634. And with the indulgence of the committee, I'd like to call the word and approve the minutes in number 20 of 2018. Afterwards, what I'd like to do is for out of respect and kindness to some of those assembled, I'd like to move item 6A. I understand student presentation up to immediately following the minutes. Seeing no objections, so it worked. So the minutes are number 20 of 2018. We have a chance to look at the minutes. I'd entertain a motion to approve. I'll move to accept the minutes of November 20th. I'll move Dan second. Is there any further comments? Yes. Under E, the approval of the designer for the new study. I think what I was trying to convey was that Daphne and Bradley were local and that JCJ had worked here before, but they weren't actually local. So they're not actually local. Thank you. Great. Can you have that? Yes, I do. Great. Are there any further edits? Seeing none, I'd like to move this to a vote. All those in favor of approving the minutes of November 20th, 2018. Signify by raising your hand. I. Okay. Any nays? Any abstentions? One abstention. So that carries one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Seven zero one. Thank you very much. And now would you like any introduction? I'll do a brief introduction. So thanks to the committee for having the MSAN student presentation tonight and thanks also to let the students go first because they've got many other things to do. I imagine when they leave us after their role. And I really just want to introduce Ms. Custard, our interim assistant principal at the high school who for many years has led the students at the MSAN conference. This year was local so we didn't have to get on planes, which was a nice thing. But really just has led not just the students at the conference but really been a fantastic leader for students across the high school more generally. And I think this is just way that this is one way that manifests is the work for the MSAN students. So I'll turn it over to Ms. Custard if you want to do a bit of an introduction for the students. They can introduce themselves. They're all student leaders and scholars, even though they're trying to play shy now. They can introduce themselves. I just want to say that I'm very happy that our district is part of the MSAN network because we continue to do the work on closing the achievement gap. And it is a struggle. It's something that we need to do district-wide and not just at the high school because once they're in high school, there are some lessons that were not learned in lower grades. So these students are all working really hard to achieve at high levels and sometimes they stumble, but they pick themselves back up and they get their work done. And going to MSAN for three days really made them do that because they missed three days at school. But for the benefit of themselves and for our district, so I want to thank them for participating and I'll let you hear from them. Wonderful. And I let Ms. Custard speak without a microphone, but I'm apologizing for everyone else. If you can, please approach the microphone when you speak. Thank you very much. Alright, so my name is Mohamed Abdul Maksud. I'm a sophomore and yeah, I'm part of MSAN and I'm one of the vice presidents of Poku. I'm Tabor Bowman. I'm a 11th grader and I'm also part of MSAN and Poku. I'm Pierre Tillis. I'm a junior, like they said, part of MSAN and Poku. I have a question. What does MSAN stand for? Minority Student Achievement Award. Do you want to know Poku stands for? Yes. Hello, my name is Taylin Pope. I'm a junior at Emerson High School. I'm one of the co-presidents for Poku and I also play basketball for the high school. Could you actually help her out? What is Poku? People of Color United. I'm Aisha Proctor. I'm an 11th grader here at Amherst and I'm a part of MSAN and Poku as well. I'm Yasin Norris-Fall. I'm a senior. I'm part of MSAN and Poku and I was also captain of volleyball team. Hi, my name is Khaleesi and I'm a junior also and I'm also part of Poku and MSAN and I play soccer in lacrosse for high school. I'm Isabella Shepherd. I am also an 11th grader. I'm part of Poku and MSAN and the new restorative justice leaders group. Sure, so I think one thing that, thank you for being here and one thing that I think would be helpful for the committee to hear is I've heard some from the teachers and adults that have been connected to your work about the action plan that you developed at the end of the conference. Some of the goals that you have for your work after the conference for the rest of the school year. So in speaking with other students and having conversations at the conference, something that was brought up was mental health and especially the African-American community. And we talked about how it's often dismissed and there's not a lot of representation for people who work in mental health and who are also people of color. So our main idea here is to kind of bring that to the school and offer representation and people that, children of color in the school who have questions about mental health, who are experiencing issues with them. We want to give them people that they can look up to and models that they can look after, people who know about this thing and experts. And so our idea is to research mental health specialists in our area and we're mainly looking for people of color that we can bring to the school and have a panel so that we can have questions that students have and we can have these specialists offer their insight and their experiences with the work that they do. So we can really just bring this idea forth and present because we feel like it's not out there enough and we need more representation in our community. Thank you. I think I turn it over to the committee to see a few of questions, but I really appreciate hearing it from you. I heard it from a number of the adults and discuss it. I miss Dr. Gramacchi and I just appreciate the lens that you're bringing to both the school but also to the larger community. But I would turn it over to the committee if they have questions. Any questions for the committee? Thank you all for being here tonight. I really appreciate it and I'm sure the committee does too. It's just from the nodding heads we've seen so far. One of you mentioned being part of the Restorative Justice Program at the high school and I was curious given the comment from the young lady who just spoke about bringing a panel of mental health specialists, how if at all you've considered integrating those two aspects of the work that you'd like to do to each other. Do you see them coordinating in any way or is this just sort of like an added event or thing that you would like to do? The Restorative Justice, we are trying to bring people together in a circle to resolve conflicts and build community and we haven't talked about integrating them exactly that way yet so it would be an added portion at this moment but it could be something that we could do in the future. At this moment in time though for the Restorative Justice we were planning on doing something with women's, like women bonding, it's like a sister thing that should be cool. So that's what we have as a plan soon versus something that could happen maybe in the next semester or possibly next year. What accomplishment did you achieve in the past year? These are all new M.S.A.N. scholars. Oh, welcome to New Year. We do have veteran M.S.A.N. scholars and they will be supporting the work that they have planned for. We have actually worked on a schedule for March so we're going to have a mental health. Right. I was just about to ask what your next steps were collectively. So you've already identified a target a whole month of programming? No, just one day but we're hoping there can be follow-up with resource, maybe a resource table during lunch during the day that we have the panel and the whole school will go but we'll have to have two assemblies because we can't all fit in the one auditorium. So I've been looking at organizations that might want to come in and have tables also while the day we have the panel. Were there other hot topics or priorities that you were thinking of that you debated doing when you selected this one? I mean that are worth sharing that you want to share. So we had kind of two main topics that we wanted to discuss and the one that we evidently chose was the mental health but the other one that we did want to bring light to was the fact that there aren't that many teachers of color in the school or teachers of color in powerful positions in the school and I feel like with having more teachers who are of color and people I can relate to most of the experiences I've gone through I feel like that would make my education so much better and I'd have people who I feel very familiar to and just make the school a place where I feel like it's not a burden but more of somewhere like I'd rather like I'd like to be just because of these teachers I see throughout my day and I feel like that'd be something very important to have in the school. Thank you. Thanks for sharing. Any other questions? Can I ask a question that's related but seemingly unrelated but related? All of you or almost all of you mentioned that you were in People of Color United or POKU and I was just curious if there's anything you'd share that you're up to in that organization that would be useful for the community to know? Yeah so POKU has been in the school for a while now. We just try our main goal for POKU is like to make the school a good community for People of Color to have an accepting place where they can come do their work and just be comfortable in a good space. MSN is more of an objective sort of like an action plan as it's called so we're trying to force or implement new stuff into the school whereas POKU is also sort of that but more as a welcoming place for People of Color in our school as well. Well if there's nothing else, there doesn't have to be. Thank you so much. Thanks for being here. Really appreciate you taking the time. So our next agenda item is announcements and public comments. Are there any announcements from the school committee? Seeing none, we're open for public comments as a remit. Sorry, I'm sorry.  It keeps striking me. So it is public comment. If you do have one, come forward to the microphone, identify yourself, an individual of three minutes to speak and as you can see we even have a little timer over there that will count down and hopefully will be unobtrusive in some way. So less unobtrusive when it's that huge. One more subtle before. Any public comments? Also continue with all that work. No, we appreciate it and thanks. So public comments will be closed. We'll move to subcommittee updates. Budget didn't meet today. No, it did not meet. Next time. Forgive me. I got an email reminding me that my services are no longer necessary. Which is cool. But then for that reason, I totally checked out to remember whether it was today or... Because of lack of response. The committee moved me. Anyway, either way. So are there any other committee business? I'll just mention that the policy subcommittee finally met yesterday and we've set forth a future meeting schedule as well. Our next meeting is in one month. It's the first Monday in January. Cool. Which means probably toward the end of January or early February, we're going to have a series of meetings in which we're voting an absolute ton of stuff or reading and discussing a ton of stuff. So that's something for you to look forward to. Yes, Superintendent. Might I mention the update from the collaborative? I was going to mention it. Oh, then I will. No, you don't have to. So the collaborative for educational services has determined that in fact one representative cannot represent both the Amherst committee and the regional school committee. And they are begging our indulgence to have somebody come from the regional committee. At least three meetings a year. They say they're so productive and enjoyable. You'll want to come many more times than that. But that they'd love to have a volunteer. Is anyone interested in volunteering? What day is that? What day are they? I think it's Wednesday, eight days. It's every other month and they offer dinner. And apparently it's Wednesdays. I think it's Wednesdays. It's usually Wednesdays. Going back and forth between Northampton and Greenfield. Okay. Okay. That sounds like a volunteer. Good. Wonderful. Thank you so much. And they also grab. Okay. So, CTF. Yeah. So I just wanted to a couple of items that we had wanted to bring to the committee's attention for discussion. We had a meeting a couple of weeks ago actually with our subcommittee and both co-principals from the middle school were in attendance and I see them in the audience today. And it was a very good conversation. It was basically about thinking through how we might bring restorative justice program to the middle school level, not just the high school. And I believe that they will be speaking about that later on. So we'll hear more about that. The main thing though that I think we wanted to address tonight was really just a discussion for the committee to decide on whether or not the goals that have put forth a bunch of priorities and the superintendent goals should be formally voted on. And I've spoken with Dr. Morris about it and with the chair.  But I think what we're looking for from the subcommittee anyway is just a, you know, formal adoption of the budget priorities and goals. Even though we've already adopted the goals previously and Ms. Cunningham has presented on them and the district has done a lot of work already in moving it forward. We really just want to make sure that the committee is supportive of the goals as they've been presented and that if there's any further conversation or discussion that we can have at this time. Is that a fair representation of, yeah. So I think all of you have had a chance to review it. I know there was a discussion. I wasn't at that meeting in October because I was actually traveling for work. But the, you know, it's really more about fine tuning or refining the goals that have been previously adopted and presented. And I don't know if there's anything else that either the chair or Dr. Morris want to say about that. Yeah. Well, I'm trying to think just process wise, should we hear from the middle school? You'd rather wrap this up and then hear from the middle school.  