 Hi, welcome to the school committee meeting of Thursday, January 26. I'm Kirstie Allison Ampey. I'm the vice chair of the school committee. I'm standing in from Ms. Exton, who has a family event to attend to tonight. And with that, before we get going, I want to note with sadness the passing of Mary Flynn, who's a retired 25-year employee of the Arlington Public Schools, who worked here on the 6th floor for many years. And with the wife of the late Peter Flynn, a public works retiree. May we have a moment of silence? Thank you. So normally, we would start with public comment. However, we have no public comment today. So we will move on to our student representatives, who also are not present either by Zoom or in person today. And thus, our next item is the approval of the model Congress field trip. Do we have? I can speak to that. So you have a trip approval documents. This is a trip that came to us a little bit late. The teachers weren't quite aware of some of our procedures with regards to making sure that we have some of this into you on time. It is an overnight trip, which is why it's coming to you for approval. It's for the model Congress team to go into Boston. They spend a lot of time doing model Congress. And they work late into the night, and then they stay overnight in Boston. It's at no cost to the students. And it is over the February break, so it doesn't impact their time in school. Move approval. Second. Any further comments, questions? I just note, I knew that this wasn't, we were trying for more approval, but when I heard about this, I felt like we've done this one before. It's in Boston. It was hitting yeses on all the things we normally worry about, so. Okay. All in favor? Yes. Yes. Hi. Any opposed? Okay. Any abstentions? No. So that passes 6-0-0. Thank you. The next item is the AHS program of studies. Mr. Danger. Dr. So thank you for having us. This is usually presented by Mr. McCarthy because it is his labor of love, and although it is collaboratively developed with the department heads and the teachers, Mr. McCarthy is the one who really carries it out to the end, but he had a family engagement. So I get the privilege of presenting it today. I just want to thank him and acknowledge that. And then Mr. Molnar is here because this is a longer than usual list of new courses, and most of that is his fault. So if there are questions, I wanted him to be able to speak to some of the great work that the visual arts department has been doing with the curriculum. So a few things to note just about why we have sort of the number of changes we have. The new building has worked in some ways as we would hope it would, and so it's created a lot of new interest opportunities, collaboration, new kinds of programming, and ideas that people have done so that arts department in particular has really taken advantage of that. So you'll look through a list of these offerings. One of the crucial things that also affects the program of studies is the elimination of the foundations of art requirements. So visual arts, or a fine art, one year of fine art, is a graduation requirement that can be met through the performing arts classes, it can be met through the visual arts classes, and there are one or two fax classes that also meet that requirement. In order to take classes in the visual arts until next year, hopefully, students had to participate in the one year foundations of art class. That was a curriculum A class. In order to go on to any other advanced art student had to take that, and then that met their arts requirement. And we've had a conversation over a lot of years about our sense that Arlington has a very strong arts program, that all of these different elective programs were strong, high-level, curricularly challenging art programs, and only kids in the know figured out that you could step over that foundation's opportunity and go straight on to the honors level art. So this year, one of the biggest changes that allows for all of this variety is doing away with the foundations of art program. In the visual and performing arts, the entry-level classes are curriculum A, and then the advanced classes are H. Since we did away with the entry-level class, I just sort of wanted to be clear with everybody, the result of that is that our arts program is honors for all, because when students come in at the entry level of art, they're taking an honor-level class right from the start. And so that may be something people would like to talk about more. There are a few classes, which again, Leo can speak about more, but I told him I'd do the short version in case you didn't want to talk about them more, but one of the exciting things that's happened in the new building are classes that are built out of collaboration. And collaboration is challenging given the way our contract works, because we can't assign two teachers to one class unless either it's a very heavily staffed class or there's 40 kids in there. So these collaborations really come out of teachers stepping forward and working together programmatically. Some examples of that are the animation classes, which are being developed in collaboration between a computer science program and our arts program. The mural painting and set design program, which will be run out of the makerspace, but obviously a collaboration from our drama teacher to make it so that the work that they're doing works in hand with our drama program. So that's the main course changes, and then in terms of policies, there's the wellness clarification, and I know there was some confusion, so I'll just address that. We have had a lot of the time sort of a misunderstanding, and we continue to work on messaging around this, around the excused absence policy. So the idea, as I try to explain it to people, is you have cuts, right, where a student is not allowed to be there and no one gave them permission. Then you have parent excused or non-disciplinary excused absences, which are not excused, and that's where people get confused. Your parents can excuse you because you've got a cold. That's considered an unexcused absence, but we have six options to do it. So you can be out four days with a cold. Your parents can excuse you. Nobody has to go to the doctor. Nobody has to ask any permission. You can have a family trip. You can miss a day or two. Your parents can excuse you. There's no disciplinary consequence. You get to make up the work. You don't have to document it. It's only if you get over six that you need to bring in documentation, work with the deans so that we know that students are getting appropriate care when they're missing that many days. So we've wanted the messaging to be clear to students that they have six absences to use flexibly, or three in the case of PE. So the change here in the language, which I think confuses some people, is that we've changed from saying, if you get seven, you will fail, to you have six that you can get before you do. So the language there says you have three in a PE class, because it's only half as long as opposed to six. But it's three to use, four would cause you to fail. And then last, which is not in the program of studies on purpose, is something that we've all talked about in here a lot, which is guidance on selecting course levels. So based on the experience we had last year with the heterogeneous grouping initiative, feedback that we got from the community, and then analysis of our own data around how students' performance was best predicted. Our plan this year is to take out the step where teachers make a judgment call about whether a student should take A or H or AP curriculum, and simply give people guidance on the things that we think most predict their success going forward. We've tried to make it simple, because there really are, I explained this to the freshman, and I think they got it. I explained it to some parents. We've run it by kids and parents to see that people understood it. Because really the idea is, if you're an honors level class, and you're getting A or B grades, which is meet standard or exceed standard, and, and this is important, you're not struggling with workload, you're not struggling with stress or anxiety, you're not having difficulty coming to school and being in school. If those three things are happening, then you're in the right level of challenge in your meeting standard. So continuing on to the honors or AP level if it's offered makes sense for you. If you are at the B, at the A curriculum A level, and you are meeting standard, then you probably are where you want to be. And if you are exceeding standard, getting A, A minus, then you might want to consider moving up to the honors level challenge. But you want to take into account, you're getting A's in the curriculum A, you're doing that without feeling overwhelmed by the workload, and being able to attend school regularly. So those are the three things that you ask people to look at. The reason we didn't put language directly in the program studies, there's a link in the program studies to this document, is because my expectation is that we will send this out to the world, and there will be about a dozen or more misconceptions or misunderstandings of the language that we would