saying, I appreciate it. Thank you very much. It's gonna work. Thank you. Good to know about tomorrow night rain or shine. So yeah, I will be there. All right, next item on the agenda is the capital facilities update. Dr. Morris, you wanna introduce? Mr. Roy Clark's gonna come up but let me frame the three parts of this update. One is last month there was an ADA update, some thoughts and Mr. Roy Clark sent a memo which was in the electronic packet on this topic about his work with Mr. Moering and DPW. The second topic is a summer update. Last year at summer we shut down a school and had a lot of troubles when we reopened it and so Mr. Roy Clark will share sort of what some of the summer work is and how we're avoiding that same scenario from reoccurring. The third one I probably can do based on a meeting I had this afternoon just do some questions about Fort River in particular and the field usage at the elementary schools. This has been more of a topic at the regional level and will continue to be next week but I think because one of the field that's used is at the elementary level I think I can give a brief update on that third topic but I'll turn to Mr. Roy Clark for the ADA piece. Oh, my light is lit, can you hear me? Yes, thank you. Thank you for having me. So you have about a half a page document in your bundle with some updates from the last time I spoke with you all about the ADA capital improvement project and I'd like to just sort of briefly summarize some of the major points and maybe fill in a few details where needed. I met with Guilford More from the town and we looked at all three elementary schools and issues with the driveways and the parking spaces and the sidewalks and curb cuts and all of that stuff. And it became very quickly evident that we wouldn't be able to get anything done this summer. All of the pay-to-contractors are already booked solid and it also became evident that any major work in the traffic areas wouldn't be able to take place when school was in session. So I wanna push all of that stuff off till next summer. I'm still trying to get feedback from folks on some of the issues that were raised in the study. For instance, I'm trying to find out how strong the impact is of having the accessible parking space be more strongly sloped than ADA requires because those are expensive fixes and if it's a relatively low impact for our community that will help me cry more times. So I'm reaching out to folks and hopefully anybody who's watching can also get back to us and say, yeah, it bothers me or no, I don't know. But I'm also hopeful that we can get some sidewalk repair work done this fall that wouldn't impinge on traffic and on buses and vans in the same way. So I'm working with Guilford to try to figure out what we can do and if there's things that we can roll up into other town projects through a joint bid. And I'm hoping that we can get something really firmed up by the end of July. So that said, the other outdoor things that I had prioritized with my initial scheme, I've had fairly good support from the staff that I've talked to yet that yes, the things that I thought would be most significant are ones that bother them a lot, uneven ground, access to playgrounds. A few things got elevated in my understanding of what would have a big impact, particularly some courtyard access and getting some accessible tables inside as well as outside. So I expect I'll be, and that's not in the thing, the inside table things have adapted to this. So those are all things that I'm hoping to look for this summer and try to get in place where I can in selected locations. Can I jump in? Just in terms of the feedback, the names in the bottom may not be familiar to the committee, but Michelle Regan-Lad is the preschool coordinator, and our preschool is an integrated preschool. So often works with students, and you know, who have disabilities is based on an integrated model. And Betsy Todd and Greta Kamp are the teachers of the ILC program, the Integrated Learning Center at Wildwood, who those three staff members are the ones who are most closely connected to the majority of students with pretty intensive disabilities. It's not that there aren't students that aren't connected to those three people, but in terms of gathering feedback, the reason that Mr. Roy Clark chose those is that they are the resident experts on disability and access in terms of our staff and in terms of the students they work with. I'm sorry to jump ahead, but I know that those three names may not be, may not have meaning with that. That's fine, and then also this packet that we currently have in front of us does not have that document that you're referring to, although it was emailed to us last week, but it's not currently in front of the committee, so we'll have to take your word for it right now. Does anybody want my copy? No, thank you. Yeah, so yeah, and they're particularly engaged with the younger populations where there's all kinds of additional difficulties just because of size. And it's just hard for kids to navigate an adult world when they're small. So that was another reason why it was great to talk with them. I will say that generally the climate in the construction world is not that good for us. Prices are high, everyone is busy, there's more work out there than people can do. And this is true for us, this is true for public projects all over Western Mass, not just paving, but all kinds of projects. So how to navigate and predict what will happen in the business future is another challenge that I want to at least tell you I'm thinking about and I'm aware that we're in a dynamic situation in terms of what contracts get bids and what kind of bids we could competitive. And also on the ADA part, that's most of what I wanted to cover on the ADA part, but I'm happy to go through these and fill you in on the points that are not in front of you if you'd like. In terms of the elementary schools, we have all of the systems running, all the chillers are running, everything is gonna be up and running all summer. We don't have any expectations for any major projects in any of the elementary schools. We're gonna be doing deep cleaning, working around all the various programs that happen in the summertime, which has its own challenges, but we've got dedicated staff and I think they're gonna do a great job this summer. I could add to that. I think the other thing that I know you've shared with me is just having, our summer programs are primarily at Crocker Farm because that's where the district summer school programs are, there's multiple programs. And just also the routine, you talked about deep cleaning, but also the maintenance of fans and belts and work that wasn't possible last year. Just, and you've talked about with me about routines that are now built in, weren't built in last year. I don't know if you could speak to that. Yeah, so right, there's the deep cleaning side of it and there's also the air quality and temperature and community and filtering issues and we'll be working on, we have several teams working on both different aspects and that's part of the plan. And so far everything's working just great. Thank you. So I have a few questions, but I'm gonna hold my questions because I just wanna make sure that the committee has any comments or questions that they would like to share first before I dive in. Okay, so thank you Mr. Roy Clark for being here tonight again, really appreciate it. I think it's helpful to hear that you have met with Superintendent Moring to review all the concerns in the different buildings. We certainly have heard, starting from last spring actually, about many of the concerns, both inside and outside the elementary school buildings and the facilities and the grounds and all of that. So it's great to hear someone is walking that with the person in charge in the town for making those kinds of repairs and doing that kind of maintenance outside. I think I probably am not alone when I express incredible amount of frustration that a lot of this work has not happened yet and that we're at this stage where we are right now. It seems like we're playing catch up constantly and so that's not a reflection on you in any way. If anything, it's to say thank you for taking the lead on this really is important to keep this moving. I have a couple of questions for you. You mentioned pushing off some of these more major repairs that would interfere with traffic and other things like that to next summer because we wouldn't be able to do that this summer since it's already so late in the year, the calendar year. So I'm wondering what the timeline is for beginning those inquiries and the bidding process given that what you just described as sort of high demand and low number of contractors presumably that would be able to do that work. So I'm assuming that there must be some sort of master plan somewhere that says you start in August or you start in September if you wanna get work done in June of next year. So I just wanna hear a little bit more about that. I think the community would like to know that. And then also you mentioned the extra deep cleaning at all the buildings. I know that there was also concern about pests last year. So