 Good evening, everyone. Today is Thursday, November 21, 2013, at 6.30 p.m. And this is the regular meeting of the Arlington School Committee. My name is Judson Pierce. And I'm very proud to chair this thoughtful committee. Before we get started tonight, I must report the very sad news of the passing of Giuseppe Pulcher, our webmaster, Claudia Vitoli's father. I'd also like to take an opportunity just now to acknowledge and request a moment of silence for the tragedy that occurred in our community this week. May their memories be a blessing, and may we please have a moment of silence. Thank you. Friends, tomorrow marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. JFK was a leader and a risk taker, indeed, even up until his final hour as President Kennedy on his trip to Dallas in November of 1963, intended to condemn his nonsense the notion that peace is a sign of weakness. His was a viewpoint not entirely popular at that time. And last week, I remarked on the importance of the Gettysburg Address 150 years ago. Examples of leadership and risk taking are present throughout that legendary speech. President Lincoln, too, was the victim of an assassin's bullet, and he, like President Kennedy, challenged the status quo and encouraged all of us to work to our noble pretentious. In researching the topic of what happened in our community near and around Boston on November 22nd, 1963, I came across an article from Time Magazine last week written by James Herb Inberg. On Friday, November 22nd, 1963, the Boston Symphony Orchestra held a concert. Its music director had just moments before the concert learned what had happened. He told the audience what had happened. He said, ladies and gentlemen, we have a press report over the wireless and we hope it is unconfirmed, but we have to doubt it, that the President of the United States has been the victim of an assassination. We will play the funeral march from Beethoven's Third Symphony. Now WGBH recorded this concert so there exists an actual audio recording. And I listened to it in Tentland. Gasp's are audible from the audience once that tragic news is delivered. What I found very interesting in that article was that Mr. Inberg talked about the healing and community strengthening power of music. He said there are times when music can seem a solitary experience that goes to the listener and it also goes to the performers. In a concoffinous age, he writes, the choice of music can define and anchor the individual, but there are times of collective crisis or celebration when music can remind us what a society is. The BSO Music Director was quoted as saying about that fateful day. In that period of time when we were all there listening to Beethoven in that concert hall, we all had to respond to this terrible tragedy for ourselves. And the music sort of sued us, reached out to each and every individual and helped us to process what had happened. So finally, friends, in our concoffinous and at times terrifying moment in history, I hope we can remember other times of great conflict in our society and the methods we employ to restore our sense of humanity. On this week where our community endured a tragedy so frightful and unnerving, and on this night where we hear from the leaders of our elementary schools and their priorities for our children, let us remember that music is among those great healing powers that we must instill in all our children. And let them understand, comfort them, as well as broaden their understanding of the world in which they live. You guys have eight more speeches for me until April. Nice job. Moving on, let's, we have a special, we have a very, very special treat tonight. We have some students from our, from three of our elementary schools, I believe, who are here to present on some projects of incredible generosity and compassion. And I'm really excited to hear and learn more about it. So I'd like to, at this time, introduce Principal Mark McEnany from the Bishop Elementary School, Dr. Eileen Woods from the down, and Miss Gorman, a fifth grade teacher at the Brackett Elementary School to introduce our special guests. Our students might want to come up too. Go ahead, thanks. We're all here right in front of the microphone. Is this yours? Good. I'm happy to introduce to you, Katie Boyle, who's a fourth grader at the Dallin Elementary School, and she's here to share a club that she started this year at Dallin. Hi, my name is Katie Boyle. I'm in fourth grade at the Dallin Elementary School. I like to tell you about a new community service club at Dallin called Kids for Change. Kids for Change is a way for Dallin students to get involved with service projects. Together with my mom, my brother, and some family friends, Oscar and Beek Hardin, we can come, we come up with ideas of planning each month a new community service activity. Kids at Dallin can help with it. This month, we are organizing a Thanksgiving food drive. Students drop off food donations and gift cards, so needy families in Arlington will have a nice Thanksgiving meal. Next month, we will be helping the town of Arlington with their holiday help program. So many kids at Dallin are very lucky. They get many toys at Christmas in Hanukkah, but there are many kids who are not as lucky. It is important that we try our hardest to help kids as many kids as we can, especially those whose families are going through tough times. The Dallin students of Kids for Change is hoping to have a monthly calendar on the school website that will list all of our projects. We already had had many Dallin students and parents and staff tell us that they want to help. We are hoping our Kids for Change Club will grow to other schools too. We are pretty excited about our new club. Thanks for taking the time to hear about. Do you have any questions? Thank you for all of us for telling us about this. I'm sure the people that are watching this right now would love to know our other people who invited to join the Dallin School in the food fundraiser where they can drop the food if your club would like additional donations. I'd like it, but we're donating all of this stuff tomorrow at 2.20, so yeah, we would like it. So if somebody wanted to, they could drop it at maybe the main office for the school before? Yeah. And just let them know that's Kids for Change? Mm-hmm. Thank you. You're welcome. Good evening, this is Jackson Dre and he's from Bishop Elementary School, he's fifth grader. And over the years, Jackson and his family have taken the initiative to work with UNICEF and he is going to talk about his efforts. Hi, my name is Jackson. I'm a fifth grader at Bishop. My family and I have been supporting UNICEF and giving money to poor families for a long time. For the past eight years, we've passed out little orange boxes to the student at Bishop to collect money for UNICEF while trick or treating on Halloween. This year, my mom didn't have time to do it. I decided it was still important to help other kids and persuaded my mom to keep doing it. I promised her that I would do most of the work. This year, Bishop raised $526.90. Some of the things this money may be used for is to provide protein biscuits for hungry kids, soccer balls for kids in refugee camps to play with, vaccines, bicycles to deliver medicines to small towns, and pumps to provide clean water to a school or village. Will you be doing all the work from now on? Um, I don't know. Good answer. Any other questions? Thank you very much, Jack. You guys scoot in. Push his ears up. Yeah, sit here, honey. Who would like one or two? I'm two, I'm two. This was a little unexpected that I was going to introduce these gentlemen, but ladies and gentlemen, we represent the Brackett School. With me tonight is Baroon, Niko, and Jackson, and they're going to tell you a little something about what we do at the Brackett for our community. The Brackett community believes in helping others. The children, parents, and staff are always looking for ideas to help. As a matter of fact, if you were to walk into our lobby today, you would be presented with three drives, the Philippine UNICEF Drive, the Arlington Food Pantry Drive, and Anton's Winter Coat Drive. A few children have asthma disease, if our school can start collecting change for the poor people of the Philippines. So a rather large bucket has been put down in the lobby. The money collected will go to UNICEF. Each year, the Brackett has done four to five food drives for the Arlington Food Pantry. Although the fifth grade organizes the drive, it is a whole school event. Last year we collected so much food, Mr. Colleen and Mr. McDonald had to take three trips to get the food to the pantry. And that was just one week's worth of collecting. We're hoping to double our efforts this year. Our first drive is already underway. It will run from November 18th to the 25th. The food is being collected in the lobby of the Brackett School of Anyone Wishes to Contribute. We are also sponsoring 12 families for Arlington's holiday helpers program. Each grade level will grant the wishes of two families. Mrs. Johnson's husband has been deployed to Iraq. She told us that many of the men and women fighting over there are not getting letters, so we decided as a school to write to the men and women, sorry, women, in Mr. Johnson's deployment. Mr. Johnson is going hand-deliver these letters to the soldiers who are not getting mail. He said it'll make him feel like Santa Claus, who will be sending out a total of 485 letters. We're hoping they'll reach the troops sometime before Christmas. I heard recently of children actually donating their Halloween candy to the soldiers overseas. I'm not sure letters are just as welcome. It's great. Thank you. Probably more often. Yeah. Well, thanks. I'm really, really happy you've come tonight and tell us a little bit about this. I mean, we're having a Thanksgiving holiday in this country the next week, and a large part of that holiday is exactly the kind of examples you're leading right now in your schools. So thank you, and thank the principals here tonight. We are very proud of all of our students. And I just want everyone to understand that these types of projects are going on in all of our schools is just that we only had five or 10 minutes this evening. And so we'll have other students come back. But I think that that is one of the things we're most proud about is the leadership and sense of generosity and compassion that our students are demonstrating by being leaders in these efforts. So thank you to all our students, and certainly thank you to the parents for the good example and their teacher. Moving on now to 45, we have total participation, Kathleen Coughlin. My name is Kathleen Coughlin. This is my husband, Mike Vardobedian. We wrote a letter to the Arlington School Committee that I'd like to read the content of now to the Arlington School Committee. Our daughter is a kindergartner at the Stratton School. We would like to call to your attention that the Magic Treehouse book series is being used as a basis for curriculum themes in the kindergarten classroom. The Magic Treehouse books are intended for children ages eight to 12 years old and in grades three through seven. The book themes so far have been dinosaurs, including armor, swords, shields, castles, dragons, and currently a book about mummies, including a ghost queen. The next book is about pirates. Our daughter just turned five years old in August. She is frightened of dinosaurs, knights, weapons, dragons, mummies, ghosts, and pirates. The reading level of the books as well as the subject matter is not age or grade appropriate. Upcoming themes may include ninjas, a ghost town, a dragon king, Vikings, the Titanic, earthquakes, and a haunted castle. These book themes inherently include elements of violence, danger, and frightening characters. They are chapter books intended to be read by older children. These inappropriate books are read to the children and they complete activities such as drawing and coloring pictures, making props, and dramatic play around these themes. Our daughter has come home with many papers and projects about dinosaurs, knights, and now mummies. Our understanding is that the kindergarten teachers are being required to use these books and activities for kindergarten instruction as part of the tools of the Mind program that has been adopted by the Arlington Public Schools. We request your support in ensuring that teachers are able to use age appropriate stories, appropriate curriculum subject matter, and materials in the kindergarten classroom. This is currently not the case. Please advise us as to how we as parents we can move forward in addressing this problem as soon as possible. Thank you for your attention to this matter. I had attached on the back some samples of the Magic Treehouse book titles and just some blurbs that I got about them from Amazon. The dinosaur book is called Dinosaurs Before Dark, and the blurb that I have about it is the mysterious treehouse whisks them to the prehistoric past. Now they have to figure out how to get home. Can they do it before dark, or will they become a dinosaur's dinner? The Night at Dawn. Jack and Annie travel back in time to Medieval England for an adventure inside a storybook castle from Feasting Hall to Dreadful Dungeon. Mummies in the morning. For this adventure, they select a story on Ancient Egypt and travel back to the Pyramid of Queen Hutepe who needs to find her copy of the Book of the Dead for a journey through the underworld. Will Jack and Annie be able to solve the puzzle, or will they end up as mummies themselves? I'll just say one more. The Pirates Pass Noon, which is the next book, I believe. Jack and Annie are in for a high-season adventure when the Magic Treehouse whisks them back to the days of deserted islands, secret maps, and ruthless pirates. Will they discover a buried treasure, or will they be forced to walk the plank? And there's some other examples of books that are later in the series. We're hoping for some support and some ideas of how we could move forward. We wanted to draw this to the attention of the school committee, and that our daughter often comes home at night, schooled. She sometimes will not even want to go in her room, and I know that's what sometimes five-year-old kids do. I get that, but it seems to be a little more as of late. And every once in a while at dinner time, she'll bring up talking about mummies, and stuff that they talked about at school. So, thank you for your time. Thank you very much for coming. I think that's it for public participation. We'll be having a discussion in about an hour on the new kindergarten curriculum tools of the mine that will be coming up at five to eight. But right now, on our agenda, we are very fortunate to have this sort of yearly presentation by our elementary school principals. I'd like to invite them up to the desk, if they so please. Up, Mr. McEnany is leading the charge. Oh, excellent. That's fine, well good. Well good. Perhaps you could all introduce yourselves with the community and us in this room. Before I get started, I was negligent. I did not point out Shabon Foley from the ADA. Please join us tonight. Welcome, Shabon. Why don't we start with Ramata? Hi, good evening. My name is Kristen DeFrancisco, and I am the principal at Hardy School. Good evening, Mark McEnany, principal of Bishop Elementary. Evening, Michael Hanna, principal at Stratton School. Karen Harple, principal of the Pierce Elementary School. I am the principal of the Pedro Principal at Sherry Donovan, the principal of the Thompson School, and I am the principal of Bracket School. On the agenda is essentially the discussion of your priorities that you've come up with together individually on crafting an FY15 budget. I know that we've started a process with our budget deputy, and we've talked about it here at the table, and we've talked about it with town leaders recently as well. So I'm sure my fellow members are very curious about what y'all are doing at your school. Well, thank you for having us tonight to discuss the budget considerations for next year. I wanna start by just acknowledging Dr. Thielman. Congratulations on your school committee achievement award that you were just honored with at the