I am happy to hear from the middle school first out of the same principle that we had earlier, that if somebody's bothered to come here, show up and set themselves up to speak. I'd rather hear from them first. Okay. So I can introduce Joseph Smith and Rebecca Sweetman, who are just going to do a summary of the kind of the dialogue that they had at that meeting and a little follow-up of what's happened since then. Right. Yeah. Thank you so much. We do want to try to run back to our chorus and band and orchestra concert. So it was a pleasure to be invited and to be able to speak with the task force the other evening. Thanks for the couple of weeks ago now. It seems like time is flying. We talked about a lot of things in regards to equity in the school and how we're looking at that, not just in regards to restorative practices but the school as a whole. And so a big piece of that was what was really important to us starting was giving all students a voice in the building and making sure that all students have a place. And so we were able to bring back student council and a student voice group in the school for the first time in a while. And we held elections along the same timeline as the elections that happened in November and those happened then and they were announced around the beginning of November. Our top three officers are students of color, so we're really happy that that is the case. Yeah. So since the beginning of the school year, Rebecca and I, Ms. Webe and I, we have had a focus on social justice at the school. One of our interviewing points was to look at disparities and discipline, our favorite topic. And so with that being said, I know that Dr. Morris had started out the year with all of the staff members, leaders of the district doing implicit bias. Ms. Webe and I then took that back to our school and we introduced that to our staff and we have made that part of our cornerstone, if you will, with all of our staff meetings. So we do a little bit on implicit bias. In addition to that, we look at how we're going to reduce the rates of unsuccessfulness for students of color in terms of academic and social. So we want to bring this new thing that the students were talking about in terms of restorative practices to our school. And so we have decided to bring a position down to our school that's going to support the dean as well as students. We also are working on looking at our equity and access to the courses that we offer and also making sure that we're offering the correct courses. So right now we know that we're lacking in math interventions and if we're going to close gaps, then we need to offer the appropriate courses for our students to help them achieve at high levels and make sure we're providing the supports to do so. And we see that there are gaps in that right now. So we're looking at how we're going to adjust that for the coming year. So in addition to that, we have been doing assemblies on anti-racism and we've been having follow-up groups with our advisory committee. So we're doing a lot right now. Are you open to questions? If there's any questions for the committee? I just want to say again, you know, I know that I'm not going to speak for the SCTF, but the conversation with both of you was really helpful. And I think it was great to hear that you're thinking about a lot of the issues and concerns that we've raised, both at this committee and also subcommittee, but frankly the community around discipline disparity and your commitment to trying to get as much data and information as you possibly can about what's happening in the classrooms and across the school is really helpful and important as well. And I think to hear your discussion about, you know, that you're already thinking about how you might be able to bring restorative practices to the middle school level, which is something that we've heard from the students. We've heard from many others for a while now because that way they can actually carry it through their adolescence into their high school years. It's not just something that they get, you know, the tail end of their public school education. So it's really great to hear that. And I, you know, I think both of you have already received the invitation for the next SCTF meeting in January. We'd, you know, love to have you there. But I think having participation from our principals in this way and from other, you know, educators and administrators is really useful when we're having those kinds of conversations. So thank you for taking the time to do that. I look forward to engaging with you in January. And I guess I have another question that sort of lines up on topic, but it's slightly different. And my assumption is the Alana Cub is district wide, right? So for the middle school, I'm just curious, I mean, so when I think about an environment in which everyone's valued students or an environment where they're appreciated and achieve regardless of their background or even celebrating everyone's background, you know, the sort of the other, the two sides of it are what the student experience is, but then also what the staff experience is around it that both in terms of how they're learning and developing what they're doing, but also literally how they feel when they come every day to work. And I was wondering if, without, I realized I wasn't putting in a spot, because that wasn't what you were coming here for. I was just wondering, since I think if we throw that into the pot too, that ends up being almost the entire agenda. I'm just wondering if you have any observations, you know, half a year in around some things that have gone well or things you're looking to do in that regard. Rebecca and I, since the beginning, have decided that we are really learning about the school culture at arms and we're not making any great changes. What we've noticed is that there seems to be a stratification with what students are experiencing and what some teachers may be experiencing. This is why we know it would be helpful to have this restorative justice program at our school to help us with the school climate culture. Great. Thank you. Is she on them? Yeah, I just wanted to say as you go through this process and you see possibilities of resources that you might need, feel free to come back and talk about it. Obviously budgets are always tight, so it's not like a promise thing, but it's, I think it's really important, particularly at the middle school level. I remember, you know, my kids, I have three kids and they're two years apart, so I was a middle school parent for six years straight, so I got a really good in-depth dive and, you know, the major theme I had with middle school administration was it's so hard for people, like in the thick of it, there's so much churn and activity going on at the middle school level to know exactly what you need and when. So, you know, open-lines communication with the school committee is awesome. We appreciate that. We'll take you up on that. Wonderful. Thank you. Any other questions? Thank you so much. Thank you. Enjoy the concert. Sure, it's wonderful. So we're still mid-item, actually. So back to the last pause. So what I'd love to do is I'd love to hear from, this is superintendent, the superintendent, and hear your thoughts. The two things I would say at sort of the outset are that which is sort of framing at least my thoughts on this anyways are that, one, the committee adopted the top-line goals and so I don't, we could revote them, but I don't think we need to because to me, the commitment is still in place that the top-line goals that we're trying to adopt, we are trying to adopt and we need to do it and build that into all the work we're doing, whether it's policies or budgeting and other activities. The second thing is that we're in the middle of a strategic planning process and to me, I think I said this at a previous meeting, but I also said this to the superintendent before, part of what I'm trying to understand and I want to understand is how these goals, since a number of them also include sort of data and reporting, the data and reporting of the goals and then also how we build it into a culture of continuous improvement in which these goals are aligned with everything else we're doing or integrated with everything else we're doing as a district. How is that going to happen? And how is that going to happen between now and the point where the district employment planner school strategy is developed and put forward? And I'm saying that before both of you talk because to me, part of what I'm looking to understand is whether, A, there's common agreement to do that because to me, whether the committee needs to vote the specifics of the memorandum that we received is partially tied to whether there's any ambiguity or disagreement over the objectives. And I say that because some things could be done this year, some things might need to happen over a year and a half or two years or whatever the judgment is, your professional judgment is, and that's part of why you have a strategy, right? Because you know you can't do everything at once. Some things you have to do over time. You also know if you don't measure it and report it, then you don't know what's happening and no one knows what's happening. I'm sure that's some dumb, but I'm providing a context here because the context I'm getting at is to me, simply voting the goals and the objectives underneath it is sort of a blunt instrument that doesn't really tell me whether anything's actually changing over time and whether things are really being implemented. To me, what matters to me anyways and to me, the culture sort of of change with the school committee if we're doing this right, working collaboratively with the leadership of the district and the community is actually knowing things are changing over time and having it reported and being transparent and getting good data and also being able to align our budget both now and year over year in a way that makes that continuous progress knowing that things are never perfect so that the bumps, and I say this also again because, again, not to belabor sort of the endless history of this district, but if you don't have, to my mind, if you don't have that framework and you don't have that shared agreement for improvement, then every hiccup in the road, whether it's a minor thing or let's say it's like an argument, it's a great recession and things fall, you know what I mean? Or the roof collapses in the middle school or something, right?  People point fingers and say, well, I wasn't sure you were really committed to begin with, right? How do you avoid that? You avoid that by having that plan, having that transparency, having that data, and then really sort of continuously working it and coming back to it over time so that the trust is built but it's also completely transparent. Everyone can kind of see what's happening and where you're going. So that's the context that at least in my mind, I'm sort of laying out for this and I guess the only further thing I'd say is that relative to any specific sort of goals and objectives is what I'd also like to know is if there's a realistic perspective or sort of counter, I want to say counter proposal, but whatever the phrase is, any information that you think would be useful for the committee to have to be able to figure out what would those objectives look like or what should those objectives look like that are realistic for us to be able to say okay, we can have a shared agreement to do this, move it forward and do it within a strategic framework. I think that would be useful for the committee to know so that you don't end up having, again, sort of a blunt conversation of either you're all in or you're not in at all or you're not sure what you've committed to. So I'll start. I feel like I was just on a couch, therapist couch, sharing every view I had on the subject and I apologize, but I was trying to do that because I think it's helpful to... Yeah, absolutely. So I'll just do a little bit of introduction and turn it over to Ms. Cunningham. So I think I'll speak specifically to a point about strategic planning and then Ms. Cunningham can lead us a little bit more detail about the recommendations and goals. So I think you're right and I agree with you that we have this strategic planning effort. The School Equity Task Force has a member that is part of that and I don't say that, to say that that's one out of a large group. But it was important to have that group represented within the planning team, which is 36, 37 people large, including parents, teachers and students. And so what I would say is we have our second meeting coming up in a couple of weeks, but in our first meeting all of the topics that are on the recommendations came up in some way, shape or form. And not just from the one kind of appointed member from SCTF, but from students, from faculty and from other parents' guardians. So I do think that process can take a while to congeal and how the priorities kind of get normed. And so that's an ongoing part of our work. But what I think is important to note that in the first meeting it wasn't absent these, and no one brought these recommendations. No one brought these pieces of paper. It was a futures protocol. So you were envisioning what the future, what you'd want the future to look like in three to five years in the district. And many of these topics, actually all of these at least were touched upon, and many of them were kind of resoundingly touched upon by many, many participants in that effort. So as that work continues and as that sort of crowdsource, members are getting more feedback on the visioning from their networks. And we'll come back together in January. We're going to see a lot of these things in the plan, not because necessarily myself or Ms. Cunningham are saying no, they need to be in the plan, but actually because the group has the level of representative diversity, and by diversity I'm not just talking about identity, it's also diversity of viewpoints. But these are things that there are many in the community who are pushing for and advocating for, and I feel very confident they'll be reflected in the strategic plan to come. And the short term, because right, that process play out over the spring, you know, into perhaps next summer. In the short term, we have a lot of work that we're doing, and that's why I wanted to... Can I ask one thing now, please? With the committee's indulgence? If the memo hasn't been shared with the working group of the planning process, can you do so? Yeah, absolutely. But I think I'll turn to Ms. Cunningham to talk about the specific goals in this particular school year. So I know that we received six goals, and they were presented at the other, the meeting two months ago. And as I look at each one, I have to think many different ways. So the last meeting that we had, we had the Human Resource Department here, which had three members, and an assistant, admin assistant. So our department is very small, right? And Dr. Morris had talked about how the funding to do a lot of the data, collect the data, and do some of the analysis that's needed would be pretty hard for such a small department to try and get done. We started preparing all that information that you saw in our slides last time. We started preparing it from September to get it ready for the November presentation. And it wasn't until about a week before that presentation that we were able to gather everything that we felt you would need to see where we went with the goals, right? So that being said, I'm looking at these six goals, and each of them requires some kind of collection of data, some kind of analysis, some kind of plan to be created, some kind of implementation of the plan, and then again, some kind of evaluation at the end of the plan, right? And what I would ask is that instead of us having six goals for this year that we have to do all of that for, that the committee considers limiting to maybe two or three goals, right? So that we can deepen the analysis, deepen the work, do some more implementation, and possibly even look to institutionalize the things that we're doing so that it's something that's taking place every year. And so, we also, we looked at some of the percentages, and I know one of the slides that we presented last meeting showed that at the regional level, the number of African-American teachers actually outweigh the percentage of African-American students. And so, when I look at some of the percentages that they're asking us to look at and change, I would like to find a way that we can look at the data and see exactly what's needed and maybe adjust those percentages to just be correct. Because if I read some of the goals correctly, it's saying reduce, right, and have the numbers be the same or similar, and we've exceeded the numbers. So, in truth, what are we looking to do, right? So, I would like for the committee to just take some of those things into consideration. As you look at the goals, just one, can we limit the amount from six, maybe to two or three that we deepen? We only have about six more meetings, maybe? Six more months of meetings. Six more months of meetings. So, to have us come and present on six goals every month is going to be pretty tough for our very small department. So, that's, you know, something that I just wanted to chime in on. Yeah, I mean, and so Ms. Cunningham, when I spoke earlier, and I think we're certainly willing to have a discussion of which goals, maybe it says two things, actually. One is that all of these goals are things that the district is actively working on. So, when Ms. Cunningham and I are sharing that we're looking for a couple of deep dives on, it's not saying, oh, yeah, we're just going to disregard the other goal areas. It's about which do we gather data, which do we come and present, and I really like the phrasing that Ms. Cunningham used, which do we make more institutionalized so that next year, we're doing, and at six is just a number that we find challenging. You know, I think number two is something that was already presented on, and it's certainly something that's been a topic of conversation that I think you heard it from students tonight. Number two, I'm sorry, not everyone may have the document in front of you, I apologize. So, number two, I'll just read it aloud. Oh, I'm sorry. Mr. Government? So, I just wanted to say just a micro comment and maybe super tanky thing. I'm a little uncomfortable having this conversation in such depth right now about the goals and all these references and details. Like, we don't have this in our packet. It wasn't part of the, like the agenda says SCTF subcommittee update, and that's it. And so, this is like all sort of coming to us now at this moment. And so, I'm sort of scrambling going back from my past meeting notes about trying to find the goals and what the discussion was, and I want to have the most beneficial conversation to the committee and the district to just finding a little hard to sort of focus in on exactly what we're trying to do tonight, but let's continue. I think we're going to have to make a decision tonight because one thing is not an agenda item to make a decision on. I think we're going to have to have an agenda item on a meeting. What's our next meeting? 