like to be able to just revise for clarity rather than putting this in the program of studies where we would have to bring it back to the school committee. The idea is it's a flexible document providing guidance. The basic answer in the program of studies is you get to choose your level, that there isn't a recommendation. This is guidance on how to do that, which we'll modify if we get different feedback. I will say that the feedback that we've gotten from eighth grade teachers and high school teachers is that people are very happy about this not being a responsibility that they're telling you what you have to do or should do, that instead they're there as a resource to give students guidance as they're processing it. And I think that it will eliminate a fair amount of bias and relational stuff from those conversations because what we've seen is part of just in the heterogeneous pilot in ninth grade is that students are making decisions about what level they think they should be at based a lot more on kind of their preconceptions about who they are and where they should be as opposed to about what their current performance is and indicators that would make it successful. And I think that is everything that is in there. Yep, that is it. Questions? Comments? Ms. Morgan? Did the eighth grade teachers, are they gonna have that same sort of guidance so that we're, because like from my experience that your freshmen next year are going to talk to their eighth grade teachers down Mass Ave, right? When they're thinking about what classes. So the last, there's a separate description for eighth grade. So you go to the second tab, how should a student decide to take curriculum H, curriculum A in grade nine. That's the guidance that will, I don't know whether it's been shared with all of the teachers. I know within the departments they've had conversations and it's been shared with the administration in the eighth grade. Okay. And I see Julie nodding, so that makes me think that it has been shared with the eighth grade teachers. Great, yeah, that just feels really important, right? Because they're really critical partners. Yeah, and there was editing, there was substantial editing that came back up and that's why if you look at the grade nine examples because there's actually only so many decisions to make, I actually gave an example for English math history science so that they can go through those examples. Great, and also I'm excited about the changes in fine arts. I was lucky enough to meet two of your art teachers, one in Whole Foods and one at Trader Joe's over like a couple week period and they both brought this up and it just, this seems like a really, a helpful thing to do, it just allows students to get to those more specific courses much more quickly and I think we want them to take these classes because they're amazing and we have incredible space and incredible people so I think it's great that we're doing this, thank you. Mr. Carton. Thanks, so first a question about the change to the final exam policy. So I did email you that but I sorted out the, I figured out what you're doing so you are eliminating the requirement for a final assessment which we have this year which is required to be 11%. So for the last two years since COVID we have not had, so if you don't have a high school kid, if you go into your high school grades prior to COVID you'd have had a term one, term two, term three, term four grade and then you'd have had X1 the exam grade. That exam grade was 11% of your grade for the year. For the last nine years the conversation has been that we wanted to move away from high stakes, low inference exams on the last day of school. Right, an hour and a half exam that a teacher has two days to grade is by definition going to have to be easy to grade quickly if it's gonna be a comprehensive exam. So most of the departments have moved to final projects, summative assessments, multiple assessments leading up to the final. So the final day is not necessarily a day in which everyone's sitting down with a blue book and doing a blue book exam. It's a day in which people are wrapping up their final projects, presenting their final projects, making sure that they've done final summative small or assignments. The final week gives people the opportunity to sit down, have a longer period of time to get through all of that and then the afternoons give them time to grade, follow up with students who really need it to make up exams. So the final afternoons are spent with those three kids who need to be sitting there in your desk doing it, making sure teachers are available for the students to do that. So we were just clarifying that language. That there is a summative assessment. There is summative assessment, but that the summative assessment may not necessarily be a sit down exam but it happens during those final weeks. Okay. So those days that we have in the schedule for final exams, for the majority of classes that are not actually no longer having an exam, are the kids still going to school those days? Yes, kids are required, teachers are required to be engaging in required substantive activities to wrapping up their summative assessments on those days. But the picture we have in our head that I walk in there for my high stakes hour and a half exam is something that we for the most part moved away from. Yeah, yeah, okay. So it actually, if you wanna be, look at language, the language we have used or I've tried to use although sometimes others language slips into it, is it's called final week, not finals or exam week. Okay. And they are final classes. Now I have a couple of questions on the R changes. So for students that are looking that really aren't interested in either fine arts or visual arts, but have to fulfill this requirement, the foundation to study art class actually was a nice solution for those students. What would you recommend for somebody who's like not interested in doing a full year of painting, not interested in doing a full year of a specialty course to fulfill their requirement through the fine arts? Maybe it's a good time. Yeah, this might be a good time to just sort of lay out some of the changes because we've addressed that in a few different ways. So firstly, one thing I should say, the foundation's course was a year long course and it was sort of very similar to what the student experience was in middle school or in elementary school where they were doing a little bit of everything. So we've taken that away and what we've replaced it with is a lot of different things. So firstly, we've semesterized almost all of our courses. So now students, there's a couple, there's gonna be one first level course called Studio Art that's sort of similar to what foundation was but it's optional and that's year long. And then there's year long courses at the end when students who have stuck with that have done a lot of art and are thinking about either majoring in art or going to an art college, there's a couple of year long courses at the end or preparing for the advanced placement exam. Those are year long, but almost everything else in between is now semester long. So students who do not picture themselves with a career in the creative economy have lots of choices. They can take woodworking, they can take metal smithing and jewelry making, they can take animation. There's a lot of wide array of choices that they can do within what was the fine arts. Maybe I can just sort of talk through a little bit some of the other changes so we understand. Our goals were one, to modernize our course offerings, to kind of reflect the trends in the contemporary art world and the creative economy. The other goal was, the other three goals, one was to expand student choice and opportunities for specialization. The next one was to remove barriers to make it easier for students to access higher level content much earlier. And then finally, as Dr. Drenger referred to, to expand interdisciplinary collaboration. So we've gone from actually 18 visual arts courses to 29 from this year to next year. However, that sounds like a ton but it's not quite as many as it sounds like. So we do have five completely new courses. We have an animation program, we're hoping to run, film making. We already have the facilities for this. It's so, we have this amazing classroom full of wonderful computers and green screens and a lot of the equipment. We just need the staff to actually develop the curriculum and do it. Metal smithing and jewelry making, mural painting and set design and then the final completely new course is called the senior studio. So that's our class. Traditionally students who are interested in going to art school or art major will take AP. We wanted to provide an alternative that provides more freedom and is more in line with what goes on at an actual art college and more aligned with, so the students have some choices. They don't have to follow the AP structure if they don't want to. So the rest of the courses, so that's just five courses, the rest of them are created by breaking up year-long courses into semester-long courses and by adding additional levels. So we used to have just ceramics one and two. Now we have ceramics one through four, et