we just, if you don't mind sharing a few more details about what those plans, you mentioned teams going that are sort of been assigned if you can just describe what that looks like a little bit more, that would be really helpful. Cool, sure. So in terms of the optimal time for paving and black top work, I think we do need to get our scope prepared at the end of the summer, early fall. I'm gonna defer once again to Mr. Moreng's expertise in that matter. But I think that it's not something we can let wait until the winter to start moving. It's gotta start moving away. But the things that we're trying to get done this fall are gonna trump that out. So, end of July, hopefully, scope of work and start making plans to get stuff done this fall. And then end of the summer, try to start getting balls rolling for next spring, late spring, early summer. It's what I would expect. Is that against the next question? Kind of. I think, and please excuse me for pushing on this, but I do think that it's important for us to sort of assign ourselves some sort of deadline, right? To say, by the end of the summer, we wanna have a very clear picture of when our bidding process will actually begin and have a plan in place for that. And I appreciate Superintendent Moreng's being a partner in this and thinking about it. I also would suggest that we might wanna bring in some other folks, maybe perhaps from other districts who have experience with this or other towns. I just think that, given the competitive nature that you seem to be describing and that anecdotally I've heard also repeated from other places, that we need to get a little aggressive with us if we actually wanna get any of these projects off the ground next year. So I would appreciate hearing, by our next meeting in August, just a sense from you about what that timeline looks like that would be really helpful. Excellent, yes. I'll try to have some dates for you. Thank you. And, you know, part of the issue is really defining the scope of the work so that we can have an idea what kind of project we're looking at. So that's, we're still sort of in the planning stages but I should have more information for you in the next meeting, not a problem. In terms of PES, we have integrated PES management program in place for all of our schools. They do visit regularly, minimum of once a month. And when issues arise, they come at least twice a month. This has been our standard practice. The issue that we had, the issues that we had at Wildwood arose from the building being unoccupied for a prolonged period of time. And that's not gonna be the case this summer. We have folks in all the buildings and probably program happening in all the buildings as well through our facilities rental usage. That's not quite it finalized. Give me another couple of days and I can tell you for sure. So in terms of teams, we've got the custodial group shifting second shift to first shift to have a larger crew to really go at stuff aggressively in a team and we'll be also looking forward to hiring some of our high school students to come in for summer help as well on the deep cleaning. And then we have our maintenance crew and some of our drivers doing work on some of the infrastructure for the buildings, specifically the heating ventilation and air conditioning, the air filters, the valves. We did a big deep cleaning last summer at Wildwood, the very end of the summer, which held us back. We've done some deep cleaning of some of those units at the other elementary schools during vacations and we're gonna have another go at it this summer. We'll be, you know, all the filters changed and all of the unit ventilators cleaned deeply. One of the ongoing issues with pests is building access. So we're also looking at ways to tighten up gaps that pests can come in through and that's part of my plan for this summer. The other major issue for pests is access to food and water. So we really wanna try to keep tight control over how food is being used in our summer programs and make sure that we're keeping on top of cleaning that and getting the trash out for the buildings as quickly as we can. So that's part of what's going on. I'm not sure if I convinced you that we have a plan, but. Thank you, I appreciate the detail and taking the time to explain that. It gives us a better picture, I think, of what's going on in those buildings this summer. And again, the community had expressed so much concern last year and rightfully so about the conditions when they returned to the buildings and, you know, quite frankly, not just last summer. I think there's also been sort of a continuing problem. So, you know, while I feel good about the renewed attention on some of this, it sounds like some of the ongoing pest issues and things like that have been ongoing. So it's, you know, I think it's worth pushing on that as well and considering, you know, an aggressive plan. Yes, and so, and part of, in terms of while I'm looking forward to meeting again with the staff there and talk about ways that we can form a team between facilities and folks working in the building to streamline the process and really jump on issues as they arise. And I hope, hoping that we can do that early in the fall since we didn't fit it in this spring. Thank you. Mr. Nakajima? You probably already have this thought through, but since the utilization of the schools is undoubtedly at a lower level during the summer, even if no building is being fully shut down for the summer, that if you don't have them scheduled now, I would get whoever it is, Minuteman or whoever else is here, is the pest control company for our district to come in, you know, like a week before the staff starts coming back in August and do like a really, really thorough check to make sure that we're on top of the, I mean, the last thing I would want is for staff to come back in August, be prepping and saying, oh, you know, we really didn't think this would have happened again this fall. So since they come in every month anyway and are scheduled every month anyway, I would just, we know when it is on the calendar now, book them now and have them come in and do a really thorough check. I think that's a great suggestion. I'm gonna check on their schedule and see if I can tweak that. Any other questions or comments from the committee? Dr. Morris? Yep, so field update. So I'll be brief to say that there are many organizations. There's a couple of regional athletic teams that use particularly the Fort River field and there's some community organizations that also use the fields, most often Fort River for their athletics. And so one of the concerns that's been expressed is the use of the fields. So right now it's a team. The DBW does some, most of the heavy lifting in terms of mowing and then Rupert's team does some of the kind of minor repair, our equipment in terms of the discharge equipment, much better for hills. So if you think of wildwood in particular, you can think of some hills that the DBW equipment can't manage but in terms of mowing a large field, they have different equipment that's much stronger than ours and what you'll hear next week at the region just to share some thoughts is we've been meeting actively, including this afternoon with town staff and athletics department staff, about formalizing our structures of who takes care of what fields, who makes which decisions about field use. And one of the things that we're looking forward to in working with the town is clarifying a protocol of when fields can be used based on the field conditions, weather conditions, et cetera, because what we know is that our fields are overused. There's no surprise there, that's not something that you haven't heard. Prior at the regional level, and I think that extends Fort River more than the other schools in terms of overuse of fields. Frankly, some of the other fields like Crocker used to be used more and it's used much less by community organizations because it's really wet. And Fort River definitely has wetness in its field use but it has maintained more community use, formal community use. And so I think it'll, I don't wanna preview too much of next week because it's crossing a little bit but I do wanna acknowledge that there have been concerns expressed about the field use and we're working with the town to clarify a plan to better manage that and it'll take a lot of commitment from community partners. So we think about recess as being the primary function of the Fort River field for Fort River families and students. And yet after schools when the fields are getting the most intense usage and trying to clarify a protocol and actually someone who may say, no, I know you plan to be at Fort River to practice export in our determination professionally. No team should be practicing there and we're sorry. So, the field stuff is gonna be, the preview is that we're working with the town I think we're making effective progress in clarifying protocols and yet it will invariably inconvenience and frankly frustrate many people to have a closer management of field use and that extends to Fort River as well. Sorry, that's not a happy story but I think it is what we need to do to maintain the primary purpose of the field which