 I move to approve the minutes of April 23rd, 2019. Second. Thank you. Thank you. And I'll be relatively brief. Just want to list the graduation moving up ceremonies. And one correction is that Fort River Elementary and the earlier version you saw of this at the regional school committee was the Citizen 130, which was the typical time that they've had it and they're actually shifting it up to one o'clock this year. So that is a change. I wanted to highlight that. Some of you may want to attend. And the Pioneer Excellence in Teaching Awards, while on its face it looks like there's no Amherst Public School staff. Catherine Havens, who is a speech language pathologist, is primarily at Pelham Elementary and that's where the recommendation for her winning the award came from. But she also works two half days a week at Crocker Farm. So she is also an Amherst Public School staff member and lovely event. I think we already talked about seat back at the region and certainly I think I'm trying not to repeat myself with things. And I think now that it's happened, I want to talk about Latino Achievement Night, which is on the back. It was a wonderful celebration. I'm really bad at counting heads, but I would guess it was over 150 people there. Really large turnout and seniors, we had to shift the schedule because seniors to get their stoles. They had another event that seniors were going to, so we shifted the, we reorganized the event and it was lovely. We had student performances and then a nice dinner afterwards, which many, a great many people stayed for. So it's just a really nice event thanks to Dr. Gavara and her team for organizing it. Amherst specific, excuse me, the FY20 budget was presented by Mr. Magano and myself to the Amherst Finance Committee on May night. Very good discussion lasted about an hour of budget priorities and we were both Mr. Magano and I agree that we felt there was broad general support from the Finance Committee for the budget. A lot of good questions digging into the weeds of school choice and how that, where those funds go, looking at trends, special education costs. I felt like it was an excellent session for them to ask questions and for us to have dialogue as it's the first go around for the Amherst public school budget with the Amherst Town Council. Two more quick updates. A couple of weeks ago there was a wonderful student art exhibit at the Mead Art Museum. It was from Wildwood 5th and 6th grade students. I was able to attend this event. It was a free day of art related activities, so in addition to student works being up in the Mead Art Museum, there was three different tables of different activities, Star Wars themes, themed treats to eat, very creative. I don't know who did that, but it was, as a non-Star Wars aficionado, I was still incredibly surprised and impacted by the incredible talent of the snacks, but it was a broad participation of families and students and it was just a lovely event and thanks to the director of the Mead who is a parent of children in the district who wants to, is meeting with me and Mr. Sheehan in the coming weeks to think about other partnerships, which was outstanding. And finally, last Thursday, we had that middle school grade advisory board met for the first time with the facilitator, Juan Rodriguez. It's about 27 people, I think, were there, something along those lines. There was Amherst public school staff, as well as regional staff and Sheetsbury elementary staff and parents, and Ms. McDonald, thank you for being the school committee rep. I felt like what was particularly useful to say at this meeting is we actually didn't focus on where 6th and 5th grade students should be located. We really dug into young adolescents, which encompasses students who are currently in this district, how their lives are changing between the ages. Their age band is 10 to 15, and I think from the people at my table, we broke into small groups, and Alison was at my table. There was, separate from the larger question, it was actually really, I found refreshing to just start with student needs. What's happening for students intellectually, social-emotionally, moral development, character development, and so we started that place to get a ground, a baseline of who these students are that we're talking about, and at future meetings we're going to then get into expanding the work of the best location for them to be educated, but we started actually from, we started just focusing on students and not actually the adults and infrastructure and all the other pieces. I don't know if you had anything to add? Yeah, no, my takeaway when I went home that evening was very similar, it was just the immersion in understanding the students at this particular age group was, I mean, I live that every day, that's my home, but it was actually nice to see that they're not that unusual, but the conversations around the table and hearing from each other and sharing those experiences and learning that together was really fascinating, and I really appreciated, I can't remember who it was, it was a community member or parent who asked that we figure out a way to really share a lot of the learning along the way in a very public way so that people hear what we're learning along the way about this particular age group, and I think that can be really, really helpful as well, because it is eye-opening even if you're living it every day. So the plan is to have a distinct district page on the website that collects not just the presentation, but also some of the artifacts, like the book that we're reading collectively, some of the notes from there. So I think by the time the next meeting occurs, which is June 3rd, I believe, the goal is to have the website up and running so that when we get to summer we have the collected notes of the first two meetings. There was also some dialogue about how perhaps Mr. Rodriguez could come in a public venue and be able to share that, because as much as the group's doing learning, he also is an expert in this area, so that's something we're having conversations with, and he happens to be bilingual, which would be very useful in our community. I think the only thing I wanted to share was one of the best comments that I received was from, we have a student rep, a former Amherst public school student, and we're reading about all the development of young adolescents, and he said, oh, yeah, I could identify all those behaviors like that's my friend this person, that's my friend that person. And so it really mattered that the adults understood it, but it was most impactful to me, actually, was that the student who was present was able to articulate that the things that we're learning about and thinking about and coming to an understanding about are what his experience is every day, being a young adolescent, and I think that lens is going to be incredibly useful as we go forward. Great, thank you. Mr. Demling. First of all, I can't believe you're not a star or is a fish in I know, but moving on from that. Can you remind us again what the general timetable schedule is, or initial thoughts are, for opportunity for public input and when the decisions might be made? Sure, so the way the group was framed both here and at the group is that it's not a decision making body, what their goal, the goal of the group is to develop a model that the community can respond to. So one of the pieces that Ms. McDonald spoke about was bringing people along as the process continues and not waiting to the end for the engagement, but really wanting the group to be able to fully get immersed in the work because they're not a group that's going to make a recommendation at the end, like we should do this or we should do that, what their goal is to try to develop a model that the community can then respond to. One of the things I shared is what I find when this question comes up is people often have a visceral response, it's a good idea or a bad idea without actually being able to respond to something tangible of what it would actually look like. And so that last part is really what the work of the group is, so we are still trying to think about engagements in the fall. The group's work ends in January or February of 2020, so we take a summer break, but we have one more meeting in June and then we have monthly meetings from September I believe to January with a final report in February, so we're trying to think for fall might be a good time to engage a larger community on where we are, where the work is, and to do some of that kind of proactive education that Mr. Rodriguez is leading us in. Mr. Nakajima. Thanks. And I'm sure you're going to dig into all this and figure it out, but the only advice I would give on that is I think if you're not doing work and meeting over the summer and then you're starting up again in September, if there's some way to engage the public as early as late October, early November, and by public they also just include this venue and just continue to have some running dialogue, just because I think the last thing you want to do, everybody knows that starting around November 20th or 21st or whatever the date is, detention is really variable and then it doesn't pick up again until like January 7th, and the next thing you know, you have a recommendation. And the one thing I care about deeply is that wherever this lands, that the public has multiple opportunities to be engaged, feel engaged, and no one pick up the newspaper and say, wait, they're talking about what when we get to the end of, to middle of January. And I think that can only be done, in other words, if there's punctuated opportunities where there's learning and sharing that can go on. Mr. Dunley. Yeah, just briefly. Thinking about the timetable of the fall, so the full school committee is going to be up for election this fall, so that will be like the first week of November. This would naturally be a topic of discussion I would imagine during those debates and discussions, so given that that's likely to come up, it would be great to be able to seed the discussion or potential of discussion with objective information as much as possible. So whatever work this group does, you know, even as early as September, October, it would be great to be able to get out there. Dr. Morris. Yeah, just I think the related but somewhat tangential is one of the things that we talked about with myself and the chair is having FY20 planning be a distinct agenda topic on the June meeting, and I think some of this conversation would be, not that it's not useful now, but I think it really mapping out the FY20 year for school committee. This is the kind of feedback that would be really helpful for us to bring back to the group. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Dr. Morris. So I just noticed a couple of members of the public walk in and not to put anyone on the spot, but we had closed public comment earlier because we didn't have any members of the public here. So if I'm going to reopen public comment now, just on the interesting chance that somebody might want to speak, and if so you can just come up to the microphone here and make sure you press the green button, you have three minutes to speak just state your name for the committee. All right, seeing no public comments, we just wanted to give a fair chance. I will close public comments now. OK, next item on the agenda is the Fort River Feasibility Study Report. Just to remind the committee, Dr. Morris, can you wait for a moment for me to? OK, yeah. Just to remind the committee, this was a conversation that started the committee in the community, actually a conversation that we started late last year around the work of the Fort River Feasibility Study Building Committee. And we've had the chair of that committee come and present to this committee a couple of times since then. Tonight he is here just to share sort of the most recent information that the committee has come up with. At this point, we thought it, you know, probably not the best idea to bring the architects in. We didn't think there was enough information that necessitated any action on the part of this committee in response to it, but did think that it was a good opportunity for the chair to come back and update us. So with that, Dr. Morris? Can I make one procedural comment before I do the introduction? Just I'm wondering, the approving the clerical awards, if we might be able to move that up to be the third item on new and continuing business? Because I think someone maybe here who wants to comment to that. So after the Alice safety presentation, is that what you're thinking? Yeah, I'm sorry. Is that OK with the committee? All right, let's go back. I apologize for not bringing that up. No, that's fine. So we'll move the item, approve clerical awards to the third bullet under Alice safety presentation for tonight. Thank you. Mr. Salvin, welcome. Dr. Morris, do you want to say anything else about the tonight? Yeah, just very briefly, I just appreciate the chair coming tonight. This is going to be in Mr. Salvin and I spoke. There's going to be a brief update, because in the fall, what we talked about is having the architects come back. Once the project is fully completed and some other people's points, summer is not the best time to gather people's attention. There may be other thoughts as the statement of interest responds from MSPA is getting closer. So what we talked about is doing a quick update tonight. On the work to date, there's still some work which you'll hear about left in the process and asking the architects come back in the fall. And they said they were willing to do so, to do a full presentation of the final report. Can we get back from summer? Thank you. And I think I've made this thing go. Can you hear me? Is the button rested? Is the little green light is on? Is it bright green? Yes. Excellent. Great. Was, as Dr. Morris noted, we're not quite done. But we have come a long way since the last time. At least I appeared before you. I think Dr. Morris has probably given you interim updates when I'm not here. One of the biggest things we did was we completed the exploration of options with the consultant. TSKP Studio out of Parford was our architect, and they lead a design team. And those have been costed out to one level. We've heard from the broader community in the form of two public outreach forums. And at our most recent meeting, we have reviewed a, I'm going to call, a final draft of the study reports. The big piece that's not done that was part of our charge was an independent cost estimate. So our design team had a cost estimator on their team. Our charge from the town was to also have a second cost estimate done by a separate consultant. They still need to interact with TSKP and their design team. So that piece is yet to be completed. It's at least a month out. And that's sort of why Dr. Morris is kind of suggesting that we're really going to come back probably in the fall because it's going to take about a month to get that completed. Then there's going to be some time for the committee to kind of absorb it and see if that changes any of our assumptions about, at least, the preliminary conclusions or preliminary findings. So that's kind of the big broader brush about where we are in kind of time frame. But I think it's safe for me to speak a little bit about what I'm going to call preliminary findings because our consultants have brought this a fair way at this point. In a really broad brush kind of way, there's been two big questions about Fort River and its site. Is it buildable? And if it is buildable, are there options or is it fairly limited? And in working with TSKP, I think it's fair to say that it is buildable, that there are options. Are there challenges? Yes, there are challenges on this site. There are floodplain issues. There are wetland issues. We have subsurface soil conditions that require to be dealt with. And we have some pre-existing moisture issues in