school committee superintendents conference down in Hyannis a couple of weeks ago. Thanks very much. Congratulations. So we begin first by thanking you, the school committee, the superintendent, and the assistant superintendent for supporting the elementary schools for staffing this year to support lower class sizes and supporting the integration of technology and professional development as we have started with the full implementation of the common core state standards. So tonight, I will frame for you our recommendations for the elementary schools as they relate to the importance of staffing to maintain low class size, the need for additional trained teaching assistants, the consideration for additional behavioral specialist personnel, and the need to develop a jobs description specific to the library teaching position along with changing this title and a discussion around increasing their pay to reflect the work that they do on a daily basis. So the center of attention and integral part and component of the social emotional well-being and academic achievement is the importance of teachers building strong, trusting relationships with teachers and their families. As the district looks at class size, it is important to consider the positive impact of how teachers will be able to do the following for their teachers when the numbers are manageable. So when things are manageable, we have the time to really listen to parents and children's wants, their needs, aspirations, as a result developing very strong personal relationships with families and child. Little things matter most to the parents, being able to help with the backpack before or after school, helping with the homework planner, extra help in learning a new concept, listening to a personal story, responding to a note, writing a note to the parents regarding the child's day. When we have 26 kids, for example, the management of that is hard. Also when things are manageable, we have time to differentiate instruction to meet the academic and emotional needs of all students. And finally, to build a stronger sense of class community and cooperation will children feel, where children feel connected to each other and feel supported by the teacher and by one another. Elementary teachers and principals know from our school communities, how valued important class size is and strong teachers are to our learners. This has been a top priority in elementary school's improvement plans across the nation for years. We have a deep understanding of the complex challenges that present in our model of the inclusive classroom. Take the makeup of an inclusive classroom, for example, of 24 children, okay? You can have three advanced learners, three on individualized education programs, nine typical children, two children 504 diagnosed with ADD, OCD, ADHD or a medical disability, three above average, two children with behavioral challenges and two with emotional issues seeing a social worker twice a week. Our teachers are often creating multiple individual, common core curriculum related lessons to meet the needs of these diverse learners each day. Teachers are responsible for demonstrating the growth through data obtained from assessment. For example, it's possible that within one classroom, students are taking multiple tests to measure reading. What has been described as lacking in American education is students' ability to problem solve and think critically. Developing these skills and students takes time for the teacher to collaborate with the children to bring out and enhance their ability at deep levels. The main focus of curriculum initiatives is individualization and differentiation. As a result of these two, come developing varied groupings. The more complex the skill, the more flexible groupings are needed. Teachers need to understand each student's skill level to enrich, review and practice. Our belief and our experience tell us that creating strong literacy foundation is the key to the future academic success for the 21st century learners. As you know, 21st century basics are not only reading, writing and math. They also include communication, higher problem solving skills, along with scientific and technological literacy. The thinking tools that allow us to understand the technological world around us. All students, not only tomorrow's scientists, not only the advanced and the fortunate need these new basics. All students need a firm grounding in mathematics, science and technology. We're preparing our children in elementary school for future jobs and for some jobs that don't even exist today. The classroom is a dynamic place constantly changing based on the complexities of students and multifaceted components of the curriculum. Teachers struggle with coverage versus in-depth understanding. Coverage is what some of us experienced in school, wrote learning in large classes. In-depth understanding is developed through experimentation, discussion and project-based learning. Lower class slices allow teacher to participate in each of these activities. They need to be able to provide time for children to engage in quality lessons and to get in-depth feedback on their assignments. We also value teaching assistants. Teaching assistants are the lifeline to supporting the diverse needs of the students with specific profiles at the same time, assisting teachers with inclusive, flexible grouping format that I mentioned earlier. I move on to the need for additional behavioral, specialist in the district. Teachers encounter situations where they need guidance, expertise and support of behavior specialists in the school or community. The social and behavioral climate of a classroom can reflect the climate of the school more broadly. Behavioral specialists play a key role in addressing the contributions of the school-ride strategies or programs to improve student behavior. Behavior is learned. Children's behaviors are shaped by the expectation as examples provided by important adults in their lives and by their peers. In the elementary grade, general education classroom teachers are arguably the most important adults at school for the large majority of our students. As such, they can play a critical role both in proactively teaching and reinforcing appropriate student behaviors and reducing the frequency of behaviors that impede learning. Accepting responsibility for the behavior learning of all students is a natural extension of the responsibility for the academic learning of all students that general education teachers exercise with such purpose every day. The goal of attaining additional behavioral support personnel in the Arlington Public Schools, elementary schools, is to help carry out their dual responsibility by recommending ways to shape and manage classroom behavior so that teaching and learning can be effective. Rounding out our recommendations is the need to develop a job description, as I mentioned, specific to the library teaching assistant position, reclassification, and to increase their pay. The elementary library assistants, they're a distinct group within the district in that they do not work under the direction of a teacher or learning specialist like most TAs do. They are acting more as paraprofessionals rather than assistants with more responsibility for whole classes of students as well as a significant amount of administrative functions. So just to give you an idea of some of the roles that a library teaching assistant provides, they advocate for the library through the effective public relations program. They administer the library budget to support program goals, book collection, book purchases, supplies for the library, and multimedia. Establishes procedures for selection, acquisition, circulation, and resource sharing of all resources in all formats. Process catalogs and circulates books in other print and non-print library materials, including mobile technology devices. And the list goes on, I have seven other bullets that I could rattle off. These library teaching assistants are doing librarian work. Library teaching assistants deserve more financially to reflect the work that they do for our schools. In summary, educational research identifies three top factors that significantly increase student achievement, the opportunity to learn, time, and assessment slash progress monitoring. Low class sizes and teaching assistants allow our teachers to provide increased opportunities to learn, more time to spend with children on academic tasks, and an increased ability to assess learning to provide meaningful feedback. At the elementary level, we firmly believe that the single best way to provide a quality education is by maintaining this lower class size and maintaining the staffing based on enrollment and the increasing numbers and increasing the number of qualified teaching assistants. The community's expectation of teachers, students, and schools has increased steadily in many ways. Some of the increased expectations are created through changes in the law, mass ed reform, while others have been necessitated by the increased complexity of the world in which we live. Meeting these expectations requires teachers' attentions to students supported by teaching assistants, behavioral specialists, parents, and principals. Thank you. Thank you. If any of the other principals want to take an opportunity to speak before we open up to questions, let's come. Okay. Let me go ahead and do the start. Can I ask all my questions? Are we doing it one at a time? I have three. Okay. All right. So my first question is, what would you say should be the maximum class size of any grade? And I know kindergarten might, I understand that different grades might be different, but that's exactly what I'm looking for. So in your recommendation, what would be the maximum class size that we should have? I think developmentally and philosophically, as you said, Cindy, the kindergarten first and even second grades should be seriously considered and capped or around 20, 20 is a very manageable number and kindergarten is 20 is a little high, 18 would be a preferred number, whereas three, four, and five, 22 kids is manageable. Once you start getting past 22 kids, the real estate alone in the classroom is hard as far as where you put these kids and the pedagogy is your approach to teaching and best practice, because you just don't have any room to move. So those numbers, and correct me if I'm wrong team, but are numbers that we would like to see maintained in our schools. Okay, great. My second question is on the behavioral specialists. Do we, how many do we have now and how many would you ideally like to see? You know, actually we have one of our special education administrators, both of them actually back there. So in case I misspeak, we have two BCBAs right now in the district and then each one of them has a behavioral support person attended upon them. So there's really four behavioral specialists, one of them in a senior position for each junior. So four in the district. Correct. Total that we have now. Correct, it's four. Ideally we need. Double that. At least one in every school. Yes. Oh yeah. That's less than double. That's all, you know. And my last question is on teaching assistants, basically the same question. How many do we have and how many do we need? And I assume actually that that's probably more a relation to how many students are in the class. So if we were at 20 and 22, would we need fewer assistants? And is it, so once we go above that, is there like an assistant needed for every four? Or I don't know if there's a formula on a math person, so I'm always looking for the numbers. It's hard to say a number in particular, you know, as you explained, but I can give an example. I have a fifth grade with 26 students in it with probably close to the same proportions that Mr. McEnany was describing before, students of all, you know, different needs. And there's a teacher in there running reading groups by herself. And she can imagine with 26 students how many reading groups you'd have to have with one teacher, no TA, it's very challenging. She's doing a fabulous job in not complaining. But when you look at that, you think, you know, that is just an unbelievable feat. So basically any class that is above these ideal numbers? Need some kind of an assistant, right? I would say yes. That's a great, that's just, again, so that I can do the math, thanks. That's it. Thanks very much, that was a great presentation. If you were to prioritize the four things I think you outlined, which would be class sizes, more TAs, redefining or better defining the library, teaching the library position, and then the behavioral specialist. If you had to prioritize this, what would you, maybe there's seven different, yeah, I know that. Well, I, and I- It was enough, they got it them four. I know, I know, I'm aware, I'm aware of the- We might not all agree on this, but I will say one thing that is on the table today that we would really like considered is the library and teaching assistant position to be heard, reclassified, and looked at. I know that we can agree on that, okay. Because we've talked about it for so many years, and nothing's been done for a long time. And we all have, like, new components that are un-used, and even as the, I have seen it now, it is amazing, and it's gathered for a lot of masters. So- And reclassifying them has some budget ramification. Absolutely, yeah. We don't know that number, obviously. Okay, great, great, great. And then if there was a second, go ahead, go ahead. I was gonna say that it also lends itself to the technology rollout that we've been doing to have the libraries available as a, as it's called these days, a learning commons for that kind of collaborative work that Mark was describing in the classrooms, a lot of potential if we can legitimately ask that of our librarians. Is there a second priority? I think that's probably true, yep. We are trying really hard in our buildings to build our capacity in a regular ed setting to help students, as Mark was talking about, access this common core curriculum and help children become college and career ready. And it's a struggle for some kids to do that, to even get to access that curriculum due to behavioral challenges. So in order for us in the regular ed setting to increase that capacity and that ability, we need the support to do that. Especially where right now, those class sizes are not at that ideal place. So not only are you experiencing children that are having this issue, but you're experiencing that in a room full of 25 children. So in order to get behavior plans in place for children and keep them in the least restrictive environment, keep them in the regular ed setting, you really need a specific type of support and those behavioral specialists can give us that. So that would be, and I think I speak for the team in saying that would be a real priority for us. Okay, thank you. I know from the parent perspective, an additional teacher is something very tangible for them to see because it does mean there's one more classroom to divide up their children. Based on what we've heard over the years about the different programs, for us we can see how a library assistant that actually is also teaching and how a behavior specialist would actually produce some of those responsibilities that might otherwise fall on the teacher. I'm wondering, could you talk a little bit more to the ways in which that would support a classroom teacher and give their time for direct children, direct student interaction? I'm sorry, nothing, I'll give them more time for direct student interaction. Oh, the TA staffing, will it? No, in terms of the behaviorist and the librarian, they're not resources that go directly to the classroom, but from our perspective, they are things that do actually benefit the teacher's ability to access their students. And I'm wondering if anybody would feel comfortable talking about that. There's not enough of us, we thought we'd have an aide. We like it when people bring in the specialists. I think that's what you're asking for too. Hello, good evening, thank you. I'm Jill Parkin, I'm one of the elementary coordinators with Chris Carlson, and I have an expertise in behavior analysis, so that's