cetera. And in a few of these courses like woodworking, metal smithing and ceramics, that last level course, level three or four is now is more or less of an independent study where these students have learned all the skills, they've learned all the machinery and now they're coming in at different periods where they're actually learning, getting a chance to really express themselves but also be there to coach and peer mentor as well. So that's sort of, and then as we mentioned, there's a couple of different collaborations that are going on. We already have a science and art collaboration which is design engineering. Very much a STEAM course and then there's the mural and set design and then the math collaboration where we're hoping we're gonna, a teacher who teaches animation but also web design and game design as well and brings some of those courses are pre-existing but ideas will bring the visual arts aesthetics into the realm of math and vice versa. Okay, and then the last question is, so all of these classes last year, this year are the ones that you're continuing are curriculum A but you're changing them all to curriculum H. So could you give me some rationale behind that? I'm changing them. All of these classes are currently curriculum H classes. It's just that they can only be accessed right now having either taken foundations of art or gotten a waiver to extend it to it. Oh, I'm looking at the program of studies and they're listed as curriculum A. And the current program of studies, they're all listed as curriculum H and the current program of studies. You're taking about the last year's program of studies? 22, 23, yeah. That's right. Take me a second, all right, give me a second. Yeah, I can add that, I mean, all of these courses are, you know, they've all these different levels of courses. So, you know, we have five different levels of courses here now but however, they're all incredibly differentiated as it is. So they're, they are, sorry, what do you call them? They're all listed as A, but people took them. That's strange. You can explain. Yeah, but I just would add that I mean, they are the title aside. They are, our classes are so much about meeting students where they are and helping them realize their artistic vision. So there's a tremendous amount of coaching and, you know, you have students in there who have had years of outside experience and private classes in with students who are just learning the basics sometimes. So we already do a tremendous amount of differentiation and it's tremendously elastic, which allows for, you know, that full range, whether we call it A or honors, frankly. Yeah, I mean, I think it's a greater conversation about that we've been having about what we mean by honors and what an honors class is and whether they're, you know, is everything at AHS gonna be honors? I mean, now you're saying that everything in our art department is going to be honors. So I guess that's sort of a greater conversation to have as we move forward with these changes. So there was, so the conversation was, I was mistaken about this, but with the art department when they brought me in to have a conversation. One of the questions was that if we had all of these classes at the entry level of the A, and in fact it appears that that was in many ways a devaluing of the art program in the past, was it really meeting that age curriculum? So we looked at what are the standards for an honors curriculum, which are in the program of studies? What are the standards we're looking at in other heterogeneous classes? We looked at the standards that the English department has been working off of and we had a conversation about Leo's rationale and the standard that the teachers wanted to hold the students to and the agreement was that their goal was to hold students to that honor standard. We then ran that by all of the department heads to talk about how that aligned with their practices. You know, one of the questions was whether that, because that's different than the way it's currently in music program, whether people were comfortable that that was a reasonable standard, that that was a fair distinction and that was where we ended up in terms of where we wanted those classes to be. Thanks. Mr. Schlittman? Yeah, I just thought that the description that you had in the, regarding the choice of this level was an individual decision and this next sentence I thought was really good. While the administration makes the final approval of core selections, we generally follow the principle of challenge by choice and I appreciate that wording and I like having it here. I'd almost like to have that little block bolded and I hope that everybody in the district and our parents and our students appreciate what it means that this district is opening up seats for kids who have the desire to go and try. Mr. Feynman? I'm impressed by the number of courses. I don't think this is the most I've ever seen for new courses so that's congrats or congrats on all the work that went into that. I'm glad to see the AP African-American studies class added. That's a good. Thank you for mentioning that. I missed that one in my running through. I saw it and I'm embarrassed to have done so. Yeah, good, good, nice, nice work. And then the, I had a question, we had a conversation here last meeting about approving a varsity sport and somehow there was an impression and somebody said it could actually happen in the program of studies but it doesn't happen in the program of studies. Now that I'm reading this document. So no one knows where we approved the varsity sport. It just happens. Okay, I need to put you on the spot. So the answer is we've done it once before in my tenure and we struggled to figure out what the process was. When the, I will say having gone through the process where I think the budget committee discussed it and then they brought it forward. We, after that, I had a sort of change of heart in our attitude about it which was that if it is an MIA, my general sense is that if it is an MIAA sport and we have sufficient interest to do it in the community, the ability to offer it and it doesn't cost more than we can afford that we should offer those. Yeah, I don't think it's a school committee decision. That's what I'm trying to say. It's not very much money. I believe it's already been requested in the budget. So I don't think you guys have to decide to do it as long as we can come up with the money. I mean, I don't mean to take us all. There was a conversation we would be looking at it in the program of studies but that's not the case. It's not in the program. And I don't, I think it's your decision based on, and you and the superintendent, I think. Is everyone nodding at me because I'll send some emails tomorrow as a result of that. Okay. If it's budgeted. Yeah, it's budgeted. I think it's, yeah. I think as a formality under the MIA rules, it should be approved by the school committee. Well, okay, let's see. If the rules say that, then it's different. It's sponsored by the school committee is the language. I think that probably is a good idea in general. I mean, as long as it's listed in the budget, then I think that can be considered our sponsorship. But, yeah. All right. Would our process then be to. Okay, I'm sorry. You send it to a committee and then they bring it forward. Okay, I think what we'll do is I'm gonna. I'm sorry to take it off. Take off. Please extend to add it to our next agenda so it's properly noticed and it's on an agenda and we'll just approve it there just to be sure if it's very clear. And I think policy should, we should have a written way of doing. Yeah. I mean, if the folks are gonna come to us asking for something, we should have some way of acknowledging that. And I think I appreciate Dr. Jinger that, so I think the last time that we did this, there was some question about whether how much sort of pushing needed to be done to have it go, right? And this feels super different to me. This one feels like there's lots of consensus. So, great. I don't think we need Dr. Jinger next time in support of this. I just wanna be sure it's done by the book. I actually, as my comment would like you to talk about the AP African American course a little bit just so that people at home understand what we're doing. So the AP is piloting a new course in African American history. There are only 60 schools in the country that are participating in the pilot right now. We were selected to do so. It looks at American history from the perspective of the African American experience. It is not going to have the AP exam piece at the end this year because that's part of the pilot. So you don't have that full thing. It's looking at the curriculum. We would count it as an AP in our weights. It's, I think, an exciting opportunity. It is something which there's controversy about nationally. The director of history and social studies is on the Zoom if we want to ask her. She'd need to be promoted though. Okay, I think, hold on. And this was not my work. This was the work of the teachers. She chatted from the line. Caitlin Moran. She chatted as Caitlin Moran at 633 and now she is gone. So she was on the Zoom. Apologies. Thank her for bringing it forward. It