is for Fort River students. Any questions or comments for the superintendent? Ms. Spitzer. Thank you for that update. I just wanted to add some to, you know my son's at Wildwood and I was just there the other day for the end of the year picnic and all of the kids were playing soccer and it's not an official field but it is currently just dirt and I know it's not one that gets used for team sports but I do feel like it's in a real state of disrepair as well. Probably not as much of a priority because I know it's not used by other community organizations but I just wanted to state for the record that that field could use some love and care too. As well as Crocker Farm for the opposite issue. Generally the drainage of Crocker Farm is a significant issue and that's why community organizations have stopped using it frankly because it doesn't drain particularly well and on weeks like this where we're gonna have a significant amount of rain it's not a particularly playable surface. So I think you're right. I want to focus on Fort River because that's where some of the concerns have come but I don't disagree and it's a little bit of grass and mostly dirt on that soccer field and that's certainly the reality right now. So thank you Dr. Morris. I appreciate that. I think you know just on the last comment about possible frustration that we'll hear from the community. I agree with you. I think that it's difficult for people to change their patterns of use expectations and all of that. At the same time I think it would be really helpful to provide an alternative or some options for folks. So it goes a lot better if we can say to them you can't use this field today but maybe you can try Graf Park or you can try some other place and checking with the town to see what is available or even across the districts because as we sort all of this out it definitely will take flexibility on the part of the district and part of the community so that we can make those changes that are very much needed as Ms. Spitzer pointed out and so many other community members have pointed out repeatedly but I think again much easier to be able to say to folks here are some other options here are some plans here's a schedule that hopefully will meet your needs is better than if we just shut them out completely. Dr. Morris and then Mr. Demling. Yeah, so I think the other piece at next week's meeting is we'll have the final report from Weston and Samson and while that's a regional agenda topic it does look at all the fields across the town including the fields at the elementary level. So I think it will be worthwhile to have that discussion and to have their analysis of whether we currently have the right amount of playable fields for the demands of the town in general and they have in my opinion some helpful to the draft I saw which is not the final one some helpful feedback about the use slash overuse of fields so more soon on that but I just want to appreciate that point of view and I think the report will be helpful in contextualizing what alternatives are out there. Thank you. Mr. Demling. I guess the one thought that is going through my mind as I'm hearing all these updates is I appreciate the additional attention but I think the fact that our facilities and our grounds are in not great shape should really come as no surprise to anybody in town. This is really a theme that courses throughout a lot of things in our town and that we have a lot of buildings and roads and places that frankly are in significant need of capital investment in our town over the years over the decades has not done a great job of taking care of things and that's the sobering reality. I don't say that to depress people but I think when we come to the table whether it's at JCPC or whether it's to the town council whether it's talking about the school building project that hopefully is a result of the statement of interest this is a sobering reality that I think is part of our duty as school committee to help educate the public about that we're in a significant capital situation in town and we're gonna have to make hard decisions and some of it is going to be frustration at not being able to use our facilities as frequently as we want to and some of it is going to be accepting solutions that are not ideal that are compromised solutions and so it's just a thread that goes through everything that I think we all kind of understand and assume but I think going forward if we're conscious about educating as much of the public as possible this is really a town-wide theme it would help in terms of being approaching all of these situations in as collaborative way as possible. Mr. Nakajima. Yeah and actually I agree with what Mr. Dilling just said but I'd add on to that that one of the themes that has arisen in the last couple of years that have been on JCPC has sometimes been that we have legacy institutional practices about how we deal with fields and buildings and facilities that may be utilized by one department but is technically owned by another department or something like that and so there is a sort of an existing practice of not necessarily identifying a responsible party who has the accountability and authority to manage appropriately the utilization and maintenance and improvements of a facility and in the case in this case our let it fields are only one example of it there are other examples but I think this is one of those things where you can go a long time by just having sort of the small town ethos of two people talking over the fence or from one cubicle to the other about hey do you think you can get the mowers over there next week oh sure no problem and there's no problem right but then as things get more complex and utilization gets more intense and the capital needs to get more intense then over time the ability to really appropriately manage who knows who to say no to how to organize the information so it's really transparent and fair and the rules are fair and then prioritize investments it's much harder to do and so the point is this is one of those areas that screams and I'm talking I'm not talking about the region now because I'm being appropriate my point is this is true for River may start to pick up for River again but it's an area where you know you already have non-forever school-based athletic activity going on there which is great that's fine but the bottom line is that you have mixed sort of jurisdictions and responsibilities around who's really responsible for managing this field who's managing utilization and then who's responsible for paying in to fix it right and I don't really think that I don't think that's serving us well right now and I think it's breaking things down and it's something that really needs significant attention and I hope in another meeting in a few days it's around a week if we don't hear about that as a topic for solution I'm gonna bring it up again because it's the reality is the money doesn't get any better as Mr. Delmonte was suggesting which means we need and then you can't be willy-nilly about how you make decisions about people need to know that their interests are being treated as fairly as someone else's and that they have access to decision makers that's really transparent and the rules of the game are fair no pun intended and so and you're not gonna get that unless you have that kind of joint agreement between the town and the school district and allow the decision making authority of money to follow in some manner that that's a practice Ms. McDonald I just have a question and if it's not appropriate just a little bit for next week but you mentioned that you're coordinating across with the athletic department and the town and the district are working together on this do you also have representation from the various youth sports organizations that utilize the field and I'm asking because I think it might be helpful to have those voices at the table when it does come down to sort of parsing out scarce resources so what let's say this so those organizations typically go through with I can think of one exception that's not relevant for the elementary level they typically go through LSSE in terms of field usage and LSSE has been part of the planning so I think there's a lot of communication loops that have to go back to those organizations but for anyone who uses outdoor sports let's say indoor sports is different LSSE even if it's not an LSSE sport has a role in the scheduling and field usage right of those and that's been the connection and so LSSE themselves uses the fields a lot but they're also the connection the conduit to the youth organization athletic organization okay I'm gonna move us on because we still have a couple of pretty weighty topics on the agenda but thank you again Mr. Roy Clark for your presentation for being here tonight and for all your work really appreciate it next time on the agenda is school choice update sure so yeah actually I think it is a happier topic so just back story is on early May got a memorandum from this desi from Department of Education that our prior model of school choice students who enter the municipal elementary district like Amherst who then would feed into the regional secondary district