why they brought me here. Right now in the district, we have two professional master's levels, behavior specialist, board certified, and we also have two higher level district-wide assistants who are specially trained, and these personnel work directly with the social workers in the building, so I do wanna acknowledge that the school committee has supported the district in expanding the social work arena in all of our schools, and I think all of the principals would agree that that's a great resource. I think what the behavior analysts bring along with their assistants is kind of an expertise in looking at more of the intensive behavioral issues and how to arrange the environment to facilitate learning for those children, but most importantly for the classroom, because when you have a social worker, they do direct work with the kids, they really deal with in the moment, they're in the buildings, but it's really nice to have some experts to look at the more in-depth look at what are the functions of behaviors, what are the accommodations that really need to be put in place for kids, the behavior support personnel, the assistants go directly into the classroom, those are hands-on personnel that go in to implement behavior support plans, they go right into the classroom, they work with kids, they're hands-on, they're specialized teaching assistants, they're district-wide, all of us at the table, including Chris, support these positions, they're essential positions to keep kids learning, to try the work, to do the deed, to really implement the plans that are in place and extend the work that the social workers are doing. There's two of them for seven elementary schools, and I have found that those two personnel for all of the creative positions that the school committee has supported us on have really made a difference, and I think we would all agree. And it's hard, it's like you put them in one place then another place, so they truly are kind of like in select places as we need them. So regarding the specific nature of things, obviously that's not gonna get decided tonight, but I would look forward to just being one of the people that would help look at what the issues are, look at what the data is, about how we have utilized these people, they do a lot of evaluations, also an alignment with the social workers, so I think there needs to be an in-depth look and I appreciate the question, but those are some examples. And Jill, as you were talking, I was thinking about, and I mentioned us building our capacity to really service children that have these issues in the regular ad setting and having the consistency of someone with that specific of a talent that's really helping children access what they need to access, it's really many folds, and one of them being that we become proactive instead of reactive, so we're not trying to treat in a crisis, which is very difficult to do, we also become able to train teachers the right way to intervene for kids, and the more examples they see of that and the more consistent of a plan that is delivered around behavior management, the more they pick up on these things and they feel confident implementing them. And maybe the next time we're at a level where we can do some intervening before, it becomes a crisis, so for me especially as one of the newer principals on the team, I think that's where my staff and I really want to build our capacity that would be so helpful. Just one more follow-up, so what I'm also hearing is that this would actually be a tier two intervention as well for our students at the elementary level that are not necessarily having complete success with their teachers and therefore need more support, but we want to pretty much give them that support as early and appropriately as possible so that they don't have greater needs later on. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you. One of the topics that's been brought before us is the growth and enrollment in the district. Would you care to comment or bring forth any descriptions for us of how that's impacted your building at this point? There's more kids there. Well, it's a surprise and so I have a building that was built larger than the population that I had, but it's now almost to the amount that's the capacity in the building. You always expect the new coming kindergarteners. You don't always expect huge numbers in other grades and so you're dealing with figuring out the personalities of all your kindergartners, but then you've got four or five kids in third grade that are brand new, you know, nothing about them and they may not have wanted to have moved. So that's where it hits the most, it's those kids, it's not the kindergarten kids because they're all new, but it hits those. And particularly if they come in and they are very dysregulated kids, kids who have been struggling in school for years, then you need to jump really fast to supply them with services that you can see that they need right away. And you might not have all the manpower to do that. I think it's really one of the reasons that having the behaviorists in the building you see how that can be helpful in getting your kids' situations and this year getting so many kids, it would have been fabulous to have more. On a very basic level, space, we don't have an extra inch at our school. Gallon is the same, actually, Gallon's. Space. Space. And also the teachers are moving toward a data-driven instruction. I'm really thinking about where kids are and how we move them to the next place and how we look at data. That's really hard to do with 27 children in your room. You want to be able to give those assessments yourself because anecdotally, you get a lot of information from more than just the numbers. You can't always do that in a manner in which you're getting the most because that's times 27 for reading, times 27 for writing, that's a lot. That's what I'm hearing teachers say a lot about the beginning of the year, that they just wish they had more time and less to do. And increasingly, in order to kind of remedy the fact that you've got 27 at most, they're usually 23 patients in front of you and you're diagnosing and prescribing all at once. We've also created times in our schedule for more homogeneous groups to be created and that's grand, but we need then the TAs to be fielding those homogeneous groups. We might have in a grade three, there's three classrooms on a given assessment, we'd really like to have seven groups of kids according to assessment data, but we need the people there to lead the groups. And we're getting pretty good at pulling different people from different places. I have one kind of all hands on deck, but the more people we have, the more fine the instruction is. That leads us to the second question. If you're talking about lowering the class size, where do we put the classes? And question number three, I'm gonna go and be the hard one, because I don't expect, unless you have any great ideas of space within your buildings where we can start putting extra classes. We can use a fourth floor. A fourth floor, okay. And the third one is the awful school committee question that as we're looking at budgets, which are limited, and if you're asking us to add something, what are we doing that maybe we shouldn't be doing or might prioritize lower and maybe not do next year? And I also won't make you answer that question before the cameras unless you choose to. But I would invite you to make sure that the administration has both sides of the equation because it will be easier to add things to your wishlist if there are things that we can sort of ease up on that maybe were a good idea a few years ago that we don't need to be doing right now. Segment, and it's all about this woman who's written a popular and very unpopular book, looking at sports. Oh boy. If you get rid of sports, they'll have all the money. I know in Arlington that's like the worst thing to say, but I... You don't have any sports at the elementary level. No, but I'm saying you do it there and then everyone gains. Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. So you want to take from the secondary to give to the elementary? Oh, I see, I see. I know, I'm just, look, I do this for a day job too and I'm looking elsewhere in the district to meet my needs so I feel your pain and would like to see efficiencies but I think that when we go for trade-offs, I think that it's difficult to come in with a wishlist unless you've also got some things you can give up at the same time. Well, last year when we did talk about our new RTI model at the elementary school, that is something that happened. We did give up some TA in each building but we also did it tonight that that was a sacrifice for something without the, and if you'd like to talk to them about that, you can. But I would say that we are very lean, very lean and I think it'd be very hard to press. It's not just the cameras rolling really. And if I put it, I just have another comment on this. You're hearing principals talk about their sights on what's really necessary for the education children but what they're also not saying is the enormous burden that they are facing. We have two principals here who are at schools almost a 500 and other districts were looking at more administrative support or more support just for the operational functions of the building but they as a group would rather put additional money into supporting the children in their building. So as superintendent, I need to point that out because it's something that concerns me is the load that they are experiencing as well. And the second thing too, which we have been working on I think very creatively and very effectively in fact I'll talk about that Mr. Pretend support is we have such talented elementary teachers who have really stepped up to taking a lead in technology and being the leaders in their building. But we have for a seven elementary schools over the school for the children we have a .5 technology special, structural special in a district that is trying and has been moving forward significantly in expanding technology, enhanced teaching and learning. So we have some other issues there as well but as you can hear from their priorities it's all about the children. If I can say anything. I don't understand the whole acquisition of more money to a district or to a town. So but listening and thinking that we have to give something up to get additional is frustrating to me. And something has to give. We need to find more money somehow. I don't know how you do that. And when you pull principles across the nation and you read any educational leadership article on principle and whether or not that they're happy with their jobs and you're gonna find 63% of them that are unhappy and stressed with their jobs right now because the demands that we hold. And so it is it's frustrating to think that we have to give something up in order for us to present this tonight and to be heard and to be considered. There's Kathy brought up something about the I guess the the understaffing of our technology specialist. I just wanted to make a comment that increasing the scope of responsibilities for our library assistants could very well also address some of that instructional need around technology. First I don't think that Mr. Schwickman's desire to ask you if there's something that you would wanna give up is an indication of his own wishes. It's a understanding that we have a finite pie and we can only slice it and if we slice it this way then we can't do the big quarters or something. So it's we are working as best we can as a committee and as a town towards making that pie bigger but we aren't in total control of that. I understand my comments were directed to the committee by any means. It's just my frustration as we have these discussions and we look at our fiscal challenges and what we need in today's world just keeps growing and we can't afford to cut back on what we're doing right now. We need to take what we have and we need additional support. We agree. We agree. So my actual question was just a sense of whether the need for more behavioral specialists is related to the push out of the inclusion model this year in the classrooms and whether is that one the relation related to the other or is it wondering where that's coming from? I think this is my first year for sure but being a teacher in the system as well I don't think this is new. I think that the support, the challenges that are coming to us in elementary school at a young age, it's increased for whatever reason. And as speaking from the teacher perspective from it's always your biggest challenge. It's always your biggest challenge on, I have a skill set and my skill set is to deliver this instruction in the best way that I can and reach all the children in my room and the textbook didn't cover this. I don't even know how to get in. I think that's always been there. I don't think that it's necessarily our shift in the inclusionary model as a matter of fact. It's probably too early to tell since it's only been a few months but my guess is that and I'm sure I share the rest of the team's guess is that as we get more proficient at this model and this push in model we are adding another skill set to our classrooms. I anticipate it to get better. Once we have really flushed out how this is going to work and once we are able to really use the TAs that are direct that are attached to the specific special ed liaisons in specific grade levels as we get better at using them that way I anticipate it will get better. So I guess that in short, I don't think so. I don't think so. Would you agree? Yep. Okay. I'm going to go for a second. Thank you again for everything you've done. I'd like to state at the outset my daughter was a school librarian and an adjacent town. As a teacher, half my career I had full-time librarians in the school and then for the same reason it happened in this community for financial they were dropped. I applaud the, I heard two of you say that your people are going towards certification. I would ask you and my colleagues to consider in this study for this that we may be able to support all of them to go there. As a former educator, the value of a good school librarian cannot be measured. They do more than check books in and out. In fact, most of them don't do that anymore as certified librarians. They provide phenomenal skills in support of the regular classroom teaching. And if I could write a check for anything right now that would be the first thing I've talked about since the day I came on the committee. The need for us to have this back at the library and to support the books and not be dependent on the wonderful parents that we've had in this community in the books. The other thing I'd like to just suggest to all of us is the idea of class sizes. I experienced the idea of a weighted class where we all know that the larger the class size, the less time the teacher or a TA is aware of it can spend with the individual student. Some children require more than other students. So I'd ask you to consider when you're arranging your classes that the classes be if possible within the constraints of the law and everything to consider how much time these students are requiring from their teacher. Difficult to do in the kindergarten but you do have data after kindergarten. I can remember having a class in my building of 18 students at my grade level and I had a class of 25 and be quite frank, I chose the 25 students because it just isn't the amount of seats in the room. You as educators know that. Thank you. Process of putting classes together is lengthy, lengthy at every school and we all have really intricate processes for that. Sometimes a mistake is made here or there but they aren't that many, they are really carefully done but when you get a lot of new students, that's where you can get into trouble. And the other thing is, I just want you to know I'm not the only person that's done this but in the past two years and I've been out of my building I haven't done it because I was too busy with so many other things but the previous years I visited every preschool. I found every kid that was coming in town into my kindergarten classes so that I could be ready