Hi. Welcome to this regular school committee meeting of December 14th, 2023. I'd like to welcome our representative, Julie keys, our school, Arlington high school representatives, Amy Coler you and Graham Minnick. And with that, we will move on to public participation or public comment. So before I open public comment, I want to read the statement. Um, I would like to apologize to the committee and the community for my misstep at our last meeting, especially actually there were a few missteps. First, I didn't have my opening blurb on hand. The paragraphs I usually read before public comment, giving direction and guidelines. Instead, I ended up winging it with less clarity than I would like. Second, during the public comment that issued, I allowed comment that in retrospect, I should have stopped. In the moment, I did this because I thought it was what was required after the spaulding vnatic ruling. Part of the discussion included in this ruling talks about how comment cannot be disallowed because of its content, even if it identifies personnel. Since that time, I've tried to contact town council to get a better understanding of what should happen. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to connect with him yet. So instead I've been reading and rereading and rereading the spaulding vnatic decision and some discussions about what this means. What I've realized is that my understanding of the implications of the ruling were incorrect. Additionally, I know now that our policy BEDH has not yet been updated to be in line with this ruling. The MAS model policy has been updated this year and it makes it more clear what we can and can't allow for public comment. It reads in part, topics for discussion should be limited to those items within the school committee's scope of authority. The authority of the school committee primarily concerns the review and approval of budget of the district's public schools, the performance of the superintendent and the educational goals and policies of the district's public schools. Comments and complaints regarding school personnel apart from the superintendent or students are generally prohibited unless those comments and complaints concern matters within the scope of school committee authority. So to limit what we're having people say, we have to limit our discussion to that specific chunk which we don't actually do get. So we will, I hope that we'll send it to policy to get updated and again I'd like to apologize for any harm that may have happened because of my mistakes last week. And with that, I open public comment and my first speaker is Ms. Keese. I can't pick a mic. Hi everybody, my name is Juliana Keese. I teach seventh grade global studies at Audison Middle School and I am the president of the Arlington Education Association which represents more than 800 educators in the Arlington public schools. Two weeks ago, two parents spoke at public participation and disparaged the work of one of my members. I want to publicly state how disappointing that is to me because it is so antithetical to everything I know about the Arlington schools community. There's a teacher shortage in the United States and Arlington is not immune. We see the effects of that shortage in our open positions or people who leave mid-year to take jobs elsewhere. We see it in the burnout that causes mental health leaves. Filling positions is challenging. Filling short-term positions even more so. From my conversations with other union presidents, this is not unique to Arlington and it is a statewide and even nationwide issue. The Arlington community has always been incredibly supportive of the schools and the school staff. Our parents are truly partners in education which makes this town such a great place to work. That made the statements at the last meeting all the more alarming. Our system relies on people volunteering to help. It's how we staff committees, how we run extracurricular activities for students. It's how we connect with families at events beyond contract hours and how we put in the professional development that's needed to improve teaching and learning. If we create an environment that is hostile to people volunteering, why would anyone keep doing it? Dr. Homan has asked me before what it would take to create more comfort taking risks in this district. I promise you this is a prime example of why people are nervous to try. I hope that in the future we can find ways to build people up rather than tearing them down, to support those who are stepping up to help students and to better embody the collaborative spirit of Arlington that I have seen over the past two decades. Thank you. Next we have Ms. Sarah Barton. Good evening. My name is Sarah Barton. I live at 57 Huntington Road and I am the CPAC chair. I came to public comment this evening to provide a couple of updates. First I want to thank the school committee for their role in CPAC gaining access to a fund for educational speakers for our members through the welcome center. Particularly the finance committee for raising the issue on their agenda. We're already putting the money to use with a workshop on executive functioning, spotting it and supporting it on January 31st at 7 p.m. so everyone is welcome to come. Next a reminder that CPAC's annual parent survey will be coming in January. I look forward to coming back in May to discuss the results with you and I'm in the process of finalizing the questions for this year's survey. So if the committee or any other stakeholders have suggestions for content areas or data that they believe would be useful to collect please do let CPAC know before winter break. And in the vein of parent feedback I'm going to switch gears and also provide mine in favor of heterogeneous groupings which I noticed were on the agenda this evening. I sometimes conduct in alumni interviews for my alma mater Pomona College which currently sits at number four on the list of U.S. news and world reports liberal arts colleges and I once asked a young man in an interview not from Arlington don't worry I was in Maryland at the time what he hoped to learn from his peers when he was at Pomona and he looked at me and he said he didn't really expect to get anything from his peers that he was used to being among the smartest people at his high school that he felt other students had different priorities and nothing to offer him. He just kept his head down and did his work and he planned to keep doing that at college. I hope it's not a surprise to this committee that I did not recommend this student for admission to Pomona. When we tell our kids that we're worried about rigor this is what we're teaching them that their peers hold them back that their peers have nothing to offer. They can only find academic challenge and satisfaction in an environment that has been tailored just for them and excludes others. I know our students academic opportunities feel high stakes but inclusion and rigor are not mutually exclusive. They are mutually supportive. Let our kids realize that their academic strength lies in their ability to incorporate diverse perspectives to find their own challenges and to embrace their own potential. Thank you. Next we have our AHS student representatives. Since it's the week before break we thought we'd say some like nice hopeful cheery comments per usual. This Friday and Saturday night is the AHS performing arts concert. If you guys heard of sneak peek at the last meeting I would highly recommend everyone attend. Sounds awesome from what I've heard. In the wellness workshop we have a concert. This today marked the very last days of them. I personally have enjoyed them and heard other people have enjoyed them. Taught some 14-year-old boys had to play poker today in competitive card games so that was always a fun time. And lastly we like different clubs and organizations around school are hosting a variety of drives including a clothing drive, a toy drive, a winter coat drive and a food drive. So if anyone in the main lobby I would recommend dropping some things off for people in need. Thank you very much. So I know I was about to say I saw this pinball machine. If any of you are interested in joining a tournament where you could potentially win a $100 prize all you have to do is scan the QR codes all over the main lobby, play all four pinball games, get the highest score possible and submit it. It's been a blast. Kids are really enjoying it. These are analog devices that are common to my child. If you have the practice I'd recommend joining. Next we have a field trip approval So this is a long-standing conference they've attended. It's an overnight in Boston which requires the school committee's approval. I'm sure if there are questions about it Dr. Janger happens to be here. We're happy to try to answer any of them. We don't have a representative here to approve this but it's improved by the school committee to ask. Have any questions? Just one. Can we change the form so it says overnight and international because I don't think we're crossing any boundaries here. That feels doable. Does anyone have any other comments or questions? Can I get a motion to approve? Motion to approve. Second. Second. Mr. Cardin is joining us via Zoom so we'll need to do things roll call but is there any further any follow-up questions? So I'll start. Mr. Cardin, how do you vote? Ms. Goebbelsen? Yes. Ms. Morgan? Yes. Mr. Filman? Yes. Ms. Ekson? Yes. Ms. Willson? Yes. And I also vote yes. So that's approved unanimously. Moving on. We have the EL education implementation update by Dr. Ford-Walker. Thank you. Good evening. I'd like to introduce Shannon O'Brien and Alessandra Magalhaze who's joining us via Zoom this evening and they're going to be helping me with our presentation tonight. Allie and Shannon are you there? Great. Thank you. I'll toss it to you to start us off. Hi, I'm Allie Magalhaze. I'm the literacy coach at the Thompson School. Can we turn the volume up in here? I can, but people with laptops have to mute it because it is up. Try again, Allie. Hi, is that better? Not much. Not much. You good? The speakers are over there as loud as it goes. I can turn it up. Okay. Allie? Hi. Can you hear me better? No.  