there was a change in practice or legal guidance actually so formerly those students once you were entering in in kindergarten or whatever grade level a student came through choice the Amherst elementary schools it meant that they would then travel with their cohort to the regional school district without any delay or complication the legal guidance actually flipped that and said that it would grandfather and current school choice students but starting next year school choice students would then have to reenter a school choice lottery to get into the regional school district at seventh grade and that there was no advantage having been an Amherst elementary school student throughout their educational career worked with the chairs of three committees of two of which are at this meeting also the Pelham School Committee chair provided some advocacy both legislatively in terms of our elected officials but also with Desi had multiple conversations with them and what I appreciate both about the elected officials Mr. Doniz and I and Ms. Hall met with the representative from Senator Comerford's office was their responsiveness it was very clear that this was purely a legal guidance they looked at the mass general law and I will say our attorney for our district and me and I'm not a lawyer agreed that the old guidance probably was inconsistent with mass general law so this wasn't a policy change from Desi it was clearly their general counsel looking at guidance that was issued in 1995 around school choice saying this doesn't match what was in the law so through that advocacy today I had a conference call that included the associate commissioner Jeff Wolfson and other Desi staff members about a process moving forward and without getting too deep into the weeds unless the committee would like me to it'll be a larger topic at the regional school committee level what the suggested work around that doesn't involve a legislative change is to work on an agreement that would need to be voted at the regional school committee that would allow elementary school choice students from member communities to tuition in to the regional school district there's language around tuition in at the same rate as school choice students with the special ed increment included so essentially it would not be continuing them as school choice they would be technically tuition in to the school but the regional school committee could make that determination and it wouldn't actually so this is an update this isn't an action step for the immerse elementary school it'll be a regional topic but it's certainly relevant as this is currently you voted to continue to be a school choice district I think I've shared that we've communicated with school choice applicants and what Desi suggested at the end of the phone conference call today was that they would actually draft language for us of what that would look like that would be consistent with how their reading of mass general law and tuition in agreements is and send it to us for our acknowledgement review and then it would be a topic for the regional school committee to review and potentially vote on sometime in the future but what it would do is from the individual student family level it would actually maintain the current practice that has been the case since 1995 we weren't a choice district then but has been the case since the region has been a school choice district in the elementary's through a different mechanism so I wanna say publicly I greatly appreciate both the work of Senator Comerford and frankly the flexibility of Desi's staff and their responsiveness I mean this advocacy usually advocacy you anticipate and I know this is a topic that you all have lived in different ways you think of it in order of magnitude of months and years and not weeks and my experience on this one is they've been more responsive than I could have thought and actually got off the phone today and say how do I acknowledge that when this all hopefully plays out well and how do I let the Board of Education know about their understanding their interest in understanding the implications for a district that had not been part of the change that was presented as purely a legal one so that's my summary is a little longer than I thought sorry but summary of where we are as it relates to the choice and the results of the advocacy I wanna thank all of you for promoting me or allowing me and supporting me in my advocacy on this topic And I just wanna say Dr. Morris I actually think you're being a little too modest in the description of this because honestly speaking I think we had our meeting with Senator Comerford staff and they were wonderful Senator Comerford certainly has supported this and acted quickly on this but I think it's also your relationship with Desi's staff that allowed this to move as quickly as it did through that pipeline because I think had we not had that kind of a relationship with the state organization that we may not have seen resolution this quickly and so it went from a sort of accidental error that they made to now them taking steps to wanna correct that and I think it's great that they're willing to draft language even for us that we could use that just shows how they're going above and beyond but really appreciate the work that you put into that. Okay, if there are no questions on school choice we will move on to the superintendent evaluation. So just a couple of words and then I'm looking at Mr. Demling to see if there's anything else that maybe he might wanna add. So in front of you is a memo, draft memo that I and Mr. Demling prepared for this committee that is the summative evaluation of Dr. Morris as superintendent of this district. It is based on the evaluations, individual evaluations that were submitted by four of our committee members. So that was me, Mr. Demling, Ms. McDonald and Ms. Spitzer and our fifth member of our committee was unable to complete this evaluation not because he did not want to not to put words in your mouth but I'm pretty sure that's true but because he was out of the country and attending some family, urgent family matters. And so what I'd like to do is I hope the committee has had a chance to review the summative evaluation in it is basically in very similar style, identical style actually from the format that we used last year. There is a narrative section that sort of explains some of the highlights of what we gleaned from the individual evaluations and then there's the charts that break down kind of the data that we receive from the individual evaluations. I want to once again thank Mr. Demling for the work that he put into putting together those charts. They were very helpful but we would try to fairly, hopefully fairly pull the highlights again both negative and positive from the individual evaluations just to try to give them the most comprehensive review that we could for both the superintendent and the community. But generally speaking, I think that the committee has expressed a great deal of satisfaction with the superintendent's work this past year. Express confidence in his ability to continue to lead the district. There were several highlights that were continuously brought up in the individual evaluations around consensus building, you know, focus on social justice work and the professional development that goes with that and then also his leadership and vision in guiding the school improvement plans and in the district's first language, dual language program which we just talked about some more tonight but have been talking about throughout this past year. So all of that really points to an incredible body of work for this superintendent and for this district and I will give a chance for you know each of our committee members to include their comments if they so choose and to make their comments to Dr. Morris and to the rest of the committee and including I had invited Mr. Nakajima since he was not able to actually do a formal evaluation if he wanted to share some thoughts and some comments but before I do that, Mr. Demling, I don't know if there's anything that you wanted to add on this process for the committee. No, I don't think process wise. I think you did a good job writing up the narrative summaries of the individual comments. I think it's always challenging to express that in a qualitative way that's publicly understandable given how technical the instructor, the superintendent Rubrik as we got gets. I think to me the core take home point if you're trying to interpret and understand this document is that the ratings, you know you have like the four ratings, right? Unsatisfactory, needs improvement, proficient in exemplary and proficient, it's, there's a tendency to think of that as maybe like a B or like okay but the actual language is fully satisfactory, the rigorous expected level of performance and that's where all four evaluators came down on with the overall performance rating so I think that's, it's really, I think our district should feel great that we have a superintendent who's able to achieve that level of performance and yeah, I'll just leave it there possibly. Right. So I guess we can maybe go down this way so it gives Mr. Nakajima a chance to say