for what was coming. I didn't mean to make, if that came off as a criticism I didn't mean so. I just, when you were asked what the ideal class size is I do know that 22 can mean three or four different things. That's where I was trying to say it and maybe I should send it down. Thank you. I was wondering if you could maybe elaborate on what kind of behavior behavior specialists deal with. I don't, it's not, I've been reading a lot lately about how the lack of play and the need to now have a curriculum in kindergarten is really degrading students, not having the time to just play and deal with all the social issues that we used to let them deal with in kindergarten and now that we have all this curriculum and the massive difference that's making in children and the number of behavior issues that actually come out of doing that. And so I don't, I want to better understand is it coming out of that? Is it, or are these like behaviors that are beyond that? I just want to better understand what a behavior specialist does I guess and what kind of behaviors we're seeing and. I think we all have experiences and opinions but I do want Jill if she could to respond to how she charges her staff. I would say that it's not all related to play. That's not to say that's not an important component in the kindergarten, I do miss the kitchens. But kids are presenting with an ability to, or with, they don't present with an ability to regulate. So kids are not able to self-regulate more than there's a need there. There's a reason why we have social workers in every building. So that's like a piece of it. It's the social, emotional, behavioral presentations of kids that has increased. Kids on the autism spectrum, obviously we all know that there's a huge amount of funds that have gone into that. There's a lot of technology, there's a lot of educational modules in place to address those kids' needs. But the kids that are coming forth now are different kinds of kids. Seriously, Charlie? We just have a larger percentage of our children have- Increasing. Increase, okay. Absolutely. It's pretty acute. I mean, our Gen Ed, I'll speak for my staff, I know the rest, they can handle a lot. And these are anomalies that generally our behavioral specialists are working with. But it's an increasing number of anomalies. Huh. And have the anomalies that have the capacity gone on if we don't intervene to derail classrooms sometimes. Oh, absolutely. Oh yeah, I know. I'd like to call it like my new, when I talk with my staff now, I say, is this an in-between Z? Or is this something that we really, and what I mean by an in-between Z is what you say that we have the capacity, our teachers have the capacity to deal with a lot. So when you have a teacher coming to you and saying help, you know it's gotten there. And I think that's happening more often than it used to. Like just as an example, like I'm a person of anecdotes, I mean, we have kids who run out of classrooms when they get upset. They might stay in the building, they might not stay in the building. That's a safety issue. That's a child who needs to learn how to learn a way to deal with when they're upset. We have curriculum in place. We have the social thinking, social cognition curriculum. We have the open circle curriculum. We're utilizing all of that. It's a general ed initiative. It's a combination of special ed, general ed. It's a whole school. I've never been in a district that does more whole school addressing of children's needs. It's a gift for Chris and I to be here, truly. However, that doesn't mean that there's not some individual nature of the programming that needs to be in place. And that's why I think the principals are kind of putting forth kind of a request. Because when you have children who sometimes run, when you have children who sometimes hit, who sometimes injure themselves, who sometimes become verbally so dysregulated that they're not just not following teachers' directions. They're, I'm trying to use the right words. They might do it in a way that appears as disrespectful. They might, there's a lot of that kind of verbal language that's some of the most difficult behavior to manage is verbal behavior. And it's all done for different reasons for different kids. There's kids that come in that don't get enough to eat. There's kids that come in that haven't slept a lot that don't feel well. There's also kids who just have different brains and so that they need to learn in a different way. So there's all kinds of etiologies. It's not just one factor, which is why you have to really take a professional specialist look at it. It's not just one answer because it's not just one kid. But the behaviors that are presented sometimes are safety issues. So that becomes more than just extra staff in the classroom because no matter how many staff you have, if the other kids don't feel safe at times, that's a problem for all of us. I mean, the kids are there to access the curriculum. So it's that kind of an anecdote. That's what it looks like. It's like putting the district-wide behavior specialist in one school in the morning and another school in the afternoon because you do the best that you can to kind of manage what you have. One follow-up question. Do the behavioral specialists, do they help teach teachers how to deal with this? So over time, they also are learning these, right? So it's kind of a coaching and a, okay, all right, great. It has to be because it's remedying those presenting behaviors in the context so it has to be right in the classroom. And the language of behavior plans has to be the same. It's behaviorism, it's pretty tight, you know? Okay, thank you. That helps a lot. Great, thank you. I have to add, for me, at the Bishop and from my experience around behavioral support, and Jill alluded to it, is safety. And when we have behaviors that can be classified as bullying. And when I think about or when I look into a particular child's eyes and see malicious intent, I'm not a specialist, I'm not a behavior specialist. I need someone to turn to and I need a team of professionals to work with to not only help this child, but to educate me, my staff and the families and to get that child and those families the support that they need. And so the behavior specialists and social workers, thank you for that again, are wonderful resources, invaluable. Watson and Dorff, do not let people find you. And you know, if I want you to have what they do visit, you have them, you go and take them. You sit them down and say, I have you for a little time. I need to get all of these things out. You really learn, you really teach them, and they take the time to teach you. So that is sort of the right thing to do once it comes in. Do not let anyone else have to see you come first. Thank you. I just wanted to thank you all again, because this is my sixth time that I've heard the elementary principals come before us and talk about the needs of the building. And this is the voice and message I've heard over the six years. I mean, to the point of asked, prioritized, which of these are the top? Which one's the second? So it really, while we do have difficult choices to make with our budget, it does make it so much easier for us to know that you are all uniformly behind the same suggestions. So thank you for that. I just want to make a comment, because I know that a lot of people listen to this, and which is I think also why it's very powerful to hear the leaders of our elementary schools talking about this. But what they are talking about is not just Arlington, going on in Arlington, these issues are rampant in this state, in this country. And we have a tremendous focus right now on data and improving scores and all of these things, which are important. There's none of us here that does not think student achievement is important. But I think it's good for you to hear this, because you have to understand some of the challenges that face schools in moving in this direction, because the curriculum that our children are expected to master has become much more of robust. There have been certainly math science that may have been taught at upper grades, that are now taught at lower grades. We have very challenging standards that we have to meet, but we are also doing it in the context of having students be able to access that curriculum. And what are the things that perhaps stand in the way? And one of our principals mentioned the issue with some children come hungry. We do have a breakfast program. But there are towns, cities in this state where that remains an issue. And maybe we'll say something a little bit about some recent stuff that's been going on with the globe and they talk about fourth grade scores going down a couple of points. You cannot look at this without looking at the whole picture of what is going on in our society that may be not about anything that's at the schools. The schools increasingly are picking up a lot of the challenges that are being presented by our society. And we see this more and more in terms of social services, in terms of all of the support and counseling. The principals all came together a couple of years ago and said, we need to have social workers in every school. And we do. That is extremely important. We are very fortunate, and I will say this in Arlington, that we do have this. This is not universal. And so it's a lot of credit to all of you and to the community that we have been able to provide this. But without these kinds of supports in a school building that help teachers deal with the range of students that are in their classrooms, you can't expect to have high achievement in all of these things. The Common Core is a very rigorous program. And just thinking about just the writing alone that we're asking teachers to have our students do, to correct, and to give feedback on a timely basis so that there is just a constant flow of this. That in and of itself would be a challenge and you layer all of this else. So it's good for people to understand the challenges that are facing our schools today. And it's not just Arlington. I really wanna say that it is really a much, much broader issue that we need to look at as a society and as a state. Yeah, I think that one of the things that I've learned this year at work is the value of a good social worker. I could not live without my social worker right now. And that resonates with me a lot because of the things that I'm seeing among early childhood, early elementary children that are coming up. The other thing that I'm concerned about on a regular basis is the quality of life and the quality of life of our principals and the world you're living in and how it is coming to work every day and recruiting, retaining strong leaders. And so that the superintendent describes you as an unselfish lot who are looking to do things for others and not yourself. I would like to make sure that somewhere is in the budget process. If there are things we could do, particularly the little things, to make your world a little bit better as you're doing this work for us, please let them come to us and don't hold back. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. I think I speak for the team also and to just cite the clear support and teaming that we feel from this committee and I want to thank you for the opportunity to talk to you tonight and have this great exchange. Thanks very much. We're a little ahead of schedule. I'd like to invite Ms. Donovan to the address. It's a practical matter. I don't know if the people that are sitting over there are cold. I can turn that off. Yes. It's freezing. Is it freezing over there? It's freezing over here. It's cold. It's just got warmer, but... I wouldn't want off because I wouldn't want to go to the other extreme, but certainly a little warmer would be better. We can bring it cold quickly. I wish it had the gradations. We didn't ask about the temperature in the elementary schools. How is the temperature? How is the temperature? It's fine. No. We don't... Where's the judge? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. How are we going to pay for that? Stop it. No, yes. See, the elementary principals hear that question. Do we need AC in the elementary schools? Turn it off. Any floor in the summer? We don't have the plan in the case. Just to introduce the segment, and by all means, correct me if I'm wrong here, I don't think I related last segment to our goals, and I really would like to do that for the public. When we're hearing from the elementary principals, we're hearing on our goal three, which has to do with resources, infrastructure, and educational environment in our schools. And right now, we're going to bridge to the new kindergarten curriculum, which is called Tools of the Mind. And this relates to our goal number two, point three, which is that kindergarten teachers will be supported with professional development to implement the Tools of the Mind program in all of our kindergarten starting in September of this year, and this is quite a comprehensive manual. I haven't seen this yet, and it's done in, I don't know if I remember, but I had a chance to look at it. If you'd like to start, I'm sure we'll ask questions after. So I'm going to give you a little bit of a history of where Tools of the Mind came and when it came into the Arlington Public Schools. When I first came here six and a half years ago, Mary Vellani was, Vellano was the kind of the head of all things kindergarten and what had been going on for a few years was that we had this combination of things going to support the kindergarten programs here. We were hooked up with an agency that would accredit the kindergartens and every five years a massive amount of paperwork had to be collected. We had to be inspected and every year a massive amount of paperwork had to be collected. So people had been doing that for a while and the accreditation program, a program went along fine except no one liked it, but we did it in order to get a grant for money to support the kindergarten program here and partially that money supported the teaching assistants that were in the kindergarten. Mary began talking about, we really need to find another way to do this and everyone agreed or most kindergarten teachers agreed and so she began looking at what else is out there that will drive us in the same direction to be able to continually get this grant because we have been chosen as exemplary program. So she looked at, I mean she talked about several things but the one program that she really really liked was the Tools of the Mind program and I wasn't so convinced in the beginning, I read some stuff about it. The way it was set up for us was that some schools in Arlington that wanted to pilot the program for two years so we could look at it in action, we could train some people that wouldn't cost us a lot of money, we would be gathering data for NYU, and we could watch it, we could watch this happen and make a judgment at the end of two years whether this really was a solid program and one we wanted to continue. So that's what we did. I didn't see a lot of people leaping forward to being trained and becoming tools classrooms through the pilot. So I thought, I need to look at this again. Maybe there's something in here that would be really right for my school and I did a lot more digging and realized that I almost passed up a really good opportunity. So I agreed to pilot it with three classes, Hardy did three classes and Stratton did one and then there was a, what did you have? A control group at Brackett's. Okay, so for the last two years, I've been able to watch it in my school and have been really, really pleased with what my teachers have learned, what they were doing. I've been really pleased with the learning of the children in these classes. I have been terribly impressed with the amount of hard work. It is, I mean, I was watching a complete transformation of teaching and I was very, very impressed with the hard work of my teachers and very impressed with the results. So in the end of last year, there were several meetings. I wasn't involved in organizing those but I went to a couple in which the decision was tossed around we need to make a decision about tools. And eventually it was decided that all