15th, maybe? Does that sound about right? January 15th, yeah, I believe. I'm sorry. I'm sorry to be on the agenda on January 15th. So, I think maybe just hearing that feedback if I could slightly turn my comments. Thanks, Mr. Demling. I want to share probably more specifics on thoughts and people could prepare a little more for the conversation as we view the six goal areas and what are things that we're actively digging in on with the data and maybe could make some recommendations. I feel like that's fair. That'd be good. Mr. Gomez? So, I just wanted to point out I think I appreciate the concern that there's not a, you know, we don't have the goals in front of us. However, I think we're having sort of a circular conversation because as both Dr. Morris and Ms. Cunningham and even Mr. Nakajima have mentioned before, these goals have already been adopted and there's not very much that's new in here except for just creating some fine tuning about how we arrive and how we hold ourselves accountable. And I think my comment is that if we don't actually attach numbers like any evaluation, you don't know if you're making progress unless you actually start to attach some numbers to it. And I know you're going through this process internally as it is, but we're looking for, I think at the subcommittee level is an opportunity to figure out what those numbers are. So working in conjunction with you, of course, but finding numbers and holding ourselves accountable to that and then being transparent about what that looks like. And so, I think a lot of these, looking at these goals, we have had numerous conversations around what these goals are. I know that they're actively being worked on. You know, with all due respect, I think when I hear we want to reduce six goals to maybe just a couple of goals, to me, I'm not quite sure what that means because I've heard from others in the district already that you were already working on these. So, I'm not sure how we would reduce these goals, or does that mean we take away the work that you're already doing, or is this, you know, we definitely need to come back and have a longer conversation about that and then decide at a committee level if there's some sort of shift or something that needs to happen. I'm really happy to hear that the strategic planning process is incorporating a lot of aspects of this. I would love to see the memo and be able to, you know, to kind of learn a little bit more about what that is because I haven't been part of those conversations. And I know that we have one member of the SCTF that is currently sitting on the committee. That person has been traveling and hasn't been able to report back on, you know, what's actually, and I don't believe you've actually had any meetings this past month. No, it won't be until the, just based on people's schedules after the new year. So all of that to say that we still, you know, this is just the very beginning stages, which is great because it gives us an opportunity to, you know, incorporate all of this together at the same time that we're also thinking about these. But, you know, I am very conscious of the fact that we've been talking about these specific goals for a while now. And I think for various members of the community, what I keep hearing is frustration because it feels like, you know, we're sort of moving in a certain direction and then we sort of stop ourselves. And so I think the community is looking for, you know, just, again, a process for us to hold ourselves accountable so that it's clear that the work that is actually taking place is, you know, having progress or is making progress for everyone. So. Can I just say that we did report on some of the work that we're doing. And when I talk about reducing the number, it's not that we're not going to work on these things. It's the number that we are diving deeper in our presentation to the community about. So we're still doing the work. We are just saying that it took from September until mid-November to get the data from someone else who's collecting it so that we can put it all together to come here to report. And so if you're looking for us to report on six goals, if it took two months, that's a whole another year, right? If you, two times six, 12 months, right? And then you have the summer. So all of this cannot I feel be reported as quickly as one year, one school year worth of time. So I'm saying if we limit the amount that you're asking us to report on to something that we can say we can do, and I think Mr. Nakajima mentioned you don't want us to say, yeah, we're going to do it and then it falls through the crack or we're just saying it to say it. I don't want to do that. When I say I'm going to be able to do four goals or three goals or two, then we know that we're going to come back and give it justice at this table, right? Before the audience, before the community. So that's what we're talking about. It's not saying that none are important or that we're not going to do it. We are, but the reporting is what we're asking for, the ability to report on two or three. So you're not allowed to do because we also need to close this on some committee topic. I'd love to I'd love to fall. I mean, I think A, this should be on the agenda. And then B, we should, if the chair of the SCTF is willing to do it, I think we should follow up outside of this meeting in preparation of the next meeting and try to continue to talk through what, first off, what's going to be discussed and presented in January too so that that's a productive conversation. Because I agree, I agree we've been at this long, I mean, what I'm, I think we've been at this long enough that it'd be great to have everyone feel like we've turned a corner in terms of the progress we're making, but also I'd sort of say that if that's what can it feel like from our side of the table or from the community's perspective. I'm also regularly hearing from the district staff leadership, professional leadership that they're doing a lot of this work already and maybe not feeling as hurt as they could be on the amount of work that's actually being done so there's a good log jam to break there on both sides, I think. Superintendent's update. Sure. It's a rather lengthy one and I know there's people waiting to present so I'll try to do some highlights especially since it's written out. So I think worth mentioning last week we had our December RIAC meeting RIAC is Racial Unbalanced Advisory Council. The council's gotten much larger this year with broader representation great, I was in Worcester and the agenda included discussion of equity positions at DESI so they've reorganized their leadership at DESI frankly in some ways that we were that aligned with the district's values and district's organization Dr. Rodriguez who is now a senior associate commissioner who now whose title and responsibilities is more connected to oversight of racial imbalance we discussed the Influence 100 project which DESI is putting on to increase the number of high-level district leaders by 100 in the next I believe 10 years with their timeline it's not launched yet but they're actively working on it and also reviewing DESI's superintendent rubric to ensure that equity elements are included in the rubric and we offered feedback to someone from there so it was a very productive meeting I think an important statement that isn't one below it but tomorrow December 12th the USDA plans to roll back some of the nutritional requirements that came out in 2010 so there was a lot of work that was done and particularly attributed to and done by Michelle Obama just to jog people's memory and the press release indicated that the standards for milk, whole grains and sodium content would be reduced and they're framing it as and I'm not trying to be ironic this is literally the wording is flexibility for districts that use how much whole grains sodium content and how much flavored milk they serve and so we've made the decision and Sasha Palmer strongly she made the decision I'm just able to report on it that we're going to hold ourselves to the higher standards we're not going to reduce the standards we have for nutrition because the federal government is planning to allow us to do it and Ms. Palmer feels very strongly on it and she's happy to come and tell you exactly how she feels sometime in the future about this but this is not flexibility we're looking for, it's not flexibility we're going to take advantage of but since it would probably be a big press release tomorrow we wanted to let people know ahead of time that's how we're going to respond to it speaking of the Human Resources presentation last month last week Ms. Ortiz who you met she gave a presentation called Equity in Food Services at the Farm to See School Conference in Lemonster talking about diversity in our hiring process another one of our staff members was in the audience for that and just the number of questions comments and how to do that how can we do that was very significant about diversifying the food service staff so kudos to Ms. Ortiz High School Principal Search so last week we sent a survey to all secondary staff and grade 8 through 7 families should say also 9 through 12 students to gather feedback on the desired qualities of the next permanent high school principal we also asked for volunteers to serve the screening committee to recommend finalists for the position Ms. Cunningham's organizing and facilitating the search so thank you Ms. Cunningham for your work and we've contracted with NezDec they can do a lot of recruitment they call people they send mailers to every principal in the region and they're assisting us with national advertising as well so we'll look to come back and get that really kicked off in a major way in January but we're sort of in the fine tuning that's right now tomorrow on the early release day all faculty and staff from the High School Summit Academy in the middle school and also some transfer office staff who weren't here last year for this will have professional development offered by Ed Mitnick he was the one if you were on the committee last year he led us the district leadership in professional development last February I believe and his work he works with MCAD and it's focused particularly on workplace harassment discrimination and what we know is that proactive training is critical once you've had an incident things are much more complicated for obvious reasons but if we can be ahead of that and what we find and what he finds is that the training itself is an intervention because people then have an ability to talk about things in a really healthy way and it really opens the door to conversations that need to occur and he's done similar work in the Holyoke Public Schools University, the town of Framingham and Boston Scientific we did invite some town of Amherstaff it's a large right, it's going to be 300 people so it's not like an extra couple people is going to make or break the presentation so I know there's some visitors from the town of Amherstaff who are also interested in coming so we invited them so we'll have a little bit of crossover between the town and the schools which is always a nice thing we have a STARS grant for vaping maybe we can come back to that as we talk about well-being a little later so I'm just conscious of time and the number of people here thank you all for those of you who are able to make it including the littlest one at the Fortown Meeting it's distracting it's very cute no, no, no, sorry compared to most, I'm looking for that distraction at most meetings I should be thanking you but it was a very productive I felt like very productive Fortown Meeting and just follow-up already that has started with that a little optimistic about the towns working together to come up with a solution so thanks to the leadership of the school committee on that last year we started we're doing it again visiting Leverett and Shootsbury Elementary Schools so that we talk with students and families I say this just because you're all welcome Shootsbury, Mr. Sullivan on board January 31st and his baking is worth the trip to Shootsbury if you do not live in Shootsbury that I can guarantee you and we'll also go to Leverett if some of you experienced his baking last year at regional school committee meetings and it's top notch that doesn't happen this year, does it? no, I'm not sure I put it on the spot I am those cookies were delicious but they were free of everything they weren't gluten, they didn't have calories Mr. Medina that comment is totally out of order your first comment was that they were delicious which means they weren't free from everything they had delicious taste and I think I'll mention just a couple more and I apologize to the length of this but I'm having a hard time skipping some of these Laramie Projects, Mr. Bechtel is here kudos to you unfortunately my family someone passed away it wasn't at the age of my children and the Laramie Project weren't a great match but I know many people including staff who were raved about their performance so we'll hear from you later I want to acknowledge you and your work for that we had a middle school student speak at a desi conference the video I think we had permission so we put on our district Facebook page it's worth watching she's a Vella student, she was talking about what Vella means to her really exciting that they hadn't included students before and they chose our students to present at this conference Mary Maple's wonderful faculty meetings, I think the last thing I'll say is that we've had a couple incidents at the high school from the last week or two where individuals have felt vulnerable and hurt and I want to acknowledge that I think everyone here has seen the letter that was shared with the community and our approach in all of those challenging situations one is to communicate