 Thank you. Welcome, everyone. This is Thursday, November 20, 2014. Dr. Anthony and Mr. Thielman are not with us at this time. Mr. Thielman may join us later in the evening. I would also like to congratulate the Hamilton High School Girls Soccer for winning the Division II North title when they defeated Conkert Kyleisle to nothing Tuesday evening. At this moment, they are playing Hingham for the state final. And at this moment, it's tied one to one with approximately 14 minutes left. We have several people at the table getting information as it comes in. So hopefully, we'll have a final score. At this time, we will have public participation. Marie Meeder? Mr. Thiel. Thank you. Marie, be careful. Just sit at the table. Just sit at the table and talk. At the table. No, no, at the table. Sit at the table. Right there. By the microphone. We need you to talk into the mic so we can have it recorded. You can record me for posterity. Yes. Hi. I'm Marie Meeder. I'm from the Arlington Education Foundation. And I happen to not have a child in the high school right now, so I'm the one who could come tonight. But I'm here to welcome you all to come to our AEF annual event Monday at Flora from 6 to 8. We're very excited about what's been going on in the schools and our ability to contribute to it and to be a conduit for all the people who want to contribute to the schools. We're excited to, we'll be hearing from Maureen Murphy about the Otteson School Improvement Grant, which I'm hearing about from my Otteson child. We'll be hearing from Laura Forrest, who's a Stratton teacher, who studies in shadow puppetry. We felt really embodied the kind of grant and work that AEF loves to fund. And so she is actually the first award of the Dawn Moses Memorial Innovations Grant. So we want to remember Dawn and all that she brought to us. And so we pick one grant per year now for that award. And so she will be talking as well. This is the third year of our technology initiative. And so we are going out in a big way to try to continue the work that we've done together with you to bring computer science back to the high school, to expand computer science and engineering in the middle school. And so we will have representatives from all of those places. We'll have Dan Sheldon and Larry Weathers and David Morse and Brandy Whitney and her cohort, whose name is just escaping me. Thank you. From the middle school with their underwater robots and other cool things. And so now those will be displays in the back so you can go back and check that out. We'll keep the talking to a minimum and make it the fun social event that it always is. So we hope to see all of you there. Thank you very much. Any questions? Thank you. At this time, I would like to direct us all to the artwork that we have around the room. It is from Deb Martin, the Bishop and Hardy art teacher, and the classes. Over here we have grade four, Georgia Roquef, marker prints. After discussing the life and artwork of the painter Georgia Roquef, the fourth grade students created monoprints of flowers using O'Keeffe's artwork as inspiration. In order to create these prints, the students first drew their images on a flat piece of styrofoam using magic markers. Then they dampened a piece of white paper using a brush. The styrofoam image face down was turned over on top of the white paper and, when removed, left behind these beautiful prints. Going down a little further, grade three, sugar skulls. The third grade is designed to their own skulls in great oil pastels after studying sugar skulls created by the Mexican Daya de los Muertos, Day of the Dead, a celebration. First, the students learned about this day of the dead. The celebration is on November 1 and 2, and is meant to poke fun at death instead of fearing it. People enjoy parades in various streets, including skulls made of sugar and decorated. They set up altars to the spirits of their ancestors in the cemeteries and prayed for the dead to return for that one night. Many people stay in the cemetery all night while others leave a feast behind on the returning skulls and spend the night at home. Then the students created their own sugar skulls designs inspired by the Mexican holiday. Unlike crayons, great pasts are made of oil, and when drawn on colored paper, they appear to glow or pop off the page. In the back here, we have grade two Miro creatures. The second grade students created drawings of creatures inspired by the paintings of Juan Miro, a Catelian Spanish painter born in Barcelona. Known for his surrealist art, his work was both dreamlike and childlike. The students in second grade observed and discussed Miro's artwork and how he created his pieces. They looked for the simple shapes that he used to put together to make more complex designs and patterns. First, the students were asked to create their own designs made out of simple and interesting shapes and lines built together to make more complex artwork. The next few art classes, the students were then asked to nicely color in their drawings without scribbling like Miro would have done. Moving over here, right behind Mr. Pierce is grade five straw blown nature paintings. The fifth grade has created paintings of animals and natural landscapes and objects using watercolor paint, brushes, and plastic drinking straws. This was a lesson in how an artist can use many different materials to create with, more specifically how painters can use many materials to make a variety of marks on the canvas. Various artworks using this method were observed and discussed. The students also discussed what they have used in the past to make paint marks on their papers, such as brushes, hands, sticks, sponges, et cetera. The students were then shown how to use a plastic drinking straw to blow puddles of watercolor paint around to create interesting marks on their papers. They were given one class to practice and see what they could do. Then they were asked to paint pictures of animals on natural landscapes using watercolors, brushes, and straws. And our last one is Abstract Collage by grade one. First grade students created mixed media abstract collages inspired by various artists, including Miriam Coutilis, a contemporary artist from Washington, D.C. Coutilis works in various media and creates beautiful abstract collages using maps, newspapers, patent papers, and paint. The students in first grade observed and discussed Coutilis artwork and how she created her pieces. They then learned about mixed media art and how it refers to artwork that uses more than one art medium or material that artists use to create artwork. First the students were asked to create their own patents on many papers to make them more interesting. The next art class, the students were asked to create their own mixed media collages using the patent paper they created the week before. Thank you. At this time we will have the budget presentation from the elementary principles. I would invite you all to come up, have a seat. I'm glad you all chose to sit that way. It'll make me the next part real easy. The first two principles to the right are our newest principles, Thad Diggman and Karen Donato. Welcome. I think we know all of them. Do you want to say anything before we start? Two to two with two minutes left. Two to two, two minutes left with our girl's soccer team. Two to two? Two to two with two minutes left. I'm sorry. Mark, would you like to begin? Michael Hanna, principal of Stratton School. Kristen DeFrancisco, principal of Hardy School. Stephanie Zurgicoff, principal at Bracket. Karen Donato, principal