sounds like a really great opportunity for our students. Mr. Hayner. Dr. Janger, he said there wasn't a test, an AP test for that because it's a pilot. Would the students get credit for it as an AP course? Yes, okay, thank you. They would get credit from us, from not towards college. Right, thank you. Okay, does anyone want to make a motion to approve the high school program of studies as presented? So moved. Second. Any further comment? Oh, did you want to speak? Sorry. I just wanted to say that the work that Dr. Janger and the team and Mr. Mjolnar has done on this year's program of studies is very aligned with the work that we're doing, the strategic plan, ahead of us even sharing it very widely. So it's really great to see and I'm really excited about some of these adjustments and some of the adjustments of language based on feedback. So nice job. Okay, thank you. So if no further comments, all in favor? All right, all right. Any opposed? Any abstentions? So motion passes 6-0-0. I just want to warn you that I did just text Ms. Moran so she might pop back on again. Thank you very much. Moving on, we have the calendar. Dr. Janger, all right, give me one moment to what? I can't tell the circle length from the oval. I can't either. And A and E, oh, this year telling me that that's oval. I want to share my screen. These ovals, these circles are supposed to be different. Some are circles and some are ovals. Really? Got to take it distinguished. Okay. So I am bringing to you this evening, good evening school committee members, some recommendations with regards to the APS school calendars for next year. We're a little ahead of schedule. I wanted to share some information about the calendars because I know that there are some community members who have been wondering because we sent a survey out and some communications about the work of the calendar committee has been doing and they're wanting an update on what we're thinking. So we would plan to bring a first read of the calendar to you next week and we went ahead and put it on the calendar for this week with a little bit of room to present some of the data from the survey. So the agenda, I'm going to talk through the calendar committee, give a quick overview of what it is, what we were looking at and some context. I would like to share some of the survey results that we got from staff and families with all of you. My recommendations for the 23-24 school year and some next steps that we'd like to take over the next year to make sure our calendar is as thoughtful and inclusive as possible moving forward. So the calendar committee consisted of the members that you see on your screen. All families and educators were invited to join our express interest in the fall of this year. We met six times November through January and we focused on three topics which the committee members raised when they came in. They said they wanted to focus on religious holidays, conferences like timing, format, frequency. And we also took a look at the format and readability. We had made, if you recall, a lot of adjustments to the calendar's format last year. And we got a lot of feedback on that. Some of it was positive and some of it was that parts were confusing, so we wanted to make sure that it was as readable as possible. We focused on these topics in part because we had gotten inquiries from families and staff. I have gotten inquiries from staff and families about why certain days aren't off and others are not. It's been a point of discussion in the past about the observance of particular religious holidays. Not because of the religious holiday but because of concerns about staffing levels and student absence levels. Also because of ongoing conversations that we've had about the role of religious conversations and celebrations in schools and we have the ability to address certain topics in a non-bargaining year but other topics we can't really address in a non-bargaining year, so that's why we focused on these. So to focus on the results a little bit, we asked staff, a question in a staff survey about whether or not they would or would not work on a particular day if school was open. Just as a reminder, when we think about the religious holidays, part of the reason why school districts will take holidays as an observed day off is because they're concerned about the ability to open on those days, either because they're not going to have sufficient staff to open on those days or because they're going to have so many students absent that it's not really a very quality instructional day because you can't really do tests or new material, you're going to have to catch so many students up later on. We have a significant Jewish population in Arlington and so we knew that we would have some faculty members who would say they would take a religious holiday on those dates on Rosh Hashanah Yom Kippur which are two observed holidays now and Good Friday. For the sake of contrast, we actually added Christmas and we added a lot of other holidays to the staff one too and I'll talk about the family survey and why we didn't and in retrospect what we're thinking about for the future because it was a good point of comparison actually to have staff respond to whether they would come to school on Christmas because it sort of gave us a numbers comparison. Admittedly, we obviously did not have all of our staff respond. We had 410 responses of those here. These are the numbers that said that they would not work on those days. And then I put a couple of comments from each stakeholder group also in the survey results for you to review. One staff member, I will read these for the people who are watching from home. One staff member said having established the Jewish High Holy Days is no school days for years now and with the increased incidences of antisemitism in our schools and nation at large deciding now to reverse course and have school on those days feels tone deaf. Another faculty member said I would prefer fewer days off especially in the fall since it makes it difficult to schedule all of the students I have to see weekly or monthly per their IEPs. I would rather fewer days off and a shorter school year. So we had contrasting perspectives across the board which has informed the recommendation that I have for you this evening. I'm going the wrong way. Let's go this way instead. Okay, so survey results from families. We asked a similar question, indicate whether you would send your students on the days listed if APS schools were to be open. For the family survey, we only focused on the three days that we actually already close on. So we asked about Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Good Friday. Some of the reasoning behind that was that it was going to be extremely hard for us to ask about all of the holidays and we were going to miss one and we didn't want to feel exclusive and really we were focused on these days and do we have the capacity to operate how many students would be gone? These are the results. We had 892 responses, 160 families said that they would not send on Rosh Hashanah, 161 said they would not send their child on Yom Kippur and 75 families said they would not send on Good Friday. Notably, if you look back at the staff results, I'll go back for one moment. The staff proportions on Good Friday were significantly different than the student proportions on Good Friday, which was interesting. And perhaps just a reflection of the population of our staff versus the population of our students, but it was certainly notable. There are a notable number of students who would not be present in school on those days and that is worth us taking into consideration. We also asked a question about the impact of elimination of days off for the specific religious holidays that we had named on the survey and the results of this are part of what has given me such pause as well as conversations with members of our community. So 37 and a half percent of our families said that elimination of days off on those holidays would have a positive or slightly positive impact for their family and I'll show you some comments. They talked a little bit about why as well. 24% said it would have a negative or slightly negative impact. 