I'm driving, Allie. Oh, okay. Should I continue? What do you guys think? Can anyone hear me? Yes. They, because the audience can hear her. We can actually continue to the next slide too. I don't have, okay, great. So, Shannon and I are literacy coaches in the district and we're really excited to be here to talk to you about the EL implementation. There are some very exciting things happening in these classrooms and we're excited to share that with you tonight. Before we even get into the classrooms and what's happening there, Dr. Ford, welcome on us to just kind of take you back a little bit and review how we got here tonight. It's been a long journey and it's kind of surreal that EL is actually happening in the classrooms because we've gone through a long process. All right. Hold on. We really can't hear, Sean. It's coming out of like this speaker over there. Yeah. Shannon, can you hear me at home? Yeah, we can't. Yeah, hold on a second, Allie. Sorry. Shannon, can you try talking just so we know if it's a promo and Allie's in? Hello. Yeah, it's very soft. Yeah, it's still okay. Oh my goodness. We can only have one speaker going in the room. There's no way to mesh them. It's going to echo. Yeah, that's going to echo. That won't work. So that's why I just... Why? ...a PCI that has a... Let me make it so the key speakers will play with the peer. Okay. These were off for these mics, so it doesn't beat that. They should be on for the peer. So he's working on that now. Okay. That's definitely going to be a problem. So what we could do is... It's doing the microphone up and down as you're doing things. Yeah, it's okay. That's just picking us up. Test, test, one, two, one, two.  Allie, say something. Hello. Hi. That's not doing anything because it's coming out of those stuff. Keep going. Say something, Allie. Hello. Okay, let's move on. Are you going to talk? Okay, so I'm going to... We'll keep moving forward so we don't waste any time. And... Do you want to try again? Hello. Hi. You hear me? No, because it's all coming through those... So it's all... Yeah. Okay. So in the interest of time, Dr. Ford-Walker will present. I can't do anything about this screen, fortunately. There it is. There we go. Thank you. All right. Okay. So that we can all hear. Great. Yeah, it's off. We're good. No, I just... Yeah, go ahead. Allie, can you try one more time? Hello. Can you hear me? No. All right. That's okay. All right, we'll keep moving. Thank you so much, Allie and Shannon. Please, you could stay on and... Maybe something magical will happen. Yeah, we'll see. We'll keep working on it. Okay, so going back a little bit to the 2022-23 school year, there was a consultant who worked with APS Hill for Literacy, and they led the district through the process of identifying three curricula options for our transition to our new literacy program. There was a pretty comprehensive process that the district went through to land on the final selection, which is EL Education. And through that process, there were a number of constituents within the community, such as teachers, school leaders, as well as directors who participated in that process, in addition to, from my understanding, different leaders as well. There was a contract that the district signed with Imagine Learning and Better Lessons, and the contract was two different contracts. One was specifically focused on professional development, and that was through Better Lessons, and then the other contract was with Imagine Learning, and they're the company that houses the particular online platform that teachers and educators use to access curriculum. In the spring of 2023, coaches began participating in professional development, as well as school-based opportunities to better understand the curriculum and just be prepared for implementation for fall 2023. Also, prior to the start of the school year, there were different professional learning opportunities that coaches participated in as well as teachers who would be implementing this year. So fast forward to fall of this year, and we have two grades in every elementary school that are currently implementing the curriculum. And right now, we're in a place where we are experiencing some bumps, but also a lot of areas of excitement. As a result of the implementation of the curriculum, our students are engaged in deeper learning opportunities that are really prioritizing the connection to science, social studies, as well as other literacy areas that over the past few years, our students haven't necessarily had an opportunity to deeply engage with. And our teachers are currently in the process of participating in professional development opportunities that are embedded throughout the year. And those are opportunities that were being led by a provider that I mentioned named Better Lessons PD. And also, they were engaging in opportunities led specifically through the Imagine Learning platform as well. Over the past month, we've made a shift from Better Lessons PD provider to the EL curriculum provider. And EL is the company that created the curriculum. And so we've experienced, I would say, better PD over the past few months, excuse me, over the past month, since we've made the shift and we've actually received, I would say, really great feedback for our implementation that we're going to apply and use as we are rolling out the second part of the curriculum for the second half of the year. So in terms of where we are now, we are currently working on planning for our cohort two teachers. And our cohort two teachers are going to be specifically prioritizing not exactly what the curriculum is, but prioritizing how to teach the different elements of the curriculum. And what I mean by that is that the curriculum is pretty intense and there are a lot of different components to it. And it's been pretty clear from the first part of our implementation this year that more support is needed with navigating through all of those different parts of the curriculum. And so for the second part of the year, our cohort two teachers are going to be really engaging in that work so that they're, I would say, better prepared than our cohort one teachers were at this time last year. Some highlights from the first part of the year have been, you can go to the next one, have been some of our teachers have been able to participate in EL conference that actually some of our teachers and some of our school leaders were able to participate in this conference that took place last month. And it took place in Colorado and it provided an opportunity for us to connect more deeply with the EL. I don't want to say community, but it really is a community because our teachers and principals came back really motivated and encouraged by the professional learning experiences that they gained as a result of being there. And they were able to talk to teachers and also talk to districts that were planning on implementation in order to better support our work. And so it was very clear that there was a community there and we're super excited to be engaging with that community as a result of this shift to the EL professional development support. So in terms of next steps, we are continuing to prioritize visiting classrooms and visiting schools over the past two months. I've been able to visit six out of the seven schools that are currently implementing. I'll be visiting my last school next week. I've had an opportunity to observe in over 25 classes and observe learning experiences where students have been participating in the use of protocols that have allowed students to share their thinking that have also allowed them to connect with one another and engage more deeply with the EL content. It's been super exciting to see. I've also been able to observe students engaging in experiential learning opportunities as well, which has been super exciting. And in some of the conversations I've had with kids, they've been really excited to share their work but also really excited to share that they enjoy literacy. And being able to hear from them has been empowering. These visits have also allowed me an opportunity to connect with schools to learn a little bit more about some of the challenges, some of the strengths, and also it's allowed for me to start to have a better sense of some of the areas that we need to plan for as we think about rolling this out at a larger scale next year. Also, the