at Thompson. Thad Diggman, principal at Dallas. Thank you. No. Getting a shot here for the newspaper. Oh, did you get my good side note? You got your hair at me, doctor. I know, I came from camp. Are we ready? Are you introducing that and Karen, I think that's what they're waiting for. That's it. Well, yes. Okay. Normally, when a new principal comes to the district, there's an opportunity within the first few months to be introduced. We certainly, at the time of your hire, did a press release and there was a lot of information but that was back in the spring and now we're here in the fall and it's been a busy agenda this fall and so we apologize that we haven't had you come earlier but tonight is a perfect time since you're here for this, for the budget discussion as well as being here with all your colleagues. They both have said that they would prefer to just give a little background and then some of their impressions, I guess, from their first couple months here. I just wanna say that they have been absolutely terrific additions to our team and I think everyone would agree with that. It's been seamless, honestly. Just, they've immediately have jumped in and I think have developed a very collaborative and strong collegial relationship with all of the other principals in the district and curriculum leaders and I can say with a lot of pride and truth that we have a very strong administrative team. So with that, I'm gonna let you, I don't know who wants to go first. I think DI comes before DO, so yeah. I'm gonna let you go first. Good evening, I'm Thad Dingman. I started in education in Colorado as an assistant director at Early Childhood Center and was also a lead teacher. I was a classroom teacher in public schools in Boulder Valley for seven years in elementary education. I moved back to the East Coast in 2010 and took on a principal ship in Western Mass, Great Barrington area and that's where I've been the last four years, leading a regional early K to fourth grade school, Muddy Brook Elementary, and starting my fifth year here at Dallin Elementary. Impressions, that's interesting. You know, I think just to kind of share Kathy's sentiment, hitting the ground running is exactly how it's felt and how it's been, it's been wonderful. I made this move professionally to work with a collaborative team, I've certainly found that. This is an incredibly welcome group and strong group of educators to be working side by side with great leadership, great systems in place. The school's exciting, it's a fast paced, busy day, lots of kids, lots of teachers. The thing that has really struck me right away is the ethic that the educators carry in the Arlington schools, especially Dallin. The classrooms and the quality of instruction is really high. They are absolutely earning the high standard that we're seeing and the outcomes that we're seeing. And they're educators who wanna hear about ideas and wanna grow, so it's felt like a really great fit. I don't know if I have that much to say, but I'm gonna try. So I'm Karen Donato, thanks for having me here. I am actually an Arlington resident and my children go to Dallin and I'm a little concerned about the new one. So far, it's going really well. I started in the early elementary, grades, teaching, first grade, and then into grade and kindergarten. I did some time in life skills classrooms in Medford Public Schools. And then I spent the bulk of my time teaching in a middle school and and over with an emotional behavioral program. And for the prior three years to coming here, I was assistant principal at Stull Elementary School, at Center School in Stull. We survived a building project, so it was so nice to come in just on the tail end of a building project. I'm thrilled to be here. I couldn't have asked for a better team to work with. And I know I can pick up the phone at any time if I have any questions. As I waved my way through some of the challenges we're facing that I can get, Laura, Kathy, anyone on the team, it's been a great transition. So I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you. Okay, thank you. Any other questions? Anyone? Questions? Mr. Dingman? Yes. You're not a Broncos fan, are you? No. Oh, that's true, that's why I work. We never asked that. It's worse. So that's it, you're not getting anything. You can take the fifth if you choose. I'd like to strike any response to that question from the record. Let it be known, I did not answer that question. As long as you're not a Yankee fan. Okay, there we, we're gonna be okay. Okay. Great. Great. Before we begin, there's two other people here that are tonight to be supportive. There are two elementary special education coordinators, Chris Carlson and Jill Parkin that are sitting back there. Awesome. And of course, you know, our director of special ed. So the purpose of this evening goes back to, what we started a couple of years ago, which was to hear from our leadership at our different schools as to what you perceive as being where we are right now, how the budget from the previous year is manifesting in the work of the school, and to talk about what you might perceive as ways that we, needs that we have, ways that we could even do a better job than we're doing. And so they've been working together discussion as to their presentation. I think, Kristen, you're going to give the main presentation. Karen and I are going to share. And Karen and Kristen are. But this is a joint presentation. The first time we did this, every school did it, and we realized that there was first of all, too much commonality not to do it this way. But I think it's important, everybody knows that this was a joint, jointly produced, and there'll be an opportunity for questions after. So I thank you, and give you an update on the resources that we prioritized in our budget last year. One of the things we asked for were more BCBA and BSP support, which are board. Would you spell that out? Absolutely, I was just going to do that. So BCBA is Board Certified Behavior Analyst, and BSP is Behavior Support Personnel. And when a student is struggling socially, emotionally, we're able to tap into these resources in order to help those students be successful in school. They consult as we develop plans, like those described to us by Jessica Minahan. Have you seen her presentation? It's fantastic. I recommend you get a chance to see one of the presentations if you can. And she's working with the district to build our knowledge of behavior through professional development workshops in her book, The Behavior Code. Because of the increased BCBA support, specific BCBAs are now designated for work at specific schools. While they each have two or three schools, there is still a point person to connect with when a teacher is struggling with a student that cannot access the curriculum due to their social or emotional needs. In some cases, BCBAs, along with the special education department, may be able to support a school by assigning a BSP to a building with a specific intervention plan in mind for that child. These short-term plans have been helpful in supporting the students that he or she can remain in their home school in their least restrictive environment. And I think we all agree that we've seen a lot of success with particular students in that area. Additionally, we had asked for more support for our library TAs, and we were happy to be able to have retained our library TAs. And we're thankful that we are able to increase their importance and work with our students with a salary increase. That has been very