the building, whether that's coming from the existing concrete slabs and a lack of vapor barriers or simply untreated humid air. But working with TSKP, there are ways to address these issues. And that will be represented in our final report. That will be out fairly soon. The other thing that I think was kind of informative for the town at a larger context is this is the first project that at least went through a feasibility study process with the zero net energy bylaw. That's been fairly informative to both the committee and hopefully to the broader community. And as I said earlier, we have this one big chunk that's left, which is the independent cost estimate. We will probably have to do a little bit of reconciliation between the two estimates to understand where the overall scopes are. So I'm not quite ready tonight to say, oh, our cost estimates kind of say a range of x to y. But I think we're getting fairly close to that point. Thank you, Mr. Saladin. Dr. Morris, is there anything that you wanted to add to that? And Mr. Nakajima, having sat on that committee now for quite a few months, is there anything that you would like to add? I do just a couple of things. I thought that was a great summary. And I just wanted to add that because a lot of the conversation around this study and report have focused on these different concepts, these different building alternative concepts for the site and what the price tag may be associated with it, I think it actually misses. If you get hung up on that, what you're missing is the fact that what this is going to end up being is an absolutely massive document transmitted electronically, mostly. I think you might have a copy. You'll probably end up with a copy. If you want a copy, you can have a copy. Members of the committee? About 2 and 1 half inches thick. But it's an absolutely huge thing with a lot of appendices in it. And so really what the charge, in my view, the charge that the committee had was to develop a really deep body of information that could be of use to the town, regardless of what happens to the site, and of use to the school committee and any future building committees. And so I'm just previewing the fact, without going into it further, that like that is the fairly lengthy discussion about what it means to meet the zero-net energy bylaw, what it applies to in the building, and what the alternatives are. There's just a lot of information then there. And I think that I just, I'm just previewing that, because I think it's great for them to know that if you want to dig into the site, if you want to dig into the distinct building conditions, and in even, this is a hard thing to do, and I think it's been hard for our committee sometimes, but thinking about how do architects and engineers think about sites and buildings like that, there's going to be just a ton of information in there for people to dig through. And I think, I hope that proves useful, obviously, to future committees. But I just wanted to let people know that it's, honestly, you could, if you wanted, you could practically ignore the design concepts and just go straight into, so what's the hydrology of the site? And if they say it's buildable despite a high water table, what do they mean by that? What are the engineering techniques that are used to create drive buildings on wet sites in the 21st century? Which is interesting. And I expect that Mr. Salvin, there was conversations around cost estimates for all the different options that would be included in that report. Is that right? Yes, even though we haven't gotten this sort of second opinion yet, it was very fascinating to see that even with the zero energy bylaw and some of the challenges on the site when adjusted for size of project and things like zero energy bylaw, this theoretical project, since we're not building anything out of this project, benchmarked very well with the MSBA projects over the last five years or so. It's right in the pack, it's not an outlier. And that in itself, even if we don't know what the kind of final numbers are tonight, tells to me at least a lot about what the feasibility of construction on the site is. Thank you. Any questions or comments from the committee for Mr. Salvin or anyone else? Mr. Demling? Yeah, I suppose we can't say enough, thanks to all the community members that participated in this. It's unpaid volunteer service committee. I mean, it's really to go for more than a year and to be consistent on that is very admirable. So yeah, so I look forward to the final report. I do think it would be good for the process to get that done earlier in the fall so that all that information is in the community has time to digest it prior to fingers crossed hearing back from the MSBA about our statement of interest. So in terms of scheduling the architect, that would be good. One question I had reading through the details and I'm glad you pointed out the net zero stuff because that was really interesting to see the adjustments there. So with the sort of the compromise proposal that we've proposed in the statement of interest that has a building of around 600 and then looking at some of the sizes in this that are smaller than that. Is it, do you have any ballpark sense of are these numbers extractable up? Like in order to say, oh yes, well if it costs this much at 400, then at 600 it costs X. I'm gonna be a little reticent to talk about projecting the cost up. Yes, I think there are ways to do that. We weren't necessarily charged with that. We did look, we did explore kind of at a limited basis whether we could get a school at 600 to fit on that site and there would be options as well for that. But they were not explored since it wasn't originally part of our charge to the same depth and that's why we'd wanna be a little reticent about being too clear about how to do that. I'm not a cost estimate professional but there are ways I suspect to project those up to other populations. Dr. Morris? Yeah and I just, I remember our conversation, you and I and I think we were doing the Amherst Media filming. This came up and I think it's a good question to come back to when the architects are here in the fall because much like Mr. Salvin says there are ways to broadly estimate that work and think about that work and they're certainly aware of the statement of interest. So I think that'd be a good one to come back to when they're here in the fall. Great. Any other questions or comments from the committee? Okay. Thank you very much for coming tonight and sharing an update on this. This is really, I'm just really appreciated. We constantly keep hearing things from the community asking about the work of this committee and wanting to know when the report's gonna be finalized. So it's good to get at least a ballpark. I completely agree with Mr. Demling's comments that will wanna get a presentation prior to the MSBA decision about whether or not we're in the pipeline. Again, the work of this committee, the Fort River Building, feasibility study building committee has only been work that's been done to ask whether or not we can build on that site not an actual project right now. We actually have to wait until the MSBA approves us. Hopefully they will soon this year for a project before we would undertake that. But the work of this committee has been extremely helpful in answering some of those very basic questions. And so it's my hope that when the architects come back and Mr. Salvin, of course, I hope you're gonna accompany them and perhaps even a couple of members of the committee, both the chair and vice chair of course, but a couple of other representative members of the committee, it would be great to have them so that we can, if a committee here, the Amherst School Committee has any questions for them, they can ask that. But also just to give them an opportunity to share in a different venue, publicly some of the work that went on from that committee, because it was incredibly important and as also as Mr. Demling pointed out, time consuming, so thank you. A million thanks for the work that you've done. Really appreciate it. Not at all. And I suspect we'd be ready and available in September if that works for your schedule and we can follow up on that. It's really just a matter of how the timing rolled out that it's not going to be ready quite before your last meeting for this sort of season. Yeah, we definitely wanna take our time with that. We don't wanna release something that's not ready for, so Dr. Morris and I will talk about timing. We'll check in with you as well and then see if we can figure out an actual timeline for the committee. Very good. Thank you. Next item on the agenda is Alice's safety presentation. Dr. Morris, you wanna introduce this one? So I have a couple of quick thoughts that I wanna share for other folks come up. But school safety is certainly rightfully on many people's minds, many parents, guardians, children, staff, and then community members. And so over the last four or five years, we've taken many, many safety measures and precautions to improve the safety of our school. At the elementary level, one of the things that's different this year is that we've had training now at all three elementary schools for staff members on Alice, and you'll hear more about that in a minute. And I think the thing that I wanna lead in with is that oftentimes there are examples where what feel like high-stakes drills occur with young children and this district has taken the very clear unwavering approach that these drills for elementary age students or schools are for staff members. They're not for children. We're not placing children in those kind of situations for a whole host of reasons, one of which is the social-emotional and the developmental appropriateness. But also there's the feeling that when children are this young, the best thing that we can help them do is to listen to the adults who will guide them. So our training has been exclusively focused in terms of Alice and the adults. Obviously we do fire safety and other drills that we do throughout the year, but when it relates to real-life simulations of intruders being in the building, that's where we wanna train, make sure our adults have all the skills they need to keep themselves and our children as safe as they can be. So with that, I'll call up Brian. Do you wanna come up? And you can introduce yourself and share a bit about what Alice is and what it's looked like at the elementary level. Sure. Thank you. Just a reminder to make sure that the button is pressed and it's bright green, otherwise they can't hear you. I have bright green. Thank you. Good evening, my name is Brian Johnson. I'm a lieutenant with the Amherst Police Department. Been involved with working with the schools in active threat response in one way, shape, or form for about the last 15 years. About three years ago, we trained a lot of the staff, both at the school and at the police department in a new program called Alice. We realized that we needed to take a more proactive approach to our response to active threat scenarios. What we had been doing for years and what most of the country was doing was simply a lockdown shelter in place type of training. And through studying a lot of data, we realized as did many places throughout the country that that wasn't enough. We needed to take a more proactive approach. So really Alice was really an enhancement of what we were already doing. It was we built upon the lockdown and shelter in place and just enhanced upon those concepts. The acronym stands for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, and Evacuate. What Alice does is it takes information that's available and it really authorizes anybody in that school to make more individual decisions as to what's gonna be the best response for them to take, whether it be locking down with their students or taking some other avenue, mainly evacuation. Evacuation is something we had stayed away from before and we realized that in these scenarios, evacuation is a valid response for if there should be an active threat situation. So the individuals are all authorized to make their own decision as to how they're going to react to a situation like this and whether it be locked down. Instead of going to the normal lockdown that we've practiced which was locked the doors to your classroom, turn the lights off, draw the blinds. We've enhanced that with a more proactive approach in terms of teaching folks how to barricade and how to make their classroom more secure or wherever they may be. And then we introduced evacuation. Most of these scenarios that take place across the country, they happen and are over with in between four to six minutes and the average response for police is between four and six minutes. So what our goal was is and you know, almost 60% of these active shooter situations really take care of themselves before the police even arrive. So it's really incumbent upon the people that are there to take care of themselves, their own safety and to build time barriers. The more time you can create, the more chances are that police have a chance to respond. In terms of the training we did with the school, I think as I started out saying, we trained a number of staff to be certified Alice instructors and a number of police officers. We, it was probably a little about over two years ago, I think we rolled this out first at the high school. We trained all high school staff and then we did active scenarios with the high school staff and then we worked down to actually doing active scenarios that included the students that was very well received on the high school level by staff and students alike. I think they were waiting for the change. We then moved down to the middle school and really did the same type of scenario where we worked with the training the staff first, did scenarios with the staff and to a lesser degree, they then did some training with their students. We just recently completed that same type of training with the elementary schools. We did each elementary school. We did one major training at first and then broke down and went to each school and did scenario-based trainings with staff at each school. And as Superintendent Morris just stated, the staff is then gonna work in this curriculum in some way, shape, or form with students, but it's not gonna be an active scenario type situation. So that's really where we're at right now. Just, so what Alice is, is again, it's a proactive approach. We're just really building upon what we've done. We enhance our lockdown scenarios. We authorize people to evacuate and those decisions are based on information that they gain and we talk about how to get that information out, whether it be from PA systems or we've done, I know, at the high school now has a system where every teacher can utilize their phone to get over the PA system. I believe that's in place at the middle school as well. So we're working on different ways to make sure people stay informed throughout these different types of scenarios. I can tell you, we had at least two that I know of scenarios where schools went into shelter in place this past year. Thankfully they were, you know, one was a medical which worked out well and one was an unruly student that had armed himself and the staff work did fantastic job and it worked as planned. The privacy of the students were protected, the students were able to be taken out without a major disruption to the school and I couldn't be more pleased with the way those two scenarios went and the staff has clearly embraced the training that we did. One question that does come up a lot is with the counter and that's been a lot of fears around what are we teaching the students and teaching staff to do? Are we teaching them to take on these active shooters, these aggressors? And that is not the case. Counter is strictly kind of a last resort type thing when you are face to face with a threat and the other things we have