next step includes continuing to reflect, assess, and adjust as needed. As I mentioned before, there have been some bumps and one of the major bumps has been really just orienting ourselves to the magnitude of materials and volume of materials, and that's been a challenge. And so, again, with the shift to the EL curriculum provider, we are seeing more of a clearer path forward in terms of how to navigate that, and teachers are feeling a little bit more able to kind of, I would say, respond to the curriculum needs that really kind of threw people for a loop at the beginning of this year. And finally, we are going to be restarting the EL implementation team. We had our first meeting last week which is comprised of literacy coaches, school leaders, assistant principals, as well as our director. And the work of this team is going to be to monitor our implementation so far this year and for the remainder of the year, as well as to think about how we're able to connect with other districts that have already implemented or are either implementing and also tapping into our EL network now as a result of this new partnership with EL education, we're able to have more access to resources that the team finds more meaningful in Arlington. And finally, I'll say that although we are experiencing and have experienced some bumps, these are bumps that are typical with any new curricula implementation, especially at this large scale. So continuing to shift as needed as well as document our lessons so that next year we can anticipate some of the challenges a little bit more smoothly and respond to them a little bit differently is something that we're prioritizing as well. Allie or Shannon, say words for us again. One more time. Hello. Well, we can barely hear you. You said hello. Say more words beside the Gettysburg address.  It's a literacy presentation here. I know I was going to say something tremendous about EL. So could you hear me about that? Say tremendous things about EL, Shannon. I just think I can hear you if you're loud into your own computer. I think one thing that is really amazing, Allie and I are in classrooms four hours a day with our teams that are implementing and we're hearing students in their level of discourse has really risen. Our first graders are saying things like I persevered when I made this magnificent thing or I collaborated with my group with or I show respect when and so our first graders are using that type of language on a daily basis and so it's really been great to see this implementation on that way and then in the upper grades our fifth graders are talking about human rights and they're connecting human rights to social issues and to the books they're reading and they're using the universal declaration of human rights and they're writing about it and connecting it to their reading. So we're seeing such an advanced level of classroom discourse. It has really shifted the way that we're teaching literacy and the way that we're building their background knowledge to apply to more complex texts and it's created an equity among students because we're all reading a shared text and all the students are interacting with the same experience. Thank you. Allie do you have anything that you want to add in? Hi yes can you all hear me now? A little bit? I'll try to yell. Just piggybacking off of what Shannon said. I think that we've been really seeing how we can make the connection also to outside the classroom. When kids are creating these magnificent things or creating these project-based learning we can connect to the community as well and that was something that we also discovered at the High Quality Work Institute that the coaches went to in Boston is how we can really open the doors so it's not just a literacy lesson but we're connecting it to our own selves reflecting and then connecting it to our community as well. And just to add one more thing I know that in the spring I think we talked about adding ELN and one thing in grades three through five that we knew that was lacking that we really needed to come in we're implementing the all block which is separate from their module lesson time and that includes things like grammar writing mechanics vocabulary independent reading working with complex texts so those third through fifth graders get a second hour every day and they're in small group rotations they get to be with the teacher for 20 minutes they're in independent or pair working for 20 minutes and they rotate through so we've really seen some success there at the grade three through five level and the great K to two level we're still using our Hegerty our foundations in small group for a second hour so our students are getting two full hours of literacy every day. Can you talk a little bit just very quickly about the trends at third through fifth that we're noticing in terms of some of the the gaps that exist so for example we talked a lot about how some of the lessons are requiring certain skills and we're realizing that at third through fifth grade that our students don't have those skills yet. So all block is built upon the fact that we've started in K and gone all the way up through fifth so at Stratton our fifth grade is implementing and our first grade is implementing first graders now are being taught things like nouns adjectives present tense future tense that's not something that was previously taught in our old curriculum and so in our fifth grade they're expecting them to know different verb tenses and way above where they were so we are kind of backtracking and figuring out where the gaps are for fifth graders right now that haven't been exposed to present tense verbs to subject predicate so we're doing that work and having to kind of do a little band-aiding but I think as we know as time goes on the gap will close because every year it's a vertical alignment and so teachers will see the shift happen but this year we are trying to fill the gaps where students knowledge hasn't been filled before I'll only add that I've been as I've shared with the committee doing office hours out with buildings and observing a couple ilt meetings and some of the things that I know I've heard from teachers is some like real excitement about the level as they were talking about of rigor of the curriculum it's a lot for teachers they have really dug into this their spending endless additional hours doing their planning time to be prepared for these lessons there's a lot of resources that go with it and they're thinking very critically about what to include what to accelerate what to decelerate when to slow down and it's really been and there the excitement about protocols is such that you start seeing other teachers in classrooms that aren't implementing starting to use some of the methods that are part of el just to try something out we're trying to manage excitement at the same time as we are encouraging people to try to some new things so I've just I've heard a lot of wonderful things from teachers who are implementing outside of the converse the observations that Dr. Ford Walker is making which I have not been a part of and it's really exciting stuff so kudos to all the teachers who are working on this they're working very hard on it okay do people have comments questions miss exton thank you very much for this presentation it's helpful to hear how this has started and I have a fifth grader at Stratton so I've also seen the the change from the student perspective too I just want to comment a little bit on on the plans for rolling this out for more grade levels I know how much work it has been for the teachers for the coaches to learn and support the teachers and I I very I feel very strongly that we roll this out as quickly as possible and make this change but I also feel very strongly that the teachers feel supported in in the way that it's rolled out just having hard how much work it is so just with the budget season coming up too is the goal to to move this to full implementation across k to five across all the schools for next year are there resources that you feel like you might need now that you might not have felt like you were needing when it and I know you weren't here Dr. Von Walker when it sort of started the plans perhaps for some of this were already in place when you came in the summer but just thinking about are there additional resources that you feel like teachers and the coaches are going to need in order for this to be successful to roll this out Katie five across seven yeah yeah I would say absolutely hands down the rollout I credit the coaches for their immense support for being in classrooms and co-teaching along with grade level teachers and really being able to get a first-hand glimpse but also experience around what it means to implement this curriculum because it's truly been a massive task and without their support and leadership we would not be in the position that we're in with that being said we have to think about how our coaches are currently providing support and we know already that they're not going to be able to provide that same level of support and that same intensity of support k to five in every single school and so we have just started our conversations around what that support needs to look like and how we can shift using the current resources