significant. Another thing we had spoken about last year were more support for special education liaisons and having at least two highly qualified special education liaisons. And our buildings for a second year continues to help not only service increasing special education caseloads, but also helps us implement models of co-teaching to support general education RTI instruction. Because special educators are now able to take on three grades each, they're able to focus on three grade levels of curriculum as opposed to six as was the previous model. We have seen the amount of collaboration with classroom teachers increase because of the reduced grade level load. Liaisons are able to build closer relationships with students that allow them to be more effective with instruction. These liaisons have been able to become part of differentiated group instruction that is based on data and to support subgroups composed of both special education students and regular education students. Having this kind of expertise in our buildings has definitely shown to be effective as we create learning environments based on data and begin to implement co-teaching strategies that benefit all of our students. Does anybody wanna chime in from there? Oh, also, we had talked about this last year. We'll continue to talk about this. As maintaining small class size, we do feel this is always going to be a priority for us because smaller class size increase our ability as educators to do the kind of teaching and for students to do the kind of learning that our district goals support. So that was what we asked for or prioritized for last year, that's fine. Doesn't matter. What we prioritized for last year and this year as we got together we and moved into thinking about next year already even though we're only in November. We have kept our district goals in mind and are requesting support based on fulfilling these goals. The district's first goal reads that the Arlington Public Schools will ensure that every graduate is prepared to complete a post-secondary degree program. Pursue a career and be an active citizen in an ever-changing world by offering a rigorous, comprehensive, standards-based, driven K-12 system of curriculum instruction and assessment that integrates social, emotional, and wellness. In order to do this, we go on to state that students will receive increased support for social-emotional needs in recognition of the interconnection between the social-emotional needs of students and the academic challenges of the curriculum. So based on that goal, we feel that in order to do this we need the support of a full-time social worker in each elementary school. Social workers work in each building on a daily basis with students who need support to access the curriculum due to many reasons. Some include anxiety, while others include the need for social scaffolding so that they can become contributing members to their classroom communities. We speak often about building the capacity of our classroom teachers around social-emotional support for students and the way we do this each day is with our social workers. They participate in administering plans that help all students access the curriculum and remain in the least restrictive environments for learning, their classrooms. These interventions occur beyond individual sessions and lunch group sessions. The support also occurs on the playground, in the cafeteria, and in classrooms so that students have in-the-moment support and scaffolding to practice needed skills. Having a full-time social worker in each building has been supported by a grant that will expire at the end of the school year. This is why we are asking for the town to maintain the full-time social worker position in each elementary school. I don't know if anyone else wants to chime in before I go on to the next issue, but I don't know how I would do my day without my social worker. This is a very, very important part of our community. You guys all set? Okay. Still in goal one, we have set forth an initiative to emphasize inquiry-based learning in order to promote student engagement and a deeper understanding of the curriculum. We are doing just that this year in mathematics as we are using our math coaches to work with teachers to design and support inquiry-based learning in math. We have begun this work in writing with a literacy lab approach to professional development. Teachers visit others who are models as they teach model writing lessons. They meet and reflect about these lessons. The observing teachers then go back to their classrooms to put this work into place. We would like to implement this model with reading as well and enhance it by providing additional literacy coach support so that when teachers begin to implement these model lessons in their classrooms, they have a coach to work with to provide feedback and strengthen the teacher practice. We have seen the benefit of this coaching model in math over the past two years and look forward to enhancing our reading instruction in the same manner. This is why we ask for the support to have a professional development time for teachers and a .5 literacy coach in each elementary school next year. Everybody good with that? Anyone want to add anything? Okay. Our next request is in order to leverage the time children spend in the intellectual and inquiry based environment described tonight, we've been spending time on enhancing our use of data to inform our instruction. Goal one, initiative four and five, talk about our commitment to narrow the achievement gap by providing subgroups additional support to obtain a PPI of 75 in the aggregate and in the high needs subgroups as well as an SGP of 51 or higher. Our goal to initiative two states that administrators and teachers will be provided professional development and planning time to be able to systematically and routinely use data to guide instructional decisions and meet students learning needs. In addition, initiative five references the need for teachers to have support around differentiating for students. We are excited to be able to provide more consistent time this year to teachers for data meetings that are helping teachers to define these subgroups and plan interventions accordingly. What we do need to enhance this model is continued professional development around analyzing data and running these meetings in a way that reaches all subgroups. Further, we would like to modify, improve and refine our data collection around response to intervention. Our subgroups are not making the effective progress that we would like to see. We need to have a way to figure out what we are missing and monitor progress. This may include the purchase of a data collection system that would help us bring relevant data to our meetings. This is why we ask for support with providing professional development for teachers and administrators around running effective data meetings and the purchase of a program that would provide multiple data measures to inform student progress and support our efforts for intervention. Everybody ready? OK. You're quiet a bunch tonight. As we work to enhance our instructional practices around math and ELA in our previous requests, we would also like to spend time on thinking about the curriculum that we currently have in the area of science. We would like to start the process around adopting a STEM science curriculum that speaks to next generation science and is aligned with common core state standards. This kind of curriculum would be more in sync with some of the engineering units and Scratch junior