frequently with those who feel harmed to understand where they're coming from and how they experience the pain to repair and restore relationships which sounds really easy and it's actually quite complex among the most complex work that we do is when someone has experienced harm how do we change that dynamic and how do we support alleged victims and alleged perpetrators or people who may have created harm because at the end of the day the thing we can do best is to create positive relationships out of challenging moments or also from an administrative lens we're looking to analyze what happens so that we can improve our system so that we, this is not code to make things sound happier we try to look at these learning opportunities it's not to minimize the pain that individuals feel but we want to use these opportunities for us to learn about how to do things better and how to prevent these situations from the past and how to improve our response to those situations and perhaps how to use them as an education moment both for everyone in our community and that's how we approach challenging situations that's how we approach the situations that we're experiencing and we continue that work of what's the right education and how do we not look at this as isolated situations, but what does it tell us about ourselves more generally and how do we improve organizationally so that people can feel safe, confident and comfortable going to school, being a staff member in our school and being a school community member so we take this incredibly seriously and I think I really want to compliment Dr. Gramacchi and her team at the high school for juggling many many things over the last couple days and their particular eye on keeping students at the forefront of our focus and everyone's health and well-being at the forefront has been in my opinion exemplary in responding to particularly challenging situations so I really want to acknowledge Dr. Gramacchi and her team for how this goes and the messaging matters and I don't mean the public messaging does matter but to be honest a great deal of focus has been on individuals who are connected to these things honor the humanity in the moment of all and then how do we successfully move forward in a productive way to improve our community and our work so that's all I think I'll say on that piece but I did want to acknowledge what's been happening at the high school and how we're planning to move forward Are there any questions from the comments from the school committee? Seeing none, thank you superintendent Thank you My only report would be that we have to follow up from the 410 meeting last week and the Mr. Mangano sent out a letter today I guess to this afternoon to we get a copy of the PowerPoint? You will tonight, yeah I was going to say, I realized I was going to say they sent a copy of the PowerPoint out to members of the 410s I was suddenly rousing, we didn't get it and you get home and we'll be there and what it also was doing was inviting a representative of each town to meet with Mr. Mangano, the superintendent and myself to try to talk through next steps on what the shared agreement might be on the regional assessment with obviously deep appreciation that everyone was on the record shooting for a level services budget for the year which is a great start to that process we can, if anyone wants to join the meeting we can't have quorum with the school committee but if anyone wants to join let us know and we'll let you know when the meeting comes up and obviously we'll listen to you on the agenda again and laugh to be and hopefully it'll be good news and progress to that you know the funny thing is I'm actually subdued compared to usual, usually I'm like a radio clown at these meetings telling me I'm actually keeping it together inadvertently, I wasn't even trying to be subdued with that, the radio clown is done for the moment and we're only like 6 minutes behind it like 5 or 6 minutes behind new ARH courses who wants to introduce so I'm going to introduce Dr. Gramacchi perhaps there's a number of staff members here to introduce the there's actually 3 courses can you remind me of something? are you anticipating taking an action tonight? I think if the committee is comfortable voting tonight that'd be great, if not then we can bring it back to the January 15th meeting I always want to start with, so what are we doing? absolutely, no I should have framed it that way so it's just really the 3, the Chinese language and culture course which Dr. Gramacchi will explain that so, thank you and we actually hope that you can vote tonight so that we can move forward with our program of studies and course planning so the 3, and I will say that in light of years of budget cuts I think it's really exciting to continue to come and advance elective courses and continue to constantly revisit our offerings to make sure that we're staying relevant and viable so we had originally had a Chinese language and culture class program for students where the curriculum was in development we've decided that we're going to keep it in that format for another year it seems to be working well and we're not at the place where I think we're ready to propose it as a course offering so we will not be presenting that tonight but know that it will still run next year in the high school as an alternative learning program course that does bear credit so tonight I want to introduce should I just start and have each person come up? of course so I'd like to introduce you to Simon Lutz the department head for social studies as well as Chris Gould one of our social studies teachers and they're going to propose an AP world history course would you have it on a do you have it you could email to well how do you share it yeah yeah Tim did he step away okay because he's logged in I mean the other thing is you could just log in as you that might be the easiest sorry is it distracting that's the one I should do before thank you Simon sorry I wasn't queued in for you yeah they get younger right yeah I don't have any I've got my tea I'm alright there you go thank you and I can if you want to advance the clicker's not working but I'll be your clicker so thank you everybody I'm Simon Lutz I'm the department head for social studies this is Chris Gould for a long time social studies teachers so we're going to propose to AP World History to our curriculum in social studies at the high school so I slide so I just want to you can just click through these I guess so I just want to first give you a quick run down or overview of what our scope and sequence looks like at the high school for those of you might not be familiar with our course offerings and what it looks like so we have three years of required social studies at the high school required social studies courses Global History 1 is our ninth grade course it's a world history course from roughly about 500 to 1700 it's very much sort of global global history but global in its approach and that it looks at sort of major developments in world civilization in the Americas, in Africa the Islamic world Southeast Asia and tries to do so through the lens of multiple perspectives tries to look at diverse voices in the curriculum sort of marginalized voices so our ninth grade course starts off the first of two years that students will take 9th through 11 in world history 10th grade they take a U.S. history course U.S. history course is sort of a U.S. 2 course it picks up where they left off in 8th grade which is roughly late 19th century after the civil war starts with reconstruction and goes through roughly Vietnam 1970s or so and then in 11th grade they do the second year of the two year sequence in world history in our global history 2 course and then finally in 12th grade there's a range of electives we have 8 elective offerings we're going to offer next year you can see the list of them there but we try to offer a range of electives in social sciences students can experience both topics they're interested as well as specific social science fields introduction to specific social science fields like anthropology and economics that they might be interested in as well so why I'll start with when for the AP global history and then we can talk about why quickly the when is going to be junior year so this will be an alternative to our global history 2 course curriculum for AP world history roughly lines up with what we have for global history 2 there's a little bit of overlap with our global history 1 course as well but it content wise provides a nice alternative to global history 2 because it lines up well with the content there so we'll offer this hopefully next year as an alternative for students to take for their third year of social studies credit and global history 2 happy to take questions that we can wait till we're done that makes a history course AP level we'll talk about that in just a moment we're going to get to the AP structure but the college board has a specific set of requirements that they curriculum that they suggest for these AP courses so the why is I think most significantly or most importantly is that we no longer have an AP course in social studies in the social studies department we've had one for a long long time but so much of the European history content was folded into our global history 1 in 2 courses they no longer made a lot of sense to offer a European history as our AP course an AP Europe as well as a number of other history electives that we had in place, African history Latin American history, Asian history were sort of that content was folded into this new 2 year sequence in 9th and 11th grade in global history 2 so we took those off the table so this would replace AP Europe as our AP offering we currently don't have one, I think we're the only department major academic department right now that doesn't have an AP offering this year if you could I think I have one more maybe blow it there it's a thank you so the other reason is I think that this is a good fit unlike Europe to some degree this is a history with AP world as a curriculum that really does sort of fit our real priority as an department of teaching history through multiple perspectives and diverse voices so unlike AP Europe which was a single looking at European history in this one place AP world has the requirement of the course, the course is built around looking at the experience of people around the world so Africa is there, Asia, the Americas and actually there's a specific requirement that no more of the course no more than 20% of the course can be European in content so I think it would really again compliment our global history two courses and alternative but also meet this important objective we have in teaching history through multiple voices and perspectives and stories a couple other reasons these are the top reasons but a few more I'm going to hand it over to Chris to talk a little bit about the course itself for students who are both motivated and interested we want to have that chance in the social in social studies and the social studies department to challenge themselves at the AP level and the AP course does offer a greater challenge and more scholarly approach to the study of the global history content it also, not that our other courses don't do this I think it's something we do really well but it does have this intense focus on the skills of the historian, how do historians work how do they research, how do they ask questions, develop evidence and place responses to those questions support them with the evidence that they found that's thoroughly infused in the AP content again consistent with our objectives as a department and then lastly the AP year of course which Chris talked for a long time has always been a hallmark of it has been the integration of music and art and literature as vehicles to examine the past as evidence art as history and we'd really like to use this as an opportunity in this course to infuse that same conspiracy to the AP course the AP world course but turn over to Chris now to talk a little bit about the AP world course itself okay and you can actually get the next slide yeah I'm going to keep running through thank you there you go so to be fair many of our courses do incorporate elements of music, art literature into the curriculum although the AP curriculum really allows and actually understands that you take those really more deeply into account when you're creating the course curriculum when you're thinking about how culture works and how it expresses itself in those genres so the world history course and its organizing principles is really predicated a lot on what the college board and the AP dictates for what has to be in one of those courses so first it is looking around an investigation of several selected themes which will be on a slide coming up here woven into some concepts that covers just four chronological periods of study at the end of the slide show I did a sort of an example of what that might look like over the course of the curriculum it's not a deep intellectual dive into the seas of history but should give you an idea of sort of how we hope to construct this thing between now and then as we sort of riff on the global history two course is now and adjust it for an AP curriculum and again the threads that are supposed to unify this are really designed to try to tap into the various unique aspects of the various global cultures that come into contact with each other how they interact and how they create a bigger picture of history next one, thanks Mike so these five themes were not something we developed but they are the AP directives for the five themes so first one is interactions between humans and the environment, second is development and interaction of cultures third, state building expansion and conflict that's actually the one I picked for my example coming up fourth is creation, expansion and interaction of economic systems and the fifth is development and transformation of social structures so those are really pretty representative of the cultural patterns that we preach and investigate in all of our history courses, we have I know I use a memory device that looks at Persia with a G at the end which is politics, economics, religion social structure, intellect which we look at in terms of education and the creation of new technologies arts, architecture, even athletics sometimes and then geography and how those things interact to form cultural identity next one please we have four time periods that the AP dictates for us so unit one they're calling regional and inter-regional interactions between 1200 and 1450 so depending on where you are it's going to have different names in Europe we're going to hit a renaissance in that period but in different continents it's going to have a different identity and a different personality unit two is global interactions 1450 to 1750 and again those first two units are time periods that are covered in the global one course in 9th grade and so Simon and I were talking a little bit more today we are proposing probably that those first two units would take up the minority of the course given that we try to look at some new approaches to the material that had already been there try to use some materials and sources that we hadn't before to give both a reminder of what had been encountered in 9th grade to deepen the study of what's there and then units three and four become sort of the flesh of what is the global two course and we feel like we really be able to do some profound study there industrialization and global integration how those two concepts interact and how they spread into all the continents and finally accelerating global change and realignments which brings us from the beginning of the 20th century to today so the course development of the current global two course