 I know that he's not going to be here but it's close to nine o'clock so let's get ourselves assembled. We will be missing the two people remotely today and we also are missing one other counselor who had to make a flight this morning at six o'clock. So, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Okay, right, ten. So I have my ten people. Dorothy's, oh you're right. I'm missing Pat. Who wants to call and wake up? I'm sorry? Okay. First of all, we are not doing this by Amherst media but we are recording and we're doing that so that the people who are not able to be here or yourselves have an opportunity to review the material in the future. We will also make a link to the recording available on the town website so that the public that is not able to be here can also view it. With that, let me call the meeting to order and the first, I'm sorry? Oh, all right. Let me stop then. Amherst media, are you ready? Good morning. For those of you that were with us last evening, it's just a few hours later and we're continuing today with actually an opportunity to both educate the council and the public on two of our major departments within the town. And so we're delighted to have that opportunity. We plan to meet today from about nine to about 11. And as I mentioned earlier, though I wasn't sure we were being recorded, there are two people who are not able to be here. It's actually three people who are not able to be here because of circumstances that allow them to miss a council meeting. So with that, Mr. Bachmann. Thank you. So this is the first of our presentations to the council from departments. I really appreciate the time that the councilors have are going to give to this effort. I know there's a lot of demands on your time and that you were here until after 11 last night and that you're here at nine this morning. So there is coffee in the back room. That's so if you need to get that extra boost. So the way we are, we've are organizing this is by department. We've had our major departments who are being prepared to present provide just an overview of their departments and answer. General questions that you may have this morning. We're going to kick off with our department of public works led by Superintendent Gilford morning, who you saw last night and assistant superintendent Amy Rusecki who's here. And then after that will flow into the superintendent of public works and the finance director. I'm sorry, superintendent of schools. This is superintendent morning and the finance director from schools who will take the second hour and again do a presentation to you. We feel like this is an opportunity for our department heads. They've been eager to get in front of you and have the opportunity to show off what they do because we have incredibly talented staff. And for me, I just wanted them to be able to you to meet them, see them in action. And then also for you to ask any kinds of questions and there'll be more coming on. So turn over to Gilford and Amy. That's perfectly fine, Gilford. Thank you so much for being here. And Amy as well. Okay, so good to see you again. It was just like yesterday. So Public Works Department is actually one of the larger departments in the public town government, not the schools. We are actually a little bigger than the police and a little bigger than the fire. So we're about 65 employees. And I'm going to start a slide show. I debated on whether to wait to ask you to wait till the end to ask questions. But I think as you see a slide, you have a question. Just go ahead and ask the question. Okay, and we'll just move through. This is our organization. There's a superintendent, which is myself. We have a director of operations, which is Amy, Amy Rzeki. We have an administration office. And then we have the town engineer, which is Jason Skeels. And then you can see who's underneath it and what falls where. There's roughly seven operational divisions, we call them. Highway, water, wastewater, tree and grounds, vehicle maintenance, street lights and traffic lights, traffic signals, and solid waste. And then we have a support staff on the engineering side, which is actually pretty robust. And I've actually moved them to the end of the presentation because I understand there's lots of engineering questions about what roads we pave and who we use for consultants and all that stuff. That's all at the end. So how do we get our money? Everything we do has needs money. We are one of the departments that gets a lot of different types of money. General fund money goes to some of the divisions, and I'll point those as we go along. The water fund pays for the water division. The sewer fund pays for the sewer division. We have a solid waste fund as well, which pays for the solid waste issues. And then we also participate in the transportation fund. We have employees paid by the transportation fund. And we actually do almost all the maintenance of the kiosk parking meters. That's all paid for it. And we handle all that in public works. We get grant funding, mostly the money we get every year is chapter 90 money. That's a grant. Then we also get our general fund capital money, which comes to the joint capital planning committee, which pays for road repair, sidewalk repair, street lights, some traffic signal work we do. Those type of thing comes in the general fund also pays for our vehicle replacement, mostly. We get other grants. You'll hear about these as you go along community development block grants CDBG complete streets program, which is a mass highway program, mass CEC, which is the mass statuses center for environment, clean energy center. We actually run our third. We're on our third grant with that agency and we do that through our wastewater side. We partner with UMass and mass CEC and we do a lot of innovative technologies and piloting down at the wastewater treatment plant and at the UMass pilot plant, which is next door to us. We also get mass works grants. We haven't got one in a while. The last one we got was the roundabout triangle in East Pleasant Street. And then we get a lot of reimbursements. We do work for the schools. We do work for other communities. We do work for the housing authority. We do work around town and do do things and then we get reimbursed for that. The last thing we did was we were supporting the South Deerfield Water District where they were going through some operator changes and we actually provided operators for them when they needed them and they reimbursed for our time and effort to be there that helped them out a lot and help them move on. We do a lot of stuff for the school. Like I said, we do a lot of paving. We did the tennis courts at the school. We do parking lots at the school. We've done some drainage work at the schools. We're pretty much a construction firm for the town. So if somebody in the town needs to do something, they come talk to us and we put it into one of our bigger projects or we make it a project for all in itself. So I'm going to keep going unless I see people raise their hand or so you get a combination of general funds fees and grant funds. Yes. Okay. So then this is the 2019 budget minus the schools. That's just a pie chart showing the overall 334, 34.3 34.4 million dollars and how those funds break up among the general. We're a big share of what goes on in this town. We sometimes get forgotten because when you call the phone and you're looking for a fireman, you don't really care for a public works person. And when you call for a policeman, you don't want a police person. But we're a big part of what this town does. So we're broken up in seven operational divisions. I'm going to start with the tree and grounds. So in the tree and grounds division, there's a division director who's also the town tree warden, Alan Snow. Alan Snow is a very qualified individual. He actually served as the president of the Mass Tree Wardens Association, probably about five, six years ago. He's involved in all the work they do as well. So he's very, he's a certified arborist and he brings a lot of experience to the table. This group, as you can see what they do, they kind of do a lot of things around parks and commons and downtown. One of the individuals in this division is funded through the transportation fund, because we maintain the parking spaces and clean up around all those bus stops and so forth. And that's paid for by transportation fund money. This group also picks up all the trash out of the public receptacles you see around town and at the parks and commons. They work, there's somebody working for this division every day of the week. They're a seven day a week operation. Highway division. Highway division is the biggest of the general fund divisions. Sorry, tree and grounds is also mostly paid for by general fund money. Highway division is almost exclusively paid for by general fund money. These are what they do. They do all the road maintenance. So we can crack seal, we can pot hole repair, we mow, we shim, which is a big pot hole repair with a big machine. And then they do all the other things you see here. Traffic sign maintenance. There's two people in this division who maintain the parking kiosk and parking meters and they get some money from the transportation fund to pay for that. There's two people in this division who also do run the vector truck, which is the big truck with the elephant hose on the front. And it sucks out catch basins. It also sucks out the sewer sanitary sewers and some of the work around the pump stations. So this division gets money from the sewer fund as well as a general fund to support that operation. This is our go to division. If we need to do something. If we need town hall says they need a generator after the September 30th snowstorm October 30th snowstorm that September October. We realize we didn't have power in this building. So we installed the generator. This is the division that comes in removes the old asphalt builds the pad for the generator installs the conduit for the generator sets everything up for our electrical division to come in and install the generator. So this group can do a lot. They do pipe work. They do just about everything there is to do that we need to do. They don't do water main work that goes to another division. I must be answering everybody's questions. This is great. The water division. Water division is 13 employees. Everybody in the water division is working towards being a certified operator. They all have to have some type of operator certification whether you're a treatment plant operator or whether you're a distribution system operator. You're certified by the state to have that position. Atkins water treatment plant is a T3 certified facility that T4 is the highest you can go. T3 is what the CEP certifies that one Centennial and baby carriage or T2 facilities. Our distribution system is classified as a D3 system. D4 is the highest. So we're pretty big or pretty big systems and treatment for water and distribution of water are all of the water reservoirs within the town of Amherst. No. We're actually the largest property tax payer in the town of Pellum. Yeah. That's what I think. And we pay property tax in Leverett and Shootsbury. So we have our big reservoir Atkins. There's a little piece of it in Amherst and the rest of it's Leverett and Shootsbury. And then we have the Pellum reservoirs. I don't know where any of those things are. So you're answering the reservoirs question. Okay. So we have four reservoirs. Atkins and then we have a complex in Pellum which has the Hall, Hilly and the Intake Reservoir. Those are three reservoirs. We have three storage tanks which are water storage tanks. We have a small one which is next to East Pleasant Street next to the big one which is actually owned by UMass. We have the small one. We have one behind Village Park Apartments and we have one in off of Bay Road in the south in the town. So those tanks are large tanks that store water for keeping the uniform water pressure throughout the whole system. We have three water treatment facilities. We have the Atkins water treatment plant in the north in the town. We have the Centennial water treatment plant which is in Pellum which is actually kind of offline at this point because of some damage that sustained under storm. And then we have the Baby Carriage water treatment plant which is in the south in the town. The Baby Carriage plants, the one that's different from the other two, it's actually treats for iron and meganese and it treats well water only. The other two treatment plants are surface water treatment. I hear those terms come up every once in a while but they're surface water. Baby Carriage is well water treatment for iron and meganese removal. We have five wells. They're just basic wells. One, two, one, two, three, four, five. That's their name is Forum. We're really complicated in this world. Well four is the big one. Well four works with Baby Carriage. The water from well four is high in iron and meganese and has to be treated with Baby Carriage. Well five is what we call Rudy. It's our backup well and when we really get in trouble we turn Rudy on and we let Rudy run for three or four days and then Rudy's done and has to sit on the bench for a little while longer. It has to recharge. It's a very small well. Well's three, one and two are almost always on and they fluctuate as the pressure in the system pressure fluctuates and keep maintains pressure. They start and stop automatically and keep everything going on. Three is the primary well that runs constantly and then you'll see one and two jockey on and off to maintain pressure as needed. So as a pretty complicated for such a small town it's a pretty complicated water system but it works really well and then the distribution system is the pipes in the ground. There's a hundred and twenty miles of those. A couple questions. This does not include the campuses. The campuses get water from the town. Do you mass buys water from the town? Amherst College buys water from the town and Hampshire College buys water from the town. And we provide sewer for them. We do. And what percentage of the residents or other operations buildings if you will in Amherst do not have public water or sewer? It's going to be a smaller and smaller number. The percentage of people who are probably on private wells is probably maybe five percent. Maybe a little lower. There's very few private wells in town anymore. Septic there's a larger number of people on septic. It's probably ten to fifteen. I'm sorry. Are those private wells concentrated in a particular area or areas in town? They're in different areas. Mostly they're on the outskirts. If you actually were to look at a map they're on the outskirts. Probably the biggest unwatered and unsewered area of town is the high point area. That area is above the hydraulic grade line. We cannot actually get water to them without making serious changes to our water system. And we have not put sewer up there because there's a lot of ledge and it'd be a lot of work to get sewer in up there as well. It says we produce two and a half to four million gallons of water a day. If there's not a drought what is there like a number of residents or a number of people that that can support on a regular basis? And if so you know how do you grade how much water is enough and if so where where are we on that? You want to do that? So the state actually does have in order to make sure that people are doing good water conservation they actually kind of set limits that are in our permit and how much water per person per day you're allowed to use. So our permit I think it currently says 85 gallons per person per day but our new our permit's under renewal. The new one's going to say 65 gallons per person per day. We are consistently below that. A lot of times we're at about 55 to 60 gallons per person per day. So and I know that at some point there's going to be a question about sustainability efforts and so whenever you can weave that in that would be great. We're going to be here for a long time. Sustainability will be here forever. Just a word here in there. We actually we just finished a study we had Tate and Howard do a study for us of what we should be concentrating on next and one of the things that they brought up was