that we have but there's no doubt that we are going to need additional resources to help support because it's just a massive undertaking and so yes we will need additional resources but we're currently identifying how that can look also we're starting to talk about how we can reshift some of our current or restructure excuse me some of our current ways in which coaches support and maybe thinking a little differently around how we can partner with other people within schools to provide some level of support as well without necessarily adding on a whole bunch of new staff if that makes sense so we're trying to look at all the different options great thank you I appreciate that and I just I want to acknowledge for Shannon and Allie and the other coaches how significant undertaking this has been for two grade levels and how significant it will be to add what four four more grades at each school so that's that's a lot thank you Ms. Morgan um I had two questions um the first one was I was could we could I get more clarity so I have a fifth grader at Stratton and I went back to school night and the way that it was presented to me so I'm confused about all block because when it was presented to me it was called wind block um and so then I was like oh well that's what we do at Gibbs cool um and I know that it's not because what Shannon just described is definitely not wind block but so is it all block is it wind block Shannon do you want to answer that so there are actually at Stratton there's two different things they have a wind block time and they also have an all block time so all block is based purely on literacy and like I said it is work on fluency grammar mechanics writing independent reading and working with complex texts and then the wind block is like what I need so teachers may teach um there's pull out services that happen during wind block they may be working on math and small groups they may they may do some reading skills they may work on maybe a science concept so wind block is more geared to any content area for what I need where all block is their second hour of literacy block that a small group focused instruction got it it was the acronyms it's the three letter acronyms that I couldn't I wasn't tracking those okay so all for those all block means additional language and literacy block oh that's going to be tough for me Shannon uh okay I'll work on that one okay because we've got ELA we have ELA we have ALL we have WYN got it but not everybody does WYN I guess not I don't know anyway okay um thank you that clarifies things um and then so given what you've learned looking at the fifth graders this year and that there's some confusion around you know present tense and adjectives and those seem like things that are really really important um so what are we going to do so maybe some of the kids who are doing the EL this year are getting some sort of support around that because they're they're needing to do it to put those band-aids on now but what about the kids who are not in the pilot groups and like given that we've we've identified this as something and you know something that needs remediation where are we going to fix that and maybe you don't know the answer maybe we don't know the answer to that yet which is okay I I do want to add in it's going to definitely be a multi-year approach right like so next year we're going to have a whole new group of kids who are going to be um missing different skills that they haven't been taught yet and it's going to be a year after year where we're going to have to make sure that we're not only teaching the curriculum that's in front of us but also doing some backtrack if that makes sense with different skills that students didn't have an opportunity to to to learn because we didn't teach it um and so I mean that's my quick response right but also there's a we have to think too about what does that mean for our students you were in middle school and high school and so we we're doing all of that thinking and all of that planning now because we have some work to do to catch kids up yeah and it's I mean in in my work we sort of say to ourselves we're like well we turned over that stone okay right because once you see it you can't unsee it right and so then you have to kind of like you have to do it after so thank you anyone else just quickly uh thanks very much for this was really helpful um the the uh partnering with other districts can you just talk a little bit about what you sure sure um so oftentimes education can be isolating oftentimes we get into our room and we are in silos or we can be in our district and be in silos and the point of partnering with other districts is to see what's working in other places identify some of those lessons that we learn and see what we can apply in order to help us be more efficient save time and also just develop connections so I would mention that we had about seven educators who were able to attend the EL conference in Colorado last month and that was really an opportunity for folks not just to learn more about EL but to develop partnerships to develop an understanding of what's happening outside of Arlington so that we can bring some of those lessons to Arlington and develop relationships so that we can better serve our students either I'm just are there other districts in Massachusetts using yes yeah okay yes there are a lot of districts in Massachusetts surrounding districts it'll be kind of a local thing where people might get together I know the zoom was the new thing but yeah you could get together in person yes and then the second point I just I did want I was just want some clarity on the district wide rollout did you say it's not going to require a lot more staff or would it what's you don't want to I would like us to explore opportunities and ways of maximizing all of our staff that we have and being a little bit being super thoughtful about adding on additional staff good that's okay thank you can I just add there are supports that we are not necessarily currently using that come from some of the providers for professional development for curricula like this like EL education that we could choose to invest in because we don't necessarily have we can't you know clone all of our coaches in all of the buildings so in looking at and I I want to commend the team because I know that our switch from some of the providers we were working with last spring before Dr. Ford Walker was here to working directly with EL education that came straight from our coaches who attended some professional development and they said okay no we need to work with EL education so we've switched now and I know that they as a provider have a lot of different options some of which give us a little bit more person power in the buildings so that we're learning from the people who have developed the curriculum and deeply understand it yeah so so when we talk about additional resources we're going to try to avoid adding a bunch of people on a temporary basis which we may or may not be able to even fill that we don't need that beyond an implementation year and look towards what can we do to provide as much professional development as deep as possible as quick as possible for this implementation year good sounds like good strategy thank you thanks very much anyone else have any comments questions I'll just say from teachers that I hear from time it's just time and it's even the time that spent doing this that they're not doing building meetings or other professional development that everyone else in the district is doing it's just it's a big time commitment so trying to find time for people to do this without taking them out of the classroom it has been a real challenge and people are really they're struggling with that but thank you very much this has been very helpful and great work and now we can move on to the visual arts presentation or visual arts report um thank you allie and shannon thank you yeah thank you all right mr millner I will be driving for you so yep so cue me before you get started though I just want to say thank you for making sure that our walls reflect the beauty of your department before we started our our meeting today um Leo was here decorating over the course of this week and going through some of our beautiful banners from the last banner competition which I'm sure he'll mention um so thank you and take it away when you're in thank you um I'll just start um talking a little bit about um the department and what kind of undergirds the work that we do um I think we'll start by saying it and we take a really long view in the visual arts and I think this is really summed up by the words of Gordon Brown who is a dean of the MIT School of Engineering who said to be a teacher is to be a prophet we are not preparing students for the world of today or the world that teachers have grown up in we are preparing students for world that we can barely imagine um and in keeping with sort of the idea of taking this long view and thinking about lifelong learning um there's sort of two frameworks that we think about in our philosophy so one is the studio habits of mind which comes out of some work from Lois Hetlin that mass art and so rather than focusing just on like okay what are the specific skills we are teaching every year or