units that we currently have at the elementary level as supplements. This is why we ask for support in the purchase of a STEM curriculum. Oh, you want to take the tools one? OK. As we all know, our Tools of the Mind curriculum in kindergarten is helping teachers to provide an environment in which our youngest students gain confidence self-regulation skills and their first exposure to discovery and inquiry-based learning. It is this foundation that will prepare these children to continue being engaged in their learning and work to become college and career ready. A recent study of the program by New York University that has just been published, the results show that students and tools classroom in comparison with students in controlled classrooms showed gains in executive function, as well as literacy and math achievement. Their achievement accelerated in first grade, meaning that they learned more efficiently and had a greater growth rate than peers from controlled classrooms showing lasting effects. These gains were especially significant for at-risk students. As teachers across the district work with tools, coaches, and visit mentor teachers, it becomes ever apparent that in order to deliver this program throughout the entire day, teachers and students would benefit from having a full-time teacher assistant. This is why we are asking for full-time kindergarten TAs next year. But I also wanted to add that because last Friday I attended a conference along with Evelyn Jarosa, one of the reading coaches, about Teaching Strategies Gold, which is a Department of Education initiative for more assessments at kindergarten level. I see people nodding their heads. It's a very big undertaking, and the teachers are being asked to do a lot of work and not questioning the value of the work. Just the workload itself is really demanding. So between tools and teaching strategy goals, our kindergarten teachers are really, really feeling the burden this year. And full-time TAs just seem necessary in this area. Should I just finish off? Why don't you do that? OK, I'll keep going. And finally, we have found it increasingly hard to recruit higher and retain qualified TAs to build the capacity of special education and general education instruction. As stated earlier, in order to create intellectually stimulating experiential learning environments that reach all subgroups, teachers need support to run inquiry-based, data-based, and differentiated classrooms. This requires a level of TA support that our TA salary base does not always support. This is why we're asking for an increase in TA salaries for next year. School Commitment members, we thank you for the opportunity to speak with you this evening and have shared our requests in order of priority. We are all happy to answer any questions you may have about these requests, as well as how we're using our resources around last year for these requests. Thank you. Questions? This starts. All right, so you said maintaining small class sizes. Loosely. Did you define small? I think it's depending on the grade level, I would have to say, and depending on particular cohorts. In the younger grades to see 25, 26 students in a classroom without a teaching assistant, we have really great teachers who are doing wonderful things, but the small group instruction that we want to do, the inquiry-based instruction that we would like to do, very often does require, for certain parts of the day, more adult intervention in the room, than is now available to students. So I still need numbers. I mean, and you don't have to answer now. I absolutely, I mean, I don't want to put you on the spot. But if at some point you could think about what the ideal is, just so we know. Because, I mean, I'm a teacher. I know that in sixth grade I know about what I can handle, but I don't teach K to five. So I would love to know from you guys, even if it is every grade is possibly different and that's fine, I feel like we keep saying that and I just don't know what small means to you, what small means to me, what small means to the union is all very different. And so I just want to understand it from everybody's point of view. So if at some point you guys could at some point maybe think about getting us into those. If I could just interject, if we come to a point for any reason, economic or whatever, one of the ways to perceive saving money is to increase class size, we need to hear from you to what's the max? What's the max? What's the breaking point? That's important. As a former educator, I think we can all agree it's going to vary with how the classrooms are made. If you've got a lot of IEPs in a room, that's different than a class that has none. Older ones, more independent, kindergarten and stuff like that. We need to know you met. You people tell us the max numbers. So even if it has all those caveats, it's fine. It could be 30 if there's no special needs. It can be, I don't know, whatever. But I don't know how that works. So how do I? If I could just interject, at Thompson and our upper grades, we have fairly large class sizes. And while the children are well behaved per se, we don't see as many of those issues. We are seeing that the teachers are not able to have that personal interaction. One of my four great teachers said something to Fector. I don't feel like I talked individually to every child today. And that's important to those connections. Even if you have an academically high class or with little IEPs or a little behavior issues, the number is still mad at you. You don't have that time and the time and then they're taking home these additional, you know, no folks and they really want to make personal comments on writing and reading and things like that. It's having a big effect. I think too, for me this year, you know, really diving into this data even more and more and being able to give teachers more time to have to look at data, how if you're really digging into data and you're really looking at these subgroups and what each student needs, you then need to change your instruction and give that intervention in a way that those students are going to receive it or do well with it. And that starts to get tricky when you're looking at 26, 27, 28 kids. Where's the time then to deliver this kind of intervention that some of them really truly need? So I think I'd probably start to get nervous when we eat past 25 in third through fifth and then even maybe even less than that in the younger grades in hopes that if we have those smaller class sizes in the younger grades, we're creating a foundation there for them that, you know, they're really able to access what they're doing. And so even if the classes do get a little bit bigger in three, four, and five, they're coming into it with a really great foundation for learning. Thank you. That's it. Anyone else? Questions? Mr. Schlickman. Okay, my first annual traditional question is everything you said or things you'd like us to add to the budget. What are we doing that maybe we shouldn't be that might save us some money? Good question. That's hard. Of course it's hard. And you don't have to answer it now. And so I'll, you know, I'm not, I don't want to put you on the spot, but we have a finite amount of resources. And, you know, our budget is capped by our agreement to the fiscal stability plan for the town. And we've got a growing enrollment and we've got a lot of pressures on the budget. So, you know, we can do more adding if we are also finding things that seemed like a good idea a few years ago that maybe we shouldn't be doing and it