taught are no longer applicable and it works on interrupting what this person is doing by distraction techniques. And so you may have heard about talking about throwing staplers and books and that type of stuff and that's exactly what we're teaching folks to do is once you are face to face with a threat and only once it gets to that point that you can't sit and be passive. You have to take an active role for your own survival and there's a lot of exercises we do with the staff that shows how easily you can actually defeat these folks and create time and space. I think we just unfortunately had two recent scenarios one out in California, one down in North Carolina where people did take an active role in combating the active shooter and wound up saving a lot of lives in doing so. So it's proven technique. That is a really, really short version. I know some of you have heard of the Alice program before, I'm more than happy to answer any questions. So where we stand now, the schools are instituting this, they have practiced, the elementary schools are next on the list, they've all been trained, all staff has been trained at each individual site and they're gonna be working into their curriculum in some way, shape or form however they deem the best way to do that with their students. So they become used to this. Again, I'm more than happy to answer any questions about where we're at or what we plan to do. Thank you, Lieutenant Johnson. Dr. Morris, did you wanna add something to that? Thank you, Lieutenant Johnson. I think, so the only two things I'd like to add and I appreciate all the work that the Amherst Police Department has done across the multiple districts around school safety. So one is that I just wanna follow up that the training has been incredibly well received by staff members and one of the things that we heard when staff members, when this training happened even as recently as it was two weeks ago at Crocker Farm was, we're starting this right now. Like, you know, I mean, people once you realize kind of the benefits of in a crisis situation not relying on a PA system that probably is not functional. Like if you're waiting for somebody to tell you what to do in a crisis situation in schools it's likely the case that that option is no longer available and it's empowering for people to realize that they can assess a situation as best they can and make decisions with the training. And I think the second on the student end I just wanna clarify and put a finer point on it is that really from a student perspective at an elementary school what we expect them to learn how to do is to make sure that they listen to their teacher and have those, the actions that the teacher tells them to do in a crisis situation would be how that plays out. It's not gonna be, you know, I know you've said this I just wanna, I know there's a main community, some concerns based on how this has rolled out in other communities that it's gonna be very analogous to what we do in a fire drill. What we do in the training that goes on for students in that is that when there's a fire drill some students, older students know what it is, younger students may not be familiar and the thing they know is when that drill, the alarm goes off, they look to their teacher and the teacher instructs them what the next step is for safety. And we're not simulating what we've done at the high school in particular with young students whether police are there or not because we don't feel like it's developmentally appropriate. And I will add that I did have the chance to meet with the PTA at the Wildwood School and they were very receptive. I explained the program to them and they were very receptive to it and I'm more than happy to also do that at any other school and meet with those parents and alleviate any fears and explain why we're going to this program. Thank you, Lieutenant. Are there any questions or comments either for the Lieutenant or Superintendent on this topic? Mr. Dumling? Yes, thank you very much for this, Lieutenant. This is very obviously important serious information for us to understand. So my first question, and I assume the answer to this is yes, is this the most, is this what the current evidence says is the most supported, most effective response? I mean there's obviously a lot of interest in this nationally and so different approaches. So I assume this is the most... Yeah, this is in fact what the FBI is now recommending with the Department of Homeland Security is recommending. They call it a number of different things. You may have heard of a run hide fight. There's a number of different names. Alice was just the program that we chose but it's all teaching the basic premise of being proactive, of getting out if you can, if there's a threat then yeah. So it is really the nationwide trend is moving towards this. Mr. Dumling? Yeah, so thank you. So that's what I assume but it's good to hear. And my other question is in Dr. Morse, this might also be a question for you, so in elementary it's a pretty wide age range from preschool to sixth graders. And I'm just wondering is there any differentiation in the training or do we suggest to teachers that they engage students differently? I would imagine there might be some questions at the older grades from students that might not come up in the younger grades. Well, nobody knows their students and their capabilities better than the teachers and that's why we authorize the teachers to make their decisions because even at the high school level you may have a classroom that has students in it that may not be able to because of physical difficulties or mental capabilities be able to handle this. So that's why there is no more blanket response. It's what's best for your classroom and for your students and they are allowed to make the decision of what's best for that. So certainly on the elementary school level what a sixth grader is gonna be capable of and what a kindergartener is gonna be capable of are very different. So your responses will be different is what's best for your class in each different scenario. And they are clearly told that it is their choice of how they're going to react to that. Dr. Morris, did you wanna ask? Yeah, and I think that's very consistent just connecting it back to the last five, six years of a safety approach which this messaging even before we got involved with Alice was what's your personal safety response? And so when we were training whatever the protocol was at the time is trying to imagine what does it look like because most of the drills in general occur without students there like before the school year we make sure that all staff because we have new staff coming go through a drill or a training and it's the thing I'm gonna know my students I'm gonna know my space, my physical space I'm gonna know some of the challenges that come up. So even these kind of regular routine trainings most of the work is actually helping staff members imagine and predict what they would do in variety of scenarios knowing their contacts better than the lieutenant myself can do. So I think just that general personal safety response has been the professional development approach for some time. Mr. Nakajima, do you wanna ask? Yeah, just thank you very much. I'm just curious what two things. One, what if there are any additional supports that having gone through the training with the staff and the teachers is there any support that the district needs to follow on with to support the implementation of Alice in the elementary schools and then I guess the second question I have is as you're looking through the year are there steps that you take to try to run through not just how, I mean this is very much focused as it should be on the classroom or the library space wherever it is but then there's also for the principal and for the administrative offices in the elementary school and for central office there's also a need to contact parents and let them know, coordinate other kinds of engagement and I'm just wondering how you think about those things or how are we are planning for those things? So on the first question, I think the challenge we always run into is time. You know, there's too many things that we feel like we need to do and not enough time and we've prioritized this to make sure that we have a training early in the school year again for all the new staff members. We're actually trying to work on how do we integrate some level of training maybe through video or electronic for staff members because one of the challenges we face is that, well, it's a 180 day school year, not every staff member who's new starts on the first day of school, right? Staff members can get onboarded throughout the year while the majority start on the first day, not all of them do. So it's an active problem that we're working on. I think Dr. Brady who's here has done a really nice job of working with us to have two things. One is an articulated plan of who does what at central office, so who's the communications officer and Chris Morland's played a large role in that as well. Who's the public information? Who connects with kind of the central command of the police and depending on the incident, there'd be other factors, other players involved in that and who's contacting the other schools. So if there's an incident at one school, how are we communicating and making sure that the other schools have that? Who's doing media management? So we have that mapped out. I think on a larger scale, one of the things that Dr. Brady and other staff members worked on this fall that we've come to completion on is a full evacuation plan so that if there's an evacuation district, we know where we're going, how we're going there. Knowing that that could change, right? Every situation, it may not be possible but we have staff members who've been assigned to different roles in the situation of an evacuation both to the site but also to kind of parent greeting, lists, who's getting lists of students on power school and so we had that in place for a while and Dr. Brady and others rebooted that this fall. We had a meeting with the administrative team and they've got binders, not quite two and a half inches thick but pretty thick binders to delineate that and each with each role having a backup to know in an emergency scenario, you can't plan for everybody to be available in that situation. And if I could add, I failed to mention the school also purchased a access to an e-learning portal. So if there are teachers are coming in in the middle of the year or teachers want a refresher they have access to the whole Alice program and it walks them through what it is and what it's all about. So if there's people that we are missing in the trainings that they have access to that training online too. That's great, thank you. Thank you again, Lieutenant Johnson for being here tonight. This is a topic that I personally have a lot of difficulty with just talking about as I'm sure a lot of members in our community do and people in this committee as well. It heartens me to hear that we've had two shelters in place already this past year and that in your opinion they've gone very well. I think just knowing that we are building that experience in our schools in real time and that they are not any more serious emergencies than the ones that you outlined already you know, makes me feel good that we've actually been doing the trainings that we said we would do and that we have a plan in place thanks to Dr. Morris and his team and working in concert with the police department. I think that the other thing I would say is we have taken great pains here in our district to make sure that the social and emotional well-being of our students is protected. And this committee is concerned primarily with our elementary schools and these are very young children we're talking about and so one of the things that I've talked with Dr. Morris about is making sure that we are not creating a situation that we see repeated on social media and repeated on media elsewhere where we have students that are faced with these very difficult scenarios that they're playing out in their minds and their classrooms over and over and over again that is leading to a lot of anxiety and depression and other types of very serious mental health issues. So it does make me feel good that we are addressing this safety concern we have a plan in place and we're doing it in a way that is not negatively impacting hopefully the large majority of our students and our staff here. So I thank you, Lieutenant Johnson for helping us with this effort also the Amherst Police Department Dr. Morris of course and the staff at our public schools because I think we've all clearly done a lot of work on this and a lot of thinking on this so thank you very much again for presenting tonight. My pleasure, thank you. Thank you. Okay next item on the agenda is we had an agenda shift earlier to approve the clerical awards and move that up to this slot. Can we hang up here? You're welcome to take a seat over there too if you'd like, that's totally fine. So just for the committee this is a reminder this item is a possible vote so there is language for proposed motion here but with that I will turn it over to Mr. Shea are you leading this or Dr. Morris? Okay. So I think the clerical and media awards every year there's two people who are honored and I'll speak a bit about Jadira Torres and I know Mr. Shea just wants to very briefly speak about Ms. Aldrich who works at Crocker Farm. So Ms. Torres works in central office almost everyone's encountered her and I think the things that people don't see is how much organization and outreach she makes to all families and I think people note that because she is bilingual that's incredibly helpful and it is but I've seen her working with particularly ELL families who speak a plethora of languages and her sensitivity and openness and welcoming nature has made a huge impact on students when they and families when they come and the first place they go is to meet her and around the registration process. So while I wasn't the, I don't submit people for this award I just wanna really recognize the tremendous amount of work she does in the tangible and intangible ways. I know Mr. Shea would like to make a statement about Ms. Aldrich. Is the microphone on? So just make sure the light is bright green on there. Yeah, that's green. So Kathy Aldrich is the administrative secretary at Crocker Farm has been at Crocker Farm for 15, 14, whatever minute years. She's a pivotal person in the success of her school. She does many wonderful things. Couple of the staff members are back there. I don't know if I should tell you this but she gives them little treats at the end of the day when they're all getting a little tired and a little, but in any case, that's not why she's been awarded here. So there was a number of her staff who had recognized this year that Ms. Aldrich has spent a large amount of time supporting a number of her fourth and fifth grade students to gain access to the many of the wonderful sporting possibilities that take place in town. So over the winter months, she helped to enroll and to drive and sort of ferry back and forth some students to basketball. And then now in the spring season, she helped to enroll and sponsor and facilitate and organize and get equipment for a decent number of her fourth and fifth grade students who wouldn't ordinarily have this opportunity to participate in La Crosse. And so last night, for example, I was on a little bit of a run, go by the high school and there's Ms. Aldrich and her husband sitting there on the sidelines. I think they're thinking to get a bigger van but that's another story. And tonight, again, right after school today, there's a bunch of little guys in fifth grade who can run into the office with their equipment and say, Ms. Aldrich, what time do I have to be back? And they were going to after school and then at 