we probably should look for another source of water outside the aquifers we draw from now. For lack of a better term we consider we kind of consider the aquifers like scorpion bowls and everybody puts a straw in the scorpion bowl and is drinking from the scorpion bowl. We have two aquifers we have primarily we're taking from we're taking from the South South Amherst the Lawrence Swamp aquifer. We're taking water out of there. Belcher Towns taking water out of there and there's actually more private wells in Belcher Town in that area than in Amherst. So there's a lot of people taking water from that area and we take almost half our water from the Lawrence Swamp. The rest of the water we take from our surface supplies which are in sort of the northeast corner of town and that's another another separate little aquifer. In our study we did we did said we should probably find a third aquifer so we can balance out a little more have a little more diversity resiliency sustainability and how we provide our water to the our system. So we're actually going to be putting out an RFP to look for a possible well site in the northwest side of town and that'll put us in another aquifer outside the three we already used. So then we'll have three scorpion bowls to drink out of and then we can rotate them around. Our new Water Management Act Permit, Water Management Act Permit. You got to hear a lot about this. There's going to be a lot of stress and pressure on us to jockey and manage where we're taking water from at certain times of the year. Less water from a surface supply during the hot weather which because surface supplies tend to dry up during the summers. More water from the wells at that time. Less water from the wells during winter when there's more water in the surface supplies. So we're going to be managing and having to do more of that. And that's all based around sustainability, building a resilient system, and maintaining peak flows for other accommodation such as mostly wildlife and the environment around us. So just on that, obviously you maintain the infrastructure for all of this. The land management for the reservoirs. Is that also under your jurisdiction as well? Yes, it is. There was a question over here on the right. And Darcy, does the distribution system reach all the way to the far south Amherst? Does it reach to the far east? Yes, the distribution system serves all of Elf Hill, goes into West Bay Road, Bay Road, does that whole southern area of the town. It actually loops through a part of Belcher Town. Well 3 is actually a Belcher Town. It goes to Belcher Town, comes back out of Belcher Town around Amherst Hills, Amherst Station Road area, comes back in. The only place the system really doesn't go to is the High Point area. And then we get a little short in Leverett Road, East Leverett Road. We don't go all the way down East Leverett Road this time. We don't go to, we go all the way down Leverett Road. We go down all the way down 63. So we pretty much, that's, we pretty much travel everywhere in the town. We actually go a little bit in the Hadley too. Was, was there a time in history that when you didn't hit Elf Road and Hulse Road, because I remember hearing during the campaign, people saying they were surprised that they had, they had their own wells. No, we, we've almost, since I've been here there's been water to the south end of town. Sewer is another issue. Sewer does not go to those areas. So everybody in that side's on septic. Is there an impact on positive or negative on increased development in the High Point area, flat hills, things like that? Because of the ledge, it's it. If you want to increase development, that part of town, it's all got to be on wells or septic systems at this time, unless the developers willing to put the investment in to bring our water system up there. So the developer would be responsible for doing that? Yes. That's normally, if you're going to develop a piece of property that's off our system, you're responsible for bringing the system, if you want the system to us, to you. So is Henry Street on the sewer and water or not? Henry Street's all watered. Okay. It's not all sewered. Okay. Thank you. Water is always popular. I'm just curious a bit, you know, especially given what we've seen in other communities about our distribution system, the status of pipes. I think you know where I'm going. Yes. I know where you're going. We have an old system. If you come visit us in the DPW, we actually have wood pipes in our conference room that we've taken out of service. They actually weren't in service. They were out of service a long time ago. But we do have an old system. We keep track of where we have the most breaks and we kind of concentrate our repairs on the areas that are failing. We have cast iron pipe in service, which has been in service for over 100 years, and it's an excellent shape. Some of it's been cleaned and relined, and it's as good as some of the newest pipe we've put in. We have some new pipe that's been in service for less than 50, 40 years, and it is trash. It has fallen apart. It is, it was thought to be the next best thing in pipe, and it's not very good, and we have problems with it. And we work to take those pieces out. So we have an active maintenance program. Next year we're going to be taking out some smaller pipes, some small cast iron pipes, some 4-inch cast iron pipes, and 2-inch cast iron pipes, which probably are not in very good condition when we take them out because of the size. But we have an active program for doing that. I guess we'll move on from water. Alright, so once you drink the water, then you have to get rid of the water. So we have 12 employees. There's four maintenance personnel, and the rest are registered operators as well, and the wastewater side plants are rated from 1 to 7. We are actually a grade 7 wastewater treatment plant, and that's basically the complications of what you do at the plant. What we do a little bit of nitrogen removal at the plant, and we do a lot of just different things that make us that complicated that we have to, we're grade 7. So our primary operators are licensed as 7s. We have several operators that are licensed at 6, and our basic operators are licensed at 4. So that's how we structure our licensing and how we do the operations there. We are under a permit. The permit is issued by EPA, not by DEP. DEP kind of gives us the side permit, but the controlling authority for wastewater in the state of Massachusetts right now is the Environmental Protection Agency. And we haven't heard much from them lately. Yeah, right. Three weeks and counting. We actually did get a request from DEP for some information, which they would have usually asked the EPA for, but since EPA is closed they had to ask us for it. It's kind of weird. We know what to do. We're like, do we really should tell you this or not? But we told them. So we have the wastewater treatment plant, which I'll show you in a few minutes, is very large. We have a lot of maintenance that goes on there. We have 21 pump stations, which soon to have 22. We'll bring the 22nd one on. That's going to be in Amherst Woods. We do a lot of pushing of material uphills and downhills and uphills again to get to the treatment plant. There's three primary pump stations, Stanley Street, Main Street and South Amherst. Those are the ones that almost everything go to and then from those pump stations I go to the wastewater treatment plant. We do daily lab testing and monitoring. We're actually authorized. We're not certified in lab. We're an authorized lab to do our own testing and we're also authorized to do some testing for other entities. We test for UMass as well for some of the tests they have to do for their reuse water. Again, we're currently a grade 7 plant and our maximum daily flow is design flow is 7.1 mgd. We've kind of been exceeding that over the last season. We've had flows that have been well over 7 mgd, a million gallons a day. We've only had one issue where we've actually released partially treated sewage during a very high rain event. So considering how everything is going and what's affecting all the other treatment facilities in the place, we are actually holding our own and the plant is doing very well. The plant is old. Picture on my right, your left, your right too. Yeah, your right too. Okay. That was a plant in 1961. The plant on the current plant was built in the 70s and put in operation in the 70s. So you start adding together things are now at a time for a major upgrade. We've been planning for a major upgrade, we've been trying to get ourselves in order for a major upgrade, but we're waiting for our new discharge permit from EPA. We haven't gotten it yet. We're concerned about or what drives the permit and the plant upgrades is what's the level of nitrogen and phosphorus we can release in our effluent. So as we treat the water, we get rid of the pathogens and all the back all the bad stuff that's in there, but then you also have nitrogen and you have phosphorus left over and then we discharge that to the Connecticut River. That flows down the river to the sound, Connecticut Sound and there's a little bit of an issue down there with nitrogen and phosphorus. So we know we're going to get some limits beyond what we already have on nitrogen and possibly get phosphorus limits. That will drive how we change and upgrade the treatment plant. So we're still kind of waiting for that and it will be something we'll probably get within a year or so. Is that the treatment plant right behind the Mullen Center? Yes, okay. And for all you who want to know, we're in Hadley and we're one of the bigger taxpayers in Hadley too. Right. So we're in Hadley and we pay taxes to Hadley the wastewater treatment plant. You said you've been exceeding sometimes the the maximum gallon limit whatever it's called discharge limit. Does that mean you're going to be looking towards upgrading to increase that limit at some point? As we look forward, if you look at the plant in the picture there, it was laid out for expansion. It was billed as a regional facility. We're not a regional facility really. So we have capacity during the low times of flow. We sometimes only have one of our clarifiers on. So let me do the little light point thing. So you have the primary clarifiers and secondaries are here and during there's three of each during low flows we'll only have one going. Then when UMass comes in we'll have two going. And then during high flow events we'll have all three of them going and sometimes we park water someplace else in the plant which we can do. So we may have to go ahead and do the expansion that was planned when the facility was built or designed in the 70s and add the fourth clarifier to each of the primaries in each of the secondaries. And we're looking at possibly having to add more aeration as well which are the little aeration is the little section over here. Amy's going to add something. I was just going to add to that point that I mean a lot of why we're having such high flow though is because you know additional flow with all of this rain water and high groundwater it's entering the sewer system and the state is actually putting a lot of pressure on communities right now to remove this it's called I&I it's inflow and infiltration and the state's putting a lot of pressure on us to remove that and so there's going to be a lot of efforts also to try and remove that so that we don't have to expand this and can kind of withstand these wetter seasons a little better. So majority of stormwater infrastructure is also tied to do we have combined sewer stormwater? We don't. So and I think the only reason we're seeing it now is the groundwater is so high and if you have a sewer pipe that the joint is a little offset flow is going to come in as you can imagine wastewater is really it's high in nitrogen it like roots love it so all it takes is just a little crack and roots are going to move towards that and then they're going to expand into the joints and make a little crack a larger crack so anytime you have just an infrastructure that's wearing down a little bit those roots are going to just keep making them worse and worse. So actually the way you think about that too is you have a sewer pipe which is six six feet in the ground the normal water table is five feet in the ground the water table right now is about two feet above the ground so you now have all that extra water pressure pushing in and even a small crack which may get a dribble of flow when the normal water table is almost like a flood now because you have so much hydrostatic head pushing the water down into that little crack so that's what we're really seeing now is the ground saturated and all that hydrostatic pressure is going wherever there's a hole to go it for the water to go to that's why you have people who have lived here 15 50 years who've never had water in their basements and now have water in their basements this could be the new norm this we talk about sustainability is how do we live in this new norm and keep things going in this new norm of wet Dorothy um can you explain the concept of the water table being two feet above the ground this one is flooded when the ground's flooded the water table will be two feet above the ground we actually have places where we are seeing flooding where there's not been flooding before some of our cross-country sewer lines um the water the ground around it is flooded now so the water is above the two feet above what the ground level above the sewer line two feet above the ground and then the sewer line is still buried five or six feet below that so really basically you have a sewer line through a pond is below a pond thank you okay so those are our big four divisions we call them they're the the big lots of people lots of things they do the lot of operations and that's pretty much what they do is operations then we have some smaller divisions which are more support to the operations we have equipment maintenance division we have three mechanics we work out the shop behind the dpw there's two bays in that shop we provided repairs to all our vehicles we also do some of the smaller vehicles outside we do conservation sometimes council and aging we don't do the police we don't do the fire and we don't do the schools right now there's been talk about us if we build a new facility making room for the schools to do school bus maintenance in our facility as well which would be fine it'd be great to do that therefore mechanic works outside a lot a lot he's outside a lot if he has to work today he'd be outside getting wet so that would be a good thing for the schools and the dpw we do minor repairs transmissions springs break jobs anything that's really really big we tend to send out we do small engine repair as you see we also do all the vehicle inspections for the town so we're a licensed vehicle inspection station we bring vehicles in we on a routine basis we inspect them send them back out we do police fire dpw and schools all those vehicles it saved us a lot of money used to be we had to be like everybody else you go to your local inspection station you get in line you have to sit and wait because you can't make an appointment so it saves us a lot of time we can schedule it because we don't control the station while we will not at this point get into the condition of this facility although we will later i just want to mention that when the people are working in these bays they don't have proper ventilation we don't have proper ventilation in these bays but these bays are the driest pieces of the building ah there you go there's always a sunny side and there's always a dark side we have the solid waste division solid waste division runs a transfer station right now we have four employees there one of the employees is a grant funded position it's a waste reduction enforcement coordinator from DEP we have this position until august of this year unless we decide to fund it uh that position will go away because the funding will go away from the grant uh transfer station is open to all residents of town it's also open to Pellum and Shootsbury and Leverett that was an agreement that was set up a long time ago because we have our watershed in those properties and