might save us a couple of dollars too. So as we move forward, and in fact, as soon as you can, I don't want to penalize anyone by saying if you find savings on the elementary level, we're going to take that money and spend it in the high school. You know, I understand that my intention of asking this question is trying to be strategic and trying to get you more than anything you have. So please, within your internal conversations, the conversations with the superintendent, Ms. Johnson, let's see if we can't push the other side of the envelope a little while too. And if there's anything we can do that would make us more efficient that we don't see from this level, we would certainly appreciate it. Running seven elementary schools is slightly more inefficient than if we had one big one. So the way you can get together and share and work together and find commonality would be good. Now the thing I also want to tell you is that having done the elementary principle gig myself, I understand your statement about the need for social workers. I could not live without my social worker and she was unfortunately part-time. So I didn't have her all day, every day. And the times that she was out of the building was considerably more difficult than the times that I had her in because we couldn't schedule kids' needs based on what her schedule was. So I understand that need very well and I'm very sympathetic to that need. May I just add something? It's also a need not only in terms of all that we've talked about, but just in terms of the principal's time prior to having social workers in a school or even half-time in a school, if you have a behavior problem, it could absolutely take a principal's time all day. And we're not, we're in a different period of education where that's really not possible to have that happen. We don't have assistant principals and I'm not saying a social worker is an assistant principal. We don't look at them in that way. But on the other hand, that person is able to, you know, share the burden during the day when there's behavior problems. And I think that everybody would agree with that. Yeah, and respond to them skillfully. You know, I mean, you know, we're pretty clever, I guess. But, you know, it's a discrete set of skills that they've cultivated in their work. And so their response is also, I would say, even more effective than what I would do when referring a child to me. Can I ask, go back to another question? Go ahead. Thank you, Mr. Chair. We've actually been talking about this question like what could we reduce? I've put the question out and it always sort of stymies everyone because you've heard the top priorities but you haven't heard all the things that are below that, too. Right. And so the things that you've already heard what the effect is of the things that we were able positions or added revenue for some other reason, how that has such a positive effect. So the thing that you then derail that in favor of something else, because I think that everyone would agree that there's been a very positive change with certainly the way we've restructured special ed, math coaches, and that's not something we want to give up. And when you look at a school and a school budget, it is pretty lean, it's mainly personnel. And so do you have fewer teachers, fewer TAs, but we're just saying we want more teachers to have lower class sizes. So it's very hard. And we do not have, we're talking about the elementary science curriculum. That has been something that we haven't put a lot of money into is textbooks and curriculum. And so there are more things that we could ask for beyond that as well. So it's a hard question to ask because there's no real clear obvious answer to it. With regard to the social workers, how many do we have right now? Is there a halftime? Is a percentage in each building? No, right now we have a full time in each building. But the grant that supports. We want it to continue. We would like it to continue. Yes. Thank you. The dinosaur here, but I don't believe that they are all funded through the grant. How many do we lose? 2.5. 5? 2.5. 2.5. We lose 2.5 for the grant. And we currently have five people, one in each building right now. Am I correct? Covering 2.5. So we have 4.5 that we're paying for. We're looking to. I'm talking just at the elementary level. So we're looking to just playing with the numbers to fund the ones that the grant. Okay. Yes. Okay, with this, the halftime literacy coach that you're looking for. I assume halftime in one building, halftime in another building? Yes, that's what they say, halftime per building. I just want them, because that would mean, it means that one school's doing literacy in the morning, one school's doing literacy in the afternoon. That can be, as an elementary teacher, I wanted mine in the morning all the time. I was fortunate, I had worked in a town that just had one elementary school. Well, it's not that model, Chair. It's more supporting teachers. So that schedule can be different. Oh, okay. These literacy coaches would be working directly with teachers, as our math coaches are doing. That's great. That takes a little bit of, excuse me, full-time kindergarten TAs that you're asking for, do you currently have, do they currently have a halftime? Halftime. Halftime. Most do. Most have a halftime. There was some, Kathy, helped to support full-time kindergarten TAs and larger kindergartens, and I don't remember how many. Yes, okay. But the idea is to have full-time, okay. And the purchase of the data support system, is that just a thought or is there a particular thing that you folks have in mind? Not yet. I don't think we have anything in particular in mind. We tossed a few names around, but it would be something that if we knew we were going to. It does exist. It does exist. It does exist. It does exist. It meets the needs that you're looking for. Okay, good. Thank you. Any other questions from the committee? This time. I should have prefaced this. Thank you very much for all the work that you've done and continue to do, and you make us proud. Thank you so much. This time I would like to recognize our AEA representative, Siobhan Foley. I apologize if I missed you at the beginning. I know. I know, it's all the parents. Yep. Meeting with teachers. What are they talking about? Want me to answer? Thank you. No, I don't want to answer that. I'm just going to just ask you if there's a copy of their statement, and Mark is saying he's going to do what that's okay with. That's okay. No, it's Mark. Mark. It's okay. Yeah, it's fine. You have a copy too if you wanted to put notes on it. Their statement. You have it as your table. What do I do? There are remarks. Oh. No. That's your class. Oh yeah, I know. Is that exciting? Sure. Is it? Oh, we'll send it to you. We'll get it. Oh yeah. Oh. I'm sorry to say that the girls, it was a three to two loss. Oh. They worked very hard at it. Oh, they're number two. We are very proud of them, and thank you all participants, parents and students. Right, they have not gone this far in a long time. They won the division north, and that is truly an accomplishment as well. Wow. And they won their league. The Middlesex League is one of the toughest leagues, other than one that's hanging in there. Wow. So moving on, superintendent's report. All right, the first point is the articles of agreement for EDCO. Two meetings ago, the committee, maybe three meetings ago, the committee voted approval of the articles. The Lincoln School Committee asked for an amendment to the agreement, and it's, you have that