three schools, all the teachers, the seven teachers who were involved in the training really were very happy with what they were doing and saw great benefits for children. And we decided to go with this curriculum as an entire district and that meant a lot of money being committed towards training and many people spending hours and hours and hours learning to do something that they did and some of them, many of them did very, very well learning another way to do this, to teach kindergarten students. So let me tell you a little bit about the program. It is a research-based program. It builds on a strong foundation for school success, meaning that it doesn't just benefit kindergarten children, the research is beginning to show that they're following these children and it's beginning to show the benefits continue as they go through school. One of the most important parts about the tools program is that is the piece of self-regulation and self-regulation in young children is really executive function. So you're learning executive function skills at a very young age. What does that really mean? It means things like this. Children gain greater capacity to control their impulses. They are more easily able to stop when asked to stop and move on to another project and they have greater ease with starting something new that might be really new and challenging. It helps children behave the same way if adult is present or not. Children are more readily to experience delayed gratification. It often suppresses impulses that just long enough for children to actually consider the consequences or alternate actions. It doesn't help. I mean, all these things that I'm talking about it isn't the same for every child but every child can gain in this way to a certain degree. The findings of the research that they're doing show that self-regulation is not limited just to the social emotional piece of the pie but also can apply to cognitive behaviors like remembering and paying attention. So as we kind of talked before, we have a lot of children that come into kindergarten without a lot of self-regulation skills and therefore in many ways they are not ready and we're not ready for the programs that we had designed for them in kindergarten. So how does tools teach self-regulation? It's taught by embedding classroom activities with specific support and assistance scaffolding that fosters self-regulation. In other words, it's not taught on its own but it's taught within the K curriculum. So I'm not gonna go into depth about this either but it's taught in two kind of basic ways. Children are listening to stories and chapter books and then they act out the characters and actions that they've read about in a very organized way. They're not being taught to play, children know how to play but they're being taught to play in a way that is organized so that they can begin to regulate themselves, help other people regulate themselves. The second way that K teachers improve the quality of the play skills is to extensively play learning games with rules. The math program, you can't really see it in there but the math program for tools is largely games. So again, children are in situations where they have to learn certain roles, and how to actually work together successfully. So let's see. So a tools classroom should look like this. It's a place where activities are specifically designed to promote self-regulation and there are also activities that focus on academic skills while also giving children the opportunity to practice all of the self-regulation executive functioning skills. Tools classrooms ensure that children meet state and national standards by emphasizing research-based activity content. And a tools classroom promotes mature play, make believe in preschool and dramatization in kindergarten. A tools teacher is scaffolding systematically the development of students self-regulation from being regulated by others to engaging in shared regulation to becoming masters of their own behavior. Tools teachers teach early literacy and mathematics. That is not thrown out and everyone's not just in a play all day long and acting out things. But they combine it with early literacy and mathematics with an emphasis on building underlying cognitive competencies such as reflective thinking and metacognition. And tools children gain control of their social, emotional and cognitive behaviors by learning how to use a variety of mental tools. They practice self-regulation learning throughout the day by engaging in the activities that are designed for them that are developmentally appropriate self-regulation activities. They learn to regulate their own behaviors as well as again behaviors of friends and they enact increasingly more complex scenarios in their imaginary play and dramatization. One of the other things that I like about tools is that I see it being very, very appropriate for special education children. Many special education children need the activities that are done in their classes, the work that they're expected to do, they need it to be scaffolded. It needs to be in pieces and in parts so that they can actually get to the whole. And tools does that very effectively for children with special learning needs. So this year I wanna tell you exactly what we're doing in tools. We're not of course in the pilot anymore. We're not doing this without paying any money and we're not gathering data with the children that we have now for NYU. That continues but it's with children that we're getting older. So we're purchasing everything that we're doing so far and this is what we're doing. So whereas in the pilot, teachers made a lot of their materials. Teachers still make a lot of their materials but the kits that actually, the kit of materials that is a tools kit, we're not bought for the teachers in the pilot. They are bought for every teacher that is doing tools now. So they're slightly less material making but probably not that much. We have a coach that is visiting every classroom regularly. She is tools trained. I don't believe she was ever a tools school teacher but she's tools trained. She observes classrooms. She sits down with teachers and talks to them about their teaching. Her job is to help them become as strong a tools teacher as they possibly can. There's also training that we're paying for where someone higher up with than a coach who's had experience with tools for many years comes and does like an all day training for kindergarten teachers. I think there are three training days this year. There's also mentoring built into this and that is we have some teachers who know how to teach tools of the mind and two of them from the Hardy School, they are mentoring other teachers that are learning right now. They prepare some of the professional development that we offer during professional development times and days in the district and they also have offered to the teachers that are learning now, dates and times to come and visit their classrooms, watch them teach and then sit down and talk about it as well. So the other thing that is not so much a support to tools teachers right now but is certainly looking at how all this is going and making some decisions going forth and that is a kindergarten steering committee that has been in existence and now primarily what we talk about is tools. How is it going? How can it be modified? What do we need to support teachers with next? It's really a tools steering committee at this point. Another thing that is happening right now just naturally with all of the teachers that were in the pilot, they're really thinking about something that they didn't spend a lot of time thinking about in the first two years and now they're putting together some ideas of what we need to do for first grade teachers that are getting tools children. Last year, first grade teachers went, they went and visited some classrooms I believe and maybe they had a couple of hours of training. This year, every first grade teacher is going to have the opportunity and be expected to spend a day in a tools kindergarten. And I've just seen a rough draft. I didn't give it to you because it's not done and it hasn't gone before the steering committee but they've made up a one page document at this point about things that first grade teachers could do in a tools way at the beginning of the year to make the transition a little bit easier and then fade that away if they want to or hold on to it if they want to as well. Okay, so another thing that you should know about tools is that during the pilot there were things about it we didn't like. The math piece of it especially is very weak. It continues to be weak. So Nadine Solomon, who's a math specialist dealing with the elementary schools, she argued with the tools people about the fact that even though we were in the pilot we would no longer continue to use just their math program. And they said no, I believe. And she said, well, we're not gonna budge on this. And they allowed us the second year to create a math program that is going back to the Kathy Richardson work that we had been doing before. So now that is the backbone and all the tools games are kind of supporting that. But even though we're learning how to have tools classrooms the math is already modified. And the other thing that we did is that after the first year, we looked at the children who had had early phonics instruction in kindergarten and where they were compared to children who had had support through the foundations program and where they were at the end of the year and realized that it would be wise and we did it. I don't think we got permission from tools in the pilot to do it at the time, but what we did is all those children who were not learning as quickly and as easily their phonics and not learning to read as quickly and easily, we provided them with the foundations starting in January. And we saw better results. So we're watching that also very carefully. So that's my recommendation to tools teachers is that those children struggling with early reading, they should pick up foundations in January of this year. So again, that's another blend. The other blend that we've done is not as extreme as that. My teachers, because of the impact of having to learn a completely new exhaustive curriculum, they dropped Open Circle for the first year and the Great Body Shop for the first year. They added Open Circle back a little bit in their second year and they did not add the Great Body Shop back. But now they're in their third year. Both of those things have been brought back into the fold. They're finding that now that they are more confident tools teachers, the things that they really loved and were a wonderful part of our curriculum before they've brought back in and have time for that. So that's where we're going with that. Okay, so I think maybe the last thing I wanna talk about is the future. Pre-K monotony is considering tools for their pre-K classes and tools in the process right now of writing a first grade curriculum. So at some point, we probably are gonna look at that and see if we're interested in that, that's farther on down the road, but that's definitely a possibility of continuing tools into first grade. I wanna share with you just a couple more things. One is, I have one first grade teacher who was so impressed about the skills and the behavior of children coming into first grade that she sent an email out after the second week of school thanking all of the tools teachers in my building. And I made a list from her of the things that she was impressed with. Children way more independent than children she had experienced before. Children who already knew how to work well together. Children who, these are called sound charts and this is the foundation, this is tools. Children who could work easily in either one. So that actually when they're sitting down and writing and the bin on their table is there, both of these are in there and children just choose whichever one looks interesting to them. But there just wasn't any problem with the transfer into foundations which is done in first grade. She had a really close connection with the kindergarten teachers and had anticipated that things would be different with these first graders coming in and she's continued some of the stuff which has made her children in her class very comfortable. She does a lot of work around two children working together, one being the checker, one being the doer and then switching off which is a very common tools thing. She's continued doing that. She totally has transformed her own teaching because in tools there's a lot less paperwork that children do. There are more things to do, more games and she could see that they were gravitating in that direction and so she changed her program which is very much less paperwork. Her children occasionally raised their hands but they were all tools trained. She never said, you don't have to, you should or whatever a few kids do but she's sort of continued that tradition and she made all of the tools math games so that at the beginning of the first grade children would be comfortable and they've continued using them throughout first grade which is great. I think that's it. I think that's it. Members, Mr. Hanna? The materials that you actually, the teachers use to teach these skills, things like that. Does tools of the mind provide those? You purchase a kit. Some of them are provided, but you do still have to make a lot. Okay, you indicated that you and the faculty weren't satisfied with the level of the math. So you adapted your, our current math, or the, I'm a math program to go with the previous one. So as far as the reading materials and stuff like that, tonight we heard some parents concerned about books and stuff. And I'm not suggesting to change the whole content immediately or stuff like that. My understanding is that one or two of those books is at a higher reading level. They're all, they're read by the teacher. Yeah, they're read by the teacher. These are for units of study. Yeah, it's, these are read-alouds. Yes, they're not intended for the children to be reading. Although, all of us have some children who come into kindergarten. Who can read them? I don't realize that. Now, the materials that are used, are they just used by the teacher? Or are they consumable by the students as well that are provided that we're purchasing? Well, there's both types. There's types that you would run off and they're consumable, but there are others that, that aren't. Let me be more specific. Is this going to be an annual cost that we have to provide to support the program? Oh, no, no, no, no. But I have to say that tools revises it, its curriculum all the time. And so the kits and the manual this year is an improvement on the last one. And my teacher's really begged the teachers who I learned to get the new, the new stuff. So I've done that, but no, it's not like massive amounts of money. I know that there is this movement for teachers, kindergarten through eighth grade, to read to students at times, particularly above their reading level. And that has been shown to actually help students become better readers. In terms of the content of those chapter books that's read, is there a broad selection that teachers can choose from? Are there specific materials that align to the program that we're somewhat locked into unless we do what we did with math? Yeah, I personally don't have a problem with the books. I kind of like, these are very, I'm sad for NHL that is anxious about it. It's the first that I've heard about that. It didn't come up during the pilot. But I think these are very provocative topics. And children, for example, mummies, five-year-olds don't really know what a mummy is. These books are not describing in depth what a mummy is. But they know, this is really cool that we're learning about this kind of provocative topic. It's not what they really center on in the classrooms that I've seen. It's more the pyramids and some other stuff. But in any case, what could happen down the road is that we never use these books after four years. And we decide on another complete series that meets the need, does what we want it to do, as long as we do it in a tool's way. We're learning with this