we were trying to offer them a waste disposal option instead of dumping it into the watershed lands around the reservoirs and around the around the reservoirs actually um we uh also operate under a DEP permit here as well the transfer station as a licensed permit and then the two closed landfills have permits as well there's monitoring that goes on there's groundwater monitoring there's surface water monitoring there's sediment monitoring and landfill gas monitoring as well i always forget something there's a lot of technical monitoring that goes on here we do all this monitoring in-house now we used to hire a consultant to do it but it's easier for us we rent the equipment we do the gas sampling and then we take the samples and send them off to the lab one of our biggest contracts we have every year is our sampling contract because they do samples for water they do samples for the landfill and they do samples sometimes for wastewater there's a lot of testing we do it's all required by the state Darcy um just wondering if you have done much consideration of the recommendations of the um refuse and recycling committee about going to one hauler uh no this that that's kind of um that committee is you're gonna I think you're looking at changing how that committee functions a little bit and that's going to be more of a sustainability-type recommendation and then then actually how we operate the transfer station the transfer station has no control over the waste haulers and DPW has no control over the waste haulers at this time all the control over the people who pick up the trash in town is through board of health regulations so it's a bigger picture than the DPW saying we're going to switch to a hauler for the entire town it's changing the board of health regulations it's bringing the board of health on board and bringing on a bunch of other people on board to do that so it's just not something that the DPW would say we're doing it's bigger I have another question do you uh could you explain what Mimi Kaplan does as far as she's the DEP funded employee and and uh how valuable her services are so Mimi Kaplan is a is the wastewater waste waste reduction enforcement coordinator and what she does is she's been going around and visiting the town checking out what's out put up placed outside for trash placed outside for recycling talking to the haulers making sure they know that you know you're really not supposed to pick up recycling that's contaminated you're just not supposed to you're supposed to leave it behind she's been doing a reach out to the renters or the property owners letting them know and what the rules are and trying to help them come into compliance with recycling rules that are the state rules and waste rules which are the state rules as well so she does a lot of outreach and then she has a lot of enforcement as far as looking at things she's not issued a fine yet we haven't had to find anybody yet she's been able to talk to people and get them to change their habits and get them going again the one thing that's interesting about Amherst and DP chose us for this grant because of that is we changed our community half of our community changes over every year so if you educate people on what to do with your trash you can't just sit back on your laurels and relax because next year a whole other group of people come in you have to educate them as well and they may come from places that don't have the same trash rules we have so she's been very good at that it's actually been a good position she's able to talk to people and get them to do what they're supposed to do since we don't pick up trash we don't see a direct impact from what our work is but the haulers do see an impact and it is helping the haulers and helping the neighborhoods we as a town ever considered in fact taking on the job of picking up trash yes before I got here the town thought about having its own haul own routes they did not do it they did bring in they did decide to do their own recycling routes and they did have two vehicles and they ran recycling and they picked up the recycling in town for a while when it first started when the recycling first started but there's never been any serious real discussion about the town taking over and doing its own trash service since I've been here thank you next this is our street and traffic light division this division has only been around since I've been here we used to contract out all our traffic light and street light work it was actually very expensive and we took a long time longer than you think to get people to come do things for us we've hired two electricians they do maintain all the street lights which the town bought our street lights if you want to know if we own a street light you look for this little tag on the pole and every light we own has that little tag on it except for the decor of lights downtown we almost know in all those they maintain the traffic lights they maintain the school zones all these things they also do a lot of the troubleshooting around the wastewater and water there's a lot of electrical components in the plants the water plants the wastewater plants the pump stations they do a lot of that troubleshooting they do a lot of that installation we do a lot of our own equipment changeouts the electricians will disconnect the power maintenance personnel will come in take out a pump take out whatever they need to put in a new one the electricians come back in they wire it back up our big thing we're doing now is generators we're replacing a generator we're replacing a generator at baby carriage treatment plant that one's being wired up now we did the one at the we did the one at town hall we have another one we're going to put in at well four we have a broken generator at mill valley we have to replace and puffed and we have to replace so we buy those we bring them in all right guys install everything and hook it all up and these these two gentlemen do a lot of that work they yeah they did all the electrical in this room as well so they're please thank them for that I will they do a lot and then they also end up I mean they end up putting a they end up putting them in an outlet somewhere and the next thing you know they're ending up working on a 140 volt motor or something so they're very diverse they're very capable they're also our front line for programming issues and programming issues are not like the it programming issues where your email doesn't work programming issues we have or where the motor controllers that are pumping that sludge are not talking to the device that's receiving the sludge and making sure the flow rates right so it's the process control manufacturing programming they do not the video game or email type programming although if you actually go look at the control panel it looks like a video game it does so this is a very important group and they've been very helpful and they've saved us a lot of money so that that is the operating divisions then we get into administration administration there's five of us Amy and I are actually two and then there's the administrative staff that do a lot of the processing we handle all the processes all the work requests that comes in the C-click fix is the public side of how people can talk to us you can email us you can phone us they'll take those and put them in as work requests we're bringing up a separate program called dude solutions it's really called dude solutions and uh dude yeah it's called dude mon remember dude mine because there's another mon coming up soon in this presentation so dude mine is for us to manage our requests and the group requests together that are similar so you can manage the workflow we're still having a little issue getting that going and we're still working on that but that's coming to help us manage everything we're one of the few departments that basically in our own bills we probably do every bill cycle which is every two weeks I don't think I've ever seen a bill warrant from us that comes downtown that's been less than 40 thousand dollars during the summer during heavy construction sign time will process two or three million dollars sometimes during a during a bill process so we do enter all our bills most departments in their bills the accounting and the interim and the accounting we do all our own payroll entry which is what the other two big divisions do police and fire we enter all those overtime special overtime holiday overtime sick time vacation time we do all the payroll in our office and then we handle all our personnel issues mostly in our office at our level and then we send the ones we can't handle up here to the HR department so this the three people in that department in this little office do a lot of little work mantejo I'm glad to hear you have a process for processing the citizen work requests and all no matter how they come in and the resident work requests but how do you what's your process for actually communicating back to the residents that filed them that either something is being done or not being done or has been done I know my own personal experience but many others you send an email and then you never hear anything or you file that secret fix not everyone does use that system so but so how do you communicate back with the individuals that file the requests so sometimes it's by email sometimes it's by a personal phone call sometimes it's actually by people showing up to actually investigate so it all depends on the type of thing type type of request and what's going on and it also some of them do get lost we are trying to correct that some get going to the black hole of Neverland if you call in a pothole request almost definitely you're not going to get a call back it goes into the work workflow they go do it or they don't do it if you doesn't get done you call back we keep pushing it out to them and they keep putting it on our list and doing it those are things we have to work a little better at and hopefully the do solution thing will allow us to do that we there is a disconnect between C-click fix and there's a little disconnect there we're trying to resolve so there is work still being done on that this is actually a question for Mr. Bachman when we do the town audit since this is a department that is largely self-contained are they sampled like everybody else or how they handle it well they do a lot of their own work but all the all the financial work comes into this building is done in this building so it is audited just like any other department okay thank you there are things that we they come to us and audit our process for how we get it to this building because we do receive money in the building right so they do come look at how we handle our money and they make sure we handle it correctly and get it transferred to this building correctly that's the biggest part of the audit we see thank you yes Dorothy I just wanted to comment that on a very big sewer job that was at my house this summer that the professionals who had to do the work never were delayed by the town I mean whenever permits and there's there were permits and inspections every step of the way and they just happened time just seamlessly so that was very good just want to compliment you thank you you had a very good contractor then we we we were well the next group is engineering and that's who handles those type of things once the permits issued by administrative staff the engineers will do the inspections and the good contractors will talk to us and keep us informed and we'll be right on top of it the problem the ones we have problems with are the contractors who don't want to talk to us and we never know what's going on so if you do hire a contractor anybody who's listening to this if they talk to us the more they talk to us the smoother the process goes the least amount you talk to us the harder it goes all right I have 10 minutes and I'm going to talk about engineering engineering five people town engineer assistant town engineer engineering technician utility technician and environmental scientist the environmental scientist is she's the newest person on our team she just got her she just passed her P.E. so she's actually now a licensed engineer we're actually very we've worked very hard to get very qualified and well-trained people it's it's helps us out a great deal so we actually have now four P.E.s in the overall department myself environmental scientist and then we have one person who may be working on getting their P.E. as well we'll see how he does so these are the things we do the engineering office prepares all the plans and specifications and manages almost everything we do in the contracting world they supervise our work we provide support to the town we supply support to all the divisions that have permits Lindsay who's our environmental scientist she coordinates all the sampling and all the permits that have to be done and coordinated for water wastewater and solid waste division she also jumps in and does other things such as stormwater we're gonna get a stormwater permit here soon we applied for it she's coordinating all the permitting for that this division handles most of that stuff the engineers in the division also provide the fieldwork and the plans that are needed for some of these things as well so we submitted an NOI for a project down the road for actually as well for we're putting a generator there we had to submit a NOI to the conservation department we prepared that and it's this group that does these things we do use consultants and this group manages the consultants right now these are the four main consultants we use and we're using a surveyor two different surveyors we're using Berkshire Design Group as a surveying company and we're using an eastern eastern land surveying I think it is northeastern land surveying this is where they kind of consider we use the consultants for very technical stuff that we the generalists don't do on an everyday basis and it would take us longer to go back and figure out how to do it we've done it but it would take us longer to figure it out than to keep doing their normal stuff we don't use the consultants for basic stuff we design our own water lines sewer lines and road repair projects in house that's basic we do that every day we're up to speed on that trying to decide what to do in the wastewater treatment plant we don't do that every day we don't see new technologies which the CDM is working on wastewater treatment plants around the nation and around the world they see what other people are doing to upgrade their plants and they bring that information in and evaluate it based on what we need to do Tate and Howard does all our water system at this time they have come in they do our model run our water model they also look at different facilities and they know how different facilities are doing they are basically in the northeast in Florida a lot of people in the northeast have offices in Florida I haven't figured that one out yet so we do use tie and bond for dam inspections and yes they're dam inspections and landfill they've been involved in landfills since they were first started so we keep them on board because they know they have a lot of history at that Weston and Samson's the newer newer group that's working with us we started then with a DPW building and now they're doing a survey on the fountain down in the Sweets of Park so engineering puts together all the road repair plans we have a payment management system we use it's called street scan the actual program they call it is Paveyman so the street scan vehicle comes out scans that gets to collect the data and they put it into this program called Paveyman and out comes what we should be doing and roughly we have basically a $28 million backlog of road repairs it's not actually the true cost because when we start looking at a road repair we start looking also at water and sewer infrastructure in the ground and repairing those things because if we're going to pave the road we're not going to leave a broken manhole we're not going to leave a section of water main pipe that needs to be replaced underneath the brand new road so they can break later and mess up everything so we do a complete analysis so a road project even though it may say in the Paveyman