on your, and Novus, it has to do with the, whether it's majority or two thirds, that would vote for a capital assessment should that need ever arise. This language, by the way, about assessments comes from the state. They just felt that it would be better to have a two thirds vote rather than just a majority. The chance of this happening is very, very slim, mainly because the EDCO doesn't own any buildings. The amount of capital that they have is quite limited. But the board voted approval of the new language, and now it has to go back to each school committee for a vote just on this particular change. That's all. And so what we would need is a vote by the school committee agreeing to the amendment of an affirmative vote of two thirds of the board members. So moved. Second. Any further discussion? All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Opposed? Thank you. Today we had a sad thing happen. Our two bus drivers are hurt, but they are noble components and they're doing much better. We had, I put a press release out earlier today that there was an accident on Lowell Street in which our vehicle was broadsided. And they ended up having to jump lanes and ended up in someone's residential homes front yard near propane tanks. So there was a lot of activity around this, helicopters and emergency vehicles. But at this point the good news is that no one was hurt. This is a vehicle that is a backup vehicle for using for special ed students. We always have to have backup vehicles because vehicles break down. In fact, they were coming back from getting a part to fix one of the buses. So you received a notice about that and I'm very happy to report that they're doing fine. I wanna congratulate the high school Thespians. They put on a performance last week of 12th night, which was terrific. It was so impressive, the range of acting and also being able to memorize the incredible volume of lines from Shakespeare and be so articulate and clear. It was a terrific performance. And so I wanna congratulate the Performing Arts Department because it takes quite a lot of leadership and patience and good director, being a good director in order to pull something off as well as they did. Some other good news. All of our music students, not all, but many of our music students will audition for the Northeast District Band Orchestra Chorus. And we always have a very good showing among the students that are selected for this particular group, actually three groups. There are over 1,100 students that audition for a seat in one of these groups, a district orchestra band or chorus, and we had 14 students that were chosen. Additionally, we had about 50 high school students that were showing their art at the Lexington Society of Arts and Crafts for the last two weeks. And apparently it was very well received by many people. We're gonna probably feature some of the art that was on display in the next newsletter. But anyway, it just goes to show the talent of our students and you just need to look around the room here and also be impressed at the age of these students and the kinds of work of art that they produce. So that's all good news. And again, I wanna echo congratulations to the girl soccer team because they just had a spectacular season and we're very proud of them. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, we'll be going to the consent agenda. Get it up here. All items listed with an asterisk are considered to be routine and will be enacted by one motion. There will be no separate discussion of these items unless a member of the committee so requests. In which event the item will be considered in its normal sequence. Approval of warrant number 15059 dated November 6th, 2014 in the amount of $415,660.63. Approval of second reading of the following policies, EB safety, EBCB fire drills, EBCD emergency, BEDBA agenda format preparation and dissemination. I'd like to pull BEDB. The last one. Yes. Okay. Any other? Entertain a motion to approve everything except BEDBA. So moved. Second. Any further discussion? All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Thank you. Ms. Stocks. I'm sorry, I guess I should have cut this last time but I feel like we should not take new business off of the list of things that can be on the agenda. And that is one of the things that you crossed out on BEDB. But I like having that because I like the ability because sometimes we just have stuff that comes up and we don't know if it'll get on the agenda. And so I would like to make sure that that gets on there. So I should have cut that last time. So help me with the procedure. We just accept that as a friendly amendment. So they'll have to amend it and bring it back. Right? We can vote an amendment. Oh, okay. So I would just amend to put that, I would like to move an amendment to put back on there the new business item on the agenda items. The motion has been made to amend the current document. Is there a second? Second. Any further discussion on that? Yes. Under the new rules that we're operating under on the open meeting law, basically we have to scope out what are, what's going to be reasonably discussed on the agenda. And having a catch all phrase of new business on an agenda under this context, it really runs afoul of the new open meeting law regulations. And if we note that the agenda that we have looking before us does not have new business on it. I don't think we've seen one since I've been back that has new business on it. I think the way to get something onto the agenda that we don't have has to be going through the agenda process. So there are reasons not to have new business on the agenda. So I don't think I can vote to support the amendment. Might it be interpreted, I interpreted it this way that an item that for new business to, in other words, a member would bring up at the meeting to be put on the next agenda, rather than just calling the chair or calling the superintendent. I just saw it as something that to go forward, may not be, that may not have been the intent. Ms. Dara. Mostly I'm concerned about things that can't wait. Like sometimes things come up and I agree that we, I definitely want to make sure that we follow that law and that we are doing our best. But given that we have to post the agenda 48 hours in advance and we don't necessarily meet every week. In some time, I mean, this is odd. Will we have back to that? The open meeting law affords us the opportunity to deal with emergency situations. If something came up, I think we had something once that in my tenure here that we had to act on because it could not wait for a normal posting. They allow that to happen without anything on an agenda for a spaceholder. So if the superintendent, we discovered something that required immediate action. We have to, there's a procedure. We are allowed to act on it. We then make a notification because we couldn't and we let the public know for it. So that piece can be dealt with without a placeholder. Okay. If that was the intent. So yes. Yeah, I mean, if something urgent came up, it would certainly come up under a superintendent's report because I don't know that how we'd have something urgent that the superintendent wasn't putting before us. And if we do have things that we want to talk about in the future, the appropriate venue within the structure of our agenda is to do it under subcommittee and liaison report so that if you had something that you wanted to discuss in the future, you could at that point ask a subcommittee to do it. Would it be appropriate under that category to just put other? Not