38 or about 40%, almost 40% said no impact. We've split basically into thirds of folks who say this would have a positive impact, a negative impact or no impact. And I think that's worth further interrogation which I'll talk a little bit more about in a moment. Here's some of the comments that we got from families on the survey, which certainly like I said, span opinions on this topic pretty widely. And I'm again gonna read them for the sake of folks from home, so bear with me. One family said my family is Jewish and we observe the high holy days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. It means so much to us that our children are not further alienated from the majority of their peers by honoring the high holy days. All the students having those days off sends a signal to the larger community that diversity exists, that we exist, matter and are welcome here. Another family member said, we must either find and pay for childcare which is not easy to find or a parent must take a vacation day so that our child is cared for. Vacation days have a quantifiable monetary cost that is significant. Those days also reduce the time we can spend together as a family. These three holidays in conjunction with other special school days cost a lot of money. Another community member said, as a rabbi with a student on an IEP in Arlington Public Schools, it is very important to me that our family's religious practices be accommodated. My son would get extremely behind and have trouble getting caught up if he had to miss three days of school in the first month every year just to observe our holy days. Another family member said, I really appreciate APS's efforts to address the religious holiday issue and hope whatever direction the district takes, it first and foremost acknowledges the growing diversity of our community, even if that means eliminating most religious holidays so as not to leave others out. And finally, another said, our jobs do not give us these days off and we get limited parental time off. Finding alternate childcare for three children for these days is extremely difficult and we don't have family around. So that just sort of reflects a little bit of the thinking people were doing when we asked about impact, positive impact, negative impact. And we know that those days off do have a negative impact on some families on the percentage that I just showed, about 37%. Also that it has a significant positive impact for other members of our community. So I will just share this really quickly and then I'll go to my recommendation. We also asked about conferences. We asked about the best month for elementary conferences and the opinion seems quite split. We did them in December before, we're doing them in January now. What this data tells us is that we could do them in December or we could do them in January. There wasn't a strong necessarily feeling either way. I think December's a very busy month. So if we were to put them back in December, which is a prior practice, then we might want to aim for earlier in the month if possible. It also means that they might need to take place before the close of term, which is a little challenging because you don't have the end of term information in front of you potentially during a conference. We also asked about the potential value of an additional elementary conference. That's something that would have to be bargained and discussed with our teachers. A lot of families, 39% said that that might, that would be very valuable. Another 26% said somewhat valuable. The calendar committee also talked about what that would look like in order to be valuable and what those conferences, what value they find in elementary conferences and length of conference. And we also talked about length of middle school conferences and the committee had some recommendations around that. We're not making significant. This doesn't really impact significant changes to the drafts that you have in front of you. I wanted to share the data since we had asked those questions on the survey. So the calendar recommendation for tonight and for this school year, for as we prepare for next school year, will be no changes to the existing holiday observances for the school year 23, 24 calendar. I had hoped to give you three years of school calendars this school year so that we could have three years charted out. I would like to delay the development of three years at a time for one more year to allow for further research and conversation, particularly on the topic of religious observances in our length of public schools. In the meantime, I would like to introduce options for childcare for families during closure dates with the biggest impact on working families. That would start this school year. I need to talk to our after school program providers and potentially some other providers in town about opening up a fee based option for families during on those holidays on Rosh Hashanah Good Friday and Yom Kippur falls on a Sunday this year. So that doesn't impact us as much and assess the cost implications of those options and whether or not we can subsidize partially or in full for low income families. I would also like to assess the connection between early year absenteeism for low income families and the impact of early days off on absenteeism because one of the analyses that I went and learned how to do because I actually didn't know before this was to look at the chronic absenteeism levels of our low income families compared to our not low income families. And right now our not low income for this school year are not low income families. Chronic absenteeism rate is about 12% but for our families who are low income and identified as low income in our data it's 24%. So it's double and that's a pretty huge impact. And so we need to better understand why that is the case. What, if any, impacts some of these early days off could have on that and it's possible that there's not any but that there is certainly work to be done with some of our families who are income insecure when it comes to getting to school because that's going to contribute to some of the gaps that we see and are in the strategic plan. And I also wanna work with our director of diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging and justice on some conversations in affinity based focus groups with Arlington faith communities and working families this spring and summer with an expansive focus on understanding how their religious identities are not recognized in schools, what the schools can do to better support those families in their observances, whether that's through blackout, evening dates where we don't do activities on certain dates through informing the community and doing education in classrooms around what observances look like and how that can impact people informing our teachers about the implications of for example, fasting or other religious observances. So we wanna go and have those conversations and I wanna work with Margaret on doing that. Ms. Thomas. So the next steps would be to draft a school year 23, 24 calendar. You have an initial draft that doesn't have all of the parts in it yet and we're still finalizing in your materials for today. Arlington public schools will still have to, like I said, add a few things to that. I would like to discuss the possibility and logistics of vacation day programming with our afterschool care providers, explore tuition subsidies for vacation care for students from low income families and plan some affinity based focus groups like I just talked about. And I'm happy to take any comments or questions from the committee. Any comments? Ms. Morgan. Will we be able to leverage the 25th of September to help mitigate the impact of the move for the high school kids? That is a great question. I would have to go back and look at the timeline on that. Just didn't, I have the move calendar, but I don't have it right now. Okay. Possibly. Well, but it's not a day off though. Cause it's not, cause it's not a Sunday. The 25th. The 25th is gray. Sorry. The 25th of September is grayed out, which is right at that. It should not be. Well, yes. Yom Kippur. 24th, hold on. No, it's the 25th. Okay. Then it should be. I went back and forth on this one cause somebody told me it was on the Sunday. It starts this Sunday night. That's why I was looking up. It's always confusing to me. Okay. Yes. Okay. So yes, perhaps, but I needed to go double check the timeline for the move. But that could be definitely utilized for move activities. It just seems like it could potentially allow the high school students one more day in the old building, which I appreciate. Nobody wants to be there, but we want our kids in school, right? So it could, you know, it could reduce by one the number of days that we need to make up down the road. And then if we have feedback on the ovals or the circles or the boxes, should we set, it's really hard. I will tell you, I had the whole January conference calendar wrong on my personal calendar up until the day before they happened. So it's, I don't know how you do this. I don't. It's really hard to streamline. We're trying very hard. I appreciate that this screams to me like extraordinary and exceptional effort. And I think that that's fantastic. I will try and think about putting it like. Send feedback to Ms. Diggins. Ms. Diggins, perfect. Thank you so much. Thank you. Yep. Anyone? Yeah, I was just gonna know. I mean, the circles versus the ovals doesn't, doesn't work. So you have to find something different to distinguish early release for all versus early release for elementary only. So that's hard to figure out. Thanks. So what will happen, I think, eventually, correct me if I'm wrong, Ms. Diggins, is that the A, the number in the circle will get replaced with an A or an E. Once we know what the all days are and what the E days are. So there won't be a number there. It'll just be A or E. I thought you were distinguishing between an oval and a circle. No, it's supposed to be. I think there's. That would be challenging. I think there's supposed to all be circles with either an A or an E in there. It's just that we don't know which days are A's or E's yet. Ms. Kies. Mr. Hader and I are over here talking