that it's $2 million it may be two and a half after we do all the extra stuff we want to do then again engineering this is kind of a sample we can design just about anything we can make nice as the little one says nice little architectural type drawings the left the left drawing is the repaving of Coles Lane that's this the right is the sidewalk in front of Sweets of Park we just did those are the things we design we supervise consultants did the two projects on both sides the one in the middle is a concept has not been really gone very far the top picture with a backhoe that's our crews working on our design on Pine Street we did not hire anybody to design Pine Street we did it all in-house we did the design we did a good part of the construction we used a consultant a contractor for the heavy construction the bottom parking lot we designed the parking lot at Amity Street went through all the permitting which everyone has to go through got it approved and then we had a contractor build it Warner Brothers built that the one on the far right is another concept which hasn't is not going to go anywhere but it's a concept we can do concept plans and figure out what we think and then decide if we need to go somewhere else we don't design roundabouts we hire somebody else because there's a lot of modeling that goes into designing a roundabout which we don't have the software to do and it would be very expensive for us to gear up to do that so we use a consultant for that type of work we only have a brief five minutes I want to start with a comment and obviously I have an advantage of having worked with the DPW for a number of years through my chairing the DPW Fire Station advisory committee and one of the issues that has come up regularly is other people see other towns and they say oh this town just built a DPW for X amount of dollars and then when you look at that DPW they realize they do about one-tenth of what our DPW does and so doing comparables for DPW for Amherst is extremely difficult we've had at least two people one on the committee and one not on the committee attempt that so down the road as we get to the issue of big capital projects of which DPW which is in a building that's 100 years old and you would not want to work there is really an issue of how do you find a comparable because as you've just seen just about anything you as a homeowner or a renter want to do that deals with the streets the trees etc is under this department so it is extraordinarily comprehensive and a big issue to tackle other comments questions Mindy Jo I have one about the street scan that created a list obviously you got an estimate from that list do you publish sort of your five-year plan or your one-year plan on which streets are going to get done when or where they might be at this time I know that might change depending on things but but so that residents could see oh you know this street is graded here and it's five years out my street's graded less so I'm seven years out you know do you publish that the list doesn't really get published until we actually decide what the list is for that year and then it gets published you can go online into the website and you can go to your street and see what your street's rated as you can also go to your neighbor's street and see what they're rated as so you can compare your streets and online but the list is very fluid and changes quite a bit we thought we had a good list for this year not sure we'll be able to do it a lot of stuff and maybe get pushed down and then again we have a lot of work left over from last year we're going to start in the spring with yes George aside from a new facility I'm wondering what's on your wish list what is what is your biggest need what would you like to have that you don't have other than the facility everything actually the biggest issue we're coming up to besides the the changes we're going to have to make to our facility and water and wastewater is personnel changes it's getting very the personnel market right now is very very tight and you look on you all get the beacon now don't you look at the back and the publications of what they're advertising for and you'll see communities advertising for truck drivers now in the beacon they're advertising for water operators in the beaking usually it was only professionals you advertise in those type of publications we're having a hard time finding people and we're actually having to spend a lot of time growing people so we bring people and who are interested in being in the community and we give them the resources to grow themselves into the job and and that's something that one you're not hiring someone who really knows all the pieces they need to know to begin with so you're a little bit behind the curve as they grow and they learn things that become some of the best operators you got but then you have to keep them as we grow operators we're a lot like the police and the fire department we make good people and then other people are looking for them too I actually expected I was going to lose to employees to South South Deerfield I kind of expected they'd want to go get more money they actually chose the work environment we have over going to get more money and a work environment that was a little unknown to them that's good those are our challenges growing employees keeping them interactive and keeping them focused on working for them that's our biggest and then Amy wants something well and I think when Guilford was talking about the electrical division as we call them I think that that illustrates that sometimes taking a service that we contract out if we're just relying on them a ton bringing them in house just ends up working out so much better so we actually we are on our ultimate wish list we do want a programmer to do all of that SCADA programming and all of that stuff and you know I know every department has what they want but I guess that's that's the number one one on my wish list is to have someone in house that can do programming rather than having to bring a consultant out every time we have to do that especially since when we do have to bring someone in they're getting the really big projects and there's you know the little the little maintenance stuff you know like something being misspelled on a screen that you're not going to bring someone in to do that and it's probably just going to be misspelled the entire time until we have someone that can just deal with some of those little little issues as well so so looking at our time we want to thank Guilford and Amy for this excellent presentation Mr. Bachman yes so I just wanted to recognize we part of this is to show you our talented staff so Guilford and Amy are both professional engineers Amy is just is the president of the mass waterworks association recently elected seen as as one of the premier people in that inner field and Guilford has extensive experience through military working in North Hampton working in the south and so they just bring a wealth of experience to our operations and we're really fortunate to have them here it really comes to evident it becomes very evident when there's a crisis so when we had led in the water at the schools two years ago Amy along with others was in the forefront when we have a any kind of water crisis or any other thing that happens you know Guilford is there on on key weekends and they're just there 24 hours a day so we're really fortunate to have you guys part of our team so thank you we're going to take about a three minute break because we do have the school superintendent and the financial person from the schools here okay I just want to mention as we are all getting reassembled that we do have a period put aside for public comment I'll be asking who wants to make public comment but that is at the end of the agenda the real purpose of this meeting is to educate 13 people either now or by video okay so would you like me to just call directly on the superintendent of schools super Tim Morris Mike thank you and thanks for having us I'm here with someone I'm Mike Morris and the superintendent I'm here with Sean McGann our finance director Doreen can you get closer to the mic? I can ours are the opposite way in our venue so I get told the opposite you know the other thing the assistant superintendent of human resources equity and diversity wanted to be here but wasn't able to with her scheduling this morning so she sent her she sent her regrets I want to start actually by making connection to the previous presentation so Amy who you just met with and I were in touch at about 4.15 this morning about the weather trying to figure out if we needed to have a delay of school and I I sell that story because it's emblematic of how we experience working with the town at the school level our goals and needs are integral and integrated we can't know what the roads are like unless the DPW is communicating to us how that's going I could then pick other town departments police department the library all the ways that the schools connect often and benefit from working with the other town department so I know we're going to talk about schools but I also wanted to start from a place of you're seeing these kind of siloed presentations is my guess and in reality we don't function as silos we really do work together and the 10 managers a great support in assisting us and creating those connections so that we're all working for the residents of Amherst Young and bless young so I start with the slide from our graduation because it's if any of you can attend this year it's Friday, June 7th at the Mullen Center at five o'clock it's a sincere invitation that's we want to reach out to you that if you'd like to attend we strongly encourage it it's about the best 90 minutes you can experience that gives you the taste of our district it's not exactly the typical high school graduation that I experienced that many of us did it's very Amherst and so we really encourage you to come and join us we'll be sending RSVPs you know we'll get a little closer to June but the reason I want to start here is you see so many students talk about their experiences one of our traditions is that for all the elementary schools and middle school that feed into us including Leopard and Shootsbury an educator from one of those schools one of those sites joins the graduation and it's amazing to see six foot four inch 18 year olds come up and greet their first grade teacher from Leopard and say oh my god you are so helpful in me getting to this place and that's the way we really build that even though we are three districts which we'll talk about in a little bit we really function as one learning community and it's a great event so you really should think about attending if you're able so just a quick one on highlights we are rankings in all sorts of ways continue to rise this year we were ranked as the number one best place to teach in Massachusetts the best school district in the western Massachusetts and ninth best in Massachusetts more generally for students that's up from kind of in the you know 15 and then 11 we've had this positive trajectory on a number of ratings on a functional level we see that in school choice school choices of program in Massachusetts where students who don't reside in a member community can apply if there's space to join that district and what we've noticed over the last couple years is a significant uptick in school choice interest these are students coming living in member communities but wanting to enroll in the Amherst public schools or the Amherst public regional schools or the Pellum regional Pellum public school because of the reputation and the education that our educators are able to offer them the breadth of offerings and the quality of education is the two things that continue to come out as why students want to get into our school district so governance you've seen this slide before if you attended the summer event that the town manager put on but I thought now that you're in different roles probably worth going over a little bit actually I want to note that there's going to be two places before the end where we'll stop for questions and then certainly we'll have questions at the end but we know there's a lot of content even though not a tremendous number of slides so we wanted to build in places and we're going to start with governance and finance we'll then talk about our students and our staff and then we'll finish with some highlights across the curricular areas so in terms of governance we have both Sean and I work for three elementary three districts excuse me three school districts only two are represented here the Amherst public schools which is a pre-K to six district for all students in the town of Amherst there's three elementary schools Crocker Farm has the district-wide preschool for River and Wildwood are both K to six schools you can see the number of students who attend those schools at the current moment Sean and I also both work for the Pelham public school that's not on here it's not connected to the Amherst public school except for that asterisk so a couple years ago we proposed and town meetings of both communities supported the formation of a regional school district planning board to assess the feasibility and the desirability of regionalizing in this case with Pelham and kind of vice versa for Pelham with Amherst and that group has met I think 25 26 times they've been meeting every other week for a long period of time now they're at the point where they're working on getting real financial figures and real sort of governance models these topics are coming up to both elementary school committees in Amherst and Pelham and there's a plan for broader community engagement engagement in coming months the Amherst public regional schools are seven through 12 regional school district for students in Amherst Leverett Pelham and Shootsbury right now we have three secondary schools the middle school the high school and Summit Academy Summit Academy is a day program for students with special needs to benefit from having a smaller more therapeutic environment this year it moved from its own site to now actually it's within the high school building it's still its own school with its own entrance and now kind of from a desi our state licensing agency it has its own model but we found some true benefits of integration of students as students and families desire to have that program in our high school it also saved significant financial resources in maintaining a building that was outdated on southeast street so that's been a successful transition we can talk a little budget and then we'll stop for questions I know these are all trying to balance the time frame we have and the amount of information that we're sharing so I'll turn it over to Sean who will do a budget overview hello so FY19 was a good example of a budget where we turn challenges into opportunities we have some significant challenges around health insurance but out of that we've made some really smart decisions that are putting us in a good place for next year's budget but I'll focus on FY19 for right now so you can see our FY19 budgets for each Amherst public schools and Amherst Pellum regional schools the public schools had a 3.2% increase that's a little larger than usual because of the health insurance premiums went up quite a bit for FY19 the major investment that we made in FY19 at the elementary level was for ELL we increased I think the sections of ELL for students and also had to add some coordination and that's driven by the number of ELL students that we have the major challenge which is the same for both the public schools and the region is the health insurance our premiums went up about 25% from FY18 to FY19 at the regional level we had a 1.6% increase which is more typical of what we see at the regional level we have to work with four towns Amherst Pellum Lever and Shootsbury so we have to put together a budget that can be supported in all four of those communities our major investment there was for to expand our Chinese language program we compete directly with schools in the area charter schools other public schools and we have a very strong Chinese program but it was missing in one section to make it a complete program