in visual arts specific media we are teaching which is the way um the visual arts sort of standards used to be the state and national standards and also what we're doing currently much more focus on what are the habits of mind so we were teaching kids to observe to develop craft but also we're focusing on when do they have chance to stretch and explore and take risks with their artwork when do they collaborate with other people and how do we facilitate that when do they get to reflect and express their own ideas and envision their own um their own artwork and their own ideas and how to how to show them the other thing we think about increasingly in the visual art is summed up by this sort of graphic here which is called Crow's theory of everything educational um everything pedagogical I'm sorry um Crow with John Crow is another mass art teacher who this is he started in the visual arts but this really I think applies to almost every field of education and he divide up all of education to these three different buckets the most basic bucket is I do it you do it so the teacher shows someone here's how you write a paragraph there's a topic sentence right evidence announces here's how you hold a paint brush here's how you mix paint it's very direct the students are repeating what the student with the teacher shows them the next and of course that is necessary sometimes right the next level is I challenge you wrestle so you notice on this graphic that it sort of opens out so in this example right we're giving students a challenge but there's a lot of ways you could you could solve that challenge right so in the visual arts it might be everybody's we're learning how to paint but what you paint is up to you or we are all working on a project where we are making art about the modern civil rights movement but the artwork you know what you can do at a sculpture you can do a painting you can do the media you choose is up to you so you're setting them challenges or it could be some other sort of you know intellectual challenge that they are then solving and they have a variety of ways to do that and then the final one is what we call you choose I support and in this mode the teacher is a coach and it is the we're leaving as much of the creativity up to the students so they're choosing what they're saying and they're choosing how they're expressing it and this is often the hardest it sounds like you know the easiest but it's actually often the hardest for students to grasp all right but it's what we're kind of want to push them to being able to do by the end of their career and but not just by the end we want them to have this experience every year and this is summed up in our site another kind of mode of teaching which we've begun to implement in Arlington started a few years ago when Dave Ardito was here and that's the thing I was working on my last day and we're continuing it here which is called teaching for artistic behaviors and this very much connects to that previous slide and it is a form of teaching that is very focused on scaffolding students to the point where they are able to do their own envisioning and choose their own medium and choose their own mode of expression and the teacher is there to coach them so if you just go to the next slide I just want to give you to start with a very personal example so one day my son when I think there's a second or third grade brought home this drawing of a fox in the snow and I was like oh that's really adorable what a cute drawing and asked him why did you draw this I've never seen him draw a fox before and he's like I don't know we'll push a little bit he's like oh the teacher asked me to draw a fox I was like okay it seemed a little strange and then I went to the show at the school this is not here in Arlington by the way and this is what I saw was a wall full of foxes in the snow and then at the other if you go to the next slide you'll see and you see this over and over again in traditional arts education in America where you'll have an entire wall where 30 students did Mondrian or you have a wall where you know all these students made it a self-portrait and then they cut up their self-portraits and mixed it with another student and you created this sort of dual portrait that's somehow supposed to serve the diversity of the students but again what we're having in all these cases is the teacher is coming up with an idea of what's going to look good and what's going to be kind of easy to manage and then all the students are making it so there's some skills being learned but the creativity is really mainly with the teacher and not with a child so this is what we're trying to move away from so what I just expressed you see here on the left here and this is a bit of a brutal summation but I think it kind of gets to it in the traditional visual arts teaching the teacher is the artist the classroom is their studio they're in control of all the supplies they put it out on the table for the students and the students are making their artist assistants making multiples of what the teacher says what we're moving towards is this model where the child is the artist the classroom is the child's studio and the teacher supports the child's creative vision so it's again it's not that it's freedom all the time but that it's we're want to make sure they have these experiences where they're learning how to get towards being able to use freedom and express themselves the results have been really impressive if you can slide um in the first place you'll get to see this kind of thing so in a tab classroom there are some where it goes back and forth between more traditional projects to what I again call the I challenge you vessel projects and really open ended projects but you also have some teachers who will let a child in the tab they might work on one project all year so these are a couple examples from Thompson where students because of this freedom we're able to really take advantage of it and a student spent an entire year building a model of the USS Arizona that's a six feet long another group of students spent who had been you know where these are two girls who were really into soccer been playing all their life and were following the women's world cup and then they made this stadium to celebrate their love of the game and and this is how they express themselves so again they were they got to have this freedom and do this kind of thing that they would never be able to do in a traditional curriculum this is a group of students at Pierce who had a whole business plan developed for how they would have created bakery and they created their muffin their their cupcakes and they had if you look back you can't really see it but there's a long blurb where they explain what they're going to make and how they're going to make and how they're going to sell and where they're going to sell and how they're going to advertise it so students really start to develop their ideas and we're noticing also with tab that students are writing a lot more so when you ask them to write a statement instead of saying well I drew a box because the teacher told me it's I made cupcakes because I want to own a bakery when I grow up I made this shit because I read all these books about you know Pearl Harbor and they so they're writing much more when you talk to them they have a lot more to say they're just and they're much more engaged in general if they're still doing a lot of traditional work if you go to the next slide so you know you'll still see students who want to draw a landscape who want to draw a cat you'll still see students who want to learn how to draw from observation and do the human figure so it's not an either or but it's it's really opening up what students can do and how they can do it and last I just say it also and this is we've seen this at our schools and in the last session we saw a lot behavioral issues in these classrooms went way down a lot of the students who might be identified by some teachers oh that kid you know they have they can't sit still they don't know how to behave they they're quote-unquote heavy hitters in a classroom where they suddenly get this freedom are they flourish and are deeply engaged and have to be often you know almost dragged away from the art room because if they're they really appreciate having this freedom so it's been a really a wonderful experience and we're now at a stage where all of our elementary schools are implementing this in various forms again there's a lot of variety in what it looks like at each school and it's influencing of course what we also do the middle and high schools where we're having these conversations continually about how do we open up assignments how do we center student growth and their own vision and I don't know if you have any questions about that because I'm going to change subjects but anyone have any questions I just wonder if you could talk to how you do skill development because it seems like there's certain things I need I mean certain techniques stuff that it'll help them to learn yeah so we kind of divide up the curriculum we have a few different teaching modes so we do absolutely do skill builders we say you know what everyone is going to do this and not everything is always up to choice so this could be something