curriculum the stuff that was produced. But I brought this with me because I'm in classes that are, these teachers, it's their third year. I see stuff all the time that they're doing, has nothing to do with tools, but they're doing it in a tool's way. I walked in the other day, saw this amazing lesson in one class using this book. Now, I knew it wasn't a tool's book. So I said, is that tool, and she said, no, no, no. But I love it. I always used it. There's this fabulous stuff that we do with it. And, but I just do it in a tool's way. I guess my follow-up question too that would be for any of our students, children, more than ever before, we're seeing different anxieties. Children, part of the reason the school adjustment counselors at the elementary level are so needed, and based on students' individual histories, there often are areas that can create uncomfortable memories and such. What strategies are in place when there are topics that might be approached in a topical way, just as a reading opportunity for the classroom, that parents do get to know if there is some determination for that child that topic might be problematic, what alternatives might exist within the context of the tool's type of classroom? Well, anything that would make a child anxious as a classroom teacher, you would not push that. You would find another way around it. I know that in the mummy book particularly, my teachers didn't like the last line and thought that the last line in the book and thought it might be scary to kids. They just never read it. They just left out parts that they thought were not quite where they wanted to go. And so what I'm hearing then perhaps is based on the fact that we have had a couple years to pilot this and the knowledge that the teachers have of the Arlington students, and there might be some need to look more closely at which choices are the most appropriate for our population here. Right, but I have to say that we piloted all of this stuff for two years. I hadn't heard that before. Dr. Allison had been the easiest one. I'm sort of duplicating what Ms. Hyam said, but I actually had a child who would have fallen into the same category as the one that we've heard of. We could never read the Magic Treehouse books even through second grade. They were just too scary and too intense. I'm not saying every child was like that. It's just I know there are some kids who are because I had one. I'm not arguing that there aren't some children. Right, and so my question was don't, I mean they're supposed to be, the tool's curriculum is supposed to be looking at the whole child. Doesn't it come with suggestions for what if the kids are scared by the books? I'm not aware that it does. No, it doesn't. But if we had a child like that. I just read it. Can you pass it down? It's based, it is totally based on those books. Okay. So the thing is, if we had a child in a class that was very upset about this series, we'd find another series that we could use, one for Egypt, one for this topic, one for that, that would be not anxiety provoking for that child. Just like you would do about any part of your curriculum. You don't want to upset a child in your class. Right, and I can understand the appeal of the Magic Treehouse books. It's easy. It's got really interesting topics to many children. I'm just, I understand where the concerns about anxiety are coming from. I'm not going to ask about Jack and Annie. But what I, so I want to, I just want to kind of summarize from my, my, just to summarize where I think we're at. A challenge has been the fund, the foundations. Yeah. We're going to, that's now going to be offered in January. Is that correct? Well, it has been. It has been. So it's now in the curriculum for. No, no, no. We offer foundation support to struggling kindergartners either through the TA in the class or a reading teacher. If a reading teacher has some free slots, we have done that in the past because it's easy to identify the children that are really not progressing. And I don't think the tools people like that we do that, but they're certainly aware. So if there's a, if you identify a need to use foundations, a teacher can use it. Yes, that's okay. The, and the math you're, we're, we're using math that we've used in the past to supplement the math that's offered in. No, no, the math in the past is the backbone of the math program. All the tools games are the support around that. Okay. Because it's the same topics that you're covering. And, and, and I would presume that if there's a, if there's a, if there's a, you know, someone's uncomfortable using a certain tech, part of a text or all are part of a text, they have, they have the chance to consult with their principal about this and talk it through and make a modification. Or talk through. So a principal called me about wondering about something that was written in one of these books. And I said to her, you know, as a teacher, one of the greatest things is you have a lot of freedom and it is your responsibility not to read something or do something that you know a child is going to be upset about. Just, I mean, have you ever read a book to a young child and known, oh, I'm going to leave that line out, that line out, that line out. Oh, every, every day. That's what you do. It's my day. That's what, that's what a teacher is trusted to do. I'm not saying Spanish sometimes. So, okay, so I guess the, we're in November. So we're in that, we're in month three of the school year. So we're in the middle of the second quarter, I guess, right? So we're early in this and I think it seems to me we need to, my sense of things is we need to monitor this some more. We need to kind of keep having discussions. Maybe the, maybe one of our committees needs to meet and go in depth on this. And we're not going to really have a good sense of whether or not this is, how successful this is for all kids for another, at least at the end of the year, maybe. Well, we have a pretty good sense or we wouldn't have gone with the program. Right, we have a good sense in the pilot. Right, I got it. I got it, I got it. So the other thing I wanted to say is that I do want you to know it hasn't been totally smooth. There, any, any curriculum that just completely pushes the curriculum aside that you were using, that you were doing, that you were creating, that's a huge change, a huge, that's huge. And I, if I had been asked to do that after teaching kindergarten for 15 years, I would have said, see you later, I'm going someplace else. So, and it's hard. The amount of work is really, really hard to get it going, set up, make some materials. And is there, I'm presuming, I'm asking, is there a lot of dialogue between all of the teachers who are using this curriculum? Are they meeting? Are they getting a chance to meet across the seven schools? And they also have a rep, every school has a kindergarten rep on the case steering committee. So I, those people come to the meetings really with a lot of questions, information about what people are feeling, what they want, what they can do. And the final point I want to make is I don't, I don't think there's any action the school committee can take at this time other than just keep getting information. You voted it in. Yeah, so it's, so I just wanted to point that out. Yes. So I think that, that's my understanding. We can get information, we should get information. Right. We should digest it and then take into account. And if you have any questions that you, you know, that come up over the next few months, you can always email me. Jerry, you said that all of the three schools, all seven teachers were really happy with the pilot, but we have 22 kindergarten teachers. My question has to do with, can you hear me all right? Yeah, my glasses are kind of. 22, we have 22 teachers in the district. Yeah. All right. We had seven who were happy with it. I'm concerned and I was concerned in February and I was concerned this spring about district and teacher buy-in. What can you tell us about those that may not be satisfied teaching this in that classroom? Well, I think there's a few people who absolutely don't want to do this. And it probably affects them deeply and affects their kind of diving into it. I think that, I think that other people, the majority of other people are buying in to different degrees. I think principals are working very, very supportively with their teachers to try to help them do the best that they can do. And there are some people who absolutely love it that were very concerned in the beginning. And I'm struggling to still understand the reason behind the change. I mean, you started the presentation with the background of the accreditation process and the grant money, but to change overhaul entirely a student's first entree into the public education system seems to warrant a larger reason and attitude adjustment or curriculum adjustment than we were tired of doing the accreditation every five years. Okay. I don't think that's a reason enough to change. I don't think that's a reason enough to change overhaul entirely something that's been working for years. And the kindergarten students who were going into first grade were doing first grade well. And it wasn't like they were having trouble adjusting to first grade. So I need a better rationale. And I want to put this on the future agendas, at least while I'm still chair, to keep monitoring it this year. I'm going to need some better rationale about why we switched to begin with. I can give you another that was a discussion point. And in kind of general terms, it was a, the kindergarten program that we had before was a very strong academic program. But the feeling among some is that it was not developmentally appropriate. And that children were being pushed really, really hard to learn to read and math. And I have nothing against pushing children to learn these things and be good at them. I just, I thought, and so did some other people, not everybody. But I thought that there's many ways to do this. And that the way we were doing it was not developmentally right on target. So that was also part of the discussion. A few other questions before we have to leave this topic for tonight. Dr. Allison Ampels. I actually just wanted to speak to your point about the seven teachers who were happy. I believe the number seven came from the number who did the pilot. It wasn't only seven among 22 who were happy. But the other ones didn't pilot it. Right. So they couldn't be happy with it because they didn't pilot it. And my question had to do with, well, they couldn't be happy and they couldn't be unhappy. They just didn't know. Or they didn't, you know, so there wasn't enough roll out in the pilot to introduce it amongst the district. We just introduced it to two schools and a control group and another school. Three schools and a control group. Yeah. I just wanted to point out 10 years ago, which was a different superintendent and very much a different school that kindergarten curriculum we actually had a disproportionately high number of students retained at the kindergarten level compared to other communities in the Commonwealth, which, you know, was part of my personal journey to this position, which is why the data sticks out. But, you know, there were a lot of children that were experiencing success and there were a lot of children in Arlington that were not at the kindergarten and first grade level. And so, you know, in light of child development and the fact that we were having that issue and there is a growing population that need executive function services and this seems directly tied to it, you know, I personally think it was an appropriate shift and I would hope that if there are broader discussions that it really is not just down to what whether we liked this better or the previous one, but really is based on education and what's appropriate for children in our changing world. Mr. Thilm? At one point I want to make, you know, 10 or 11 years ago when I joined school committee, I don't want to criticize anybody in leadership, but the tendency, you would see different programs in reading, you would see different programs in math at different elementary schools. It was not uncommon to see seven different schools operating in seven different ways. And so, I applaud the district for choosing one curriculum and implementing it and trying to make it work at seven elementary schools. That's not an easy thing. 22 teachers, 22 different, they're very talented people. You go into teaching your talent to your artistic, you're creative, you've got a lot of gifts and it's tough to manage. I know that. So, I certainly would never want to see us compromise here or go back to the old days where everybody did their own thing in every school and every school had their own thing going on and, you know, you would kind of, you know, when I ran for school committee first, I would hear whether Pierce does it this way and Thompson under Mike McCabe does it this way and, you know, the Brackett does it this way and it was chaotic. So, I think I applaud the district for saying, okay, this is what we're going to do in all seven elementary schools and I think we just have to keep monitoring it and we can't compromise. We can't kind of do this compromise where so many people get to do their own thing in each school. We can't go back to that. That was a bad system that hurt kids and Libra refers to the exact circumstances that led us to make some changes as a school committee years later. And just for you, I'm going to start. Yeah, so I also want to applaud the district because, as I said previously when we were talking to the elementary principals, one of the issues I've had is, as a teacher myself, is the lack of play and the lack of really letting students use their imaginations and then just taking that and allowing it and the thing that I love about this curriculum is that what it does is it takes that and then it talks about the science in that and the math in that and just takes a story and kind of then pulls learning out of a story which to me then shows that kids, you can learn from anything and what I really love is how important play is and how important it is that kids get to come up with so much of what happens in this curriculum and I think that that's so vital these days. I mean, given everything else and how rigorous everything else gets to be as you climb up the ladder, we see ourselves with a lot of curriculums that we don't have a choice on and so I love it when something comes along and we get to choose it and we get to make it our own and I think that the nice thing is, is that the longer we have it and the better we get at understanding what it means. It's like common core, right? I mean, the new curriculum is rigorous and yes, as a math teacher, it's really hard for me to be moving to that but I see the wonderfulness that it can be when I truly learn and can apply and get my students to be thinking and problem solving in the way that it will make me and I think that it's the same with this and that eventually what we see is that we will learn as teachers that, oh, we can do this with any story or with any thing is what we're doing is we're taking a story and pulling out all of the things that we can build on for kids but it allows play and school to kind of become one and become together and I really like that about the curriculum so I really, I applaud the work, I know it's hard, I know it's really hard when we're going to a new curriculum, I hope that we are listening, I know that those 22 people all probably have great feedback and so what we need to do is kind of, as my colleagues have said, monitor it, make sure that we're meeting and that those people are talking and sharing the great things and helping each other over the bumps with the pieces that are difficult or maybe don't feel right or don't work or whatever it is but I think it's really great and I'm excited personally, I was, when I was touring some of the schools last year when we were doing the series we were in a kindergarten class that had had the tools of the mind and just the stuff that was all over the walls all the stuff the kids had created they build all this stuff to put on these plays and they get to decide what to do