what he wanted to say and then we'll go from there. Well, first thing I wanna do is just apologize for not submitting the evaluation. This is, it's my fault at looking at the submittal deadline is June 8th and since I was due to be back in the United States on June 6th, I thought, hey, I'll just do it June 7th while I'm heavily jet lagged, who cares? And then I had a major family emergency in Japan that prevented me from coming back until just a couple of days ago so I apologize for that. I've read through this, I agree, I agree, I know that there's some variation within specific elements but I'm prepared to vote for it and I also agree with the colleagues on the school committee. They're, without going into it, I think most of the things I thought were met, some of them were a significant progress and I think that echoes sort of the range of responses that were in here. I think one of the observations I would make generally, and I think it comes through in the school improvement plans, it comes through in the work that you've done to develop a capital improvement plan for the elementary schools is, I think this year, even more than last year, I think you've made significant advances in your sort of syncretic or integrative practice of balancing both your desire to have an inquiry and research-based sort of practice, evidence-based, based on research evidence, practice and approach with also the human art of working with various constituencies and staff to try to recognize that no good ideas or good ideas are developed absent a group setting and to do that it means you're engaging stakeholders at multiple levels, includes things like the family engagement elements that are in here and even more than last year, I think there's lots of evidence in both, in literally what you submitted as well as the practical experience we've had during the year in which you've improved your ability to create a good collaborative leadership team both in central office, within the elementary schools, understand where to lead and where to also delegate while also developing a significantly improved sense of vision and direction and purpose around how we're working. So it's something that I just, I was, I had to say this I was actually literally thinking about this today because I was thinking about the way, and we talked about this earlier in some meeting, about the way in which you're deploying the earlier than expected release time this year and the professional development work and the way in which resources, the work of the team, aligning professional development to strategic objectives for next year, how all these things lined up and what really struck me about the quality of that work was actually that the quality of that work wouldn't occur unless you'd figured out how to even improve upon your ability as superintendent to know how to work effectively with others in a team setting in which you have, for better or for worse, you signed up to have the educational leader role. So it means you have a central role in that process and yet the realities are never gonna be effective unless you can figure out how to animate other people to then provide their own leadership effectively. And I just see you doing an even better job of that. I struggled with the proficient exemplary thing. I agree with the proficient recommendation of my four colleagues. I'd also say you're risking becoming exemplary. If you keep at this, you're gonna actually force us to give you an exemplary rating, but you're gonna have to earn it. You're gonna have to earn it, which means to me continuing, like we talked about this last year, continuing to apply yourself along these different areas, either the goals we set or the personal professional development goals, but I'm just pleased that you can, there's progress both in the practical evidence of what we've done this year and the goals that were set, but there's also, I think, in terms of the ethos and the practice and the environment, there's also their evidence we can sense in the relationship that we see between you and your colleagues and in the community of this improvement as well. And that's great. Things aren't perfect, but that's great. So thank you. Thank you. I'm gonna skip my turn and hand it over to Ms. Spitzer. Are you sure? Is there any comments? I wanna thank the chair and Mr. Dumbling for putting this together. Thank you guys. It's very easy to read just like last year. And I guess I just wanna echo a lot of what's been said already, but just that I think we set, a lot of the goals are long-term and sustained and I think that's the way it should be. And I think if we continue on the, I guess what I wanna say is, I think you've really done a good job of laying the groundwork for a lot of these, hopefully things like a capital plan and the physical environment to improve over time. I think if we can continue with the direction we're going in with both the schools creating their own plans and then the regional planning, all of the planning that's happening right now is really, hopefully we'll be fruitful. And hopefully we can get to that point where we can check the exemplary box or click it in this digital age. But anyways, thank you and I'll leave that at that. Ms. McDonald. I'll also express thanks to you both for compiling this excellent document because I struggled even just completing the survey. And I was late. So thank you for allowing me to get mine in late. I won't repeat things that my colleagues have said, but I share a lot of those same sentiments. And I think the thing that I do not, haven't heard this already, but none of us is perfect and including yourself. And I think what I tried to call out in here and what I was thinking about as I completed the survey was that as long as an individual is willing to take feedback, get input and work collaboratively, that overcomes any of our imperfections. And I think that I really see not only would I rate you as exemplary on that, but also I find it inspirational for myself in sort of how I can approach my own work and other things that I do too. So I do wanna point that out because I do think that that is an exceptional strength that you bring to your work and to the district and that we all benefit not just the students and the staff, but also the entire community. So thank you. Mr. Dunwein. Yeah, I feel like I could just say plus one, plus one, plus one, everything everybody's saying. I mean, as a school committee, I think it's very fortunate that we have a superintendent that we feel very confident we can work with and that I feel is an excellent fit for our district. Like Ms. McDonald said, nobody's perfect, but I think as a town and as a school committee, we would be hard pressed to replace someone at the same level of quality and productivity as what you've shown us the last couple of years. I think this year in particular, hopefully knock on wood, we can look back at years from now as this was the year of dual language and that would be a big smile on our face. This was the year of the compromise proposal for the school building project that again, major knock on wood, the statement of interest gets accepted and that process executes. Those are two massive things that could have incredible benefit going forward and so I really think those are excellent highlights. As you're reading through the details of the individual evaluations and the summative evaluation, I think the evaluative instrument is just structured that it's not going to ever be an ideal thing and we've talked about this before, so I won't belabor the point, but this idea of what are you evaluating on and when you're asked to evaluate goals, specifically should you respond to what's specifically articulated as the described benchmark? I think I had the most struggle with this when I was evaluating diversity of teaching staff. I think as expressed in terms of new hires representing a higher percentage, persons of color than the current staffing percentages, I think the data you provided shows that that was clearly met and was over met and so that means exceeded and yet monitoring and increasing the diversity of our staff is never something that we should not pay attention to going forward, right? And so you want to sort of balance those two things. Anyway, that's more of a meta point, but yeah, I just wanted to thank the superintendent for an excellent year of work. I would echo Mr. Nakajima's sentiments of a lot of these things. I feel like you're on the proficient exemplary fence and Mr. Nakajima said it much better than I did about how weaving those two threads of that research evidence and the human art of engagement, I think you've really done an exceptional job with and so knowing that you have that approach to problems and you've fostered an excellent working relationship with the school committee, I think means that whatever problems expected or unexpected come down in the future, we can feel confident as a town and as a community that you'll be up to the challenge to taking on. So thank you again for a very productive and beneficial year. So I also don't want to belabor the point but absolutely in agreement with all of the things that my colleagues have said, I think that