about election day. I'm assuming November 7th is the full school PD day? Yes. Usually in non-election years we do that on November 1st. Oh, yeah. I did not know that. Yeah, the day after Halloween is a great day to have a PD day. Yeah. Yes. That makes sense. We will move it. The following year, November 24th, you're gonna have a Monday and Tuesday, which is the 11th, which is a national holiday. The 12th will be the national election day. The following week, Thanksgiving. So November's gonna get a lot of punches in it. In 24, 25. Yes. Cool. So now that you just got 23 settled. Okay, we're not going here. Yeah. I won't be there. Yeah, we'll move that to that. Okay. Mr. Churchman. Yeah, I mean, the one thing I wanna say is that the old calendar was both ugly and confusing. And I know that Liz Diggins has done a lot of work to try to take stuff from other communities and meld it into something that's a lot more visually pleasing and a lot easier to understand. And the clarity of this, there's no good way to do this, but the clarity of what we have here before us right now is far superior to anything we've had in the past and probably one of the better ones that I've seen as opposed to the train wreck that we currently run. So I just wanted to commend Ms. Diggins for, I know how much work she put into this. And it's commendable. The other thing, just as a note on the high holidays, Russia Shona is the Saturday, which is the 16th of September. So that's the day we don't have to worry about on the calendar. Yom Kippur is a Monday the 25th that creates a three-day weekend. Thank you for correcting me. And it's correct in the calendar, but it's a little counter-intuitive. But thanks, thanks. Thank you. Okay, any further comments? So this is just the first read we needed to see it and you've heard some feedback and bring it next week. Yep, I mean next week. Yes, okay, great. Thank you very much. So moving on, strategic plan. So I will not present a bunch of slides today. You have received in your materials a bunch more initiative documents in draft form. So we are open to and still making small adjustments as we go, but we have made it through the major effort of getting all of those initiative documents drafted in as close to one voice as we can manage to put finances attached to the items that we feel like we can project approximately how much we think each of those action strands is going to cost. And what I will be sharing with the community because we discussed having an open comment period, I haven't quite decided how long I think this open comment period should be. So I'm open to feedback on that. But what I think I will probably do is publish this website, and I'm still adding some materials to it, to the community with a letter that explains how the strategic plan came to be and how it's laid out and what its components are. If you go to the site, there are a couple of bars at the top that invite you to learn about the plan and the structure. It talks about how the plan was developed, what is in the plan, and it lays out that graphic that I had showed you the last time we met that explains that there's one vision emission for priorities, 12 initiatives, what is included in the initiatives. And then if you go back to the homepage, there is an area for each of the four priority areas. Priority area one clearly lays out those focal groups that we had discussed and has links to each of the initiative documents. What I'm hoping to add to the homepage is a video that walks through each of the priorities and explains them. To some extent, probably explains what the major strands of work are too, like goes down to the strand level, which are those milestones that are in each of the initiative documents. And that is a way of asking families to sort of engage with the plan without needing to go and read all 12 documents, which is sort of a laborious task. And then invites them to fill out a form for public comment, telling us what they think we should include, what they don't feel like they heard about, that they were expecting, that we might have missed. Any sort of notes that they have about details that they hope in implementation of the plan they will see happen in the schools and use some of those comments to further tweak and refine and improve upon the documents that you have received. So that is where we're at. That is what we're working on right now. As you have time to go through each of the initiative documents, I would really appreciate getting some feedback. I appreciate some of what I have received already and we're continuing to make revisions to some of the documents as we go. So if community members are in the document and they see somebody typing, they shouldn't be surprised because they are live and currently changing documents. And I'm really grateful for the opportunity to take a little bit more time to get some more community input. It will probably take me another couple of weeks to make a video and get it translated because I do wanna make sure we post this in as accessible a ways possible and our vendor takes a little bit of time to turn videos around, those aren't quick. So I'll take any questions that the committee has. Mr. Schutkin? What's our timeline going forward? That's one of the pieces I actually was seeking some feedback on how long the committee thinks the public comment period would be. And then we would need to, this is a plan that I would imagine we would vote into policy. So something that maybe a subcommittee would take, CIAA has been looking at it throughout the process. So it might make sense for that committee to initially give it the final stamp and then send it to this committee for the final, final stamp. I would imagine, I mean, I imagine my suggestion would be to leave it open for at least a month once we get the video up and send everything out to families. And then maybe revisit as a subcommittee, but we can, we have flexibility. It doesn't officially start till July one. Because I really like this but I haven't really had a chance to go and study it. I mean, it's just the first draft showing up and just sort of getting a sense for my purposes and for everybody else out there. How much time we're gonna have to think about it and absorb it and maybe look for little tweaks and make it really even more wonderful. Their comments. Okay, I'll make one now since somebody else is popping up. I think in terms of timing, one of the main things we need to decide is are we going to approve it before April or after? Basically before the election or after because we're going to have a somewhat different board composition. I think we should do it before. Mr. Thielman. Yeah, I think we should do it before. Number one, and number two, if the curriculum subcommittee meets and it looks like we're gonna get to a point where we're wordsmithing the document, I would suggest that we do what we did last time for the mission and have a kind of a retreat in your office to go through it. Because if it gets to that level and we're wordsmithing at this table, it's not effective, not a good use of people's time. Did you know wordsmithing? Cool. Mr. Cardin. Yeah, I mean, I think it's an excellent shape already. I mean, I think if people take some time while she's recording her video to go through it and see if they have any substantive changes or even technical changes, Dr. Homan's really open to adjusting things. So I don't anticipate the need for wordsmithing. As I said, if you do. Yeah. If you do. Yeah, in our committee. Yeah, then let us know in advance we should have a retreat. Yeah, I don't think we need a retreat, but yes. And we haven't heard what the community has to say about it, right? And they may have totally different take on it and make us, make Dr. Homan adjust things a lot. So, okay, so definitely before April, we can sit down and talk about some dates and where you and Ms. Eckstern can. I guess one question I have about this is just in reading through the drafts, I was unclear how the costs work, whether they are all on top of each other, so they're each separate costs or whether some of them are duplicate, there's the same bundle here and there. This was the subject of much debate. So we were struggling with, do we write the costs in as like the assumption that the following year those things are now in the budget. So what's the add on this year, right? Or are we mapping out the entire cost of the plan? So if you put a position in in year one, you're gonna see that position again and again and again in the cost out for the five years. We did it the latter way. Okay, but I meant for priority one and priority two if they have something that kind of overlaps. I mean, I'm not necessarily speaking to the right ones, but there were some things that overlapped. I wasn't sure are the costs that are mentioned in priority two already in priority one? Yeah. Or are they? We only put the cost for a thing in one spot. Okay, so we add up all the costs to get to the total. Correct. Yeah, and where that happened, I tried to put a note in to fund, like see the strand above or see, you know, she had 1.2 at the cost map onto this strand too. And then some of them seem like there might be cost savings in terms of other