and for this course also really looks at where we are how we got here and how to effect change so I'm anticipating that in this course particularly whenever a piece of writing is coming to me or a presentation is given that there will be some attention paid to how is this historical idea relevant to what's happening today we can kind of trace one of those five themes that we just looked at through time that's kind of what I tried to do on these next few slides which has some image because we're always trying to get the kids to do more image than text so here's an example I took the theme of state building expansion and conflict across the curriculum so if we started at the first time period that we're given we might be talking about something like Aztec supremacy in Central America the tribute they collect the threats of war to defeat their neighbors under control and so that would in Latin America at least we'd be able to see that theme even before Europeans arrived we often sort of think of those things wrongly I would say from a European perspective and how do those things matter to western cultures but I think in this way we'd be able to look at it in a much broader view next one and so then the arrival of the Europeans we could use a source like the accounts of the Spanish arrival by Spanish missionaries you could also use what's called the Codex Florentino which is a whole manuscript of particularly images that were primary sources from the time of the arrival of the Europeans there's some great artwork there of some of the indigenous culture that went on and some of the tragedies that occurred when those cultures interacted with each other so that might be a source we could use or a couple of them next one and then we could look at in the next century the Latin American revolutions and independence movements documented by Simone Boulevard who seems to be everywhere in Latin America in the early 19th century an example might be his address at the Congress of Angostura and I just happened to find this image of him and again I just wanted to sort of give some examples of primary source approaches, art approaches manuscript approaches that we could use in addition to some standard texts in looking at this stuff I think I've got one more maybe? No I've got two more so you know getting a little closer to the present we've got the nationalization of oil in Mexico in 1938 which becomes kind of a hallmark of Mexican identity and their sort of ability to thrust themselves forward and then the last one comes right up to today as Andres Obrador the president of Mexico celebrates the 80th anniversary of the expropriation of oil and so I really want us to be able to connect what's happening right now in the paper so that we can go to various current news sources put up somebody taking a selfie with the president of Mexico and ask questions like how did we get here do you have any questions? Mr. Obrador yeah so let's take this course I really love the idea of that global perspective the max 20% European history so it makes me think I don't think we do this anymore but it was either 5th or 6th grade in the Amherst school district we used to some teachers were using guns and steel so theories of history which really and when you look at history from this kind of perspective those sorts of ideas of why certain cultures came to why one was culturally and militarily dominant over the other those questions are begged and so does this course sort of probe any of those questions those theories of history and how do you think about guiding students through that kind of conversation? you're reminding me of a bunch of activities and thrusts of the APU of course that used to exist and there's a lot of historiography and historical theory that went on there that will lend themselves perfectly to this course the global two course already is looking at some of that material so we've brought in materials that look at if I go to the APURO course for a second so if we look at issues of moving from sort of social history issues so the APURO kids did a social history paper I'm inclined to think that we'll probably have some form of that in the global two course where they're really forced to look at what happens when you try to tell the stories of people who are not very well documented who tells that story how well do they tell it how much chance and risk are you willing to take which was a very difficult but very worthwhile paper for the APURO students of many years in a row so historical theory will be a very big part of it I think it's really important guns, germs and steel the stuff we've used in history courses and still use little excerpts of it today in both the global classes we use these in our we use historical, we use historians in their work in the classes that we teach but the AP curriculum requires that you integrate those kinds of sources and have students looking at interpretations of history and often competing interpretations of history and I think that would be a hallmark of what the course would be about A question I guess for the superintendent how do you arrange that a student really wants to take this interest in course to the course conflicts or once, twice, sometimes a year what do you do? I'm fortunate to be able to turn this question to Dr. Gramacchi who is much more knowledgeable about course schedules, I mean this has been part of her work in all seriousness this is part of her work historically at the high school has been trying and I'm using the word intentional, the verb intentionally, trying to resolve conflicts that emerge when students want to take courses that don't necessarily align perfectly in schedule so do you mind Dr. Gramacchi coming up to just be able to respond to that it's a very real question for our students in fact How do you decide how to make it available to a student who has a number of choices? I mean are there two avoid conflicts what do you do? Right so the most important thing we do is that we take those course requests early and we try to staff the appropriate number of sections so the big bad word in scheduling is singleton when there's only one at one time it's very difficult so as many students as we can get to request the courses the more sections and then it provides some relief in the scheduling that's the quick answer we actually anticipate two sections of this that's not for sure a thing two sections of somewhere between 20 and 25 students ballparking, something like that so that at least allows some flexibility depending on what schedules look like and then students if they've got a double conflict they have to make a decision depends on what it's conflicting with they have to decide what they want to do yes one thing I noticed was that and this is maybe just background information but I noticed that the AP College Board had revised the spectrum so deleting almost like a millennium history yeah so Google was a year and a half ago or so College Board did announce that they were taking the AP World History course which again in like history and went to the present so it was again several millennia of world history which to me seems overwhelming and I was when I saw partly I was gravitated towards more towards AP World as a choice when they chopped a whole bunch off there was some pushback by AP World History teachers who didn't like the revisions and their main objection which I do hear their main objection was that it eliminated this plenty of time where students got to understand and appreciate the development of civilizations, cultures around the world prior to European contact so they could start to see the sort of unique, rich achievements of world peoples before the Europeans start reaching out and the tragedy as Chris mentioned often of the contact between Europeans and the rest of the world so the AP the College Board heard that right and then sort of pushed it back a little bit further, sort of brought a little bit more of that history back in so I think it was going to start in like 50, I don't know their original proposal was to start in like 1500 or maybe later 1700 or something like that and they pushed it back to 1200 so that you could see the emergence of civilizations in the Americas like the Aztec, the Inca, the Maya you could look at the African civilizations, you could look at the achievements of the Islamic world again prior to the sort of Europeans make contact with these other civilizations so that's part of the context I think another important thing about this that we should that we're aware of and that you should be aware of is that the College Board says that they are going to publish some some more curricular information in January so especially some models of lots of models online we're going to have to put together if you approve the course is an AP syllabus they have lots of models online of the the syllabus for the old AP world history course that started way back when but they don't have any of that kind of information yet available for this revised version so to some degree I'm sort of guessing what those units are based on what I know the time period that they're suggesting we should have a little bit more information about exactly what this is going to look like exactly the the sort of units I don't anticipate they would change the themes and all they might break those units down a little bit more finally instead of four I anticipate there's probably five or six I don't know if that helps a little bit more of the context there what's going on the question was to what yet to what extent is it on you to develop the syllabus or how much you know how much guidance do you get from the AP call you know how much freedom or whatever do you have right when you're trying to the AP does give a lot of guidance but it is a very difficult thing to do to create this I mean we did a we did an AP on it three or four years ago and even just updating what was already there was quite a bit of work and probably it's really profitable work and that they want to keep the course current updated according to the newest educational thinking and that you're addressing you know historical ideas and themes in ways that are you know that seem authentic and things that were done 20 years ago may not seem authentic anymore so it's it's a fair bit of work I think the benefits we have are a global history two course that exists so we can certainly draw elements from that an AP zero course that has existed for a long time we can take some things from that but we'll certainly need to create some you know some different approaches to hit all the bases that the AP demands that we get on the way through so they they are pretty specific sort of checklist that they're looking for in the syllabus that ensures that you're integrating where appropriate scholarly sources that you're integrating primary sources that you're integrating when and where you're going to touch on those themes that we talked about within the content areas they I mean they also insist that you have excerpts from or a textbook that's published within the last I don't know what it is now five or six or ten years but you know so that's one reason that AP Euro course had to be updated because we had an older book and so we needed to update and make sure that we were really bringing our teaching of the history right up until the present time so that that relevant piece became a you know a really genuine part of what we were trying to do Mr. Ardonias, Mr. Spitzer and then Mr. Molina we probably need to move on unless somebody has a burning question so I also just want to second Mr. Demling's comment about wishing that I hadn't been able to take this class this is wonderful thank you for I'm glad to hear especially that there's all the different perspectives that are being brought into into this material I noticed that at the very end of the section that describes this course that the price of the suggested text is running from 111 to 199 per book I'm assuming why the big variation and where do we get the pricing for the total cost for the course so I the College Board publishes a list of acceptable AP texts requested copies of all of them so that we can start reviewing them and see which ones we like the price could very well be a factor also in which one we select I'm not exactly sure why there's such a wide range they do charge you more it seems the publishers charge you more for AP textbooks than they do for non AP textbooks and I think to some degree that's because these are college texts and they tend to charge more for college texts so what they have are sort of college world history textbooks that they call, that they stamp AP on and then charge high schools a lot more money for I haven't had a lot of time yet to sift through all of those materials and to see which ones really we think are the ones that are most feasible but obviously we'll be budget conscious in making a choice but I was just pricing them online and going to the publishers websites and seeing what their charge was it very well might be the case if you're ordering because the sales people will give you a bit of discount on the volume involved but I haven't quite gone that far in my research yet very briefly that we'd be looking to use this year's budget we've already looked in school committee votes that we would not you likely won't see this next month as a budget add for the FY20 for two reasons one is we've been conscious and we knew these courses were coming and we budgeted accordingly within this year's budget the second reason is the staff are going to need to have the textbooks before July 1st turns and rolls around to plan and then implement in the fall so I just it's not to take away from the conversation you just had but it might be a relevant next step question is is this something we're going to see in the budget and it may answer that Thank you so much so I took your history honors here I graduated in 1999 so it was a long time ago and I guess the reason I'm prefacing with that is that I just want to understand how we're using and this is a broader question not just for the social studies department but when I was a student here we had AP in the sciences and world languages but we didn't have it in social studies or English and instead we had an honors option and have we gotten rid of that honors track completely or why I guess and if not why do an AP course rather than create a kind of our own in-house honors well we haven't gotten rid of we haven't got rid of an honors option so and the AP has existed for a number of years yeah no I'm just saying like that's why I prefaced with 1999 but only that one course I mean it's been around since probably the mid 90s at least the AP Europe yeah okay well I opted because of the instructor because there are so many awesome options that we have but I'm not under the AP rubric those are trying to understand like what's the motivation for having AP versus kind of our in-house that's a good question so we do have we will have an honors option still for global history 2 so you'll be able to take if you choose to take for those who take global history 2 there will be an honors option within the classroom to get to take global history 2 for honors credit but for those students who are seeking a separate highly motivated seeking a separate option for the sort of global history 2 curriculum we did want to have this AP course available to people, to students I think you know to me I do think that AP and the way we will build it will represent an even greater level of challenge than our honors courses do they tend to ask students to deal in even greater depth of content and to some degree a faster pace than our honors options will ask of students so I think this is going to be a course that is for very motivated students who want to take a study of history at Amherst High School