you have done an incredible job of showing us all what an open door policy actually is for any executive leader that is in any organization or company or school district or government body to truly take the time to listen to every constituent who sends an email, makes a phone call, asks for some of your time. That is really a remarkable thing. And it's not something that I think we often take the time to appreciate because it helps in so many different ways. Not only are you showing your openness to hearing different points of view and perspectives but also I think taking that time to acknowledge that you may not have all the answers and that our community has a lot to say and that's a good thing. And even though you may not always agree with all of us all the time, the fact that you're still willing to accept all of that input and feedback throughout the course of the year and give us an opportunity to share our thinking with you is a sign of a true leader. And I really appreciate that and thank you for that probably above all. But I think also just to echo what we heard the individual evaluations definitely pointed to some very remarkable gains. Dual language program which is historic for our community, something that has been tried in the past and we weren't able to achieve. The work that has gone into putting together a comprehensive capital plan. And even though I express my frustration and have done so in meetings and in my individual evaluation will continue to put pressure on not just the superintendent but I think all of us to continue to do better on that front understanding the importance of healthy environments and buildings for our students and for our staff. This is the first time that I've seen an actual capital plan being put together. And so I think we're sort of at that threshold of very positive change. And I think we have to thank Dr. Morris for that work and for his team for all of that. And then finally I think the work that we have done as a district together and that the community has helped lead but also Dr. Morris with your support and the team that you have put together to focus us so deeply on social justice and racial equity that has carried through both through your assistant superintendent's work but also just the professional development work that's gone on with educators and staff throughout the entire district and not just this district but the other two districts that you oversee. But since we're talking about this one specifically I really wanna commend you for that. I think that it's an aspiration and a vision that we have had and held close to our hearts. And it's great to see that work actually finally getting put, not just coming off the ground but actually starting to fly. So thank you for that. I think it also has been an excellent year. I'm looking forward to the next year and hopefully many more of your work continuing work with that. And just a note on this process again I think just as a reminder for the community that maybe either just tuning in or maybe watching this later on the evaluation is based on this summative evaluation which is the official position that we should be voting on hopefully tonight with the committee's approval is the official position of the committee but also represents several independent individual evaluations as well as a very broad and lengthy document that Dr. Morris put together that included evidence for all of the work that has gone on the past year and all of that is part of the public record. I encourage people, we had a very robust conversation about this at our last meeting about how that document actually shows such an incredible breath of work that's taken place in the district not just by Dr. Morris but by all of the administrators and staff and educators in the district and really is something worth reviewing and taking time. And again, I don't think all of us are going to agree with everything that's in there and there's probably some places where we could make improvements in many different ways but it really is, it gives a great picture of the district's work to date so I highly encourage people to take a look at that. So with that, I'm assuming unless Dr. Morris there's anything that you wanna add in response or if you have any questions for the committee. My preference would be if I could share remarks after you vote, I just think that'd probably be the right procedure. Sounds good, okay. So with the committee's permission, I'm assuming that we might be ready for a vote on this memo given the comments that we've just heard. So I will take a motion if anyone is so moved. Mr. Nakajima. Move to approve as presented the 2018-2019 superintendent evaluation memo. We have a motion, do I have a second? Second. Thank you, Ms. Spitzer. Any further comments, questions? Okay, all those in favor? It is unanimous, thank you very much. Dr. Morris. Yeah, so I do have a couple of things I'd like to share. Thank you for that feedback, not just the positive feedback but the feedback more generally. Probably Sasha's watching this enjoying it because she knows this is probably super uncomfortable for me because this is not my cup of tea so to speak but I really do take all the words you shared to heart and thank you. And one of the reasons I wanted to comment after you voted is I wanna really acknowledge your work in support of the district because as you know with the artifact document it's about the work of the district, right? So I'm not everywhere, I don't do many of the tasks that matter the most for kids but what really matters for I think for our organization is that we actually have a leadership team and I'm including the school committee as a key part of that that actively advocates and works together to support the organization and I do feel very supported in that way. One term that when I first started in the role is acting in an interim that I use a lot. One of my goals was about promoting psychological safety of staff so some of you may not be as familiar with that, I won't go into the details now if you Google it and it's a well-known researcher, she's at Harvard who coined the term and what they found is in any organization this has been studied a little more in the business world than education although that's shifting, having a structure in place where professionals can gather feedback, critical feedback, can take risks, kind of honest candid conversations that are actually about the goals of the organization and not about the individual personalities, that's the highest functioning organizations. For instance, Google did a self-assessment of their own organization, they found that was the number one factor and their highest performing teams was folks who felt psychological safety so that term sometimes can, people perceive it as a soft term, it's actually not at all, it's actually can you actually have honest conversations, can you share honest feedback and that it's always about the goals of the organization, it's not about anything else and I think this, in my experience, this committee really models that well and I think I've tried to partner with you all on that and that matters for the people who are presenting tonight and the people who are doing the work that as we're gathering feedback, dual language is a great example so that program's better because of the questions that were asked because of the presentations that were requested to push us to think differently about the work and it wasn't that any of you necessarily need to be dual language experts or read as much research as Ms. Richardson and myself but the lottery is a great example of a place where without that feedback we would not have gotten to the place where we have a lottery and to date knock on wood, no one's come to say it was unfair, it's unjust, it's not connected to the goals of the district, it's not that we don't have talented people working on that but without that community infused feedback and support along the way and the questions you asked we wouldn't have landed in that place and so when we think about the health and I think all of us are feeling very optimistic about where our organization is headed, I really do wanna, it sounds weird to say in the tail end of an evaluation but there's no good time to talk about this. I do really wanna acknowledge that what I feel like is I'm not gonna use a rating category because that would be weird, I'd realize that there's double meanings of words so I've appreciated the way that the committee has partnered with each other and with me and district staff to promote what we all want for kids so I wanna really say thank you. I think the other piece, I think Amy Edmondson is the author if anyone's really curious about looking up Psychological Safety, I think. So the other piece that when I think to transition, I know our next topic is going to FY20 but on a personal level this isn't about the district organization or like district more generally, it's really about me and some goals I'm thinking about. One of the things on the staff evaluation, the 360 degree part of it, that I know I need to improve next year and I've been actively thinking about structures to help myself improve is now that we have strategic plans