4.30 they were heading off to the La Crosse game. And so it's been really powerful. It's amazing to see the little transformation that's taking place with some of these little guys. And we thank her from the bottom of our heart for all this work. Great. So just to summarize, I think just to make it clear for folks who may be watching, this is actually the clerical awards for 2019. And so there was a subcommittee that was formed to select the annual clerical award winners. Mrs. McDonald actually served on that committee. And they reviewed six nominations for the award and then after deliberation, selected Kathy Aldrich, who Mr. Shea just mentioned, who's the principal's assistant at Crocker Farm, and Yadira Torres, who's the elementary registrar. And these are the Amherst recipients for 2019. So I don't know if the committee has any questions or comments, Mr. Nakajima, did you have a comment or do you have a motion? Go for it. Move to approve clerical awards of $500 each for Catherine Aldrich at Crocker Farm. And Yadira Torres at Central Office. Thank you. I have a motion. Do I have a second? Second. Thank you. Any questions or further comments? All those in favor? Okay, it is unanimous. Thank you, Ms. Torres and Ms. Aldrich for your outstanding work. We really appreciate your work and the work of all of our administrative team in our schools. So the next topic is strategic planning update for Crocker Farm School. And so just to give a bit of context, we've, you heard an update maybe two months ago, I think it was March from Wildwood and from Crocker Farm. And at this point, Crocker Farm has a draft school improvement plan that they'd like to share pieces of. And the school improvement plan process in Massachusetts is that it gets presented to the public because it's developed by members of the public as well as staff. And then it goes to the superintendent for the final review and approval before the next school year and all three of our schools are on tap for that and on pace for that. The other two schools will be presenting their public drafts at the June Amherst School Committee meeting, but we appreciate that Crocker Farm being ready to share theirs tonight. And Mr. Shea and Ms. Smith can introduce themselves and get rolling. My name is Derek Shea. I'm the principal of Crocker Farm. And I'm Jen Smith. I'm the assistant principal at Crocker Farm. Thank you. Maybe just see a couple of quick things to begin with. This is behind me is Mary Lambert and Alvie Burrell. Mary Lambert is our math coach and Alvie is one of our special education co-teachers, so I'd like to thank them for coming along tonight. Still here. We had a group of 10 teachers and 10 community members from the Crocker Farm district who took part in this process. Our teachers received a small stipend to be part of this. Our parents did not, but they were still there. Probably met anywhere from seven, eight, nine, 10 different times over the course of the last nine months or so, and the goal was to obviously come up with some small number of goals that would help our school think about how we're gonna improve and get better. I think everyone knows, so Crocker Farm's a relatively small little school in the south side of town, approximately, what, 10, 12 minutes away from the rest of the action. So we have this sort of little distance that in some ways I think strengthens us and makes us feel really good about ourselves. I've told you all this before, I love Crocker Farm. It's a great role place. It's got a lot of potential. I think our students, our teachers and our families almost universally would say that they're very happy to be part of the community. We want to keep it that way, and we want to just share with you tonight a few ideas about how we plan to try to get a little bit better. This slide is basically, you should come see it sometime, this is what the students developed a few years ago that are really looking at some of the core values of our school. It's a beautiful little town, that's in four pieces. Anyway, we'll move on. There's another slide I just wanted to show you. So just a couple of things about why we would do this, the school improvement plan. So the first thing is just action, right? So I just put that word up there because we have a responsibility to act and to do something. I'll tell you this quite quickly. I was running through Mill River last week two weeks ago, and there was a second, third grade baseball game taking place. I don't know if I've ever been to a second and third grade baseball game, but anyway, there was a game going on and I was running by, and there was a pitch. I think the adults pitch actually, and then the kids hit. Someone pitched, someone hit the ball. The ball went in at the outfield. I was running by and I sort of half stopped. And as ball went in the outfield, there's a little guy went to pick up the ball. I think it was a little guy, could have been a little girl. And then there was about 50 voices yelling at this little kid to do something, like, pick it up, go get it, go. And the little kid just froze. It was awful, right? Because there's at least like 50 people telling the kid what to do. So I tell you that story because the little kid wanted to act but just didn't feel comfortable, right? Because everyone was telling them what to do. We kind of feel like that's the way sometimes too, right? Because there's a lot of people telling us what to do. There's a lot of books out there. Mike and I exchange emails probably every day in the latest, like, you know, researcher, various things. But we don't have this piece where we can't act. So we're interested in acting all the time, right? So I put that word up there because action is what we want to be about. We want to try to continue to do stuff. Purpose and mastery. What does that mean? Well, we really want to make sure that we have a purpose. And we want to make sure that that purpose has got some sort of impact obviously for the future. We can talk about that in a second. And the mastery piece, I think what I've learned in the 22 years that I've been working in the Amber schools and the perhaps 30 years that I've been involved in so in terms of education and social work is I'm never actually going to get to that mastery piece, but it's still something that we really want to sort of strive towards. So I think, again, our plan is really driven by the idea of action, this idea of purpose where we want to have somewhere we want to go and mastery. And then there's this little last piece that I just wanted to mention. And some of this purpose mastery we sort of borrowed from a book that we've been reading anyway. Well, I can tell you later the author's name. But the last piece is this whole notion of sort of collective action. And I put autonomy in this sort of parentheses. So one thing I've learned in the 22 years again that I've been in Amherst schools is that it's a continuous learning place. So some of you did this up here. I went to undergraduate school, I went to graduate school. I did a lot of learning. Amherst schools the last 22 years, we learn all the time. We're constantly in motion. But what I think we need to get a little bit better at is we need to get a little bit better at this idea of sort of collective learning. There's a lot of small pockets of learning, perhaps not as focused as I like it to be. And so our idea behind this plan again is to figure out a small number of collective steps that we would like to take together at Crocker Farm. And then in parentheses we left and autonomy, right? Because then all of you sitting up there could probably figure this out, right? We don't all want to be these sort of clockwork orange do what you're told all the time. There has to be some room for autonomy, right? There has to be some room for doing your own thing. Next slide, and then I'll stop talking. Actually a couple more slides. All right, so listen, choice equals opportunity. Couldn't come up with a better one than this. Here's the idea, right? And I just saw the sheet when I came in tonight. June 7th is a high school graduation ceremony. I don't usually go to it. I will go this year because I have a child who will be graduating from high school. I'm sadly looking forward to it. My son's going to graduate and go off and do something and somewhere else outside of Amherst. And so I think what we'll find next week when we go to the graduation ceremony, I think our schools are doing a terribly good job. You'll see that when you look at the school profile and all the various things, but we still have work to do because I think some kids from different, from various backgrounds are getting perhaps bigger opportunities than other kids. And we need to do something about that, right? And so again, this is not a criticism, but it's an observation that's perhaps a fact. But choice is opportunity, right? So my life, I've had some good choices and good opportunities. Why? Because of education. Last couple of slides and then we'll stop. These are some of our kids. And we've permission to put them up there. We put this up there because it's pointless to come to the school committee and talk about school improvement plans. There's no kids involved, right? It just seems pointless. But there's two parts to this. Oh, let's go back one bit a little bit. So these are little kindergartners. The joy of our school. So what happens every year is that we get a whole bunch of kindergartners that come to your school. This all happens in elementary school, right? Kindergarteners come and then they move on and move on. So last year we had about 57 kindergartners show that. And so, Jen, I'll show you this next slide. Isn't that a great picture, by the way? They're all characters in their own way. This is just a little bit about the demographic of our school, right? And it's connected to our kindergartners as well. And so I think people are quite aware that our school demographics are ever changing. We can go on to the next slide. So, and go back again to the slide previous, right? So the demographics of who we are, it's just, it's amazing. And we have a photograph of our wall and our school of all the families come see it sometime. It helps to sort of talk about that again. But this is an interesting little slide that helps, I think, frame for tonight the conversation, right? So this is where our kindergartners come in. And this is the percentage of kindergartners when they're identifying letters. So what happens is they get this little, is it one minute test? And they get a chance to see how many letters they can identify. So look at this little spread here. So, zero to 10 letters, whatever, what's that? 20, whatever percent? 11 to 39, 50, 40 plus letters. I don't know what that is. What, 2019, I forget what the exact number is. So we have this massive variability that shows up in our front door every year. And we have an obligation to make sure that our teachers and all of us, our counselors, our ELL teachers and our special ed teachers and our response teachers all have the skill set to be able to make sure that we can work with the variability that comes into our building and do something with this variability so as that every kid has an opportunity to excel and be strong, whether or not you're just starting to figure out the letters or whether or not you can read Harry Potter for crying out loud. So again, it's an important part. Variability continues through the whole year and through the whole system. But again, this is what happens when little people just walk in our front door. Hopefully this is a good little frame to have Jen to give you some really good scientific thinking. So I'll stop talking. So what Derek just shared is really the heart behind our plan. And so our school instructional leadership team, which is made up of teachers in a para and two of them are right here. And our school governance council, which is made up of family members, like Derek mentioned before, developed these three containers or objectives for the work of the plan. First, we wanna get better at our instructional practices that promote engaged and relevant learning. Second, we wanna continue to build deeper relationships with our families, with our students, and with our greater community. And third, we wanna continue to foster the social emotional wellbeing of our students. So each of these objectives has a smart goal, initiatives, and action steps that are attached to each of them. We will be here all night if I went through all of that with you. So for this evening, I just wanna share with you a few of the highlights from the Engaged Learning Objective. So in this cartoon, you will notice a variety of different animals and species. And then a teacher-like person saying that everybody has to take the same final exam and they all have to climb that tree. I think the monkey is really stoked about that because I think the monkey's gonna do really well. And I think the fish is like, uh-oh, how am I gonna do that? And maybe the seal's just like, I don't know, what am I gonna do? So this reinforces the idea that a one-size-fits-all approach to teaching and learning doesn't address variability. And as Derek shared, our school's full of variability, starting with our kindergartners that first come to us. And that's a really great thing and we are really proud of that. And our purpose and our goal is to identify a few high-leverage instructional strategies that are really gonna address that variability and that we can work on together and that promote access and equity. So the following evidence-based approaches to instruction put the child at the center. So not only do they seek to get to know kids as learners, but as people with personalities and backgrounds and different experiences and language and culture and all those contribute to their learning process. So universal design for learning and differentiation, those ideas and methods have been in the district for a while and what we're really excited to do with these is to develop a shared understanding of what those approaches really mean and get good at that. Our hope is to create a really strong foundation so we can build upon in the upcoming years. As some of you know, we have a lot of new staff coming into our building and we really wanna highlight this as an opportunity to again engage in that collective work together. So universal design for learning seeks to remove barriers to instruction. It's really flexible in how students access information, how they engage with it and how they seek to show what they know. So as we have learned that we can't remove every single barrier to instruction. So then we need to accommodate. And so differentiation allows us to be able to tailor either the learning environment, how kids show what they know, what the content is to really meet the individual needs of students. So our new learning in the upcoming years and something that we're all really excited about diving into more is the idea around cultural sustaining pedagogy and really building the cultural competency of our staff. So not only do you wanna make sure that we're teaching in ways that are relevant and responsive to all of our kids. We wanna learn how to embed a social justice framework into our teaching and learning. We wanna learn how to not only embrace and welcome everybody. We wanna learn how to support and maintain and value and sustain cultural differences over time. And that's something that we all need to get better at and something that we really want to grow in the next coming years around. So that's, you have the plan, I think, and we encourage you to read it and we're happy to answer any questions that you may have. I just wanna add one other quick piece is I think that, and thank you, Jen, that I think that the framework again, and I think I said this in the beginning, but I just wanna reiterate it is that there are many things if we want it better, Tim, there's many ideas that float around