and there were no kids in there but I could just see from all the stuff that it was fun to be there I was like, man, I want to go back to kindergarten so I don't know, I'm really for it and I know it's hard work and I applaud all the work that they're doing and I look forward to hearing some of the pros and cons and how we can move forward and work those through and massage it out and make it something great so thank you Yeah, I'd just like to echo my colleagues' comments I have certainly made no judgments based on anecdote or evidence or I certainly haven't poured through that manual yet and I'm sure there are others like it but I really, really would appreciate regular updates I'd love to see curriculum instruction take this as an agenda item during this year and really sort of flesh this out a little bit I just had a couple questions on the steering committee which you call the tool steering committee I mean, how often does it mean once a month With whom? Me and a representative from each school and a preschool representative And since we're lucky to have the other elementary school principals here tonight do any of you have a comment on this discussion and it's new for all of you in your schools except the pilots but any thoughts, comments, things that Sherry didn't Well there is one big thing that I left out which is the writing that children do in the tools program we had previously been using Lucy Cawkins curriculum which I love tools is better the writing is amazing these children can do it's really amazing All right, well we will continue to Oh, Mr. Schlicken Yeah, one of the things is that with the discussion of what has been happening in terms of the need for additional behavioral support social workers trying to get kids to acculturate within a classroom the thing that hit my ear when we first talked about tools last year and what I'm seeing now is that this is a means for doing that work and setting up the support structures and socializing children into school in a way that they can come to school every day with a curious spirit and if that packaging and that acculturation is emerging and moving up into first grade and second grade next year that is something that we need to document and demonstrate as being an outcome I'm all for once teachers are familiar with the program for them within the spirit of it to get off of the fidelity of a first-year use and to adjust the materials and maybe there is a need for adjusting materials I don't know beyond what we're doing because but and I'm not going to micromanage to that point but I think that if we can demonstrate the long-term outcomes in terms of better educational attainment kids being on task able and ready to learn and interested in school that's a good outcome in my mind I haven't seen the long-term effects although tools people are looking at it yet but I have to say this is my seventh year in Arlington I don't know sixth year in Arlington seventh year I mean around 07, 0607 yeah so I have three kindergarten classes this year one teacher is new to tools but the other two this is their third year I do not have a behavior problem in kindergarten this year and it's the first year do I have a different type of child no I have all the kinds of mix that I've always had but they're all very, very, very comfortable mm-hmm thank you very much Sherry and thank you to all our principals for spending some time with us tonight really appreciate that and your help and your guidance will inform our budget-making process thanks talking again I'm sure Dr. Vody I didn't let you in on that do you have anything to add before they go home we want to thank them all they're all tired after a long day they're there at school at you know seven in the morning so thank them all we will talk more about this as we go forward and I will echo the last thing that Sherry had said well two last things is is that she has commented on that this year a couple times to me that the behavior are no behavior problems that's amazing yeah I want to steal this maybe that's the way to get rid of needing the behavioral specialists well yeah well down the road yes you know you can at some point right they were in the schools there'd be no behavior problems what AC is the key no I don't think so all right let's move on but monthly financial reporting Ms. Johnson thank you for presenting us with us you were at long range planning this morning so Mr. Pierce I just wanted to share with the committee that Dr. Allison Ampe and I didn't get to look through the book as much and when we asked Principal Donovan about getting to hold on to it she told us that it was needed for a class tomorrow but we did actually request if she could send the committee the book list for the program and then if there are approved alternatives when one of the book topics is not appropriate for that class what those alternatives are that that might be helpful in terms of us understanding this issue a little better thank you okay Ms. Johnson you have the monthly tracking reports we are doing well so far we mentioned last month the projected overage and out of district tuition we're still tracking it about the same number at this point it is still early in the year we haven't really gone into the heating heating season and it won't be to the other side of that and how many snow days or non snow days will have some budgetary impact that can't be known at this time we do have some we have had some open positions in maintenance custodial and clerical some of which are in the process of being filled some of which have been filled but because we're almost at the midway point of the year and those salaries weren't being utilized at the beginning part of the year that's why there is some savings in those lines right now any questions Mr. Hainer line 811 831s and a 3 custodian salary wages 3181113 custodial yes okay the august had a positive variance of 8000 plus october had a zero variance now november has a positive variance of 10 000 because we had people in positions who left and then you know that this is this is a very fluid thing with the comings and goings and we have added we've recently hired two custodians and there is more flux in the offing but it was it was 10 000 early early projections are just that their projections and yeah I can't nail it every month thank you 81119 the summer program we went from october to a negative variance from 4 000 to a negative 17 000 yes because I round I rounded up the last of the expenses and moved them into that line okay now the 8121 had no variance for 2 prior and now we have a positive variance of 66 000 yes at the beginning of the year I'm going to tell you that we're exactly on budget and as as things begin to unfold and I get some actual expenses to look at I feel a little bit more comfortable projecting any kind of variance but I am really reluctant to to to have a variance in the first month that you know it's effectively the first month of the school year okay but 0203 and 0203 are showing a 98 000 and a 22 000 negative it is still it is still very early in the year and the way I project these is I take what we've done divided by the number of weeks we've done it and then project it forward but it could be that they're front-loaded for various reasons there's a lot of variance this time of the year I understand that it's just that the two prior reports had the zero variance that's why I'm bringing it that I'm happy with your answer again I will assume it's a similar answer with 204 and 304 I'm sorry not too 204 is a long-term sub it's a positive variance of 45 000 but it's again very early in the year okay and 81 304 maintenance salary went from 108 000 positive variance to 48 000 yes we've added two and a half positions okay we didn't add positions I misspoke we filled positions thank you 81 307 it says permit what is it permit has to do with a particular classification of extra pay that's allotted to custodians by contract for certain kinds of duties and at the top of my there's like three or four different pay categories in that nature and I can't remember which one of them permit is but it is a special pay category under the custodial contract okay and 81 314 custodian custodial clothing there's a problem with the way it was budgeted that the the clothing allowance for both custodians mate or all three maintenance and the bus drivers was all lumped into clothing allowance and so what's happened this month is I've broken the budget out that should have been in custodial clothing allowance away from clothing allowance so the budget was all in clothing allowance but the expenses for custodial clothing allowance had been on a separate line and so now I've moved the budget to be with the custodial clothing allowance so basically you had three kinds of clothing allowance lumped together and now I've broken it out into two okay and it was an increase because your original budget was 9600 now it's 10400 I was reading with a better budget okay okay I just want to make that teacher moving that was dramatic it went from 6,055 negative last report to 17 17,000 who moved in the last month no one moved in the last month the expenses have been the same all along the only difference if you'll go back and look at those reports is that I was projecting to move those into a revolving account and now I'm projecting to leave them in the general fund but the expenses haven't changed okay it's the projections that have changed 82404 had all three tracking reports have zero in the budget and is now showing still showing zero in the budget right there's no budget correct I didn't have a line item for budget for roof repairs this year okay because it hasn't been a steady it hasn't been a steady expense category in the last three years okay we also a similar thing with ground supply ground supplies correct but we're now showing a negative variance of ten thousand dollars are we incurring expenses one of the one of the things that's tricky about maintenance is that when I inherited the maintenance budget it was all pretty much in one big lump and over time I've been trying to break it out line by line at this time of the year I'm not going to say that we're going to have savings in HVAC or boilers or anything like that until we get through the heating season thank you so I'm in sort of a bad spot right now for the things that have no budget line I'm showing a variance over budget because there is no budget and I do have expenses I fully anticipate that there are many lines in the in the facilities budget where I will have savings to offset these but at this point in the year I don't want to show savings because that's feels unlucky and my last one 83802 environmental services it only went up 20 dollars from August to October but it's gone up close to about eight thousand plus it's then in a negative variance 83802 environmental services I mean the budget hasn't changed right the expenses have gone up and instead of me estimating that instead of me projecting that I would move those expenses into revolving I'm now estimating that I'm going to keep them in the general fund thank you Mr. Fillman could you just explain the variance formula one more time I missed that your formula for that column this is variance okay basically I'm saying at this point in the year for the most part that we're going to spend to budget unless I have specific reason to believe otherwise in the case of some of the salary ish lines in my ish I mean substitutes temporary salaries I am doing a projection based on time the number of weeks where this particular job would have been expensing divided by total expenses and projected out to the end of the year so the variance is a projection for the remainder of the year that's what I want to clarify it's not a year to date we're behind or ahead of year to date okay got it so the bottom line is that the variance is showing us to be slightly ahead of budget by correct and I am continuing to estimate very conservatively so I suspect there are other lines where we're going to come in under but at this point I don't want to I don't want to overcommit that's all I wanted to clarify the you know that every time in the budget you've Diane you've been telling every time in these presentations you keep telling us the special education but it's going to be over by $700,000 and we better we got to get prepared for next year so I guess it's not it is not a discussion that I had about the FY15 budget I'm aware of that but I just want to leave it out there that it's a big that's a big number you're showing us it's not a small number 700,000 is not a it's a big number it's a big number and I'm very grateful that over the last several years we've had the the political support to create the reserves that we now have so that that I'm not staying up every night worrying about that variance for this year for this year but you know the most important thing you can buy yourself in budgeting is time right you know you have time to adapt to almost anything if you have time it's when you don't have time and that's where the the reserves are so vital because special education is something that swings and can swing dramatically and very quickly so those reserves that buffering is essential to sensible budget planning year over year okay thank you Dr. Allison um I just wanted to know on the salary lines the 81201 81304 examples where you're projecting a positive variance does that mean that you do not plan to fill those positions no those aren't positions those are temporary salaries and so I'm projecting those as a run rate based on what's been spent so far over time and then I'm extending time to the end of the fiscal year so if they spend as they have begun that is where they would end up but I have no reason to necessarily know that they will spend at that rate I will continue to use that mathematical model as we move forward in time and as the number of weeks that we have actual expenses froze and the number of weeks that I'm guessing shrinks the number will get closer closer to where we'll eventually land so I can't look at these and say oh it looks like there's a position that's not filled no you would where you would look is in the permanent salaries because you know where I'm showing it is custodial salaries clerical salary and wages and maintenance and maintenance salaries which is 81304 all the other I'm not sure when I built the chart of accounts it was kind of in a rush why this number is an outlier but the other ones the 81111 through 81117 are all full-time permanent positions and if I had been thinking better the full-time maintenance positions would be living at 81118 where they belong numerically so those are really the categories where it's position by position and where we have a vacancy that you would be showing up those kinds of savings okay okay thank you just for my own as the year goes on those variances pluses and minus well they get bigger you know because at this point well oh well okay I will be showing places where I genuinely believe we have savings there are places where I think we have a really good chance of having savings but I'm not gonna I'm not gonna cook my goose by saying so at this point thank you but I am gonna say you know obviously if I didn't plan a budget in this line and I have expenses that's obviously if we see a 98,000 positive in May that looks good in May in May but not in June it may in May thank you thank you Ms. Johnson onto the superintendent's report well I have a few things this evening first of all I want to publicly thank and acknowledge all of our social workers in our district as beginning the meeting we acknowledge this tragedy that we had this week and it literally happened a block away from one of our elementary schools and our children in that school left school that day hearing helicopters seeing police cars media trucks so we one of the things that we have benefited from and really showed up in this particular crisis is that we have now this counseling grant and this summer through the children's room all of our social workers were trained on crisis care and what do you do in a crisis to support the students the teachers in a building and so they all gathered together were there to support the teachers at Pierce and