the same thing. I don't think we really need to. I mean, do we all chair a subcommittee? Well, kind of, I mean, but that's part of the problem. Like what if it doesn't have anything to do with the subcommittee, like, you know, you went to something and you want to share it. Like, we don't have any place for that. And I guess that's what I always thought of as the business. My position as the chair, I'm afforded cut blanched to whatever I want to say. You folks don't. So, I mean, committee, just a spot. Maybe we should just, we could rename it to committee and member reports. I have no problem with that. Would that, I just want to make sure that we have a place for all this, you know, there's like, stuff that happens that we want to talk about. And I just don't know where it goes. Yeah. So I don't know where that, I mean, so if we don't want to put new business on, that's fine. I just want to make sure that we have some idea of where that's going to go. So, sorry. Oh, so I think there's a difference between a business that's actionable that we're going to take an action, which seems like that would violate the open meeting laws. And just report. We're saying, hey, I was at this conference and this came up and I just want to tell you about it. Right, so that's. I mean, right now, Dr. Ampe is attending a conference that would not fit on any of these committee reports, but I'm looking forward to hearing her and other than a specific agenda item under that. Maybe the word members are. Member reports. Member report. Yeah, something like that. Yeah. Subcommittee and member reports, that would be a member report. How about that? Can I ask you a question of our superintendent? Do you recall in your experience as a school committee member on your agenda, do you have a space for members to say what was new on their mind? It would come up under more subcommittee reports, but we never had new business. No. No, it's the same reasons that Mr. Schlickman had articulated. You could have member reports, I suppose under committee reports, but again, then there would have to be some definition of what a report would consist of. Right. How about a spot announcements? Oh yeah. Just announcements. Something like that. Whatever we do, it cannot be actionable requiring a vote. Right, right, right. Because that would have to be articulated in some way in the agenda. Right. I agree. If we want to announce a member is participating in a play, there's a spot for it. Right, exactly. Okay, yeah. So maybe instead of new business announcements. Announcements. Announcements, how's that? It sounds good. Yeah, okay. What do you think, Paul? I, if we dispose of the motion before us, I would support a motion for announcements. Pull my motion. Okay. Would you like? Pull my motion. I meant, actually I'm gonna, so I meant now I'll try a new one. Don't amend the amendment. Pull the first one, new one, is to amend BEDB to include an item called announcements that will be on the. Second. There we go. Any further discussion? All those in favor? Aye. Moving on to committee reports. Now we have to, don't we have to approve the whole policy? Well, yes. Okay, thank you. Okay, approve for second reading. I move we approve BEDBA for second reading. As amended. As amended. Is there a second? Thank you. Further discussion? All those in favor? Aye. Now may I go on to the. Now you can. To subcommittee reports, policy and procedure. Mr. Pierce. Well, we just approved some policies. Thank you all very much for doing that. We will meet again on December 2nd. Is our agenda been posted yet? I think so. Yeah, last week. I don't have it in front of me, but full of. Policies. Policies. Policies. Well said. Well said. All right. A couple of things. The first one is I want everyone to know that as you may already be aware that we are going to see some cuts in our budget due to reductions by our governor, Patrick. No. Yes, we are. Oh, yes we are. Speaker Julio. No, that's different. Okay. So the cuts are coming in two packages. There's a first set of cuts that Patrick does not need approval for. Those are gonna be things like regional transportation, special education reimbursements, Metco funding, most of those have already been announced. Those are going to affect us directly. There's a whole bunch of other line items that are going to be affected that he has control over. He asked the legislature to also make cuts to cities and towns. Delio has said no, but we have a $329 million budget gap. So we're gonna have to find, well, he's gonna have to find out where those come from. We can all know that they're coming from our pockets. So I just want people to be aware of that. We don't really know exactly what everything is gonna be or when it's gonna be, but I do wanna make people aware of that, that that is happening. I know Adam and everyone is well on top of this and well aware of it, but a lot of people who watch may not realize that that's what's going on. And the second thing that I wanted to let the committee know is that long range planning. I hope anybody who attends that meeting got the notice that they had to move it from December 2nd. That is no longer a meeting time. And they are looking at either December 15th, which is a Monday, or December 18th, which is a Thursday. And they have sent out a doodle poll to try to figure that out. In the morning. Yes, it's always at eight o'clock. Yeah. So those are the two things on budget. Another thing that I wanted to talk about was when we went to long range planning, the last meeting they had, and then also I saw a mail from, I guess it was from someone in Melrose, and I forwarded the information to everybody about how Melrose has changed their website to put up, they're gonna change the information on their website to give people updated information about schools and schooling and what's going on. And I just thought, and then after when we went to long range planning, we brought all this data with us about schools and schooling and kind of town census data, all this great data. And I realized that we don't, like we should share that with everybody. Like a lot of people may really be interested in that data. And as I was reading this stuff on the Melrose webpage, it was just interesting. It was like going to school isn't the same as it was. And I think we all do it, things get stuck in your head. You think, oh, we are a town of X, we have this many children, we have this many percent of families with children in the school, and yet those statistics change. And it would be good, I think. And so I am wanting to pass the torch to our community relations team to kind of maybe figure out a way where we can put some of that information. I like it the Melrose one, it's literally right on the front page. But I just, and it doesn't have to happen very often, but I think that there's just some really good data out there that if we shared it and people knew, because when we went to long range planning, we realized that there was just a lot of stuff. We live with it every day, like we know, God, we have this whole new curriculum, we have the Common Core, we have this new teacher eval system. People who aren't in education don't necessarily know that, they don't realize all the stressors and all the stuff that's going on in the schools. And I feel like more and more people, the more transparent we can be with what's going on and just sharing that information, the more they will understand what we're dealing with. I think also those other people coming to the long range planning, if they had that knowing where it