our school and our community that we all want to sort of think about and focus and work on, right? And so what we were really working hard on is trying to just narrow that focus to a small number of pieces that perhaps will grow, hopefully will grow and enlarge in and sort of take us in slightly different directions. But the whole idea again is what we're really gonna work on in the next couple of years is making sure that every single member of our team is involved in this process in terms of this, these focused areas that we're gonna learn. It's not a small number of people. It's not like, well, you get to choose to be part of this. We are all collectively gonna take part in this learning. And going back to a few months ago when I was here, when Mr. Demling was asking, just in terms of the framework for the future for identity and who we are, I think Crocker Farm already has this sort of, there's an identity of terms of community and who we are and this sort of neighborhood that it doesn't truly exist, but it's close enough. And I think over the next couple of years, our hope is that through this work we'll really sort of come to this firm place about who we are and who we want to be. There's a couple of changes coming around, right? There's a couple of ideas about grade sixies and the new school and whatever. And so what we want to do is we want to stay highly relevant in this next conversation over the next three, four, five years. And we think that this is probably one of the best ways to go about doing that. Thank you so much. Thank you, Mr. Shane. I think Ms. Smith really appreciate the presentation. I think your plan is very comprehensive and I have a lot of thoughts about that, but I'm gonna allow Dr. Morris and then other members of the committee to speak up first if they so choose. Dr. Morris? Yeah, just very briefly, I just wanna comment because of time, because I reiterated that we had other things on the agenda. I think one thing that's important for the committee to know is how many, how iterative this process was, how often the committee would do work, it would go back to the faculty and the staff, feedback, and that happened. So when the team here is talking about collective work, it wasn't a top-down hierarchical, this is the collective work, it truly came from surveying all stakeholders, both kind of literally, but also having the iterative pieces is where we are, what are people think. And that process is continuing and that's why it's still in draft format now, but I think it's just an important variable I wanted to share with the committee and the community. Thank you. So I'm gonna allow the committee to make comments if they so wish or if they have any questions. I'm gonna start from over here and just go that way. Mr. Nakajima. Well, there's a lot to it. I actually appreciated, oftentimes when we get PowerPoints at these meetings, I think to myself, I don't want the PowerPoint, I wanna dig into the report. This is actually the PowerPoint I was helpful because there's so much to tail in here that it's actually helpful to get an overview of what the general principles and approach to seeing the kids is obviously great. And so I guess I'm building on something that Dr. Morris just said in terms of the iterative nature of the work and developing the strategy. There's so much listed in here of different sort of teams and groups and activities. My assumption is, and just correct me if I'm wrong and if I'm wrong, that's great, but I'm just, my assumption is that what you're planning to do is already closely aligned with activities that have been integral to what Crockerfarm is as a professional and learning community. In that, so when I'm looking at all these things that are being listed, you might actually say, well, honestly, we've been doing this or this or this, but the value in the strategy is not only sort of the collective endeavor of defining the goals, but also the way in which it allows you to have even a sharper common purpose as well as marginally resources here and there that get better aligned to what you're trying to do. Is that right or does that make sense? Yep. And I think I've just added that, for example, Ms. Lambert who's sitting there who's her math coach, Ms. Lambert's been doing some amazing work with math training with teachers in the last couple of years, so in many respects, it's about bringing all this stuff in together. The train has already left the station. It's not like we're sitting at the station waiting for the train to leave. We're just trying to make sure that we're heading in the right direction. I don't know if that, I like trains, but anyway, that's, we're just trying to figure out our direction. I think, and just to finish that, I think that's great because that's to me, that's one, every time I ever hear anything about Crocker, I hear wonderful things, so why would you do things radically differently than you've been doing it? But also I think that when you think of the spirit of a strategic planning process, it really, if there's something very wrong, if the process leads you to say, I wanna do things that are radically different than what I've been doing, rather than focusing and improving and getting everyone better aligned. So I think that's great. I guess the other question I had is, I didn't see it in the stats at the beginning. So when you say 78% of students by 2020 will be, I think, at least proficient or something like that, where are we now and how much of a stretch goal is that and do you feel that's, you're on track? Yeah, so we're at 72% based on our winter data. And just thinking with colleagues, a 5% increase in one year seems lofty but attainable at the same time. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Nakajima. I have just a couple of very quick comments. I think when I first saw the title for this presentation and the fact that it said School Improvement Plan, I was a little concerned because initially we had sort of come to this conversation about all of our elementary schools by way of the work that was going on at Fort River and thinking about how that school was approaching their dual language program. And this committee felt very strongly as did Dr. Morris that we didn't want our other two schools in the district, elementary schools in the district to give off a sense that they were being left behind in some way, right? And so the conversation initially was, how do we also help both Crocker Farm and Wildwood articulate their vision for how they are running their schools and what this community actually means? It was not actually an attempt to say the school needs to be fixed or improved in any way. So I actually found when I dug into this plan, a very clever way of dealing with the question at hand, because you managed to take a critical look at the work of your teachers and curriculum learning process and find ways to tweak and change and enhance, and I guess ultimately improve, right? Even though there wasn't actually a call for improvement, it was really intended to be an opportunity to redefine or define your identity from the beginning. And so I have to commend you for that, because I actually think that it takes an incredible amount of work to go through this process and to come up with a way of articulating all the work that takes place in your school on a regular basis and still attaching some stretch goals to that and still finding a way to improve that. So I really appreciated all of that. I also wanna say that I think that the universal design for learning in particular, I find very appealing just because of its flexibility in the way that you are attempting to engage people where they are, and that includes educators as well, right? And so I think that ultimately helps to convey a sense of who Crocker Farm is or what the Crocker Farm community actually is. It's not about hammering people into a mold or making them be a certain way. It really is meeting people where they are and that includes our youngest learners. So I really appreciate that and commend you for that. And then also I think that the framework, Ms. Smith, I think you just mentioned it about the, sort of enhancing a social justice framework. I love that language. I think it's interesting to see that happen at an elementary school level because typically the conversations that we end up having around that are at much older grades and that's great. But I've always felt very strongly that if we don't start those conversations from early on and also still meeting kids where they are, community members where they are, that we miss a really huge opportunity and that by the time they get to middle school or high school, it's not that it's too late, it's never too late to learn and change minds and all of that. But you don't have a strong foundation to stand on. You're basically tearing down and rebuilding. So it's wonderful to hear that one of our schools, all of our schools, frankly, but I think that the way that you've articulated this in particular is really exciting, really reflects the community of Crocker Farm quite well. And I'm excited to see that happen and sort of move on. I will say that the plan is very ambitious. There is a lot of moving parts to this and I trust that you have had those conversations with your staff and you've been able to talk through what this actually means, but there are a lot of moving pieces in here. So I don't know if you have any comments to that specifically or anything else that I've just said, but thank you. I would just say briefly that recently, Jen was in touch with, I forget the woman's name, but there's a person who is a former high-ranking official in the sort of teaching tolerance agency and I think she's sort of spun off to do some of her own independent work right now. And so I think Jen had an hour long or so dialogue with her last week on the telephone to try to talk with her a little bit about some of our sort of social justice ideas and where we want to go. And we may want to come back to you all at some point because we're not asking for a lot of money to do these things, but we might need a couple of dollars just to sort of bring some of these people to come in and work with us. And in terms of ambitious, I think you're right. I think we have an ambitious group of people who work in the building who, it's all systems go all the time. And so it's best to be that way, but I understand what you're saying. Even when we were thinking about that 72 to 78% or 73, we were, a couple of people were saying 80 and a couple of people were saying, oh, that's five's too many. So it is a little bit of the flavor of the building, but I think we've got it under control and we'll hopefully keep it being ambitious, but then- And the good news is that we already have a lot of the structures in place to be able to facilitate and execute the plan. So we do have committees that are already aligned and gonna be supporting this work. We're gonna distribute the leadership amongst three different committees that are already establishing and to do summer work. We've had a family engagement committee already for the last couple of years. They've been doing a lot of these things. So for us, it's just building upon what we've been doing for the last couple of years. So it is ambitious. We have three to five years. To work on it. And we're just gonna see what we can do. Great, thank you. I don't have a lot to add because you've asked some of my questions already. So I had a similar reaction as I read through the plan and then listening to you this evening that it's ambitious and how much of this is new versus sort of building on what's already been started. So thank you for the questions and thank you for the responses. And the only thing that I will add is what I, just a comment on what I really appreciated when stood out for me, both reading and listening tonight is two things. It's similar to what Ms. Ordonas had said was what's at the heart of this, at least as my takeaway was you're taking a great school and looking at how to make it even stronger. And so not really improvement from that it's needing of improvement, but actually how do we take what's working well and make it even stronger across the board. And the other piece what I loved was your comments about the variability of the students and putting the students at the heart of that. A lot of folks could look at variability as a challenge and rather than even frame it as that, you've positioned it as a strength of the school and something to really leverage and move forward as the heart of your community. So thank you, I really appreciate it. Thank you, Domenic. Yeah, could you go back to the slide on demographics? Sure. Seriously, I love this, I can't tell you how much I love this slide. Like this is like, this is the page one, this is on the front of the Glossy Flyer for Amherst Regional Public Schools. It's so amazing the eclecticness of diversity that we have on so many different dimensions in such a small school. And so it's not just ethnicity and diversity as shown here, but in terms of language diversity and economic diversity and cognitive ability, a neurodiversity, if I'm thinking to myself, if I had kids that were going to go into elementary school and said, where do I want them to go to school? This would be the start of, this would be at the top of the list and it's such a strength when I think about what is special about Amherst schools? We always say people move to Amherst because of the schools, why is that? One reason obviously is because we have amazing teachers and our community invests the resources that we can have small class sizes and so our academics and our support of the arts is great. But this is like another thing that you can't engineer and so I'm so glad that you featured this so prominently and that you have the social justice committee featured so prominently in a lot of these initiatives to reflect and support that diversity. And it just makes me so happy to see this. So thank you for emphasizing that and it's funny, Dr. Morris, when we talk about marketing and how do we highlight the strengths of our district, it's just such a special place to be because of this, because of this melting pot environment. So the question I have is more for Dr. Morris, when I look at this resources column, I see a lot of dollar signs in terms of implementing that and I always think about this two-sided coin of how we want to differentiate and as you mentioned earlier in your presentation about how not one size fits all, we want to meet every learner where they are. That takes a lot of resource support of teachers and so we don't want to set great teachers up to fail with lofty expectations that we can't financially support and so how do we strike that other than just saying we'll creatively make it work? Where do those conversations happen where we really have to pull back and say this is what's practically achievable and this is what's aspirational? So I have two responses to that. One is that I think this team and I think collectively the elementary schools have gotten really, I think of the right adjective. Savvy about how they look at their budget and making sure that their every dollar is spent wisely. So the past practice historically is that teachers would spend line, there'd be money collectively that we get to this time of the year and people would be spending furiously and what I've noticed a difference over the last few years is that Crocker formed a good example but I think it's true at all schools are being much more deliberate about their resource management throughout the year and Kudos to the principals and Kudos to Mr. Mangano who's been really worked with principals closely on that. So when we think about resources the first thing I wanna note is that it's the right question but one of the responses has been the thoughtful use of resources that are already in the budget and I don't wanna go back in time but I would