that represents the greatest sort of level of challenge I'd also say and this is the sort of, I'll be honest this is the practical piece of me speaking here too that I think that there are students in families in our community that are looking for AP courses to build their resumes for when they apply to college and that should be the only reason we do this this should be authentically an important course that really challenges students with a level of rigor and scholarship that they wouldn't necessarily get even in one of our honors courses but I do think that there's a practical element of this too I'd like to keep our program at the high school to allow a wide variety of families in our community and for some I think AP is part of that package and this is again all anecdotal from 20 years ago now but one of the nice things about having the honors in the same classroom is that I was there when they transitioned from having the honors be in a separate classroom where you take an honors course where the honors students may have separate tucks and write separate papers but they were all in the same classroom and they really diversified the classroom for me and so I'm wondering have we reached a point where now where our AP courses are as diverse as our student body or are we still seeing the same kind of lack of diversity for lack of a better word in the AP courses that would be the only thing that I could see is for not wanting to pursue and I'm just curious I'm not trying to be critical so when it was only AP Euro we saw some diversity but not as much as we wanted I'll be honest with that I think probably some of it was what the name of the course was and the material that was in there did not appeal even in terms of its topic to a more diverse population there were plenty of exceptions to that but in terms of mirroring what was going on the population of our school did not typically do that so the school, the world history element will have a much better chance of doing that as you I'm sure you know that our courses are not there's no prerequisites for these courses in terms of what grade you've gotten much to the dismay of my nephew who goes to school in New Jersey he can't believe you can just sign up for a course and take it and I will say that my experience in the last four or five years with the AP Euro course has been it's not a horror show it's not this thing that people see as this huge monster and they have to survive it like Marine boot camp or something once upon a time it had shades of that although most of the kids who came through came through with great feelings and affection for it but it's really trying to stay within the bounds of how much homework do we give how much reading do we give what can really be done in a student life that's reasonable and yet we are going to demand you know, some deep thinking some careful writing some advanced sources that we're looking at so it's a complicated answer to that I think the world history will give us a broader spectrum I think we really want to sell it to a diverse population of students and after that we'll have to get back to but I certainly see an Amherst Regional High School population that is much more diverse at all of its levels of achievement than I did ten years ago that's my take on it two points, the college board has to approve your family syllabus and then the cost of textbooks you have a smaller population large fixed cost higher fixed cost per book higher price thank you very much I assume we're taking it as a group not an individual that'd be my preference but at the will of the board thank you thank you there's any guidance you have superintendent I don't know based on what else we have going on I just want to make sure we're we're running late but I'm cool with it as long as everyone else is cool with it so I can introduce this is John Bechtold director of performing arts and theater and successful director of the show as I mentioned last week so thanks for being here Mr. Bechtold thanks thanks so much and thanks for the support I think it's wonderful the timing of the show just happened to coincide with a course proposal called new theater workshop which is devoted to making new works of theater for students of all stripes I don't know how much time has been spent looking over the proposal I tried to keep it brief so we could cut to objectives and several key points of rationale and then hopefully we'll dig out the rest so I'll try to front load this as best I can the core idea here is that while the high school continues to change and you've heard that already tonight that we want to create a curriculum that is reflective of our students' interests that is also preparing them for their future and is also reflecting the ideals of the school that we want and one of the things that we know in the performing arts department we hear deeply about is putting students through a rigorous experience in the creative process to become makers of things of experiences of collaborative efforts of ensemble work we believe these skill sets really matter beyond high school but also have this wonderful bonus I mean deeply personal endeavors that also bring out these skills so the commitment that you see students make is always a big part of this work we also in our department want to continue to foster experiences that are more project based and put students in the position of making work that they can call their own and a recent example of this the last time I was here for a course proposal was to talk about music production class that's now several years in and is turning out students that are making incredible things that then they put their name on and we want more work in our department that reflects that in addition we also want to make theater specifically something that feels more accessible to our students I think the common depictions of theater are pretty narrow and certainly so for our students so to offer them exposure to the really wide ranging and exciting world of theater making that's out there that is reflective of so much other work that's happening today feels incredibly rewarding so that's kind of the warm up lap to this as far as the skill sets and things that we hope for in the course we want a course where students 9 through 12 so they could take it walking in as a first year student or in their last semester of high school class where their job is to make original work in a variety of formats using a variety of conceptual branches and lenses to get there and create works that also have a large amount of their own value structures and interest intact doing work like the Laramie project is a great case in point we just saw approximately 60 students take this deep dive into some very difficult issues and some very challenging questions and that isn't even to talk about the theater making part of that yet and the sophistication and the dedication with which they're able to do that is a pretty good full example of the work that we'd like to take on the problem is that we don't get to offer that kind of experience to all of our students certainly it is limited to those that can make a commitment in the extracurricular day one of our hopes with this course is that we can bring students in in the curricular day that does a few things one doesn't make a different demand to meet outside of school secondly it gives them the opportunity to explore something safely there is something about having a class in this and I see this with my acting and stagecraft classes the students that venture in there they're not quite ready to walk out on a stage or into an audition room but want to see what it's all about want to see if something might be here for them and this course emphasizes that last but not least I think the other thing that's really exciting about this work is that theater can often feel like theater to that you need a huge budget to make this thing you need to buy the rights to so and so and so there's this very limited sense of what is possible in theater making this course is going to intentionally emphasize not big tech extravagances but a DIY kind of way of thinking and methodology that allows students to take a situation and a set of materials that they might never have thought of using outside of school and suddenly they're building some sort of exhibit in college or starting a protest that creates the work and uses theater making in street theater as a source for that or finding a way to convert as I've seen I've gone to two different colleges to see our alums take over their school libraries and convert those big labyrinthine spaces into an immersive theater piece and this is of their own creation and making I want to see more of that and I want to get more students into that and that's why this course proposal is here tonight great anything that you're done with so I really liked the history course that was presented I can't tell you how much I love this course I think I'm going to demand that there is school committee representation and to be allowed to be enrolled in this course so last spring the theater department put on this immersive I would call this like surreal improv which was amazing all student driven immersive audience member and then this past weekend I had the opportunity to see the Laramie project without exaggeration the Laramie project was the most powerful student performance I've ever had the opportunity to experience it was it was unbelievable how these students adopted these roles the members of Laramie who were being interviewed a couple of years after the killing of Matthew Shepard adopting these roles in these small spaces with the audience and you'd move from space to space and then you'd be there in the emergency room when he arrived there you'd be there at the press conference and then at the funeral and the trial and then it was this build and all throughout the images of the fence and the evocative media coverage it was so powerful I'm getting a little choked up about it and then to I was talking to Mr. Sullivan about it a little later it was only sort of after this intense experience that you wanted everybody on the planet to feel it's like when you I remember the first time that I saw a documentary on the Holocaust and I was very young I walked out of it thinking every human being needs to experience this it was like that and then to realize that these are high school kids these are high school kids that were delivering that experience it was incredible so take that and then have Bing Bong just shows me the incredible dynamic range of what has already been able to be accomplished so to take that potential of the students that are already creating this and the staff that are already so dedicated supporting that to be able to broaden that accessibility to empower students with that level of creative expression is just such an amazing idea so thank you for bringing this idea forward and your continued initiative to bring that to more students well there's a counter thank you here of course too a lot of this work and research that went into this proposal is a result of my spatical last year so thank you in turn Mr. Mayor just a clarification the students didn't write the layer of the project did they no they did not what they did is took a play that was designed for 10 actors on a bare stage and converted into a play for 40 actors so they did somewhat right absolutely the adaptation was a critical part of that work how does I'm curious by the way of course the students work is impressive I was blowing past that of course it's very impressive so how does this fit with sort of like a program of study or what's the concept how this fits with what a student might experience either through after schools activity but also within the regular coursework that's a great question because it brings to bear the weird place that theater exists in the school which is in this model that is kind of a hybrid is both curricular and extracurricular and those two dovetail with each other so all the major productions that we do in six or seven a year are all extracurricular productions that is the time and resources spent are all out of school and a course like this is curricular during the day the overlap is a few different things one it is sometimes these courses and I would speak to any of the theater courses because I could see evidence there which is why I feel like I can be supportive in what I would speak to here that it serves as a bridge into those productions for students that would never otherwise find their way there so that's an important first factor because those are also meant to be ends to themselves especially a course like this they're meant to leave with a discrete set of skills so this could very much be for the student that really has no fundamental interest in theater as an art form but understands that the tools that they're being given can be used to really build something that might vaguely be called theater but has so much practical application beyond so I want to draw students that don't see themselves as theater kids and that's much easier in a curricular format that isn't an extracurricular format where you get to preach the choir a little bit more, or at least roping kids that you only get to a certain level with so I think those are two key things and I think the third key thing is that we get to make a statement as a school about the kind of work that we value when we put a course like this into our curriculum and that is heard by students and it's heard by our community that there is a way of taking something that could otherwise sound like just art for art's sake and realize that we are sending out students that are prepared to go to a process not just to analyze the world but to synthesize things and respond to it and a course like this can offer that and is there another question of these when I think it's wonderful to have students generating their own material, their own experiences it then naturally raises the question for me about how that changes their experience and relates to written material that's out there makes like source work that would be within typically within an English department or something where they're reading it almost as literature but in fact it really isn't, it's actually theater I mean Shakespeare is the obvious one there's lots of it absolutely and it is exciting because when you get involved as a creator in something your research or your investment in those kinds of materials has both a very practical application you need to understand it so you can use it formally but you also develop this personal attachment to it and I can point to the Laramie project we received a raft of materials from the Matthew Shepard Foundation primary sources of all shapes and sizes from transcripts to letters to news reports to videos to audio recordings to letters to the family and we got to pick and sort through those and if anyone was just standing back and looking with an educator's lens they would have loved to have called that their classroom here we were just trying to get some work done anything else there is something you know that was for about 10 students 15 how many would be in this class well the average class size for acting or stage craft is in the low 20 so I would suspect to be around there there's certainly no limit in terms of tech or physical materials to hold them back to something like computer keyboards or something yeah just a quick question I mean I find all this absolutely fascinating and I have to ask if there does this become an additive course or is this something that pushes something else out of the way and if so what might that be no that's a great question to ask my suspicion is that it's not an additive course the most likely scenario is that I teach multiple sections of acting one for instance I'd say the most like end