was, could touch on it ahead and save you a lot of time in that presentation. They come from, like we're trying to do with our agenda and stuff like that. Exactly, exactly. So I just thought maybe you guys could take a look at that. I'm not on that committee, but. You can come visit. Yeah, absolutely, I'm glad to. If you guys are going to talk about that, that would be awesome. Yeah, well, when the esteemed chair of the budget subcommittee is concluded with the report, policies, I mean, community relations may take you up on that. All right, cool. And the only other thing I had is, I did want to mention that, unfortunately in the article that we have made in the advocate today, we are quoted as saying the school committee admitted it violated the state's open meeting law. And I want to make sure that people know that we did not state that. We did not violate the open meeting law. What we stated was that it's hard to know with the open meeting law. And that we are, we admitted that we are continuing to support the open meeting law as we move forward. But that certainly we did not admit to making that mistake. So there you go, I'm done. Thank you. Community relation? Mm-hmm. Just a second. It would be appropriate to make a comment about the 19 hour later when. You can do it now. Okay, I was actually waiting for Johnson to get here. She said capital planning, but we did talk about what the effect would be. And I think it'd be good for you to know. If you remember, we're one year out on Circuit Breaker. And it's been a great budget tool to be able to do that. So we won't be affected by nine seat cuts to Circuit Breaker this year. But certainly would be next year. Now, in terms of how Diane budgets, she, how this is going to work this year to those districts that are still getting their, you know, spending the money that they're getting that year is that there's usually a fourth quarter payment. And it appears that what's gonna happen now is that's not gonna be distributed. But usually that's more than what you anticipated. It's not usually a lot, but it's, and they think that they can cover it. So what's gonna happen is that when we budget, we budget for what we would be getting, not anything beyond that. So in terms of our budget for next year, we didn't take into account that there could be any extra money. So that's good news. On the MedCo, our director is looking at some ways to be able to affect, to save some money in transportation. That's what the money is about. We had actually hoped to have more evening buses but that may not be possible now. The other area is kindergarten. And again, it's about a 1.5. We're going to have to look at some way to trim some of the, probably the professional development. We haven't entirely decided what that's gonna look. We're certainly not gonna change the fact we have TAs in the classroom. That's where most of the money goes. So I think we're gonna be okay this year with these cuts, but any change is always, you would hope to do something else with it. I'd ask you to keep us abreast as things come, things that you have to cut, or trim, or it may have a ripple effect on the following. Just make us aware so that everyone knows we don't wanna, you know, we trust you. It's just, as Ms. Stocks just said, the transparency out there makes it a lot easier when the hit comes with telling people upfront. I'll say it. Mr. Schlickman, community. Okay, I'll do community relations after I make a comment on the nine C cuts. I wanna say how hurtful these kinds of cuts are to school systems, much more than any other entity. Because for school systems, we buy our stuff in the summer for the school year. We commit to hiring teachers for the school year. So if we take a cut in July 1st, we can adjust our budget. But a cut of $50,000 at this point of year is the equivalent of $100,000 cut that would come at the beginning of the year, just because of what we'd have to do is an adjustment to fold that into this part of the year. The state really needs to understand that even if it's on an account like Circuit Breaker or Transportation Reimbursement or Sped Reimbursement, just because transportation isn't in the classroom, it's coming out of the same budget. And that if you lose $100,000 from your transportation account, it's just the same as losing $100,000 from another account because you're gonna have to make up for it someplace. Cuts, mid-year cuts from the state on schools are a huge problem and the folks that are sitting up on Beacon Hill need to understand what the impact is. The town can postpone paving a street until the next fiscal year in theory. They have more flexibility. We don't. We've committed, we've spent. At this point of the year, we're on track to close out our budget in June and all of a sudden to have some of the stuff thrown at us is problematic. And there are other districts, such as the regionals who are really relying on a regional transportation, including Minuteman, who are definitely gonna be hurt by that. How are they gonna make it through the school year if all of a sudden revenue they've counted on doesn't come through unless something miraculous happens and we don't have to heat the buildings this year? Thank you, thank you. Can I come in? Go ahead. You folks are gonna eat up this time. We're not getting out till 9.30 as usual, I know. You're absolutely right. And I think most districts are not in the position we are in terms of how we've managed to get one year out on Circuit Breaker. But we've been in that spot before. And that's about the amount of money that we'd be looking at this year if these cuts were to go through. That would be a huge cut that we'd have to make up. And you're absolutely right. Doing it during the middle of the year is really tough. And so I don't wanna make it seem like that's a rosy picture. It's just that we've managed to plan so that we've sort of buffered ourselves in the immediate effect and then can budget anticipating it next year. Okay, now that'll be on topic on community relations. Our next topic is going to be dashboard and starting to talk on websites. So we'll have to put a doodle out and make sure that Ms. Starks is there because that certainly folds into the website. We'll put a doodle out to figure out when people can make it. We'll probably do it sometime in December. Cool. Great. Curriculum Instruction Assessment. Dr. Ampe is not here and facilities, Mr. Thielman is not here. So we'll hear from them in the next meeting. The Chair, I would like to mention Mocktown meeting. Lauren McKenney and Siobhan Foley, third grade classes from Thompson School, participated in a Mocktown meeting last Friday at Town Hall. Each class presented and supported a Warren article and the other class opposed it. I'm happy to say that both articles passed. These students were phenomenal. It was videoed. We have to add one more piece and I'm going to speak to Ms. Foley at the end of this is the hope that ACMI will have this to be televised over the Thanksgiving holiday. Oh, great. And it is my hope to take this piece of media to Town meeting and share it with the Town meeting the first night. I commend the students, teachers and parents for making it a wonderful educational experience. It was really great. With that, if no one else has any other business, I will entertain a motion to adjourn. We're not going to do executions. There was no executive session tonight. Oh, there's no. Oh, holy moly. We accept your apologies profoundly. Motion to adjourn. Oh. Second. Second. All those in favor. Aye. This meeting is adjourned.