and so we added that section and I think we feel pretty good about where our Chinese program is right now yeah can I add to that piece Sean so I think the other thing to note is this came from families coming from in many ways coming from a charter school who wanted to come to the public schools and facilitated we facilitated meetings of their request about what their needs were because some of the students were having a significantly different model of education at the elementary school experience and how could we meet their needs if they wanted to transition to the public school experience so this really was driven by families telling us what their needs were and trying to meet it so that students who were in our home district could return to the public schools because that was their desire but they needed to make sure that their continued exploration of Chinese would continue at the secondary level right and we also put all of our resources online so if you go to that link which is a little funny but it brings you to the ARPS website you can find our budget presentations which are like two or three hundred page documents I feel like to read and look at lots of charts and information we also put our four town meeting presentations which are the the meetings for Leverett Palmshoots Berry and Amherst or the regional level we put quarterly budget reports that we make to school committee after each quarter which kind of gives a progress update on the the current year push the button got used to that we put our audit reports so if you want to see our past audit reports OPEB which will be an issue you'll have to deal with our OPEB reports are up there so we try to put all of our financial information up there if you ever look and you don't see something you can email me or Mike and let us know and we'll get it up there so one of the measures that we look at to see how successful sort of school is doing is our tuition out numbers for charter choice and both because those are really sort of the other educational opportunities that families can make in the area and we have quite a few of them so we have we have a lot of high quality public school programs around us just neighboring towns we have three charter schools that are within distance that we send kids to and we have three vocational schools that are within distance that kids go to so there's a lot of choices for families and so this chart shows Amherst which is the dotted blue line that's actually Amherst Pell and Leverand Shootsbury K through 12 compared to our neighboring towns and what percentage of our students go to a charter school or choice into another public school vocational is not included here because vocational isn't that the data's not available online for all the schools so you can see all the communities have been trending upward lately because there's been expanding charter schools in the area but for the first time since this chart was put together Amherst went down for FY 18 and we're seeing that trend continue for FY 19 so we flattened out in terms of the percentage of students who are leaving and we're actually seeing students come back in and this chart also illustrates that so this includes just the Amherst numbers and it also includes vocational so vocational is green is the number of students K-12 that go out so you can see there was a sort of an incline up through FY 17 part of that was because one of the charter schools in the area expanded to high school so they were adding grades every year and also the Smith vocational I had some programming which drew some more kids but FY 18 we saw a big drop and we're seeing that flatten out for FY 19 so we're seeing our numbers flatten out in terms of kids leaving the district which has a big financial impact that got shared with you but we thought we'd pause and see if there are at least preliminary questions on budget or governance before we start talking about our students and staff Questions at this point I have two up for I was under the impression when we had the four towns meeting that you started out last year with over a million dollars in deficit and yet that's not what you showed could you explain the difference? I think this is is this the slide you're referencing? Yes Right So if you look at Amherst Pellum Regional you can see the reduction that was the reduction related to health insurance so a million 12,750 dollars I see Okay and in the relationship with Pellum and the discussion with Pellum down the road and you may want to wait to address this How does that fit in with our conversation about a new elementary school and the proportioning of students across elementary schools? So it's certainly something that the Regionalization Board has discussed I would say they're not at a phase where that's an active that there's like a clear next step on that front I also just when we think about Pellum school right now Pellum school is roughly 60 percent Pellum residents and 40 percent choice students it's roughly so that's only about 50 neighborhood of 50 choice students so there's not a tremendous amount of space and those students once you're a choice student and you're a choice student in so for instance if you if you're a kindergarten family and you have a student who choices and who lives in Belcher Town and goes to Pellum Elementary you're guaranteed a slot there all the way through the end of Pellum Elementary actually all the way through 12th grade within our district so I think any implication for kind of enrollment would be relatively minor and play out over many years Thank you Other questions Okay let's move on Sure So we're going to talk about our favorite topic which is our students So this is the Wildwood Elementary School Chorus and I think it's just it's a nice visual representation of the diversity that our students bring to our school and the great benefit that we get as a district for having such a diverse demographic we're one of very few districts there's about three that whose demographics in terms of race ethnicity special education socioeconomic status and English language learner status mirror pretty closely the state average which I'm going to editorialize a little bit is really sad if you think of the state mean you would expect many districts to represent the what the state averages are but because of residential segregation lots of other factors it's actually very few districts that actually are microcosms of the commonwealth so we're really fortunate and for me and for us that's a great opportunity that we take very seriously in terms of how we integrate our students and how they feel connected with one another in the in our organization so this is for the Amherst public schools not the region because that draws students from other the other three communities so if you look at who our students are roughly a quarter of them their first language is not English we have over 30 languages spoken among our elementary school population and that's a wonderful benefit and it's also a challenge how do we staff that how do we support students particularly in low incident languages right so Spanish Chinese some of our more common first languages of our students they're relatively easy to make sure we have staffing for they recently had students come and I'm not going to identify it because it would be identifying for the students but it's a language where there are incredibly few residents of Massachusetts who speak that language let alone residents of western Massachusetts so as much as the benefit from a financial and staffing perspective it creates some challenges that we try to our best to meet and I think we do our best good faith effort to do that but but it can be challenging you can see that we have a slightly higher than average students with disabilities percentage and you know some of that from what families tell us is because we do right by students with disabilities we provide resources and supports that they need to access the curriculum and one of the things that happens in any market is if you're seen to be particularly good at something more people come and while that's a wonderful thing we want the diversity neurodevelopmental diversity within our schools you know doing the right thing can get challenging as there's more and more students or higher percentage of students with disabilities and economic disadvantage you could see we're very aligned with the state average it's a big surprise to many people when they think about AMRs they don't necessarily think about these numbers you know to think of 33% and just to describe economically disadvantage for a second that students who are on food stamps or other public assistance that's not the like in the old model where you've got free and reduced lunch that's actually not the model the state uses now these are students who the families are known because of other government resources that go to them so SNAP which is what kind of food stamps are called right now so our free reduced lunch numbers are actually significantly higher than the 33.4 they're over 40% but since the state uses this metric it's the one that we use as well I I think they're going to make their presentation and then we'll ask questions yeah I think we'll just do a slide or two or three slides and then we can stop here's another slide thanks to the thankfully I didn't have to create this one it's very nice it's more like Sean's variety of neat slides than mine but this was actually created by the we had an enrollment working group over the past few years to look at our enrollment challenges and this looks at our enrollment distribution by race ethnicity again at the elementary level and one of the things you notice is that this goes back 20 years that some of the groups stay ethnic racial groups stay pretty constant while other groups you have significant differences not challenges excuse me differences so you look our fastest growing demographic is Latino Hispanic or Hispanic students I call Latino but the state uses Hispanic I feel really weird actually having that on a slide but perhaps a conversation for a different day it's worth noting that you know some of these like the multiracial slide you could category only came up in 2006 so that can skew some of the data a little bit because Desi didn't collect that prior to that to fiscal year 06 but this slide if you if I asked the average Massachusetts resident plot out what Amherst public school students race ethnicity is I doubt they would have this this slide and for us again incredible benefit incredible opportunity we love the diversity and we value that and it makes all of our students there's lots of evidence in the educational setting diversity only engenders creative thinking and the type of problem solving that we want for our students so it's an exciting trend for us but it's a surprise to many people particularly as it doesn't mirror the larger Amherst community and I think we're like many communities in Massachusetts where our student our young the demographics of our young people is very different than the young the demographics of the town as a whole and that's an opportunity for us but it's something that is surprising to many I think I'll just do one or two on staff and then we can stop for another round of questions so the reason the whole operation works is that we have incredible staff members incredible educators in our schools they come from local places some are graduates of our district which is always neat some come from far away places and some like me just come from New York which is not that far away but not that local as well but people come because of our environment you know that ranking that I shared at the beginning is because teachers feel supported in the work and they really love working with our demographic of students the vast majority have advanced degrees in their discipline they're highly talented and many awards and honors go to our staff members both local and beyond because of recognition of their work one of the major focuses of our school committee over the past few years for many years I should say has been the diversity of our staff and how to since we have this shift in our students how do we increase the diversity of our staff I think it's worth noting that our students roll through every year through our schools our staff as I'll mention in a bit mostly stays here because they like it which is a good thing the challenge with that is it's hard to make dense in diversity changes in diversity of staffing when not many people are leaving because you mean you're not hiring all that many people but we've been very successful the last three years so the percentage of professional staff members of color has increased over a third in the last three years to the current which is over a quarter of our staff professional staff identifies as people of color which is the top five of districts in Massachusetts and it's number one outside the Boston area and our administrative staff is even higher than that just about a third a little over a third of our administrative team are people of color and that's also a significant increase from a few years prior to the last slide on staff and students one of the things that we know is that the world's changing education's changing and we need to support our staff to do that so I just I was going to do a slide of all the PD that we do and it was like four point font and really not helpful so I decided to do a snapshot of staff development that we did because I think it's indicative of the way we approach this task of how do we support all staff members it's worth noting that all staff members were invited to this even some of our staff who don't typically work on professional development days were invited so we had a significant group of paraeducators custodians food service staff members in this workshops and our theme in the morning was equity and diversity these are the workshops that were offered it was a they came from two sources one we survey staff to say what are the needs what are you struggling with and how can we support you and most of these workshops were led by staff members I led the one implicit bias in the process of embiasing most of them are led by educators closer to the staff level as opposed to administrators there were a few that we did pull in local faculty members from colleges and universities that this wasn't everyone gets together in the auditorium for three hours and listens to a lecture actually everyone did get together in the auditorium for about 25 minutes and they listened to high school students describe their how they experience schools and then we broke out and many of these even these breakout workshops had high school students and middle school students involved in them as well we know we want to respond to all of our students and we know that right now despite our best efforts not every student feels as connected as we want in the community as well as the school district and that's our effort of how to do that well both in the academic level as well as the social emotional piece so now I think now we want to pause for questions Dorothy just wondered if on the chart that you had of the different levels I guess disabilities and high needs if you could talk about that a little bit but that means so high needs is a sort of composite of English language learners special education and or education excuse me economically disadvantaged students the state has this way of clumping them to make a kind of meta category of students who across the state are underserved in school populations so that's what that term means in terms of students with disabilities we follow kind of you know about the law but ethically as well that when there are concerns either expressed by a family member or or the school or the secondary level even by a student themselves that we evaluate them with licensed psychologist special education teachers depending on the need occupational therapists physical therapists to assess whether they have a disability that is making it difficult for the student to access fully access the curriculum if they do have disabilities then we identify those the programs that they need and we deliver those services there's annual reviews every year to assess progress and a full