of stage craft probably one of those sections is pushed aside while we make room for this question thank you last but not least math department chair AP statistics this is one of the most important subjects like anywhere one of the most important skills to have I totally agree so Jane you can take it away so we have been planning this for a really long time sorry this is like the math department I should say years ago we implemented statistics 2 which made our statistics course a full year course because we in our old curriculum we didn't have any statistics so we knew how important it was and we wanted to make sure students had access to it it wasn't a perfect model but it at least gave students an avenue to get some statistics education before they went to college so when we were doing that we were looking forward to after we integrated statistics and probability into our curriculum to move to the AP stats course so we're ready so this is not an add on it is taking our honors statistics one and two and changing it into an AP course the students are ready for it they're right now almost doing everything in the AP course so I think it's important that we give it that label and it's up to them whether they want to take the exam or not at the end and skip over a course in college so we also have we want to keep our college prep course in statistics because those students also should have access to it but they don't always move as quickly through the curriculum they're 11th and 12th graders so math education at that juncture has kind of students are at many many different levels so that's why we want to offer two different courses so there would be slight adjustments to our current course that we have now I looked at the syllabus that is on the college board that I know Mr. Lutz referred to and we saw that we'd have to make some minor changes I'm working also with someone who's currently on our staff who taught AP statistics elsewhere and she's currently teaching the honors and college prep statistics course right now so she's like they're ready so we wouldn't be pulling kids from necessarily other courses because they're already taking honors so I don't feel like that's an issue access it increases access for a student to have a math AP course because right now we currently offer AP BC calculus and AP AB calculus but not every student in high school gets prepared to take a calculus course in high school so what this would allow students who are in our college prep track after their junior year if they reached integrated for then their senior year they could have access to the AP statistics course so it would open that up for our students just kind of stop here for a sec are there questions it's not as fascinating I'm really sorry the word drama I should have brought graphs for you I have to say I actually this is another class that I wish I had been able to take when I was in high school because when I found myself in college casting about trying to figure out as a liberal arts major what math could speak to me and provide both the requirements and help me with my work statistics was where I ended up and I had no basis for it and so it's just a shortcoming of my education but I do really appreciate all the work that's gone into this I think it's absolutely spectacular that's why I have no questions about this because I think it makes perfect sense and fully support this idea I fell in love with the statistics in college myself and carried it forward to grad school when I was little so it was sincerely meant although I was trying to counterbalance the excitement around academic theater thank you for doing that so I have a similar reaction to Sir Johnny's which is this is straightforward and I think it really actually hits a need right now in careers in the workplace not to get too analytical about what jobs require these days but this is a very hot skill it's a very hot topic there's a lot of data in the world and human beings are trying to figure out what to do with it and how to collect it and analyze it in a professional rigorous way is good and I like how you're phrasing elevating this work that students are already doing at this level of rigor with the honors stats one and two to the AP level this isn't just if you can't handle calculus do stats it's an AP level course that's as valuable going forward with as many career paths in preparation as calculus I really like the framing of it thank you for saying that I appreciate it as somebody at some level statistics myself I know calculus is the basis for a lot of this but this would be something that you'd either take calculus calculus is one of your prerequisites no this is a non-calculus this is sort of an introductory course so that when engineers go to college they have some basis in probability and statistics so they can access calculus could students take calculus and potentially take statistics or would they have to choose between one or the other it's all about schedules potentially absolutely we have some students right now who since we have a semester course who take a semester of statistics and then calculus or something like that you can't have the AP but I haven't run this by my boss yet so what we were thinking since we only making small tweaks what we'd like to keep is the option of the stats one or just for half for the first half of the year so that if a student did want to do that they could access it so I just want to thank you and I just want to say the thing that sort of binds the three courses together because they're in different disciplines is that all three of the departments have been talking about these courses for quite some time and that process to think through and write course proposals really starts in the spring of last year that people are at and beyond and what I appreciate is that it's providing rigorous instruction with the focus on access and diversity and that's true in all three of the courses so when I think of common threads despite the distinct areas or disciplines I think that's offering new and exciting choices for our high school students for me the common thread that's the most important that we want to give our students broad access that it's diversifying our course catalog we know these seats will be filled and we know the students will do high quality learning that's going to advance them and whatever they choose to do beyond so really thank all three of them and it's not crowding out other courses as we've described and you have the money to pay for it without looking for additional budget ads for this year I thought I'd just finish the clincher that's right the clincher is for you there there are questions from the committee if there is an appetite for an motion to approve the three courses as presented or any subset thereof I would entertain the motion Mr. Nant? move that we approve three courses as presented is there a second for that? second any further debate or discussion on the motion? seeing none all those in favor of the motion please signify by raising your hand it carries unanimously with one absent today so it's 8-0 thank you very much appreciate it welcome, thank you see those were worth the wait would I be personally my luck to ask for a four-minute break? I don't know what do you guys think? we're okay? then you get it it's a motion to approve the enemies if I can sign let's lay it out open meeting law, right? the potato chip piece wasn't there a federal court that declared that secret recordings are now legal both police as well as public I voted you an email about that this afternoon but it's not quite it's implications for K-12 are a little bigger than it is for police just assuming for school committees though well, given that it's more about the venue actually all right, we're here there's another way of staying for back back in our regularly appointed meeting next on the agenda is the math and curriculum update welcome welcome to the table thank you so I'll just do a brief introduction the topic is that we talked at previous meetings we wanted to share a curriculum update as well as an update on the math review process and how that was going knowing that we'll come back and they'll share a timeline that this will be, we're coming back again, this will still be cold and wintery when that happens but we didn't want to wait until we had the math review because it was a topic of interest and we wanted to share the work that started some of the history where we are now and where we hope to move to so I'll turn it over to Tim to start us off all right, thank you and thank you for having us tonight as Dr. Morris said the idea is to give you sort of an update bring everybody up to speed on specifically the high school math program and the plan right now is for the consultant who's reviewing grades 6 through 12 to come to your meeting in February, I think it's February 12 so no snow day on February 12, please and and that'll be a much more in-depth discussion so so the Mr. Sheen, would you mind reminding just for people that may be watching what this consultant is actually supposed to do I actually have that in here a little bit later so I'll come back around to that if that's okay as long as we have some sort of summary all right so the sort of agenda for the next few minutes is to go back over the timeline because many if not all of you have joined the school committee since the time that the high school adopted the IMP math program Dr. Gromacki will go over some of the data Ms. Moody will talk about some student math survey that was done by the district in June and the result of that and then I'll circle back around with some information about the math program review and the consultant's work and our next steps so in terms of timeline the high school math department began looking at the curriculum back around 2013 and prior to that time the math standards had some change had come about both from the national professional organizations as well as the state and there was a greater emphasis on math practices and so the department used as their core question which math curriculum best captures and supports the math practice and content standards and you can see up there on the timeline there was professional development around the revised standards and there was a pretty intensive textbook selection process that the department designed and then went through and the faculty in the math department worked with professional development staff and textbook sales people engaged in a review process in which they rated several textbooks and also made them available to the public for review and comment and so this was quite a lengthy process certainly before my time in this role I've been told since then and I just included on the next slide some data it's a little bit hard to see because of the blue background I apologize for that around the analysis of the four main textbooks that the department looked at and so the table on the left was rating them as far as their rigor and the table on the right was rating them as far as their responsiveness standards for mathematical practice and the four programs in the blue bars were the core plus program that lime green was college prep math the red orange was the center for math education project and purple was the interactive math program or IMP which you can see came out the highest ratings on both of those measures and the department was considering what both changes to the SATs so in terms of college preparation and also what employers are looking at as far as work place preparation and so things that were newer to math than when most of us were in school things like critical thinking and problem solving communication both written and oral collaboration and teamwork modeling looking for and making use of structures and making sense of complex problem solving and perseverance so it probably sounds very different than what all of you did in high school math and then the timeline subsequent to that was the sort of a structured implementation of the IMP math program and so this is a reminder of the current math courses at Amherst regional high school and AP statistics and we erased the word proposed thanks to you it's now an approved course the ones where you see slashes like integrated 2H3H4H it's the integrated 2 and the honors version of that course we forgot to put one course on there I apologize it's integrated 5 and it's CP so it sort of extends what the integrated 4 would do into the 5th year quite alright and of course the high school program of studies which is on the high school's website you can read in-depth descriptions of each of those courses and then in terms of ongoing work there's a math working group that was formed almost 2 years ago now and that's actually a K-12 group along with parent representation and that group was tasked specifically with looking at access to mathematics courses and again that's K-12 so are all students able to access mathematics courses including higher level ones and what kinds of supports are in place what kind of intervention is in place to support student learning vertical alignment so do we have a clear path from kindergarten to high school graduation in terms of learning math and the answer to that one is we have work to do on that and that's one of the things that we're hoping the consultant will give us some guidance on we have some ideas but it will also be helpful to get an outside set of eyes and professional development for teachers and so the math working group considered all of those things and we've been implementing a good deal of professional development on the elementary side but a few of our middle and high school teachers have also participated in that it's known as AVMR which is a trademark name advantage math recovery and it's something that we've invested a lot of time in over the last couple years and interestingly enough a lot of neighboring school districts have now jumped on to that so which has really been the teachers who've gone through that training have raved about how it's changed their thinking about how children learn math, how students learn math how they assess math how they make determinations about how to proceed from where students are just very briefly for those of you who are in the Amherst school committee about a year and a half ago, maybe a year ago there was a presentation by the three elementary math coaches around AVMR and that has started at the elementary level but it's certainly become a more K-12 professional development and focused just to jog some people's memories I thought it was wicked cool it is so we actually have three new cohorts of teachers that have just started the training and the other one will start next week and I'm joining in on the third cohort to take that training because it's something that's becoming more universal so I decided that I'd like to jump in and get the training as well so at this point I'm going to hand it over to Dr. Gromacki to talk about some recent trends in high school math achievement yeah so there's been some data that has been out there around MCAS and SATs and PSATs so we thought it was important for us to really make sure that we looked at the data and felt like we could present that so the first graph here is the MCAS data from 2013 to 2018 you will see that there's a dip in MCAS in 2017 and just because of all these years so the first cohort of all IMP students would have taken MCAS in 2017 and then you see in 2018 it actually goes up to 88 so 86, 83, 88 and then the number of needs improvement and failing is at 13 which actually again went down as you would expect so we've received a lot of questions about SAT scores and kind of how things are trending so what we did is we put the data up here but it's really important to note and I worked closely with the college counselor around this data is that the test