where we think we know everyone loves it and we don't do it anyway so we're going to teach all together so for ceramics when you if you teach ceramics everybody wants to do it we don't need to if that's something we make sure everyone does there are also some things where you realize if they don't try it out they're never going to get it so for instance you know a lot of our teachers will make sure everyone tries print making and block printing because if they don't try it they won't understand it but what we've discovered is you can make a lot of things optional and then kids will opt in and at first you might start with one small group of kids opting in but then the kids next to them will say oh that looks really cool and then the kids start teaching each other and it starts to spread organically and it makes a big difference of course for our students when they choose something versus being forced to do something we've also found in the past you know we have had all this required curriculum and you know you teach a year after year and then they get to high school and they don't know it they don't remember it and it's often because they really weren't engaged so we're so we're you know experimenting and we have different requirements at different schools and teachers are experimenting which are the required assignments which are more open which are optional and kids get a choice and we're kind of thinking over that and we're going to sort of come over I think after a few years kind of decide are there certain things we really want to make sure everyone tries and are there certain things we just leave open. Thank you. I just want to say I have a third grader and a first grader at the Pierce School and those cupcakes when I looked at the slide deck earlier today I immediately remembered seeing them in the spring when we had the first time since I've been at Pierce I don't know if this happened pre-pandemic and the evening of the arts where Malia Trezyk and Ivan Xu sort of created this great I mean it was really wonderful and I just remember walking around in those little statements the artist statements and I had heard about it I was like how are these kids all I mean like that that seemed like a real stretch for my kindergartner it was but they were so proud they were all I mean it was a really it was really great evidence of everything you're talking about here so yeah that was really wonderful to see and yeah she's that's still a work in progress but it's yeah making great progress there at that school as well. Thank you. So we are we just want to talk to you some of the other changes going on in the visual arts in the district so oh sorry should go back and slide so we do have at the elementary level we are piloting a couple of different programs so at three schools right now actually sorry two schools at Dallen and at Bishop we are piloting an intensive schedule so as you probably know art is traditionally taught students get it once a week for the entire year if they have it on a Monday they miss you know like 10 classes a year you know so it's it's not much art and it's kind of sporadic what we're experimenting with at these schools is an intensive schedule where instead of having once a week for the whole year they'll have it two quarters of a year but twice a week so this we're doing this with art and visual art and music so they'll have first and third quarter they'll have visual art twice a week and second and fourth quarter they'll have music twice a week and no art obviously we'd rather have twice a week all year but that's not a possibility in our current schedule but what we're the reason we're trying this out and again this time we tried in my last district is we've noticed that when you do this when you have twice a week you get firstly a lot more relationship building so students and teachers are able to build relationships much more quickly you get can get into a lot more depth kids remember what they're doing from class to class you don't have to remind them or like remember what they're doing and and again therefore more continuity in what they're working on so it's teachers have certainly noticed the kids have noticed it's much more intense there's much more in depth and we're going to kind of experiment with and see how it goes because of course the trade off is then you have half the year with no art so it is a trade off but we're hoping that it leads to again greater depth more finished products more buy-in from the students and we'll see how it goes another pilot we're trying is the interdisciplinary collaboration so we do have an imbalance in our schedule as you may know you know we some of our schools have a much larger population than others so in the schools where there's a slightly less popular lower population so Pierce and Bishop and Dalin our art teachers there and our music teachers are making a real push to do more interdisciplinary collaboration and this is something which you know some we've always you know known as is really powerful there's a lot of research about you know when kids get a chance to write and think about something read about something but also make art in response to what they're studying there's much greater depth of learning and something they hold on to for often much more of their lives and but you know it's hard to it needs that we need work it needs common planning time it needs actually teachers need to push in and we work with a general education teachers or and find time to meet with them outside of the class so we're trying at these schools and planning collaborations right now that will take place in the spring and one thing of ads you know since we just saw the presentation about the L curriculum is this also jobs really well with the expeditionary learning as it was originally called and this is something that in its early stages was a big part of the L was that there's arts as well integrated into so students will during during doing these intensive units and then having sort of a capstone project integrating the arts so this thing we're not doing that part this year because again we're as as Julie mentioned teachers need time to plan and they don't even have time to collaborate and plan on the L curriculum let alone now can you go meet with your art teacher so something we'd love to do more of and we just you know need the planning time and of course the other sort of thing that's holding us back is you know a school like Thompson where there's the art teacher there teaches 28 sections um simply has no time to also do this on the side so we'd love to something we'd love to do and hope at some point we can think about how do we get the staffing at some of these other schools to be able to support these other collaborations another this is an initiative academic conversation is an initiative we are piloting well something that is part of the professional development work going on at the high school across disciplines but it's also something we are focusing on individual art and at the secondary sort of six through 12 level but especially at the high school so again what we're working on is developing much more discussion models where the kids are doing the talking to each other as you probably remember for your own educational experience right so much of discourse in classrooms is sort of ping-pong with the teacher on one side of the table and all the kids on the other side of the table and it's teacher student teacher student teacher student what we're trying to get away from individual arts is we're trying to break down that terror time and give us much more time where the kids are talking to each other and having engaging in conversation where they push each other's learning and engaging in analysis and synthesis and exploring each other's ideas giving each other feedback and building on it so we are trying out different models we are conducting peer observations which is again something going on at high school that we are also enthusiastically adopting and trying out and we're hoping to bring this start this there and kind of bring it down gradually into the middle and then elementary schools as well I want to update that I mentioned this when I saw you all last year but we had a big program of study revision at the high school and it's going really well so I just wanted to share some of you know what's happening there you know as as mentioned we we took got rid of the foundations of art class which was sort of a bottleneck that prevented students from focusing on their next slide on their particular subject area or media that they're interested in and this has enabled us to then open up a lot of new programming so we have four new programs we have metal smithing and jeweler making filmmaking animation we added a mural painting and set design so our students are now building the sets for the shows that are coming up and planning murals to fill this beautiful but empty school and we're also expanded a digital photography program so that you know all students can have access to SLR digital cameras to do higher quality and professional standard work all in total there's you know 12 new new courses where they've been added and then several other courses almost all of our existing courses were changed from year long to semesterized