reevaluation every three years to see if the disability is still impacting the student's access to the curriculum one of the things that we pride ourselves in is that we have in district special education programs so we have relative to other districts very few students who attend out of district placements both there's there's some financial savings in that even though it doesn't always it appears differently so we have what it looks like is we have beefed up special ed staffing and very low out of district costs the reality is there's some wash between those things but we feel like we have to do our honest best to say if a student can be educated locally we want to educate them locally we want them with their peers not just for that student's benefit but we feel like for students who are neurodevelopmentally typical they benefit from having the broad access to the diverse neurodevelopmental diversity for our population what we know is that if students first see someone with significant disability at age 18 or 21 or only in the community not in the school that's not a great model we've done that model for a long time in the United States and we know that that leads to a lot of discrimination for folks with disabilities in the larger community and so we feel like as a school district our commitment is to change that dynamic both of the students with disabilities but actually for the broader community of learners as well well you're on the disability chart many people would suggest that a lot of the diversity that you're depicting here is because of the higher ed institutions versus people who just choose to move to Amherst for other reasons what would be your split on the percentage of that yeah so the majority of our students are not children of faculty of faculty members at the universities students of most of our students most of them are children are not are not children of students okay the best majority you know are not and I think as it relates to poverty I think we see something so I used to get gotten at less in the last few years but a lot of questions of like well are your economically disadvantaged numbers higher because you have the quote-unquote starving graduate student model that's a really small percentage of our students and particularly as with this new economically disadvantaged versus free reduced lunch it's it really doesn't come out much in these numbers you know we have families who that certainly we do have that demographic with the majority of our families who are struggling economically are struggling economically you know without like long-term prospects of well I get this degree and all of a sudden I'm on a high paying job in two years these are families who whose parents for a whole host of reasons didn't move on into higher education and have advanced degrees that's more typically what we see in terms of economically disadvantaged I think that's a commonly misunderstood issue in Amherst I appreciate you raising it yeah yes bandy joe so I think you've touched on this a little bit but maybe not directly so I know with my past service on town meeting and a whole bunch of things with budget a lot of people say we have a very high per people cost both both in the elementary schools and in the regional schools can you speak to what the district might be doing that causes that or results in that compared to local other districts yeah so I can start and then I'll ask Sean to jump in so I think a couple things one is the demographics of our school dictate that we have more students who need ELL support they have more students who need who need special education programs and that has financial impact on our schools we also have a community that values two things that are costly one is relatively small school size class size excuse me so our class size at the elementary level is 19 students that's lower than the typical average class size of this elementary level in western massachusetts for sure so you know when we compare ourselves to other communities could we combine sections and have classes of 25 sure you know does our community demand more they do and for good reason I think another factor that talks that gets at the kind of that conundrum that you say how do you explain this is that our community values I'll call electives and specials categories that at really high levels so for instance if you in our high school the range of courses that you'll receive is very different than what I received as a student right so we have courses on gay and lesbian literature we have an MSAN course minority student achievement network which is a broad network talking about social justice and equity areas our theater program is expansive and we're editing another course on theater next year so we're not a high school where you enter and you take okay well English 9 English 10 English 11 and then English 12 the vantage point of our community and the demands of our community are that we offer a much wider range of offerings for our students and so it's difficult balancing the financial realities and what the community is demanding on the other end and we try to do our best we have less finite less electives than we used to we used to offer more languages than we currently do and we've had to make reductions in areas we cut a number of electives last year in that budget process family consumer science and blanking on a couple others but we've had to make those decisions Sean can also fill in a little more details yeah I'm on I think everything Mike said is correct the other thing I would say when I look at the numbers is a big chunk of our increase in per people spending has actually been because of declining enrollment so having similar or slightly increased budgets but fewer kids to spread it across there's some costs that kind of scale down when your enrollment goes down but there's a lot of costs that also stays flat you know retiree health insurance utilities things like that you have fewer students to spread it out over so the per people cost goes up so the last five to 10 years a big chunk of the increase has actually been declining enrollment not as much our budgets going up a huge amount each year yes Dorothy I was trying to learn more about the school system and I noticed that you have a connection between the middle school and the high school which I think is very very high level where students who have a high academic ability can start high school courses in the middle school could you talk about that sure we could talk a bit about that I think it's worth noting that we've tried to keep our cohorts together so I wouldn't say that's the typical model what we've tried to do I'll give you like a really tangible one because I think the general ones won't be helpful so math is an area where we often have students who feel like they need additional levels of challenge and sorry I'm like it's a wider semi-circle so I feel like for the two members on the outside I apologize I feel like I haven't said hi to Alyssa or Darcy and so what we've done is created a program within the middle school that in the middle of seventh grade students can opt into our portfolio course it means after school students need to not only be have strong skills in mathematics but be highly motivated to do that they meet after school and they have a lot of independent work that's assigned that they have to meet certain benchmarks along the way they do that for the last year and a half of their two years in middle school and at the successful completion when they enter high school they skip essentially what's the ninth grade math course which allows them to take calculus as a junior and then multi-variable mathematics as a senior which is very rarely offered in public schools in the north that I'm aware of in the northeast so that's a way that we've tried to be able to respond to the diverse demographics of learners that we have knowing that there are students who need extra support which we've probably talked about more than some students I'm glad you raised who need additional challenge on the other end of the academic continuum Pat I deeply appreciate the work it looks like you're doing around racism I wonder if you have kept statistics about discipline of students of color compared to student white students we have and that's something the school committee has certainly shown an interest in and we've talked about last year we talked about at length all that information in terms of suspension is all public information it's online and certainly if someone's interested in the link I can share that with you it gives you for every district of the mass of chusas that the discipline disparity for every district of mass of chusas so you can compare yourself to other districts as well as a state average around that but it's something that we talk about frequently and we're actively working on George so you said one of the biggest challenges you're facing is declining student enrollments what do you see in the future what's the projection so I think that'll work really well into one of the last slides if it's okay to hold that question because we definitely have an answer but I think it'll it'll meld well with the last slide and the issue the other national trend is the whole issue of the baby boomers retiring out and I'm sure you've started to see that but yet your retention rate seems to be high how are you dealing with being able to continue to attract the talent you need so we've doing a lot more recruitment are kind of we've stepped up our efforts around that and you know one of the things that's interesting is the reputation matters a lot right in any any organization to recruit like if people come for a visit here that's a good place to work that means a lot and our word of mouth we do all these kind of fancy things that I could describe some wish costs money yet I it's going to sound like a an odd thing but the thing that I think has netted the greatest gains are we now when we're doing a job posting we send it out to all staff members and encourage that to share to their personal and professional networks really simple it's free and I can't tell you how many applicants we get by saying oh yeah I heard from my friend Lynn that you know she loves working at the middle school and you know I'm working in this other community but I saw this job posting so I could describe some of the more technical things and there are them and I don't want to minimize them but that word of mouth is invaluable and so we've been really playing that up with staff and they've been responding beautifully okay move on all right so I am conscious of time so I'm sorry if I'm I'll try to be briefer than I was maybe perhaps planning on the last section so for elementary highlights I think it's worth noting that all three of our elementary schools in Amherst are doing they're in a period of intensive planning to further identify their unique identities certainly the one that's getting a lot of public attention is that the school committee has approved and Desi just approved five days ago the adoption of a dual language program that will start in kindergarten next year at Fort River we're really thrilled about it and I am actually I'm going to take their time to read the mission statement because I think it's worth reading this was developed by families and parents who are parents guardians and staff who are on a leadership team I'll read it in English because my Spanish pronunciation is not the finest but it's done both languages the Fort River dual language program celebrates and integrates the cultures of all of our students families and staff the dual language program appreciates nurtures and challenges all of our individual students to reach their fullest potential as learners and global citizens the dual language program promotes equity by developing bilingual and by literate students prepared for economic and social leadership in our community and world I happen to like that a lot and I think it gives you a much better flavor than anything else I could share about that Cargo from a wild but are actively working on their identity and we'll bring back proposals in the spring for the school committee to consider the middle the right slide the right images are part of our garden program so one of the larger themes has been the integration of whole child education in our elementary schools that we want students not just learning in the classroom but actually doing what authentic garden you know professionals would do and that applies to math and other areas as well just the pictures of the gardens a little cuter than the pictures of what that would look like perhaps and some of the other content areas but we're teaching social studies we want our students to be historians and do the age appropriate task that a historian would do not read from a textbook which is not what a historian would actually do the middle image isn't from the art classroom but I think it's indicative of another major focus has been a growth mindset developing a growth mindset for our students not I'm good at math I'm bad at reading things like that is that the effort is really the what we focus our attention on and that benefits not just students who are struggling but what we see and research would indicate many students what happens to many students is for students who don't find incredible challenge early on in education they get the sense that their identity is wrapped up in their test score or what they do and not about their work and then they hit a certain place and they have struggle and they say well I'm not good at math anymore instead of I need to work hard in math or I need to learn differently in mathematics and really changing the mindset of both our staff our students has been intentional focus over the past few years so the art example is again doing multiple drafts not just I did the project and I'm done the process is equally as important as the product at the end we're talking about young students and so this comes from a larger video and series which I won't talk about right now but this came from Wildwood's art class but the idea is you're doing multiple drafts learning about it and improving throughout the method throughout the process I say please and just on our school garden program we've done a lot in the last couple of years at least once or twice a year now that the students actually harvest the the produce or the crop and serve it in the school lunch program so I know we did it once last year I think they're going to try to do it twice this year fall and spring but we'll let you know if you want to stop by and try it out with some I had the vegetable soup this fall it was outstanding so yeah maybe we'll have time to talk about food service briefly as we go at the secondary level the image is that there's a pointer here oh cool at the top left it was the Puerto Rican independence flag raising event that I know some of you attended in November and so the reason that image is on here is those are our middle school student leaders who are raising the flag used to be the town sort of own the event the schools took on owning the event this year and for us that's also representative of our focus on student leadership so at every level from seven through 12 you'll see student leadership as being a key part of our schools even when it's responding to difficult incidents I've been in multiple conversations this year with students and they're telling us what they need and they're taking the lead on how that goes you might have read on the paper we sometimes have student protests and the reason that students feel comfortable coming and doing that is they work with the administration on how to do that successfully it's not a that's how we approach working with our students we want them to be advocates we want them to be passionate and we want them learning and we've been able to find a right balance for that we have a strong focus on extracurriculars you know there's a picture of our western mass winning girls cross-country team we also could have put the boys cross-country team because they also won the western mass championship but it's not just athletics we have incredible drama program which I'll speak in a second about clubs it's amazing what students do after 