changed in 2016 and so it's very hard to compare the two scores but nonetheless we do have the three years of data and so you'll see that the ARHS average compared to the state average there is a smaller gap in some places but what we're not seeing is some kind of plummeting scores or scores that are dramatically decreasing and at the same time I don't think we're comfortable saying that this is the best metric to use to evaluate our math program but the fact that people are talking about this data we thought that we would bring it to you because we had some clarity well there was a letter to the committee so the next set is with the concordance table so this is an attempt to try to convert the scores from the new test and the old test to try and have some kind of consistency so that you can see the change we just cautioned that this shouldn't be used for longitudinal data or research but this is an effort to try and show the trend in the pattern because the test is different and the scores are different I know Myra Ross the college counselor reminded us that in 2015 the top score was 760 it was an 800 and so this is an attempt to see what it would look like if you had the same scores across all six years so the ACT I actually would have thought more students took the ACT today I feel like we get a lot of requests for ACT and in 2013 we had 112 students take the ACT and in 2018 we only had 68 so that's just not I wouldn't have predicted that we also know that a lot of colleges are going test optional and so Myra's been talking to students a lot the college counselor Miss Ross she's been talking a lot about the fact that a lot of colleges aren't using that we don't still encourage our students to take them and so forth but more and more colleges each year are going test optional so for the ACT again we tried to look over the past six years to determine if we're seeing huge variances and the last one there's also been some talk about the PSAT there's something about the cloud and how they're managing their data so we did not have access to state data for the PSAT but our scores just came in for 2018 so we actually took the 178 students who took it and then we just averaged that and got the mean so that's the 561 so again if you're only looking at years 2016 and 17 there definitely was a decline I don't know that we can say exactly what why or what Myra also because she's been here for many many years said that it's not uncommon that if you actually look over the past 15 years there are definitely places where you see dips some classes are stronger than others there's just a lot of variables so if you're only looking at 16, 17 you could start to be concerned that there is a dip but again this is PSAT these are the 11th grade scores and and then we also have our 10th grade PSAT scores too where we're not yet seeing any kind of large it's looking very similar to this but for 10th grade we have to remember that they actually don't have access to a lot of the math yet that they will have by 11th grade so these are the scores as reported and Tim who did these slides sourced each data point just back so that we know where those scores came from Mr. Renato are you looking for metrics to measure the success of any program what would those metrics be? that's why we had an outside consultant come in so what we wanted to is we really wanted the student feedback piece because what we heard in January when we had the coffee with the families was talk to the students listen to their experience and that's that qualitative data piece that we can't ignore and I know that Ms. Moodiel speak to that so we had over 550 responses where students some of them wrote pages about their experience so I think that's important and we have the scores how the students are doing in the courses and again I don't think we're putting this up here to advocate one way or the other we're just trying to say this is the data that we have Mr. Donis? so thank you for this I think it's really helpful and informative one comment that I think you just made before we were looking at the SAT 2013 to 2018 chart you mentioned the gap is decreasing between the high school and the state level and I just looking at the numbers a little more closely it looks like the state numbers are going up which is great right shows some sort of upward movement on that but our numbers are also increasing so I guess there's been the state appears to be improving at least from this book this chart is showing I don't know if that's accurate and perhaps accelerating I don't know what's happening across the state again I think it's fantastic but our numbers are still increasing is that correct because it looks here like they're still steady growth from 2013 to 2018 we started at 585 and now we're at 620 in the SAT the SAT adds page 5 of this handout and SAT is really hard because it's not a required test and so I thought you might ask about participation so for example the PSAT we started offering in the high school during the school day which is different than the way it used to be offered which was on Saturday you had to get here early in the morning on a Saturday so we now have 77% last year it was 78% of the students actually taking it where in 2013 and we were a much larger school but we only had 67% of the students taking it so we actually increased participation which again one could say is another variable so yeah thank you for this just because like you mentioned there is some data out there with people drawing different conclusions so when you've poured over this data all the different ways to look at and present MCAS and PSATs and SATs there's different ways that you can say present a data or a trend if you want to show a line going up or down you're only going to show the advanced you're only going to show advanced and proficient or you're only going to show for these three years so all that being said knowing that this is a only one and not the biggest and most important part of the math evaluation picture is there anything at all in any of those data sets where you looked at and said that is maybe something that is concerning to you I just kind of want to get your sense of time with the data that we have if there's anything that concerned you from that kind of standpoint we did actually look at the MCAS scores we put up there we grouped in the way that they're typically looked at by school districts and so we grouped the advanced and the proficient together and the needs improvement and failing together because that's typically how school districts look at it but I did break them down in four separate groups and we did in fact find that the advanced group has declined a little bit and I can show you all this up just in case that question came up so you can get it on the screen now I was not a plant I'll show you I can try to go about it so you can speak to it and so you can see the table on the left side you can see what happens there with the advanced and it does decline and the proficient starts to go up which does bring about some questions and it makes we want to drill down a little bit further so how many students are going from advanced to proficient but with that provision going up how many students are going from needs improvement to proficient what are the sort of questions there and there could be a lot of other questions are we at this point serving our students who sort of represent that middle range better than we did in the past at the expense of some of the students who are at the advanced range I think that's an important question and there's certainly others and to sort of get down that far you have to sort of go to the student level of the data and work with the high school faculty who know the students better to say which students are falling into these categories just because part of my job is I do a lot of data analysis so one thing I think is also important when trying to interpret the story here is that a data trend when you're looking at two data points and you're trying to interpolate a trend the human mind has such a need to draw a meaning in conclusion we want to classify especially a line it's none I can talk about data as fit theory all day but it wants to draw a conclusion and so I think in this case particularly when we're dealing with small number of variances and we're talking about less than 20 students going not that that's not important is the difference between a decline and a flat line over two data points so they can be good because it can draw your attention into things that you might want to drill down with further like what's the story or what that is but in terms of drawing a broad conclusion I think the most challenging part about interpreting data is not prematurely drawing the conclusion and yet honoring that signal and then using that signal for further analysis you know one of the interesting things is you go back to 2011 and it looks very similar can I have something for you here just to go to your point apparently your conclusions are a little I just want to say how this a little bit more because when we get back the MCAS data they specifically tell us which questions that the students struggled on so that's interesting data for us because we can look at that and then we can make adjustments if we feel like it's necessary or emphasize something to that so that I feel like that helps us a lot let's move it along I was also looking at doesn't find that really interesting this improvement line appears to have gone down a little bit as well you didn't mention that one as a concern and so I'm wondering is it because you I don't know what that tells you I think it's one of those questions that going back to the student level is it did those students move to the proficient level or did some of them move to the failing level which would be a great concern if they're moving from needs improvement up to proficient and we're doing what we're supposed to be doing so I think it raises more questions than answers at this point to consider it's a very brief point but it's relevant to that question which is that one of the things that I also looked at was the student growth index so it looks at like the 8th grade students who took the math and MCAS in 8th grade how they do in their 10th grade and did they make above average progress in the middle range and so for the most recent year there were slightly above the mean for growth from 8th grade to 10th grade because I think the nice thing and I know there's a lot of critiques of that data source but it looks at the individual student level and what happened in those two years so it sort of tries to be a proxy for that question of well these lines change but when there's actually individual kids behind them and what was that growth trajectory from 8th to 10th grade so it's just another factor and there's more charts you could do that you could ever want but it's just that's one that I use because I think it answers that that's actually really critical because when you're talking about this the challenges the language you use can obscure the fact of are you talking about the same students progress over time and what's the impact trajectory versus are there different cohorts moving through time and then what happens to those different cohorts and if they do I mean just there are a lot of things that could happen of students that could problematize their experience when you start talking about different cohorts of students I think it even gets more complex just trying to explain what's really going on why is this occurring that's a good question and I assume that it is but I know you did the student survey and as part of this review process is teacher feedback being taken into like how was that so maybe it makes sense if Ms. Moody talks about the student survey that the high school did and then I can sort of bring in the teacher piece with what the consultant is doing too if that's alright just one more thing about the MCAS this year they're taking the new test so there'll be differences in the data there I'm sure I'm not sure if there was differences in the middle school data but one thing that is not helpful is when all of the testing organizations decide to change all of their tests on us and it like puts an axe right through the longitudinal data and we've encountered that already below the high school level and now it's coming for high school as the state changes over to the next generation MCAS so it's a conundrum it's one that everyone in Massachusetts is going to share though that's right Mr. Minino and then Ms. Vagal will the scoring change or just the context? both so my question is sort of retching back a little bit back to the courses I'm not very familiar at all with the math curriculum at the high school so can you help me understand how somebody progresses through the IMP how do they get to take calculus for 40 years of IMP sure so the state standards pushed a lot of the algebra one down into 8th grade so when students enter most students from the 8th grade enter the 9th grade in year two not year one we have a small cohort of students that enter in year one which is using the same concepts but looking at them in a different ways to strengthen those students so if you're an integrated two honors in your 9th grade, 10th grade 3 honors, 4 honors is your junior and then your senior year would be calculus or statistics the CP goes out through year 5 which by the end of year 5 you've completed essentially through precalculus and so then you'd be ready to take that oh college prep so we have two tracks that go through our school we also have accelerated students which happens at different levels so there is a course that's offered halfway through the 7th grade year through the 8th grade year which is compatible to our integrated two honors so we do have some students who come in in the 9th grade and they take integrated 3 honors, then 10th grade 4 honors junior year calculus, AP calculus and then they usually go to Amherst college to take multivariable calculus and then we have acceleration here also at the high school when they do a summer portfolio of work to advance to the next level course so a lot of stuff going on what meeting management is no I just very brief comment, it's worth noting how rare that is that our seniors have the opportunity to take multivariables not just that they have the opportunity but to take it at Amherst college obviously nationally right now so that's quite the opportunity for a public school to make that thank you so sorry so last year there was a parent meeting here and parents really wanted us to ask how they were feeling and so we wanted to collect data around their experience and we wanted to use that data to improve our implementation so with any good implementation you really try to bring in as much of the community as possible so teachers administrators math educators math instructors in a lot of cases and then the families who want to bring in and get their ideas so Mr. Jackson worked with a UMass researcher and together they collaborated and put together the survey we didn't get the survey results until the beginning of this year just because the lateness of when the survey happened so we were we're really looking to inform our work moving forward we have done a lot of work, pre-work before our implementation we had a lot of professional development throughout the implementation but we knew we needed our next steps happening so we wanted it to inform our curriculum and instructional practices so the following next slides are excerpts from Mr. Jackson's letter home and I don't know if that's available does everybody remember does everybody okay okay good okay so there are some themes that emerge from them and so one of them was students felt like there wasn't enough support in the inquiry process so we've been working in our d