courses so that students could experiment more try out more different things and this is also allowed us to offer more higher level courses so all of our lower level courses are mixed they're heterogeneous but we now have also a lot more level two level three four and even level five classes so students can really specialize as they get into the upper grades and it's been very popular all of our classes are full and you know the course requests more than doubled as a first choice for the digital art collective and there are a lot of courses where we have long waiting lists right now so we're very excited about the work we've done and it's been it's been really good to see in action we've also as you mentioned you've mentioned peer show that has been a big thing we're very excited about getting back to last year was the first year where we had visual arts in-person shows at every school this is something we will do again this year and expand we're also working with the performing arts department to at every school try to align it so you have an art visual arts and music performing together just to bring in more people and that'll be happening here at the high school as well finally if you go to the next slide we are initiating a lot more public art programs so as you see in this room and on that slide there's we've had for a number of years youth banner project the family of Gracie James has been generously funding the printing of these banners every year we're doing that also this year and they will be up in Mass Ave in the spring so that will continue but we are also starting public art projects at the middle school and at the high school so at the middle school this year we're going to be starting mural making clubs where the art teachers will work with students interested in painting murals in the in Ottison at the high school we're starting in addition to the mural and the set design class we're starting a whole process to gather places around the school teachers and administrators can submit ideas and students can submit locations we'll then sort of gab an inventory of locations that can be decorated and we will then have students submitting proposals for designs some of them will just be things that we print on vinyl some will be painted on panels and put up some will be printed on large vinyl and sheets and stuck adhered to the wall and some of this is even including some of a really large public spaces we have you know the architects have a plan for a mural of printed mural in the cafeteria but we are there now competing with our students who will be submitting their own designs for a 12 foot by 72 foot mural so I'm really excited to see how this come out and you know also hoping to eventually get these out or have our students out working in the community so I know I'm meeting later in the week with the arts council the arts council are starting to build those partnerships so we can identify places in this community where they can start to work on murals either with professional artists or having their own sites that they can produce work in I think that's about all I got for you except actually one more thing last thing I mentioned thank you for your patience is we are also really working on modernizing the visual arts department until this year everything we teach in our own kin would have been recognizable to let's say a high school teacher in 1920 you know we had photography printmaking film of not films sorry ceramics drawing painting sculpture etc this is the first year that we are moving into late 20th century media like animation and filmmaking and also now moving into 21st century media like digital art making and these are extremely popular they're obviously a huge part of the creative economy when let's do people work on in the arts and as careers and we are now just now bringing them into our only in high school and it's been because are really excited about it a digital art is something that you know we've seen kids of all ages really get into and it's not something that competes with it really supports the work they're doing you know analog work by hand but of course it's very expensive you know we need to for instance if you're going to have digital art as a accessible in all our elementary middle and high schools we need to go from our current inventory of 90 iPads to about 165 iPads 168 so that's you know a big expense that is we'd like to invest in because we've seen I've certainly seen the results of how this works and in other districts and some of our other programs we've just started like animation and filmmaking they're very expensive to get off the ground once you get them going they're actually cheaper to run than your average studio art course but they do take a significant investment to get going and I just hope we have the support of the school ready to do that thank you thank you Mr. Simon this is a great presentation I learned a lot um I have a question since we've eliminated the foundations of art bottleneck at the high school do you have like any sense of the numbers of kids participating in all the electives you mentioned um yeah I do I mean I the well this is I don't have the actually I think we I can certainly get this okay it doesn't be precise but is it feels it's a lot more it's right so that's what I was kind of hoping yeah that I will hear yeah honestly they're all full you got to be at the mic oh yeah sorry yeah is they're all full there are five teachers um okay so you're talking about 600 yeah kids at any given time so the outcome is more kids are participating because we eliminated this yes um also they're I mean there's a lot of kids who have been able to get into then we have for instance like woodworking or or um ceramics you know the waiting list big waiting list yeah yeah so but that was always the case I think yeah those are always the case but there's more courses like metalsmithing and film that you wish are they're starting to grow and popularity as well and that's that's expanding so yeah all the classes are full yeah we it's it's been good okay I just that's that's what I kind of and in terms of the um the the pilots you talked about that's ideas you have for a pilot that you want to see and just in school year 25 next year no they're both things that we are the schedule pilot the elementary school the intensive schedule that has started now that has that has started um first we're going to see how it goes yeah the interdisciplinary collaboration pilot yeah right now in a planning phase but we're hoping to have some of those units be taught in the spring so it's right now it's at a level of like individual teachers meeting together you know volunteer voluntarily um and we're hoping to you know produce some really good units and learn from it that we can you know then have some some exemplars that we can share so yeah small steps though thank you um so I want to go back to the bottleneck for just a second so the foundations of art so I think what is fabulous is that like we've we've eliminated that right and I guess what I would just say as somebody who talks to a lot of families and a lot of like like middle school families is that what we haven't eliminated is that people still think it exists right so like those who have older kids are no they're like oh no no you have to take that foundations of art class no you can't take those things freshman year oh no your your art teacher in eighth grade is going to give you a recommendation to skip that right and that like narrative is still very pervasive out there like hopefully by the time like Laura's kids get there they'll be like what are you talking about like foundations of art but we do have I think a few more years ahead of us of people who were their parents either they have older kids or they've talked to other people and they very are committed to this idea that like you cannot take upper level art unless you like go through this like you know this gate right so I think as you um talk to families and as you work on thinking about how you introduce this um at you know for eighth graders of the oddison or even talking to current freshmen who maybe haven't met their fine arts requirement just remembering that like removing the barrier is like is fabulous and it and it's still like very much exists in the minds of many many people in our community because it was there for such a long time so um as we keep talking about it I think it's great it was part of this conversation I talk about it with people all the time I'm like hey no you could you just go right in now um but I do think it's important to remember that this sense of it's existence is still pretty pervasive at least has been my experience thank you for the reminder it's like oh yeah we got to you know get to all the eighth graders is the main thing it's really important yeah I've been probably three more years of like messaging and then people will forgotten that it exists yeah any other questions mr shulkin um so we've got a new high school facility uh can you just very briefly talk about how the uh the new high school is helping you uh move forward with the IR program because I've heard a lot of really positives from the teachers of work here uh about the the the new facility allowing them to do great things with kids yeah no