positions in the district. Are those already included or their savings that would be realized that are not, that we don't see in this document? So I would think about the cost of the plan, not as fully, and we're working on a spreadsheet right now that actually does a full cost out and like totals it all at the bottom. But whatever that cost out is, it's included, parts of it would be a readjustment of things that we already do. So it would be spending money that we already spend in maybe a slightly different way, which would be to say there are efficiencies within the system that we're using to supply the plan. Those are not included in that cost out. So this is us saying this is the full cost of the full plan, some of which is gonna require additions and some of which is gonna be wrapped into how we do budget planning over the next few years. So we're gonna plan strategically, because we have this plan, we're gonna plan the budget strategically in alignment with the plan. Okay, let me just make sure I understand. So the full cost may not, the whole thing may not cost what that full number is because there may be efficiencies which will cover some of its cost. Correct, okay. Okay, anyone else have any questions about this? Great, okay. So we hope our audience will take a look and there will be announcements and videos and translated videos and feedback forms coming soon. Next, superintendent's goals. Dr. Holman. I don't have any updates to the goals that you looked at for our first read last meeting. Okay, does anyone have any comments on the goals? Seeing none, would anyone like to move or approve? I move approval of the goals. Second. Okay. Any further comments on the goals? Nope. Just get it done, Liz. Let us know how it goes. Keep us posted over there. I was gonna say, I like Mr. Cardin's form. I thought that was very nice. I really appreciated that form. Thank you, Mr. Cardin. Sure. Very much streamlined things for me. Okay. So all in favor of the superintendent's goals. Aye. Aye. Okay. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Okay. That passes 6-0-0. Are we? Okay. So the next is, now the agenda reads possible vote to accept the FY24 budget allocation. I would edit that to possible vote to acknowledge the FY24 budget allocation. The number is 88,947,333. $34, which would be our allocation from the town. That is the number that has been given to us by the town manager in the latest long range plan. And there's many things where it may change, but right now that's our number and that's the number that we're going to be building our budget are on. Can I have a motion to acknowledge that number? Move to approve or acknowledge as amended. Okay. Do I have a second? Second. Any further comments? Mr. Schlichman. Was this discussed at the budget meeting earlier? Yes. Yeah. Is there anything emerging from the budget subcommittee meeting of relevance to this vote? No. Okay. I assume that one of the outstanding items which has been talked about is the amount of state aid. Yes. That's the thing that might adjust the number. Yeah. No. No. Well. Whether or not the town chooses to go for an override may change things. But we don't know. And we won't know for a while. But we're solid that this. We're solid that this is the number that we're building. This is the number we're building our budget on. Okay. We're not going to have any regression. Okay. Thank you. And we acknowledge that this is the number that Mr. Poole provided Dr. Homan. And we're, I am grateful for her conversations. Yes. So maybe just get some background. So the override included a four year plan which ends in this fiscal year 23. This number continues the assumptions of the plan, the commitments of the plan for another year. So it includes a seven percent increase of special ed, a three and a half percent increase in regular ed, the enrollment adjustment amount and what was negotiated last year which were declining amounts of funds for a COVID adjustment. Last year was 900, I think this year is 600. Next year goes down. The year after goes down to 370. So that is all in the number that Cure C cited. Nothing has changed. There was some discussion of making changes but nothing has been changed. There may be some people who want that number to be reduced. There may be some people who, you know, once data comes in, we may request an increase but the town manager's budget is printed with that number. Our budget will be built around that number for now. Thank you. Any further comments? Okay. All in favor? Yes. All right. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Okay. So that motion passes 600. Moving on. Superintendent's update. I wanna start by sharing that we did our January set of instructional rounds as an administrative team at Gibbs and Hardy. We had a lot of positive feedback on this one and that it was the best yet. And I credit that to the fact that teachers joined us for the first time and it was a lot of fun to have teachers there. So what happened was we had three teachers from Hardy join us at Gibbs and three teachers from Gibbs join us at Hardy, which made for a lot of fun conversations because it sort of takes them out of their context and get to look at a new school and meet some new people. So we focused on the benefits and we are focusing for the year on the benefits of academic discourse and strategies for ensuring equitable engagement and contribution to classroom discourse. We're using the book, Academic Conversations, which has a lot of really concrete strategies for building discussion norms in classrooms and talking norms in classrooms, which is how students build content knowledge and we are obviously looking to have a really engaging classrooms where students feel the agency has expressed their ideas and every single student is having a voice. And so that's what we're looking for this year in our instructional rounds. I'm very grateful for the teachers who joined us and for having them with us and we're thinking a lot about how to expand this practice into the schools, give teachers more opportunities to do this with their colleagues. And I know a lot of our ILTs are focused on that and are trying out some new things this year. So I also had a quick update on COVID-19 illness and absences, we are seeing a decrease in our absence rates, which has been great. And coming back from the break, as I said, we had fewer than we were necessarily expecting and that trend has continued. We have had a couple of instances where we've had some COVID-19 spread in a classroom or in an LC, it has been isolated to a particular classroom or LC. In most cases, students test at home and they're symptomatic and call it in. And so we don't have a lot of necessarily concern about it spreading a lot while they are at school. They're after school events, there are things going on on the weekends. In those cases, we issue notice to families and let them know that there's an uptick in COVID-19 cases, it's not an outbreak. The term outbreak has very specific public health definitions attached to it. So these are not outbreaks. They are us noticing and increase incidents of people reporting to us that there are COVID-19 cases in a particular area of a school, like a learning community or a classroom. And so we try to make recommendations and notices as local as we possibly can because we don't necessarily want to be disrupting learning with mask recommendations or changes in practice where we don't have to. And so I know that families had questions about this about why some of our practices have changed since earlier in the pandemic and just wanted to give a brief update about our protocols and policies. We do check in with the health department every time we have one of these instances just to make sure that we're aligned in our messaging and what they would recommend. I also wanted to give an update on deputy superintendent search. We are moving right along this week. We have had a lot of activity surrounding this search this week. We've done initial interviews as I reported. Last time we met, the finalist round is almost completed. That round has included two school visits for each of the candidates with students, teachers and administrators being visited at each of those sites. They have the opportunity to go into some classrooms, interact with students. And one of those is not completed because one of our candidates had something come up and wasn't able to make it to their scheduled visit. So we've rescheduled that candidate for next week. Our afternoon and evening forums were this past week. They visited with central office staff as well on Wednesday and completed a finalist task with the cabinet team. They visited with their potential direct reports, the curriculum directors and a couple of administrative assistants who currently report directly to the assistant superintendent. And then I'm going to be doing individual meetings with each of the candidates and reference checks over the next week or so. The goal is still to have a recommendation to the school committee on February 9th. And I wanna thank the members of our community who have participated and provided very comprehensive feedback which we're still looking through and sorting through. And people