for the elementary schools. We have a lot of things, right? What was the word that was used lofty goals earlier? There was a distinction in the feedback from the folks I evaluate on accessibility versus observing practice. So in terms of accessibility, those rankings were much higher than it was in terms of that I was observing practice and that really needs to change next year. I mean, for the better, not like I'll be less accessible but and that's something that I'm actively talking about. I've been talking to the chair about and that's certainly something whether it's in my formal goals from the school committee, my own personal goals doesn't really matter but it is something that as we make these ambitious plans that we have being accessible is one thing but being present to directly observe the work as it's in progress is something that not that the ratings were terrible on that. I mean, it's public document anyone can look at it but they weren't where I want them to be and they were accurate. So the people I was evaluating I think accurately displayed that that was not the strength of my performance in this year and I think because of where we are organizationally I know that's something I need to work on next year and that's easier to say but actually I think actively thinking about the structures of my work at the elementary level and where we are being present isn't so much a challenge. I'm in the schools pretty frequently but what I'm doing, I think that's the piece that needs to change. I do a lot of supervision working with principals trying to build capacity which can't change but being actually in classrooms observing how things are going, talking to principals to build our collective capacity to make sure these ambitious plans get implemented with fidelity and to support our students is something that I'm actively thinking about. So I know that's a preview a little bit but that's not necessarily like an agenda topic perhaps for the school committee as we think about agenda topics for FY20 but in my own self-evaluation of my work that's an area and perhaps the area for me that I feel like I need to improve most significantly as we head to next year. So I wanted to share some reflections on that. Thank you, Dr. Morse and thank you for the preview as well. I mean, I think that is definitely a great jumping off point for our next agenda items but also it sets a good tone for our very last meeting of this school year for this body anyway. So if there are no further comments or thoughts from the committee I would like to move us on to the FY20 school committee planning which is our next agenda item with an eye to the clock to say that we're about 20 minutes past where I had hoped we would be at this point but we also had some technical difficulties and some important questions so that is okay but I do wanna keep us moving. So in your packet you should have a list of dates for future school committee meetings. These include all of them both the Amherst and Regent Pella meetings so obviously this body is just looking at the Amherst meetings but these are the proposed dates for the next calendar year but I think more than just the dates themselves we're looking for some guidance from the committee on topics that we'd like to have brought back. Any issues that you see arising I think Superintendent and I try to sit fairly regularly to go through what we think should be on the next topics for discussion for the committee but would certainly appreciate hearing some now if there are things that you think we need to prioritize over the upcoming year in addition to the things that we've already talked about such as like capital planning stuff. So perhaps we'll start from this direction. Mr. Demling, do you wanna take a shot at that? Sure. So I guess first just process question so if things occur to us later hopefully not much later but in the coming days and weeks and such. No. Okay, moving on. I'm sorry Mr. Demling, I'm just teasing you. It will be the best way to share. Yes, this is not your only opportunity to share, absolutely. Okay, so we can email you and Dr. Morse. Okay, so just a few examples. If I think about the past year and sort of emerging things this notion of breakfast after the bell and more broadly increasing student access to food that has this amazing nexus of being more beneficial to students and financially advantageous the more we grow but it's just such an amazing rare overlap to me but it seems like something that should be really pursued. Now, we saw that there's implementation challenges not the least of which is food attracts rodents at Wildwood. So that's the kind of thing that would take I think a little more broad planning but there's a few topics that get the community really excited whenever I talk to people and this farm to school connection with that the literal roots of the valley the book of the plow, right? Where this agricultural themed place I just think is pretty great. So that's something I'd like to have sort of more clarifying in terms of like what do we do in terms of initiatives? Certainly if the statement of interest comes back positive in December that's going to take a lot of our attention and unlike this year, we have an opportunity to pre-plan for that a little bit. You know, I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels that if we are accepted that we want to proceed as expeditiously as humanly possible given the urgency of the situation and that is no easy feat given that it's going to be a building project of a lot of people and a lot of meetings and so I think that that's something that could take some good forethought. And the least articulated sort of focus that I would love to hear some more suggestions from you on are just this notion of, it's an emerging notion of emotional well-being as this foundational undercurrent over a lot of what we do. We heard a lot of this from the school improvement plans tonight and it's a funny compliment to see the strategies at the elementary level sort of go from this ground up where the endpoint is kind of the district level strategy of the region. You know, we sort of, we did the strategic planning from the opposite direction. So sort of seeing the end results of those three school improvement plans and then taking a step back during the summer from your vantage point and saying, okay, what are the common themes here of things that you can work on as a district-wide initiative maybe that would tie in and support the various things going on? Because as the principal has mentioned, you know, they don't operate in a silo and the more that they're able to cross pollinate the better and so those are just some additional thoughts. Thank you, Mr. Demling. Ms. McDonald, you have any thoughts? And don't feel, please don't feel pressured either. I mean, honestly, because I know this is sort of sprung on the, it's an agenda item, but it wasn't, you know, we're not putting, trying to put anybody on the spot. I would echo a lot of what Mr. Demling said and I don't really, I haven't really put a lot of thought into it, but one thing that just popped into my head as I was listening to you and I don't know if this elevates to major topics for us to be addressing in the next school year, but I do think we need to come back to the question of expanded preschool access. That's when we touched on, touched on again, but I think, you know, it would be helpful to continue to talk about that and understand the progress that's been made in some of the initiatives that you undertook this year. Thank you. Ms. Whitzer. Thank you. Just wanted to confirm that housing and specifically the issue around homelessness students, I mean, that's on the, that was on the agenda and I think we'll be in the fall. So I don't think that's adding as much as just being sure we don't let it drop. And then I think just because this keeps coming up, the issues around, you know, we've stated as a goal the diversity of the staff and I want to make sure that we maybe also tie that maybe to a conversation about licensing and just make sure that we're staying on track with that. And then with all of this planning and setting of metrics of ways that we're going to be tracking things and the data's too vague, but I think it's important that somehow we build into our meetings a way to sort of see if we're making progress on the goals that were stated both in the school improvement plans and then in any larger planning that's happening in the district. And so if we can find a way to formalize that in our calendar, that might be good or maybe we need a subcommittee, I don't know. But it's something that's, I think as we make these plans, we want to make sure we hold ourselves accountable and how do we do that? And that's a big conversation. And then just again with the potential for this hopefully positive statement of interest, it seems like it's an opportunity when we're talking about the built environment and how we're building our schools, it really opens up I think an opportunity to think about ways of bringing the farms to the schools or ways of bringing project-based learning. And so I don't know if there's any learning we can do by looking at outside of our own district