say that our principals are using them more thoughtfully and more gradually throughout the year instead of being concerned and some of that's that we had years like this year where we weren't freezing budgets. So I think in the past sometimes there was such a concern about freezing budgets that all the money would be spent right away because you didn't know if it was gonna be there and then other years where the flip happened where it was like, oh, we actually, the money's really there, it didn't freeze, let's spend it all on April, May and June. So I think the management of finances is one answer. I think the other one is that as we're being more intentional and more focused to use a word that I think I heard earlier it allows Mr. Sheen to look at Title I, Title IIA funds which are grant funds that we receive and can be used towards professional development more intentionally. I think one of the things that I heard from this group and I think you'll hear from Wildwood and Fort River is the benefit of putting together a plan like this is we can actually be financially planful and in the absence of something like this, things come up, there's good ideas all the time that we can think about doing and from this, this kind of document Mr. Sheen can look at both the curriculum lines at the district level but also the grant funding lines and okay, I gotta earmark this for CAS because that's who's gonna come in to do UDL and so the fact that the schools are being so much more organized now and what their needs are and what the plan is allows us to budget much more intentionally around that. I know it's long-winded but I think some of it's about you could always say yeah, with more money we could do more things but some of it's frankly about being more organized and being better stewards of the budget we have and being more intentional about how it's going to be used throughout the school year. Can I just make one last comment before we go? So I would just like to thank all of you for your observations, your comments, your support and also thank you to Mike. I don't get to say this publicly very often but Mike is someone who puts a lot of trust in us and really allows the principals and the various people in the schools to get to work and doesn't sort of stand over our shoulder sort of overly watching. Certainly there's a support and I really appreciate that. I think it is good tonight for us to spend a little bit of time celebrating some of our successes and think about some of our possible future successes but the main thing that we've gotta keep thinking about is we're not quite there yet, right? And so we've got some work to do still and Jen mentioned earlier some words equity and access and this is where we want to go, right? And there's a lot of beauty and Mr. Deming was right, you come in and you see the photograph in our school of all the families and who we look like and where we come from. It's a thing of beauty, it's working quite well and now we want it to work very, very well. So great successes and I think we got some work to do and that's where we want to go. Great, well thank you very much again for coming tonight. I look forward to hearing another update as you start to implement this work. I think we'll talk with Dr. Morris to figure out when that might be but thank you very much. Okay, moving us on then. Next item on the agenda is ADA compliance and capital needs update. Dr. Morris, do you want to? I know Mr. Roy Clark is on his way. We're a little ahead of schedule on the agenda which is not a bad thing but I was wondering if there was one of the other items that's brief that we could perhaps flip to give Mr. Roy Clark a chance to park and walk up. Sure, how about we go to the School Choice Desi Guidance? Change, is that okay? Is that okay with the committee? Great, thank you. Thanks for that flexibility. So I want to be conscious that I think everyone at this table was here at the regional conversation which isn't the same as here but in terms of the document that's in the packet, it's the same document. I think there's a different concern. So coming from the elementary level, one of the concerns about the new School Choice Guidance is that historically since 1995 when the original guidance came out for School Choice, I don't think we were even School Choice Districts at that point of view that time but since that original guidance, students who have entered the district at any grade level, the Amherst Elementary District have automatically entered the regional district at grade seven and for families that's been an expectation and understanding that that's how that would play out. This guidance changes that aspect for new School Choice Guidance. I want to be really clear. So current School Choice students are, I don't know a better word for it as I said last week or two weeks ago, I still don't have a better word but are grandfathered into the old system. So current School Choice will still flow automatically to the region but for students who are future School Choice students, it will not flow automatically to the region. What I've done since we've last spoke is I've been in touch with Desi. I spoke to them yesterday afternoon and I asked whether this change, the change of this advisory was truly a legal change or it was legal and related to a philosophical change from the department and they were clear it was a legal change. When they looked at the language, they felt like the guidance from 1995 was inconsistent with the Mass General Law that governs School Choice. Talking to our attorney, he also agrees that the guidance was inconsistent with the actual Mass General Law. There's only nine districts compilation, when I'm saying districts, I mean like for us, it'd be three districts that I work for, I work for the Pellum Public Schools, Amherst Public Schools and Region. It's only nine compilations of districts that are affected by this across the Commonwealth. Most regional districts are K to 12 or pre-K to 12 and out of those that are in our situation split between municipal elementary districts and regional districts at the secondary level, many of those do not accept School Choice students at the elementary level. So the other thing that's notable when I told spoke to Desi is they were surprised and had not anticipated the issues that might come from this legal change. And I don't say that to be flip or they just said, no, we hadn't thought through all these pieces it was strictly a legal interpretation. It wasn't about, as I said, a philosophical or policy change. And so what I've done is I have reached out to those nine superintendents across the Commonwealth who are affected. I had conversations with a few and I've reached out to all them electronically. I've drafted a letter that will go to representatives, or excuse me, elected officials at the state house. Mr. Terry has, I've asked him and he's written revised MGL language that would go into that, that would allow for regional districts and municipal districts to come to inter-district agreements around school choice. And three superintendents, myself being one of them, are now signed up on this letter that we wanna fine tune over the next few days. And we'll be sending it to our local senators because of where we are in the budget process. We'll be local senators. We'll carbon copy the representatives who are associated with those three districts and try to advocate for some legal change at the state level. I don't think it would be controversial in speaking to many of the nine superintendents. I would say the practices weren't all consistent across every district about how this had played out even before this legal change. And I've sent that legal guidance to DESI at their request so they could review the proposed legal change that we're advocating for and offer any feedback before the letter goes out. The first glance, they didn't see many issues but they wanna go through all their formal processes as well. So that was a little long-winded but I wanted to fill the committee in with kind of the interpretation that we perceive, the steps that we've taken and potential advocacy efforts that at least a group of, there's not many superintendents to make those efforts. And that's one of the challenges. Nine superintendents is not a huge number. But we're gonna do the best we can and advocate for more flexibility for this to be a local controlled decision instead of automatically entering the region or not possible to enter the region except another school choice lottery process. So Dr. Morris, I just wanna take a moment to, for folks from the community who may be watching this, who were not watching the regional school committee meeting, this, what Dr. Morris has been talking about is actually referencing a letter that we received from DESI a couple of weeks ago regarding a legal change. This is a legal advisory that was sent to us regarding a legal change that's been made that affects school choice students who are coming in from other districts, other communities that are not Amherst and that are choosing into our elementary schools. And where previous practice had been that school choice students coming in at, say kindergarten level would automatically get entrance into middle school and high school. Now that is no longer the case. And so the steps that Dr. Morris was describing was actually about trying to get this changed, understanding the impact that it would have on our families and in our communities and asking our legislators, state legislator to intercede on our behalf. So hopefully that is something that can happen. We did have a conversation about this at another committee and recognizing that our budget cycle this year is quite heavy on issues related to education legislation. A lot of asks on the table for legislators. So we don't necessarily expect that there would be change to happen in this cycle in this year, but at the very least we can make legislators aware of this as a problem that is impacting, while not very many districts still impacting quite a few families, caregivers and students, of course. So we wanna make sure that if there's any changes that we can help make that we make them. Dr. Morris, did you wanna add to that? Very briefly, thank you for that background and summary. Apologize for going too quickly on that. I think the other thing to note is this week we'll be communicating with the 68 families who have requested to enter the school choice lottery for the Amherst public schools. That's just for this particular district. For the next school year, certainly we won't have 68 seats. It won't be close to that. But just communicating to them that this is the current situation and this is the link to the actual letter that's in the packet so that we're being totally transparent. What we don't wanna do is have students enter, families enter the school choice lottery for their children not knowing this significant change and we hope they still apply. We think the Amherst public schools are a great place to continue the conversation we just had. But we wanna be transparent and fully open with families about this change because we're not convinced that the advocacy efforts will be successful. We're still gonna try, but we wanna make sure that no family doesn't come back and say you didn't tell me and it'd be a very reasonable thing to be concerned about. So we're doing that advocacy on behalf of people who are applying right now for school choice. I also wonder, Dr. Morris, if you've considered perhaps putting a notice on the district website for new families that are looking for information about the district and are thinking of applying here for their students just so that they see that front and center. Another area too to think about is perhaps some of the local newspapers and communities where we typically will get school choice applications because as you said, you don't wanna have families making an uninformed decision, right? We certainly hope they will decide to send their students here, their children here, but if it will have an impact on them in the future, then they may wanna reconsider. Any questions or comments for Dr. Morris on this topic? Mr. Demling? Yeah, so I appreciate the proactive advocacy you've taken with the superintendents. That was something I was thinking of next year given that it's pretty late in the legislative cycle. So if those efforts are unsuccessful this year, I think this is something that our school committee could consider joining in an advocacy effort next year. Obviously in the third week of May, this isn't something that we would be able to coordinate with multiple school committees on this fiscal year, but if we know that if this fails, this current advocacy effort fails, we would have time for next session. And even if it is a small number, if all or nearly all of those affected were joined in that, that could potentially be a powerful thing. And we do practically have time on this given that because of current choice students in our district are grandfathered in and most families choice in at KR1, this won't really affect most families until five or six years from now. So it's time. I guess on the communication piece, I think we should definitely update the website and make sure that anytime anybody inquires about school choice, we clarify this. I'm not sure about broadcasting it to newspapers because if we broadcast that it, hey, now you can't go into the region, but then it changes, then we would have to broadcast that change. And I think it might be confusing to sort of update as we go to external sources. I appreciate that point of view, I think. And I understand the rationale behind it. I think that's obviously gonna be a choice or decision for the superintendent to make. From my perspective, I think we can't forecast whether legislation or advocacy for the part of legislators will be successful. So I think given what we know right now, that that would be my recommendation, but the committee may feel differently and the superintendent certainly may feel differently as well. Mr. Nakajima. I hadn't really, I mean, that could be misunderstanding. I hadn't really understood the point being doing a press release or something. My assumption, if I misunderstood that, I thought we just wanted to make sure that our website had clear information so that if somebody, like there has in fact been a change in the school choice program, anyone who's applying they should know that, right? Like we'd absolutely want them to know that. And so I told, to me, having that on the website and maybe even having it as, if you know the distinction I'm getting at, like news on the website, as opposed to news you'd actually send to a reporter. Like to me, it should be news on the website because you wanna make sure that anyone, and I think similarly sending out the letters to the 68 families who've applied, I think that's great to do that because they need to know that. They may very well, I mean it's unfortunate, but the reality is it may affect some of their decisions or not. I'm depending on how they're looking at that 12 or 13 year period. So I think that's particularly important. It is hard to handicap because I think the fact that Desi didn't think this was, they considered it more of a technical fix than one that was meaningful is actually weirdly good news because it means they're not gonna be opposed to changing it. The trouble is if it's only nine districts and you described, oh you talked about this earlier, you were describing how some districts, there's different superintendents secondary and elementary and so in those kind of bifurcated situations, there may not be a collective desire on the part of those communities so they're gonna be able to act with collective action and unfortunately the more you get that kind of response, the less likelihood anyone's gonna view this to be a problem to be solved for a while. But I think we just need to keep at it. The