have been very thoughtful about this and dedicated a lot of time to it and a lot of people have. So I just really appreciated the time people have given to this process including our candidates who have spent a lot of time with us this week and gave enough a lot of time to consider this role and are an exceptionally well-prepared group of candidates. We're very lucky. So it'll be a hard decision. And I look forward to letting you know what it is in a couple of weeks. And that is all I have to share. Your enrollments are in your materials and I'm happy to answer any questions. Okay. Any questions about the update? No? Okay. Moving on. Mr. Mason, the financial report. Good evening school committee members and those that are maybe watching remotely in a later time or right now. Tonight I'm gonna go over the finances as of December 31st, 2022. And so in the reports, the slide deck is gonna be a condensed version. Once again, you would have found more reports in the full report packet. That's also a novice, which includes reports on the general fund, grants, grants that are carried over from prior fiscal years, COVID-19 related grants, the electric bus related grants special revenue and revolving funds. We'll start off with the general fund. We're spending the budget, I guess as planned, but we still had some balance remaining from once again, from vacant positions. That's gonna be probably stated every time I produce a report for the remainder of the year. But right now we're at total spending of around $32.7 million. We're encumbered with salaries and outside vendor obligations around $47.8 million. And what we're projected to spend was remaining in department budgets around $3 million. And there are some pending transfers and expenditures, one-time expenditures that we anticipate to happen. That's around $567,000, which some of those include a transfer from S or three. There was a literacy coach that was being charged to the grant that we originally budgeted part of the grant that we see that due to vacancies, we can be able to then move those expenditures over to the general fund and then possibly use some of these dollars for fiscal 24 budget. And fiscal 24 is the last year that we could use S or three. We have a couple of months in fiscal 25, but we should spend it down to fiscal 24. It also includes athletic stipends that were posted to the revolving account where we previously had posted revenue collected for fees since we're not collecting fees. It should not be posted there. So that will be moved over as well as any other applicable expenditures related to instruction that's on the foreign tuition account. Some one-time expenditures that we're including in here is a project for possibly the Audison and Bishop audiovisual projects. They're outdated equipment in those spaces. And we believe that they'll have at least a life, a useful life cycle of about five years. So if there's any talk about a new Audison, that's not a worry. And then also looking at re-envisioning, using some funds to design for re-envisioning Bishop and Stratton main offices, which would allow us to make additional office spaces and also look at improving building security at the entrances. So that in result leaves us with a balance of about $300,000 at the end of the fiscal year. This slide is the budget versus actual based on the budget transfer categories. This is just based on the categories that's outlined in school committee policy DBJ. And you would have also seen actual versus budget month by month or by month. And what you'll notice that actual in December is higher, but it's not necessarily an overspending in that month. It's just that month at three periods, pay periods. And so majority of our budget is salaries. That's why you still see that. And all the budgetary numbers is evenly spread out across 10 months. So that's why the budget number is not matching or reflecting that extra pay period. Then we'll talk about special revenue and revolving. Overall, we had a starting balance of the core funds. We have other funds, but these are the core funds that we're talking about around $5.1 million. And we've collected about $1.4 million at this point. And our expenditures around $1.3, leaving us with a current cash balance of about $5.2 on hand. We anticipate about $1.9 million additional collected, mainly between our afterschool rentals and circuit breaker. We have three more payments to collect, which we'll use for next year. And then we do have about $1.7 million of accumbrances. And we're gonna have credits hitting those accounts based on the athletic expenses and some foreign tuition expenses that will be moved to the general fund. Last but not least, just an overview of just the core grants. We had about 2.5, that's been awarded to date. And an additional 832 that's been identified for from the prior year. And so we're gonna continue to spend and work on spending these down. And I thank you for your time and I will leave it to the chair to allow any questions. Thank you. Any questions, Mr. Cardin? Yeah, I get some of that projected spending that you were talking about. I don't think we've done that at budget. I don't know. It would be good to have a plan for that reviewed at budget. And it may have to come up to the full committee if it crosses over the allocations before we actually spend it. Thanks. Any other questions? Okay, I'll put that on our next agenda. Great, thank you. Okay, there is no consent agenda. Next is subcommittee liaison reports and announcements. And I am first up with budget. So we met this past week and we did strategizing for the next long range plan as well as hearing updates on the budget process which is underway and is expected in a couple weeks. And we will be meeting again February 10th. Oh, sorry, community relations. The school committee chat for families of color, January 28th has been rescheduled to March 4th. Curriculum assessment instruction. We haven't met, but we probably need to. So we'll have a meeting. Facilities. We're trying to schedule a meeting after we schedule another meeting for something else, but we're gonna do that. We're gonna schedule a meeting the next week or two. Look for an email. Policy. No report. High school. Can we do it on site at the parcel? Sure. Why not actually? High school. High school building committee meets next, no, the following week, first Tuesday. Yeah, all is going well. Okay. Superintendent in Evaluation. Nothing. Ways and reports. Announcement. I have lots of liaison. I've been liaising all week as it turns out. Let me see, where did I go first? I went to Envision Arlington where I believe it was members of the standing committee. I think they're trying to figure out what their path forward looks, sounds, and feels like, and so there was a lot of conversation. I'm not super familiar with their work, so I didn't feel like I brought much to the conversation, but I did. So anyway, I'm not sure where that's going. I also went to the wellness committee and we are still working away at that wellness policy. Some interesting things came up around food in schools and recess and withholding recess. So I did, I sort of have continued to tell them that it's going to be sort of a lengthy endeavor to move that policy through our policy subcommittee and then here, because the changes are pretty significant. So when it gets closer to a time where it's going to be done, we have one more meeting with the DESI representative to make sure it's all legal and then we'll make sure to work with Mr. Schlickman to push that through. So yes, that's it. I think that's all the liaising I did, but it was many hours actually of liaising. Thank you. Anyone else? Mr. Hayner? We're on announcements? Yeah. Okay. The Rotary Club of Wellington will be having its annual polar dip to raise money for polio vaccinations at noon this Saturday at St. Camilla's parking lot. You're all invited. Not to go in to watch. Start bringing ice cubes. Somebody is already bringing a bucket of ice cubes. I'm going in. It's an inexpensive cardiac exam if you survive in a great shape. Okay. Well, we hope you survive. Yeah. You're going to be a pop. Yes. Thank you. I think it's a grand popsicle. Grand popsicle, yeah. Anything else? Any future agenda items? Mr. Schlickman? Yeah, first on any announcements just to make note that the Erlington Education Foundation will be having their innovation showcase on next Monday, January 30th from six to eight at Punjab Restaurant. And remember has it the superintendent will be speaking. And they'll be food, but they're requesting a donation, but it's a worthwhile thing to do. And it's very worthwhile to support the AEF because the money you donate to them comes back into the schools and does great things. This is a recognition of that. And for future agenda items, I'd like to have an update on implementation of policy. E-C-E-V. E-C-E-V. E-V. Oh, okay. What is it? Electric vehicle. It's electric vehicles. Okay. Okay, that's all. Anything else? Hearing none, move to adjourn because there is, we don't have any, we didn't, we don't have anything for the next few sessions. So move to adjourn. So move. Second. Okay. All in favor? Aye. Any post? Any abstention? Nope. Okay. We are adjourned.