to think about how other schools have kind of been really creative about that. But that is only if we actually have a successful statement of interest. Dr. Morris, do you want to say something? Homelessness has really been planned at the regional level. And I was gonna actually acknowledge that I think my experience is it functions quite differently when the kids are younger and it's more prevalent right now in our district when students are younger. So I do think if the committee wants to pursue that, sometimes because the two committees can meet or we just feel like we get it at, we talk about a region, but I actually think there's a particular different set of scenarios at the elementary level related to homelessness even if we're doing it at both committees to do that. I'm gonna skip myself for now, Mr. Nakajima. Sure. So I'm gonna re-enforce some of the things that have been brought up, maybe do it come at an absolutely different angle. I think that, A, I think that since we've been presented three school improvement plans, one of the things I wanna make sure we're doing is that we're talking about those plans next year and we're having follow-up on them substantively. I mean, I think my colleagues have already been expressing that but I'm just sort of putting it bluntly that in a certain sense if one of the, if the between the chair and the superintendent and the principals, they came up with other things they wanted to highlight, I'm not even sure I care as long as it's considered important and follows their plan. But along with that, I would say that because there was a common theme of family engagement embracing the diversity of our students which could mean any number in creating a welcoming environment and thinking about the social emotional well-being of students, this is no fault of the plans but because they were setting goals without a context of what kind of experiences are families having now? What kind of, what are the differentiated experiences of students that they're having now? If there's a, I mean, and forgive me for putting it this way because this probably sounds wrong. Like we tend to talk about our schools in a purely celebratory manner but nobody would say we need, nobody would ever say we need to really, really improve and sort of close the last gap or mile on embracing students of all backgrounds and making them feel welcome unless there was some sense there was a problem definition right that we weren't fully doing the job right now and that all families weren't feeling that way now and so, and I think that this is an environment which as you were saying earlier about wanting to do a better job of observation and implementing the plans, I think that's critical because on some level, some of the elements that were most focused by Crocker, Wildwood, and For River are goals that are amorphous to get what the data would be that would say most meaningfully that you've actually obtained that objective. And so it's, so the observation I think just bought on that the observational element is critical to at least using your professional judgment to say, oh, I think I see it when I see it or I don't see it when I'm looking. But anyways, I think my point is what I'd love to see is better definition on how to bring that topic back in our topics, embracing the diversity of our district. I think this actually includes homeless children and families because they're part of the diversity of our district and the differentiated experience of students who may or may not feel fully engaged and welcome. So I don't think it's a different thing. I also think that we should, echoing something that the chair said earlier, I think that if we really have the objective of making a substantial progress on capital improvement goals next year, then we need to hit that hard early in the year as specifically as possible. And I think it's good pressure to put on all of us, but I said this out of meeting last meeting, so I'll say it in meeting this time. I still found the presentation to be slightly amorphous and I get that's because some of the plans need to be coordinated with the departments and we're not sure how it goes, but the bottom line is if you're trying to communicate to the public that you're gonna use scarce dollars well in a reasonably expeditious fashion to improve the capital environment of that your staff and students and families are experiencing, then I don't really, I don't have that vibe yet that I know what's actually gonna happen between December and now and next May. And the only way we're gonna get that is if we have agenda items that early in the year that are then followed up on, that are really task oriented, which is sort of a partner to Mr. Demling and others comments earlier about the SOI, right? Like we already sort of know that if we get accepted then there's gonna be a whole process we need to think through to hit that really well. Well, same thing's true on this too, so. So I don't wanna echo what's been said. I agree with the rest of the committee on the different items and issues. I guess the only thing that I would add to this list is, and I know that we've talked previously about curriculum, sort of math curriculum work that's going on, we had a conversation at the regional level, we've also had basic conversations at the district, the Amherst School Committee level. I think that we really need to pay very special attention to what's happening especially among our Latino population but I think just more broadly to make sure that we are not widening the gap that currently exists. And so what I would hope is that in the upcoming year, in addition to all these other topics that we can also have a substantive conversation on how we're doing to help close that achievement gap that we see emerging in middle school and then continuing all the way through high school but that we know starts in the elementary school level. And I think honestly, Dr. Morris, your comments earlier about being present and spending more time in the classroom will be such a welcome piece of this, to have your thoughts and your focused attention on how you see instruction across the district. And I know you already spend a lot of time in the schools but I think with this particular piece working very closely with your director of curricula and others in the district to help address this issue and then bringing that to the committee would really go a long way in reinforcing faith in the work that's going on in our schools. So I think unless there's anything that you would like to add, Dr. Morris, on that or any comments or reflections? No, okay. I didn't say that that list aligns, I couldn't have written it but aligns I think with what priorities are and it's really helpful to have this in advance so that when Chair and I do some summer planning and can map out things in the fall, this makes logical sense and it's really a continuation of ongoing work that we're doing. I mean there's new pieces in it but I think some of it is really connected to like the math what Mr. Donis just talked about. We've been talking about that and then what does that look like and what's the feedback loop that school committee and the community get. So it all makes sense to me. Great, great. Okay, so last time on the agenda is accepting gifts and we do have some gifts if somebody would like to make a motion and read them hopefully. Ms. McDonald. I move to accept the following gifts from Judith Newcombe, number 1393 to support Crocker Farm at principal discretion on the amount of $500 from Martha Ulver, number 995463 to support the Crocker Farm at a principal discretion on the amount of $10 and another gift from Martha Ulver, number 99550 to support Crocker Farm at the principal discretion on the amount of $10 and from UMass V Credit Union to support Great Changers Project, grade three student activities and the amount of $250 for a total of $770. Thank you, Ms. McDonald. We have a motion. Do I have a second? Second. Thank you. Any questions or comments? Dr. Morse. So I alluded to this at the beginning but I want to acknowledge that Judith Newcombe, Judy Newcombe is a longtime educator who retired on Friday from years of service both at Wildwood School and at Crocker Farm School which are the childhood educator worked in last most of her time in this district was at kindergarten and just how touched Mr. Shea was because we talked about this this morning to receive that gift and as one token of how she's given back to her community and so I just wanted to make a public note of appreciation for Ms. Newcombe and her work. Thank you. That's great. Great. So with that, all those in favor? Thank you. It's unanimous. Okay. Well, so we have our marching orders for the upcoming year. We've got our list of meetings. If the committee would like to bring any additional items to my attention or to the superintendent's please feel free to do so. But with that, I hope everyone has a safe and wonderful summer break. We will reconvene August 20th that looks like according to this schedule. So Mr. Nakajima, did you want to move to adjourn? Thank you. Do I have a second? Second. Ms. McDonald, all those in favor? All right, we are adjourned. Thank you very much.