to support the children at Pierce the day after and they handled it very professionally they were just quite wonderful so I want to say that and I think that in general this has been my experience since being in Arlington is that when things happen people in this district really do come together and support each other in very significant ways and that did happen but it's important that say that because you know we are really starting in a very tangible way seeing some of the benefits of this counseling grant not to mention all the other good things and in fact one of the things that we probably will put on the agenda sometime mid-year is an update on all of the activities that that are going on through that grant I also want to congratulate kudos to the high school I don't know how many of you were able to see Dead Man walking but it was excellent and well you you saw as a committee four minutes of it last week but the whole play was was very professionally done the staging was excellent and everyone was quite spellbound by it so congratulations to them I also want to acknowledge two of our teachers and this you know occasionally this will happen but particularly in this situation one of the things I think you've heard is that we have teachers acting as leaders in many ways they offer professional development they mentor they go out and they represent Arlington at conferences they give professional development at much larger stages and are are acknowledged for their their knowledge and their leadership and last week we had two of our teachers who are the technology leaders in their building as I mentioned earlier we have each school has a technology leader and at Thompson we have Nicole Melnick and Estran and Marie Abbott and they there was an iPad summit last week in which a thousand people attended the conference and they were presenters at that conference on the way they use social media in their classrooms Twitter, blogs, YouTube Pine Trispers I don't even know quite what that is but they they had over 60 people there and they had rave reviews so I want to acknowledge them because it's a lot of work to present at a major conference and in addition to all of the other work that they do but along the same lines I wanted to to talk a little bit about that conference in relationship to the the direction we're going with technology the Justin Reich who is an Arlington resident founder of EdTech which is a an organization that does a lot of promoting of technology education in fact they were a sponsor of the conference spoke about the necessity when you when you roll out technology or have a technology plan about having an educational vision you just don't get technology just to have more devices and tools and it's it really has to be aligned with a vision and much to our assistant superintendent's surprise he called out Arlington at this conference as having a vision and let me just saying that that in meeting with our assistant superintendent in my hometown of Arlington regarding their vision Arlington in grades k to five they focus on tools of the mind and habits of the mind in grades six to ten they focus on the ability for students to conduct discourse and base that discourse on evidence everything they do including how they use technology is there to meet that vision and that is what is necessary for success so we may not have all of the laptops tools and so forth but I will say that we're doing how we're moving forward is in alignment with a vision about how you use technology and not just to have technology so I thought you'd like to know that piece of it one of the other things is that every once in a while we talk about some of the successes that we our students have in lots of different areas including athletics and this this season we had a very successful season in athletics in many respects and and and I think sort of at the top of it separate apart from the achievement of the different teams I think that the cultural change at the high school has been very positive in looking at reaffirming what the role athletics plays in a high school in terms of developing a lot of a lot of great character building skills discipline habits of mind team building collaboration all those wonderful things that they talk about at booster dinners but it's true and our new athletic director has brought our captains together every Tuesday morning to work with them but separate apart from all of those things they did very well the football team this year won the middle sex league liberty championship and they went into post season but this was the first time that we've been in the well this is the second year I guess the middle sex league so they did very very well our cheerleading group qualified for regionals at the meet that we hosted a few weeks ago and so they're going to they're I don't know what happened with their competition and I think it's actually coming up this Sunday field hockey team made the tournament for the first time in four years and in fact in the first round they beat the number one seed and and we're able to go a little further into the into the tourney girls soccer came in second in the league and made it to the D2 north semifinal game but they they lost to one of our lost to Wilmington and then the boys cross country competed in the divisional meet last Saturday and as a team the boys placed 10th out of 25 teams in the divisional so that's still quite accomplishment and and then Andrew Peterson who's a sophomore will be turning to the States this weekend for the second year in a row so the teams did very well in all aspects of it and so we're very proud of our athletes and look forward to the next season so those are the our chairs disappear that's all I have this evening thank you this time we'll do the consent agenda all items listed with an asterisk are considered to be routine and will be enacted by one motion no separate discussion of these items unless a member of the committee so requests in which event that item will be considered in its normal sequence approval of warrant number 14067 dated November 14th 2013 total warrant amount $636,227.31 approval of draft minutes none approval of facing racism student weekend retreat March 14th 2014 6 p.m. Sunday March 16th 2014 second all those in favor thank you I will return the gavel okay all right subcommittee and liaison reports so I move approval its second reading of policy BEDH public participation at school committee meetings this this basically clarifies and tightens some of the rules makes them a little bit clear we talked about this last week and I presented to you a second reading and I move approval just quick policies and procedures so we received them so last week the committee voted to have the law firm take a look at all of our policies so Karen I just want to make sure that once this that all we make sure everything's updated on the website because she's going to start going through it after she's going to do it on the website she's going to go back no she's going to go through the website yeah so she's going to start after that is that okay yeah so she's going to go through the website and start after Thanksgiving Mr. Karen we are updated on the website okay and once this is up there then I think she'll start that she's revising policy ke that whole conversation we had and we'll once we get through the Thanksgiving break we'll look at dates for a second another meeting let's see well a good number of us were at the long-range planning meeting this morning and I thought it was a great discussion about the school committee budget I am optimistic it sounds like they are moving in the direction of helping us figure out how to increase our budget didn't seem to be a discussion about whether or not we needed to increase our budget given pressures from enrollment etc one thing that came to mind of course after I left was that one of the things I think that we also need to be saying is that although they can only obviously add money to future budgets that we are living right now as we've heard from our principals in schools that have taken the brunt of this thousand additional students that we have in the schools since you know we started the current budget process shall we say so with the percentages that we get now and that we need to probably remind them that some amount of some amount of that addition needs to go to alleviate some of the pain that we're already feeling and that we haven't had any relief from so I know that those talks are ongoing and I wanted to ask my colleague because I apologize that I had to leave before the end of the meeting but I didn't know what the outcome was as far as next meeting and what next steps were taking so I didn't know if we scheduled a follow-up meeting okay I'm digging it up it's sometime in December 16th that's correct it's a Tuesday Monday Monday at 8 a.m oh excellent December 16th Monday 8 a.m okay and is that when I know that they had requested that you run some scenario it's actually going to be Adam and Andrew that are that are pumping various scenarios through the long range plans the various iterations on a per pupil times the number of new students and also an iteration based on a a 1.8 percent increase on the non-fixed part of our budget I'm not exactly sure who they're going to ask what the fixed and the unfixed part of the budget are yeah so I'm not sure how that calculation is going to go so I have Andrew I know I'm sorry Mr. Flanagan the deputy town manager who does a lot of the number crunching is a way at professional development the rest of this week but I suspect when he comes back next week that he will be talking okay all right cool great thank you so I guess that's so for everybody that's kind of where the whole budget talking is going because I know that that's a major part of where we stand right now I feel like we're kind of in limbo I mean we will continue to move forward in hearing from the principals and starting to have those kinds of thought processes but obviously we're kind of hoping that more money will come instead of could you speak a little bit to the stratum discussion you also had this morning and I didn't stay much beyond that so I had I had to leave so go ahead my sister yeah we we spoke about the stratum and you know there I think it was reaffirmed that there's a very strong commitment to moving the stratum forward to parody but that with the understanding that the MSBA will probably not look that favorably on a major reconstruction project so that this is going to have to be a multi-step process part of which is going to be to determine what parody is but in the determining of what parody is for the stratum we have to bear in mind the ability of the town to finance it without support from the MSBA and so so it has to be so that what's in play now is the development of a a building I mean for want of a better term a building committee to to determine with many stakeholders to determine what parody would be what it would look like at the stratum and you know so that it is on a even footing with the other schools in the district that weekend that we can afford and there was some discussion about methods to finance the stratum with the idea being that we would try to do it without the need for a debt exclusion that we would still do what needs to be done to bring the stratum to parody there was some discussion of reallocation of assets perhaps some sales to move that forward to create revenues to do that and that's it so I don't have a budget subcommittee meeting yet I'm kind of hoping that some of this will we'll have some money to talk about so all right community reallocation nothing curriculum instruction assessment accountability I speak of your name earlier yeah we will be meeting before we will schedule meeting before our next session and would you consider taking out the tools in the mind I'd like to talk to the administration about what things we I mean how we would go about taking that I mean what what would be the result or what would what would happen with that nothing at this time but I would ask the superintendent just to reaffirm we're going forward with the SLI on the high school yes we are Mr. Heiner so we've reached the end of our regular meeting secretaries secretary it's all right it's very few it's only been a week so you know we didn't have much but we did receive the following correspondence emails from Linda Hansen the president of AA about concerns with Boston and releasing teacher ratings to the public and what that means in Arlington and requesting a discussion about what school level release of data will mean in Arlington and how we want to deal with that so something that another subcommittee might want to start thinking about we did receive email from the superintendent outlining how the tragedy in town was handled in the peer school as well an invitation for a wellness summit to be held at Gillette stadium on Tuesday December 10th that is it oh you've come to the end I did well I did want to put Mr. Heiner on the spot oh excellent you want to hear about this but I I thought it would be best if if he spoke about it oh if he didn't ask the children's room please bear with me to to read it today is children's grief awareness day the state was created to help us all become more aware of the needs of grieving children and of the benefits they obtained through the support of others I volunteer at the children's room I it's a it's an honor I've been doing for six years I thought I was going to do it for six months it has helped me deal with the grief that I had when my mother passed away over almost 30 years ago and it's a wonderful thing and it's an understanding and I would recommend those of you in the audience and here that don't know of the children's room you just go on the website take a look at them they're a wonderful organization and I would like to commend the superintendent and the children's room for the proactive way this system is I taught in a system for 28 years that would only react to tragedies and we have wonderful programs and wonderful people here in this and it's with the support of the administration that makes this go forward thank you and on that note I really would like to thank the students who came earlier tonight what they showed us about what they were committing to this year in terms of generous just the generosity in town parents and students exhibit we're going to be doing more of that as the meetings go on this year we're going to see some more examples of our students work and it's really nice so I'd like to entertain a motion and move them to executive session and conduct strategy sessions in preparation for negotiations with union and our non-union personnel our contract negotiations with union and our non-union if we can help them at home convening and have them at home and to discuss strategy with respect to bargaining and litigation if they're at home convening they have a detriment of the fact from bargaining for litigating litigating position of public body and chair social players and we're going to agreement early education association and aid aid and aid by those exchanges from 2013 2014 school year performing in visual arts and oxygen reading exhibit only for the purposes of adjournment no no no no no so we're we're we're we're we're with us a second a second a second and roll call aye aye aye aye aye aye aye aye there's an executive session thank you we're back in particular session yeah adjourn executive session we have a motion to to make yes Mr. Hamer I moved that the school committee approve the memorandum of agreement between the Ellington education association unit A and the school committee regarding evaluation changes for the 2013-2014 school year performing and visual arts and autism reading second aye aye there's a Mr. Filman another motion so I move that the Ellington school committee will participate in an interest-based bargaining process with the Ellington education association in the upcoming negotiations and some of our members will undergo a joint training with the AEA in the coming months second any discussion? all those in favor say aye aye all those against? motion motion to adjourn second all those in favor aye aye we need our adjournment