2.15 in the afternoon sometimes feels equally important to students and equally amazing is what they do during the school day right after this or soon after this I'll be actually high school students interviewing me and then I'm going to film an Amherst media segment with a student and the director of our high school which produced the Laramie project so incredibly poignant tale this was the we were the first school in the country to do this as an immersive theater incident this or incident a mission of theater experience for spectators and the feedback we received was that it was a moving experience for all who participated both the students who supported their fellow students were in it as well as the larger community and what you'll notice is that our student performances tackle major social justice issues so this doesn't seem notable we had to be a little aware if there was going to be people weren't so happy we were doing it there but other than that it's very consistent with our work there's a technical aspect to the theater performance but there's also the broader kind of social emotional development and social justice elements in all of that and lastly I'll talk I'll give a little bit of data on academic achievement because we're a school system we should do that right so advanced placement we had 152 students which is roughly a third of juniors and seniors took at least one AP exam in 2018 83% of those students scored three or higher which is essentially what you can opt out of of course when you get to higher education at most institutions we boast 18 AP scholars 14 AP scholars with honors and 8 AP scholars with distinctions our students receive national honors from the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards at the state level our students were at awarded five gold keys four silver keys and 10 honorable mentions which is part of this art competition which is amazing for one school that would be like a region of the state but that's just us our print and online newspaper The Graphic won the highest achievement award for the New England Scholastic Press Association for the fourth year in a row every year on average last year was seven we had six to eight high school student musicians are selected for the Allstate Music Festival if you like seeing music you should see our student musicians the first time I went to one I couldn't believe it wasn't a university level whether it's the chorale or it's the orchestra of the band they're just incredible our theater company was awarded the 2018 Samuel Minow Jones Award for literary contributions and that was through the library again another connection with town departments and the sciences our high school Jets engineering club entered nine teams which is a total of 70 students in the national test of engineering that they put on and we won overall best in the state at the ninth and tenth and eleventh and twelfth grade levels because it separates out the underclassmen from the upper classmen at world languages from 2017 national Latin exam we earned 13 gold medals 19 excuse me nine silver medals six magna cum laude five cum laude right I could keep on going but just I think it's important to note how incredible our students are performing I already talked a little bit about athletics because of time I think I'll keep going so one of the other central aspects of everything we do is that we engage the community um so I have a couple examples up here I mentioned the window into ARP so thanks to Amherst Media they film about twice a month this year last year at once a month they've been pleasant with me and letting me do twice a month and these are films with lots of high interest we did one recently on the yellow program which that's an image from so that the larger community can see whether it's online or on Amherst Media get to know what's happening in the schools this year we've started an LPAC which is an English language English learners parent advisory council so CPAC is more familiar that's a special education version of that and we had really strong turnout with lots of translators you could imagine given our demographics come out for that because we want English learners English learners parents and guardians to be actively part of our community to the right when we started our dual language program before we moved to actually a formal implementation plan we went to every local we're kind of the five largest local preschools in town and shared here's what we're thinking what do you think because that was our demographic it was incoming kindergarten students they weren't all in our schools most of them weren't families weren't connected to our schools yet so we try to meet families where they are as much as we can we have a Friday update that I send out every week if anyone wants to get on that you can just let me know it just gives you an update of what's going on in the schools and it might be it's also online if you just want to check our website but if you want to be added to the lists or happy to add anyone on gives you a little bit keeps you abreast of what's happening in our schools we have a pretty significant social media presence and in other examples you know we currently are starting our principal search we have a vacancy at the high school and before we even start doing anything the first thing we do is survey staff and families to say what do you want to see in a high school principal what attributes are important to you what characteristics and that infuses on every single area we do that we want that engagement we want to understand how the community what they want to share as we're having to make decisions and the last slide then we'll open up for any questions so what are challenges what are things I heard at the end of that DPW presentation what are you know what are some things that we have that are challenges so as those of you who attended the first four town meeting know we have a challenge of developing consensus on what's a long-term plan for the regional assessment methodology some of you have been in that for a long time and you know probably wrinkles from all the meetings that you've attended trying to work with four very different communities on how do we fund our regional schools moving forward we've had flat state aid so what that means is that all municipalities including in this case Amherst are having to fund more because our increase in state aid is typically less than 1% our costs go up more than 1% so therefore the towns are covering the difference a lot of unfairness to that but that's our current reality we talked about charter schools before from an infrastructure organization point of view we have two elementary schools this is no surprise probably anyone who are in need of major costly work to remain viable and we talked last night at the Amherst School community meeting about the MSBA statement of interest process and certain decisions that certainly we would come back and talk in more detail with the town council in the next couple months we have the middle school roof is failing so we have that on our capital project the region we have the high school fields which some of you may have been to there was a meeting in the fall about the condition of the high school fields and that's another thing that probably both the town and the school is a joint study and probably bring back to this group at some point to the declining enrollment question so right now we have five school buildings for 2600 students there's whether that's a good thing or bad thing that's not what I'm gonna weigh but it's it's inefficient financially inefficient to have five school buildings for 2600 students so I think an active part of our conversation is are there more efficient ways to do it can we spend less on infrastructure and more on teachers and students that's essentially the what we're trying to think about so we currently have a study kicking off that's looking at multiple models at the regional level so you know what would it mean if sixth grade went to the middle school what would it mean if seventh and eighth grade went to the high school so we've that was a capital request from last year so that'll be an ongoing set of meetings and then we three public meetings one in January February and March just looking at the infrastructure not looking at the educational implications at this point but trying to understand you know would new building with new construction be needed to do that would everyone fit what are the implications of that at the elementary level certainly there's been active conversations about as that population and that enrollment has declined to do we need three buildings some of the palatable question that I received earlier has been one that we receive is there are other ways to organize ourselves that are more fiscally sound so that the towns get some relief from the impact on their finances from a teaching and learning perspective we're responding to an increasing number of students who enroll in the district without high-probability preschool there's one thing I want you to walk away with is that it's a major issue in our community and so it ends up in the schools for a time being it's a much broader issue about preschool access something that I'm actively working on but there's not necessarily easy fix but when we have students who don't have access to high-quality education from you know birth to five they're already research would indicate at a huge disadvantage of being successful in their school experience and then beyond meeting social emotional well-being needs we went to we did a lot of professional development last year about well-being of students there's been an increase in nationally about anxiety in students secondary students we've tried to try to right size our homework expectation things like that but people's addiction to their what's probably in front of everyone else their phones right that's part of it vaping there's a lot of challenges for adolescents and adolescents and we're trying to develop a coherent plan of how to respond to them how to support our students to make the best choices moving forward and then we want to ensure that our curriculum materials meet all the learners so we have students who are chomping at the bit for more and more we have other students need more assistance and how do you differentiate which are our jargony word how do we differentiate our curriculum so that all students needs are met right so we want to push all students to the outer edge of their potential and how do we do that in a way given that how students perceive themselves and their background experiences are quite diverse so I don't think we're going to we can talk about food service if they ask but I think at the time we'll hold on that Sean was Sean was excited to talk I wasn't really excited but I think if it comes up in the questions but I want to give time for great more questions I know we went to the question Evan in terms of our role I mean building issues are a major issue in this town so I I guess we obviously approve some of that funding or the bonding if it needs bonded or things like that and I know that's part of the role but where do you or if you know where the school committee stands see our role in terms of any advising of what they're considering in terms of either combining or new buildings or all of that I'd like to hear your perspective on that sure so we talked about last night so it's sort of fresh in my mind we didn't get to a resolution place but we actively had a conversation specifically about the statement of interest process for the MSPA this year about where that gets slotted in because statements of interest need to be signed by both the school or but need to be voted by both the school committee and in this case the town council given the change of government that we've had in this community so we tried to plot a timeline that gave the town council enough time where the town council wouldn't feel rushed if we get to a place of consensus would be able to consider on its own but I think there's a feeling also the school committee is doing a lot of work on the educational side of trying to think what's in the best interests of students so we had a slideshow I shared with the the town manager I think is going to share with with you all not that everything on that slide deck that was brought agreement it was my presentation last night but we're actively looking to engage the broader community over the next two months about some of these issues and one of the things that we talked about is certainly utilizing or asking town councilors to be an active part of you know where do we want to have meetings when are good meetings for people in your precincts can you help us advertise can you attend perhaps so that you're you know you feel informed about what the community is talking about so we talked about that some I think the other thing that came up last night and I don't think I'm speaking at turn I think it was broad consensus on the school committee that we'll need whether it's a town manager or the town council to give us some there's some fiscal questions that are lingering and I think that you know more perhaps than just some of the educational aspects is something that that we need to rely on you know the professional staff of the town and the town council on so for instance to put a finer point I'm not asking this question to be answered now but I think it's a relevant question is you know is the town willing to self fund a school right and not rely on grant funds right that's a really hard question for it's a question I won't answer it's not my place to be actually weighing in on that one but even for the school committee I think that's like a place where whether it's a professional staff of the town or the town council getting some direction you know would be helpful not that they don't have their own opinions on that matter and certainly I think the town manager frankly last fall gave his opinion pretty clearly on that matter but like those are the types of things that the school committee doesn't want to operate in a vacuum nor do I and there's a natural I guess nexus where we need to meet on that because all the decisions that are made educationally have financial implications as well and you know I think one of the school members I think it's worth noting said last night um actually I'm sorry I was a member of the public it wasn't a school remember it said you know we want to be conscious but I've heard school members say in the past which is probably why I got confused we want to be conscious of the other building projects in town so if you know Guilford was still here in the back of the room I imagine he'd have some thoughts about building projects if Sharon was here I imagine she'd have thoughts and if Tim was here I'm guessing he has some things to say about capital improvements that are needed across the town so that all comes to you all right to the school committee does their piece they're going to advocate for what they think is right and then you all have to weigh lots of competing variables and that's going to be a real challenge so I think those are some of the conversations that you know perhaps we need to start having does that answer excuse me yes Paul well I think one of the points that the superintendent has made to me is that in terms of us going to the MSBA for funding that it's super important for the town to be aligned and that what does that mean it means that the town council is aligned with the school committee and the presentation and the and the identify and the goals that we're going to them with so we have a relatively compressed time frame because this application is due April 12th the school committee has sort of carved out February we're sort of carving out March for the council to sort of grab and there's a whole public process but I think to strengthen our application to the MSBA and to convey to them that the town is on the same page the council and the school committee both have to be saying yes to the same thing would you support that? So Hype let me just ask no please process possibility hypothetically if the council those 10 of us that our district counselors committed to holding one of our district meetings in