reality is the problem for us and if it's only a problem for us and four or five of their districts, then we need to keep banging on it because we wanna help our families. Dr. Morris. I think the feedback I've heard from a couple of people I spoke to is on the advocacy front maybe the timing's difficult this year but it's hard to think that people would be opposed to this change because all it does is it allows for local control and it doesn't cost the state anything. So the challenge is actually getting it on, getting it through a process, like who's gonna advocate for it? But everyone I've spoken to including superintendents who didn't feel comfortable signing on because of similar to what Mr. Nakadima said, they're like, no, the flexibility would be, like you don't have to take it on. So I think it's a relatively non-controversial budget neutral item, it's just, how does it actually get on the plate that it needs to get on to move? Okay, any other comments or questions on this topic? Okay, moving us along, thank you Dr. Morris for the update, please keep us posted. Next item on the agenda is ADA compliance and capital needs update. Dr. Morris, do you wanna introduce? I will, thank you, I'm Mr. Roy Clark and come up and there's a bright green button on that means people will be able to hear you if you speak and if it's not then you wanna press one of those buttons to make it bright green. So we've spent multiple times this year about the ADA audit and in the current draft of the joint capital planning, JCPC, there are funds allotted for repair work as it relates to ADA audit. To review, there was a presentation in January, we continued working with the firm that specialized in this with three community based meetings where anyone from the community staff members or families could come. We did, I think Ms. Spitzer asked me or the chair to say, but since I'm talking you said okay, Ms. Spitzer and Mr. Yaffe spoke yesterday. So one of the feedback from the last meeting is making sure Wildwood both from a staff perspective as well as from parent perspective were able to contribute to that. So they were able to have a conversation and Mr. Roy Clark heard all that and wants to share a bit of where he is in the planning and what the next steps are moving forward. So with that, I think I'll turn it over to him. Thank you Mr. Roy Clark for being here. Thank you for having me. Yeah, I'd like to start just by thanking the JCPC for giving us funds this coming fiscal year to start cracking on these problems. I think everyone understands that this is gonna be a multi-year process both because of timing and cost and the intricacies of working around school schedules. That said, I believe that our primary goal should be to improve accessibility getting into the school and out of the school into the playgrounds and out of the playgrounds. Those are the areas where we would have the greatest impact on the most number of people. And so I proceeded with that assumption to try to prioritize those goals. In your packet, you will have a spreadsheet itemizing the 31 goals for exterior improvements that the ADA study developed that KMA developed for that. And you'll also have my write up of my prioritization approach but just to sort of briefly go over my thinking based on the assumption that getting into and out of the schools and the playgrounds is our priority. There are some areas where it's beyond our physical abilities to make a complete remediation but we can make some progress I believe in improvements there. So what I did was I took all 31, I broke them down in their in-year spreadsheet and tried to prioritize them at four levels. Highest, high, medium and low. And I made seven prioritization assumptions that are in your packet. Getting into and out of the school more easily is the highest priority. Getting between the school and the playground is next level down, high priority. Being able to get in and out of the highly used courtyards and having access to picnic tables and benches would be medium priority. And the infrequently used courtyards and play areas would then become a lower priority. Mitigating some of the lower lesser accessibility issues might end up being a lower priority. I can give you some examples of that. Rubberized play services were listed as being desirable but the expense and the maintenance of those may push them into a lower priority category. So with that general framework, in your spreadsheet everything is identified. Now a lot of the recommendations from the ADA study actually had several actions needed for one issue. And so you'll see in your spreadsheet, sometimes there are two, three or four actions needed to be taken and I prioritize them separately to try to help get a handle on the scope of the issue. So my next steps will be to share this with stakeholders to see if my prioritization scheme works for them and to get better information about which areas are more important or less important or more highly used. I need to prioritize access to the playgrounds and we're not gonna be able to make every possible route to the playground accessible this year. So I need to try to get some information from the users in the school. What routes would be best for them and see what we can afford to do. Once I have all that information, we'll be going out and getting some design work and some bin work done. There's a couple of other things in the way. Some of the parking issues have to do with slope of parking lots and some of the parking lots like at Wildwood are quite steep. I'm not quite sure how much we can mitigate the slope at the accessible parking areas there. So I'm looking into possibilities of changing where they're located. So there's a bunch of moving parts there that I have to evaluate with folks who know more about these kinds of things than I do. The bench and table accessibility issues, there's some choices there, whether we add sidewalk to the benches and tables or move the benches and tables or simply add more accessible benches and tables on a pathway that's already accessible. So there's some decision making there. We'll be looking at what we can manage in-house with our staff as well as what we need to hire out and some consultation, some design work for where we need ramps, especially in a couple of the courtyards that are highly used. And then we'll be putting the other bid documents and putting them up to bid. I think a lot of the contractors that are dealing with paving issues are already booked for this summer. So this is gonna be a process that will take a little time to get in place, but it's no time like the president to get it started. So that's sort of a quick overview. Do you want me to go into more detail or do you have questions? Well, why don't we take questions from the committee at this point? Ms. Chinagajima, I saw your hand go up. Sure, thank you. I think, thank you very much. Thanks for the presentation. I guess I have two questions. And one, you started the answer a second ago. Are you anticipating that for some of the items that have to go out for bid, that you're likely to do the work in spring or something like, like you'd work through getting out the whatever bids and things like that to center what you're gonna do. And then given what you just said about construction teams being booked already that you'd anticipate of getting done later, that's the first question. And the second one is, you prioritized, completely understandably, a lot of parking lot-oriented work, but then you identified a lot of challenges with doing parking lot work. I mean, not at Wildwood for a very sort of a hard to imagine how you fix challenge or the entire parking lot unless you're doing the work. But then even at the other ones, I'm just curious, since that's been put as the highest priority or as high a priority as there is, how are you digging into the feasibility of creating these accessible spaces, for example? Excellent. Yes, I recognize that some of that is not something that we can accomplish. For example, we're not gonna totally regrade the entire front parking lot at Wildwood. It's conceivable that we could take some soil out and build a retaining wall on the section closest to the building and that might be economical, but I don't know until I get some pricing. So that's why I'm pursuing alternative locations for that parking that would be on flat or ground, not necessarily as close to the main entrance as the current spots, but possibly more accessible because they're flat. So even though it's my highest priority in terms of where, what I think we wanna address, addressing some of those issues will be partial at the first round. So for example, once again at Wildwood, the sidewalk going around the south side of the building is in terrible shape, largely because of the trees that are planted right next to it and their roots have caused humps and bumps and all kinds of stuff. So I don't think that it's gonna be reasonable for us to redo that entire sidewalk, but if I can find an acceptable route to do sections of it instead of the amount of money it would take and possibly the damage to the trees that are there to fix it, that would be my first choice. But I wanted to be clear about the prioritization as a first step and then we have to look at what we can afford and what design we can do to alleviate situations that we can't completely mitigate. Does that help some? It sounds like Mr. Naga-Juji, do you have a clarifying or is that answer your question? Sure. Okay. Any other questions or comments from the committee? Mr. Dunleng. Oh, yeah, so thank you very much for this. Sorry. I really appreciate it. I basically was saying thank you. You're welcome. I really appreciate that the first next step is to verify the prioritization of the stakeholders. I've found in my own personal trying to learn about accessibility and which is still an ongoing process that sometimes the assumptions I make at a systematic structural level aren't totally in line with people who are working with students on an individual level. They might have like a story that they say, oh, this small cost item would make a huge difference because of XYZ. So I don't think at your level you need to go and talk to every single teacher, but having like the building administrators being able to collect that information, particularly from the teachers and the support staff who are working with students with accessibility issues and having that rolled up so that the building administrators can share that with you, I think would really help in calibrating. The previous theme you were talking about about effective use of resources that thoughtful application. But thank you very much for the presentation. Very organized. Dr. Morris. Could I add to just, and I know you'll agree with me or I think, is that CPAC is another really incredibly valuable resource in terms of a stakeholder group that has met multiple times in this topic with district administrators, River myself, but also building level administrators and often have a window into whether it's through children or adults or just a larger perspective that can benefit us in the work and they would be an active stakeholder in this process as well. Absolutely, I agree with your comments and that, as Dr. Morris said earlier, that conversation has already started between me and some of the elementary school principals and hopefully it will continue through all of you as well as CPAC and other organizations that are involved. This is not a done deal. This is a first crack at how can we approach this most reasonably and get the biggest effect out of the money that we have available and until we have some design work done and some pricing done and some feedback from the stakeholders done, I don't think we'll be signing contracts to do work. Mr. Nakajima. The only thing I would say is, I probably got hung up on the fact that when I was looking at the qualifications you put on some of the items that you were listing and I was thinking in my head how challenging it might be to accomplish them even if they're considered valuable investments to make is I'd also just say when you're looking at the next 13 months, it would be wonderful to do some things that are deeply felt and meaningful to the communities in our elementary schools but also to individuals, staff and students and others who would be most personally affected by it. And so I'm just saying that while you're prioritizing things and engaging with the community and the administrators to think about what to do, don't make the perfect the enemy of the good. If you can find that between now and a year from now, July, you could have done things that could have made a real difference and move the community forward whether they're medium or high priority items. Absolutely and I think that's absolutely right. And there's feedback that I'll be looking for. I mean, one of the things that got identified at practically every school was the assessable parking signs were not at the appropriate height. Now to my mind, that may be a lesser priority but I need feedback to find out if I'm correct in that assumption. It's not a big ticket item to fix but we need to pick and choose where we put our energies just because there's only so much we can do. So I'll be, my mind is certainly open to hearing what's really gonna make a big difference. So I just to jump in would also say thank you for putting this together and for thinking this through. We've had this conversation multiple times before. There's a real challenge here, right? Because we have applied to the MSBA for funding to rebuild, renovate depending on what a future feasibility study building committee decides. One or both of our schools, obviously all three of our schools are showing problems and need to be addressed but that said, I know that the community has expressed a very strong dislike for the idea of throwing money away because if we end up redoing one or both of these buildings we will potentially have thrown away whatever work we've done into making it accessible or anything like that. That said, we still have students and educators and community members that come to our schools on a regular basis that are challenged by the infrastructure and the challenges that many of us take for granted. We can step over that crack in a sidewalk, become monumental challenges for people with mobility issues and other challenges. And so I also wanna echo the sense of urgency I think that we've heard to try to address as many of these issues as we can as soon as we can without having to wait in an inordinate amount of time. Again, balancing those priority issues and I think I'm anxious I guess to bring in local experts and to have them do a walk around of the buildings and of the properties to get some input on cost and feasibility and how long it would take to implement any of these projects. It definitely feels like there's a lot of things that you've outlined here in this plan that are low hanging fruit that would be pretty easy like the signs that you just mentioned. We don't necessarily need an expert for something like that, right? But I do think that bringing in other voices sooner rather than later to help advise us would be really helpful, especially if we anticipate that getting bids from local contractors is gonna take a while because of the time of year that we're potentially putting in those bids. Another point that I wanna make is just something that I've heard anecdotally. It was mentioned in the report and again I recognize that this is just sort of a first draft but just in thinking about priorities one of the things that struck me was categorizing playgrounds, the rubberizing the play surface as a low priority and I understand the reason why because of cost and at the same time it is an accessibility issue because people cannot ambulate very well on wood chips especially if they're using wheels to get around or they have limited mobility. And so it