February early March and it for a good share of that presentation we would focus on the schools making sure that that was widely publicized and on different evenings so that different people could be there would that be helpful? So can I add to Paul's and then answer yours? To the town managers sorry we get a lot of these all the time so we call each other by our first names so I want to put a final point on the town manager's statement so the feedback I received from the MSBA when we had a failed statement of interest last you know this in 2018 was very directly we know your buildings are in poor shape every year's a new year they have two huge projects right now one is successfully moving forward in Somerville it's over a quarter of a billion dollars is another one that's proposed in Arlington that's more than that I think it's in the neighborhood of 300 million dollars so they're financially you know they're going to be a little limited because those projects they're in a fixed project just like we are just like you are right and so there's the competition for non for other projects is going to heat up so they they're very clear every year's a new year we can't guarantee anything but what they did said is we know your buildings are in very poor condition and what we're looking for is there to be consensus on a plan moving forward and that doesn't mean new or you know new construction or add rent or like that stuff that a future building committee would have to sort out but at a core level you know how big the school and are you replacing both schools or not right so that's the kind of core question the MSBA needs to have consensus and they were very clear and I said this last night I'll say it again like if you don't have that you certainly can put an application but it may make sense to wait till 2020 was the direct feedback that I received from MSBA I think that's I could keep going but I'm not sure it's probably appropriate for this setting for me to keep going with you know our discussions or at least my vantage point on that because I think they're probably I'm just conscious of time your question directly so we should talk last night I think the challenge of organizing I think we're better way to put it is we're meeting again next week the school committee and I to map out a clear plan of engagements and we'll get back to you yeah just I think the number of engagements in the time frame may warrant us to ask for maybe three meetings that right which I know doesn't align with districts but it's hard to schedule that many meetings in that crime frame so that's what we're discussing so there's an active interest in town council involvement the logistics we still need probably one more meeting to sort through okay Alyssa I think it will be important to put something like that in writing and I realize we do have the power point that we haven't had a chance to read yet but as you develop that with the school committee because in the past statements of interest have just been a generic thing that we've signed off on at the select board level obviously we're in a different body now but school committee did it and we said oh yeah it sounds really scary but it's fine to send your kids to these schools they're not that scary and then it went off it's merry wet and I appreciate that you've been given additional direction based on our recent history and based on their budget constraints but I think that makes it really different this year in terms of it just being yet another checklist of all the things that are wrong with our building so for us to really understand I think we're going to have to look at some things that are in writing that are provided by you in the school committee to help us be able to understand it ourselves and then communicate it out to our constituents what what is it we need to do at what stage because as you indicated many decisions are made far down the road but in terms of reflecting that interest back to the MSBA what can we do here because this is different we've never had to do this before yeah got it and Andy Jones I'm sorry I just wanted to follow up on Lynn with the forum with the district meetings there is a requirement in the charter for the school committee to have at least one forum on schools so this might be a good time to do that right additional questions comments oh I'm sorry Evan I think what I was going to say earlier has probably been spoken to to to some extent one of the things I'm trying to wrap my head around is obviously with the last project it received the support of the school committee it received the support of the voters it failed in the legislative body we are now the legislative body my assumption is the MSBA is very curious as to how we will operate and whether or not we would see and in this new legislative body something similar and I'm assuming that they will be more likely to get us into the process if they have confidence that you know we are that we will prove the funding should it get to the same point I'm trying to wrap my head around how we give them that confidence you know past it voting on a statement of interest seems like a fairly milk toast statement of support because the statement of interest is very bare bones and so maybe a little bit from your perspective of what you see the role of the council in this process beyond just reaching out to constituents but also what you think the council needs to do to show the MSBA to give them that confidence that the same thing won't happen again so thanks that's a great question and so I'll put a little finer point or more detailed comment and I was going to going to after the speaker spoke so what they're looking for in our MSBA is an additional statement formal statement that defines kind of at a broad level what we want and what they're talking about is you know roughly what's the school size and roughly is and are we intending it to replace both of the outdated elementary schools are not they're not looking and I'm just I made this point probably ad nauseam last night but I'm in a new setting they're not looking for addition renovations not looking for the spirit of the net zero law like all that stuff is important who the architects are going to be the specific educational plan with all the details worked out they would find that inappropriate to be in the statement of interest because there's a whole process they have to lay that out because of our past history and you know what they want to see is that we have some consensus that we're talking about roughly the same thing so are they going to look for every small detail no but it's not just the traditional standard of interest they're looking for a formal paragraph in there that really defines we're looking for a school roughly I'm going to say a silly number because I don't want to say a real number because then people will look into it right so they're going to look for like we want an elementary school with 10,000 students in it and it's not going to replace both buildings right that would be a you know a statement that the lat level of detail and they want that statement to be endorsed by both the school committee and then the town council and that's why they want it in the SOI they don't want it later because my assumption I was talking to them so give us a little more time we can work on it maybe by summer and they were emphatic that it's either in the SOI or it's not in the SOI it's not something that can be an addendum that comes later and if they felt like that wasn't going to work for our community or if our community couldn't gather around that then that's the statement of maybe 2020 is a better option for our application I have all sorts of thoughts on that but probably better to hold them see if there's other questions on other topics yes Dorothy there's so many parts that go into this and for example the question is that you brought up of reconfiguring the sixth and seventh grade maybe going from the elementary schools or to the middle schools or from the middle school to the high school wouldn't we need to have that information first so my honest answer is there's always going to be something like that in this community that we could say we could wait till the regionalization discussion ends we could wait till lots of things end and I think there's good reasons the logical point of view I don't think our buildings my personal opinion is I don't think our buildings can wait for the adults I don't think our students can wait for the adults to sort through all those things so and I don't mean that to be flip at all just I think we're getting to the place where we need to take action and we need to take action soon and staff member last night the school committee public comment you know I think accurately describe the buildings and now as barriers like they were always concerns and now they've crossed that threshold to being barriers wildwood the average typical life of a school building the MSPA would say is 50 years so wildwood will be 50 next year and Fort River will be 50 a couple years after that and they weren't well designed to begin with so I do think a reasonable kind of middle ground could be saying I could imagine having a conversation if we want an elementary school of X number of students there's lots of ways to get there and we can figure out some of those details later on in the process but if we can get the community to say two core questions are we saying we're replacing both buildings or not and roughly what's the school size to do there because there's lots of different ways to replace buildings you know you talked about sixth grade to the middle school there's also the Pelham piece there's building at other places there's a whole variety and we've gotten great public feedback and emails I want to say from the community with all sorts of creative solutions that that I don't want to speak for the school committee that I hadn't thought of but I think if we can answer those two core questions with rough here's what we're thinking some of those other pieces about six to seven we'll sort out that study we expect to be done by the end of March so we'll probably have to be closer to a decision at that point but we're doing our best to get all the data and all the information so we can make the best decisions but I by personal opinion I've said this publicly at the school committee levels I think we should make a commitment as a community that our kindergartners don't graduate from open classroom six grades classrooms you know another way to put it which someone said is that babies born in 2019 should never be in an open classroom right depending on your demographic one maybe more relevant relevant than the other I don't think our buildings will sustain I think the capital costs and you may have heard of that I know that's another conversation we'll come back to to require those buildings to be open for that length of time is going to get more and more significant and I agree with the staff members who are telling us something's got to give it does seem to me that the issue of great configuration is probably one of the more divisive issues so that as I personally think about this I believe that has to be a convert part of the conversation yeah so yeah and perhaps again not to speak for the school committee but they've they've been very clear that they actually I'll just leave it at that I don't want to speak for them okay thank you Alyssa if I could just follow up on that really briefly I think it's really important for everyone to remember the school committee can decide on great configuration tomorrow right school committee gets to decide that doesn't matter how upset it makes the rest of the community so I think that that is an important part of our conversation but as you keep saying although we need to be thinking about those possibilities in terms of that number they want they want the number they don't want us to say well if it's k5 then it's this number well wait if it's pre-k to this then it's this number they want a number right any other questions I'd like to thank you very much you can probably move to the side this has been extremely informative and obviously you can tell there's lots of interest on the part of the counselors yeah and we just want to thank the counselors for having us and welcoming us in this morning we really enjoyed the interaction and more to come thank you all right thank you we now will have time for public comment is there anybody who would like to make a comment please identify yourself by name address and we ask that you keep your comments to three minutes and the council does not respond to your comments my name is Ginny Hamilton I live at 140 Middle Street and South Amherst and thank you I mainly want to say thank you and I can do that in less than three minutes I attended the school committee meeting last night and wanted to come this morning to hear the school's presentation in context of DPW and I hope you were having similar meetings with the library director and the fire chief soon as well because this you all know better than anyone in this town those are the four competing major projects that are on the table for our town right now and there's significant interdependence between them and there's going to be tradeoffs that we have to be making looking at at all of these projects listening to the public comments last night at the school committee much of it was talking about the educational impacts of our buildings and I want to repeat what Dr. Morris said teachers stood up and said that the conditions in those schools are interfering with the ability of our kids to learn and to add as a crocker parent you know crocker has windows crocker has walls in all of our classrooms it's a great school but it's got into infrastructure problems as well apparently the temperature in the gym yesterday was 42 degrees so there are maintenance issues that are very real and you all have seen those numbers as well as well as a longer term infrastructure and privately however what was interesting is nobody talked about money in the comments last night but privately when we're sharing these numbers about the school projections and the maintenance costs the main thing I'm hearing from people is how is this town how are we going to pay for this and that's what we've elected you all to struggle with and to find those tradeoffs so you know if looking at the Fort River building projections for a second if school committee were to send a proposal to you all for two new buildings that's 90 to 130 million dollars for two based on the latest numbers so you would all have to look at how does that affect the water treatment facility much less a new DPW building these are very real cost in a town that is very demanding of the services that we want and we expect especially for our children and as we all know construction costs are getting higher particularly when we set such high standards for net zero and high lead certifications which I totally support we want to be that sort of leadership but it means that the costs are real so I want to thank you for taking these on and I also want to urge you to take them on sooner rather than later we can't keep kicking these major capital expenses down the road it's only going to make them more expensive so I hope that those conversations that are happening are just right around the corner not much farther down the road and I appreciate you all taking this on thank you is are there any other public comments just as a matter of communication the town manager and I have been discussing a February focus on capital projects and so that we're not kicking it down the road I'm not responding to you particularly Ginny but to everybody in town and we'll be working on that as well as looking for a way that we can assist in the town coming to consensus on the schools is there any other comment from counselors at this time do I hear a motion to adjourn so moved second okay second was from Sarah and anything else all those in favor I we can do hand raising tonight or this morning because we're not doing remote okay there was unanimous from all of us that are attending excuse me Melissa could the communications committee stick around for a minute so we can schedule a meeting thank you