is I think honestly a consideration for us if at all possible for us to replace some of these surfaces with something that is actually more accessible in the short term. I do know that there's some community members that would be interested and would benefit from that for having that be a part of the equation. So I guess my caution is to not necessarily dismiss that quickly for things like that even though again cost may be a factor whether or not these are gonna be on sites that may or may not be replaced in the next few years at the same time they have such a high impact and there's such benefit to students and others that we really need to strongly consider whether or not we should be doing it. Yes, you're not the first person to mention the soft surfaces to me and that's part of why I wanna get input from the stakeholders and see what's gonna make a big difference. Absolutely, yeah. Any other comments from the committee or questions? Okay, thank you very much again for taking the time to come tonight. My pleasure, sorry, I hope I have your meeting. No, this is great. Very good timing, thank you. Next item on the agenda is the superintendent evaluation tool. This is a possible vote. So this is a conversation that has begun at, well, we had it here. Do we call like an actual break? This is a technical dilemma over here. Yeah, we don't have any more power points, right? No. Can you speak in the... Can you hear me? Yeah, it sounds, that's funny because I actually heard this mic sound like it was working normally. It's just a room echoing. Good being. I think it might be. There's a certain, there's a difference in sound. Well, now you sound like the voices. Now you sound like, yeah. Voice of the committee. Okay, so back to our task at hand. Ms. Spitzer has volunteered and very extremely helpful in helping to put together the superintendent's evaluation tool and process for which we really appreciate her work. So before the committee today and shared prior in our packets is a example because this hasn't been launched yet of the superintendent's evaluation tool. This for members who were here last year, you recognize this, this is exactly the same tool that we used before. All of the superintendent's goals for this past year have been input into this draft tool here. And so what we are voting on tonight and there's actually language for the proposed motion is to approve the evaluation tool. And then we can also talk through timing, which Ms. Spitzer has recommended that we get input back from, so this would be launched as soon as Ms. Westmoreland can launch it for the committee, which I understand is actually like pretty quickly, right? Tomorrow even. Okay, thank you, Ms. Westmoreland. And Ms. Spitzer has recommended that we get the completed evaluations back by June 8th, if that's amenable to the committee. So with that, I will take any comments, questions, thoughts that you might have on this tool and I will also take a motion if you're so ready. Mr. Nakajima. I move that the committee approve as presented the evaluation tool of the 2018-2019 superintendent evaluation. Okay, we have a motion. Do I have a second? Second. Thank you, Ms. McDonald. It's been moved and seconded. Any questions, comments? Happy dances. Mr. Demling. I just, it's one of those things that once the system is up and running, you don't really think too much about it because the system is great, but the fact that we have an evaluation tool like this that's accessible online that has been defined that has gone through so many discussions and different committees. So many different people's work has gone into this. Ms. Spitzer, the latest. It's just really great to have that opportunity and not something to take for granted that we have that. So it's all the work that has gone behind this now, excellent system is appreciated. Very well said, Mr. Demling. That's absolutely right. Okay, seeing no other questions or comments, all those in favor? It is unanimous. Thank you very much. So Ms. Westmoreland, you will send this out to the committee tomorrow. Okay, so Ms. Westmoreland will send this out to the committee with a link tomorrow. Just repeating it for the video. Yes, but for the Amherst School Committee, that will go out tomorrow with a link and the artifacts from Dr. Morris will be, will accompany that. And so we have until midnight, June 8th. Midnight, 11.59 PM, probably is what we should say, right? Yes, 11.59 PM in 30 seconds on June 8th. Okay, thank you very much. And that's that. So the next item on the agenda is the Amherst Palem Regionalization Update. And we have our very own chair of that board that sits on our committee to help update us on where that committee stands. Mr. Demling. Yes, so last Tuesday, the 14th, our board took a formal vote not to recommend regionalization and to complete our report as is the core requirement of mass general law. And that will be completed over the coming weeks. We don't expect to be meeting past next month. And we will submit that to the Amherst Town Council on the Palem Select Board, make ourselves available to other committees, should they wish, but that should conclude our work. So I thought I would just put a bow on this given that it has been over a year, over 40 meetings and a lot of work from a number of volunteers. So the vote was unanimous, it was 5-0. There was one member absent, but that member was also supportive of the vote. And it was fairly clear. And I think from the beginning, we had always said that we were looking for, to answer the question, is this a win-win for both communities, both Amherst and Palem? And I think the conclusion of all board members was that it wasn't, that it was always a high bar needing both the evidence of educational and financial benefit to both towns, but also clear or at least strong indication of public support and support from town officials. So when you looked at that from both towns that clearly wasn't there. I think the financial benefit to the Palem was what was there, and there was support expressed from Palem town officials, but that was sort of it in terms of checking all those boxes, the public input that we got. Even though we had sparse attendance at our public forums, we did hear from members of the public over the course of our work. And for most, it was a range of responses from either apathetic to just not supportive. And so it certainly was not an overarching call for it. So, we were talking about other responses. I think we understood the response from the Amherst town officials about the concerns about not wanting to complicate the statement of interest and the fact that we're in a new government and we haven't even had a year's cycle of that. And those are understandable. I think a couple of take homes that I leave the process with is, one, is that I think we're fortunate in Amherst that we're not yet at a state of real fiscal urgency that would make us really consider something like this. I mean, there was savings. It wasn't enough to motivate, but there were savings. And when I look at the future big variables in school funding, there's so far no evidence that the state is going to change its posture on funding school districts like ours, ours that rely on per pupil cost and hold harmless district, so to speak, and rely on the unfunded mandates and that are hit hard by charter school funding. So until those things are addressed on a fundamental level, we can expect that variable to trend in the negative. And we also know that we have fantastic support from the town in terms of the value of education and back that up. But the town has limited resources as well. And so we understand this may be something that we have to come back to a number of years from now. So I think that's just one thing. I think that's the other thing is, and our board expressed this is just great frustration with the state in terms of its support for regional schools. On the one hand, we had a regionalization and efficiency grant that funded our consultants. And so that was great, but it didn't cost the two towns any money to go through this. On the other hand, the state has chronically shorted regional school district transportation, which is the main financial incentive. There's a number of laws that are really antiquated, the need to be updated, the cause problems with agreeing on assessment methods, with coming up with a reasonable mechanism for elections and governance, which are some of the problems that we ran into on this board. And these have been well documented by a state auditor recommended to be studied by a commission that would be minimal cost, but has not been approved by the state. Hoping it happens this year, but so with regards to those two issues, our board is considering a couple of letters this week to send to the Joint Committee on Education saying, thanks for the regionalization and efficiency grant, but if you want to actually do what you're asking us to do, what you're asking small towns and regional communities out in this area of the state to regionalize and be efficient with their state funds, need to back it up. So I think that that's another sort of big picture thing that we came back with. But at the end of the day, we'll produce a report, it should be able to be picked up should our town or other towns want to evaluate these things going forward. Yeah, and that's it. We'll be wrapping up next month. Thank you, Mr. Deming. Can you just remind me and the committee, I guess, when you expect the report to be finished or do you have a date yet? You said before at the end of this month. So we have meetings scheduled. I'm just looking at my calendar. Through June 28th, we might not need to go there. So I would say mid to late June by the latest is when we will be finished. Okay, thank you. And just to add to the comments from Mr. Deming, I really appreciate the work that Mr. Deming has put in personally, but also that the committee put into the, or the board put into to explore this issue. You know, we heard, I think, from town officials from both Pellum and Amherst at our meeting several weeks ago that, you know, there was definitely a very strong amount of admiration respect between the two communities for the work and sort of closeness that both communities have had for each other. And that said, it just did not feel like the right time to move forward. And as Mr. Deming mentioned, and as we talked about in our last meeting, this is something that, you know, none of us went into lightly. We thought it was an important question to answer. But for all the reasons that have been stated, you know, perhaps not the right time. One thing that I did hear from both Amherst and Pellum town leaders was that if there were in the future a call from community members for something like this that, you know, they would reopen the question again. But at this point in time, it doesn't seem like something that, you know, either community is completely 100% into. So we're gonna table this one. And again, thank you so much for the work that you've put into this. And I think once we get that report, it'll be useful probably to share with this committee and then probably to share out, you know, more broadly district-wide so that people are aware of the decision that's been made. Because oftentimes these kinds of boards make recommendations and, you know, the committee might hear it and then act or not act on it and the rest of the community doesn't necessarily know that it's even happened, right? That conversation has happened. So let's not let that happen again. Thank you, Mr. Demling. Really appreciate the update. Any questions from the committee for Mr. Demling? Mr. Nakajima. I just wanted to echo really deep thanks for all the work that you did and your colleagues on the board did. It's just an extraordinary amount of work and I guess I can say this kind of bit tongue and shake. Finishing up a mega month multi-hour report that by intent doesn't end up with a school being built, just informs a further process. I can sympathize, I can sympathize. I mean, I mean this in a way, I can sympathize with going through something where you've just the quality of the deliberation in the thinking that all of you did. I think also helped inform the deliberation of the towns and trying to think about, think better about, so what are really the steps, what's implied with it, what's the outcome, what are the implications? And you went through really in-depth presentation on that a couple of times, but even recently when the two towns met. And if you hadn't done all of that work, we wouldn't have been able to land where we are. It's not a great place to sit. I think it's probably the best decision for Amherst. I think for Palem, it begs the question that we talked about at that two towns meeting of, is there anything else that we can do to work together as towns because we're under a lot of fiscal stress in Amherst. There are an extraordinary amount of fiscal stress in Palem, which we are close communities. And so it wasn't a cavalier position in the part of Amherst to provide the feedback that we did. But my point is simply that if you hadn't done extraordinary work, we wouldn't have had any kind of foundation to make a decision. So I think it was really, really great work. Okay, so thank you very much. Moving us along, last time on the agenda, well, for the new and continuing business anyway, is accepting gifts. We do have quite a few gifts, which is very exciting. So I will take a motion if anyone wants to read these. Mr. Nakajima. I move that the committee accept the finaling donations. Fort River Parent Council, number 2029, from Music Core's t-shirts with an amount of $100. Stop and Shop, number 8073433. A plus rewards of principal's discretion, Fort River, $561.14. Lucia Spiro, number 6991, ELL students, an amount of $400 for a total of $1,061.14. And in compliance with state regulations regarding the receipt of gifts, recommend that the Amherst School Committee officially accept these donations. So we're except, I'm moving that we accept the donation of James Kwak and Sylvia Brandt, Vanguard 664581 to support Crocker Farm Preschool Program of Principal Discretion, third of three payments in the amount of $5,000. Thank you, we have a motion. Do I hear a second? Second. Mr. Dunling, thank you. All those in favor? Thank you very much. Dr. Morris, did you want to make a comment? Very briefly, Lucia Spiro is a former, she's a retired ELL teacher from our district. And I think some of you got to meet her. She came to one of the listening sessions. That's a many retired teachers from our community in March? Is that March? January or February, actually. February, excuse me. And so I just wanted to note my appreciation to Ms. Spiro, but also to retired educators who stay connected to the district. And this is one example and there's many others, but it just, she does this every year and it's my annual opportunity to thank the many people who have retired from great work in the district. Absolutely, thank you and thank Ms. Spiro. Okay, so moving us along, school committee planning. Dr. Morris? So for June, I have actually three topics listed, but all of them are pretty weighty in terms of time. The school improvement plans for both Fort River and Wildwood, superintendent evaluation, and FY20 planning. Certainly there are other ideas for them, but those three will, none of them are brief. Nothing important, right? Of course that is a joke. Any other school committee matters that we want to address in June? Mr. Demling? Maybe it's part of the superintendent update, but an update on dual language, program status, enrollment, planning, all that. Okay, if there are any other thoughts, additions for the next agenda, please feel free to email them to myself and Dr. Morris. And with that, I will take a motion. Anybody want to move? Move to adjourn. Can I have a second? Second. All those in favor of adjourning? Are you sure? We are adjourned. Thank you.