it's been wonderful I mean I think our teachers really appreciate what we have um the facilities are fantastic um so you know we have obviously a great woodworking shop um we have our CAD sort of computer we have a computer room where people are about to do design work and solid works and and auto CAD to design things that they could then you know build in our wood shop or with our um 3d printers and laser cutters and things of that nature um we now have you know again converted a classroom into a metalsmithing and jewelry making so kids are are soldering they were they will soon be welding um there is the um you know again the ceramics you know we have two kilns again we probably could use a third but you know we don't we're fine right now um and um you know we've added screen printing so we've added you know have there's a lot of sort of space still to sort of add these components um you know we have one classroom that's all the animation filmmaking photography and able to um really work that out and make sure all of those are supported so I think it's it's really we haven't yet you know found something oh this this medium we can't do because you know of our real lack of facilities it really does feel like we're still we have what we need and we have potential to grow in terms of what we can offer technically and the rest of the district I remember that when we reopened Stratton with a kiln in that building that we went from one kiln to two on the elementary level I think that was uh kilns of the elementary schools you know I think there are right now there are three schools that have I mean that's you know would be nice of course we have uh yeah three of our elementary schools have kilns at this present time but yes that certainly would be nice to have yeah I'm just sort of thinking that now that we've got this uh facility here how do we uh do we have the facilities in the um programming that would support kids as they're moving up so they can take full advantage of this um that's a very good question I mean I think that's part of why I mean there's a couple of ways you can move I mean for one thing as you mentioned like having a kiln in every school would certainly help um that's something kids love and would support that growth towards the ceramics program in the high school I think adding um the iPads being able to have those and it's not like everyone needs one but you know if you have for instance 12 at each elementary school it could be something where you could rotate through all the upper level students um and then if you had you know more at the middle schools that would then really facilitate kids moving into that and with a ton of skills that they can apply at the high school level what software are you putting on the iPad what software yeah um so the apps we use the main one we use is procreate it's a digital art app there's also some animation apps um one's called rough animator or that one we're hoping to use we haven't got one that one set up yet um you know people use stop motion um but mainly it's procreate is the and we have enough money for licenses for the what's our licenses for the software yeah those are those are those are at basically they're like five bucks you know the pop those are not those are not much more it's more the hardware itself that's um been a in a hurdle okay I love the presentation it's full of visual joy and in beautiful things and uh you you best powerpoint of the year so far thank you thank you anyone else I completely agree I just emailed my guidance counselor to switch out of econ and into the conversation okay next we have dr jinger all right well thank you I'll be driving so following the best powerpoint presentation of the year while he was presenting I was just going this is really visually really interesting I'm gonna send him my slides to clean it up um so the I have two presentations I think in a row yep the the first is once again a brief hopefully return to talking about heterogeneous grade nine English oh that's the first one that is the first one that's at least that's what I thought is that the first one which one do we have to sit first that is what I'm doing and you'll notice it looks very similar to the other one okay um so hi I'm here to talk to you about my school plan um one of a number of the initiatives that are going to be followed have been mentioned already this evening which is nice it means that there's some connection people are actually embedding these things in the things that they're doing so my understanding was I was always supposed to have 10 slides I have 14 I will go as quickly as possible so next slide so this is our academic mission which I think is worth reviewing I always underline those three sections right that our goal at Arlington High School is learning connecting and caring in a safe supporting and nurturing environment which is the social emotional piece in order to create knowledge values and intellectual curiosity and that ties obviously into the school mission next slide into the mission of the district as a whole some of the big things that are driving sort of life in Arlington High School right now our enrollment growth and the new building this slide that talks about enrollment growth as you can see we've been creeping up pretty steadily we went up this year by about 30 more students than we had expected in most of our best estimates we were thinking we were going to hit about 1580 last year we've hit 1613 it um really depends on what kind of enrollment expectations you have um in terms of estimating how many kids you think we're going to have next year if you do long-term trends we have about 20 students if you do last year's trends we have about 100 students I'm going to guesstimate that we're going to get something comparable last to last year's attrition from eighth to ninth grade um and something comparable to previous trends in the other grades because I think we got a bunch of kids back at the upper levels because of the new building and because people recovering from COVID and that that won't sustain that puts us around 50 to 60 new students next year so when I come to you and ask for money later those are the numbers that I'm working from next slide so this year there's been a lot going on which is hard to tell given how sort of lovely and pleasant the environment of the school is we've moved over the course of basically a weekend from the half of the old building into the new building so we now have and this is new terminology for everyone I do not like that the architects call the middle of the building the spine it makes sense from a structural point of view but it is not what it is in the school so I will be talking from now on about the steam wing the humanities wing the central building and the performing arts wing and next year the athletics wing um so we moved into the new central building humanities wing which meant that our language department our facts department our English department our history department our school counseling department our nursing clinic our library and our cafeteria all moved over the course of a week and although people hit the ground running people are still recovering that was a lot for people are definitely ready for vacation um if you look at our MCAS scores the quick eyeball version of this is we saw some widening gaps um post COVID those widening gaps have tipped up slightly in most of the areas which is a nice hopeful trend and in general our MCAS scores remain relatively high and relatively consistent we were really excited this year to see that we ticked up in the um school climate and culture measures in panorama there were some really big gains in teacher-student relationships and rigorous expectations and that's nice because those are things that we were really working on um and so it's nice to see that when we focus energy on that and the teachers are really working hard at that but that's something you see in the class um we'll talk about some of the other trends then we get to the next slide inclusive not there yet though so obviously one of our big initiatives over the last year and over this year are the piloting of the heterogeneous grouping in English 9 and we've continued to see some significant increases in curriculum age participation with relatively stable results on almost everything else and we were really interested to see pretty substantial increased participation in AP exams with maintained score levels um next slide so what are the challenges well we can in the fall we had to build a schedule based on the old building and that's still affecting the schedule this year hopefully some of that will smooth out next year when we have space the mid-year move what the construction company refers to as day two adjustments the way they talked about it is the building is ready for you to move in and then we'd say but that's not finished and they say that's a day two adjustment um so some of the things that are still being sort of fixed and worked through in the building are still taking a lot of attention although the building is running really smoothly and very effective as a space and then phase three construction is still affecting us we still have the construction all through the back we have limited parking um we actually went through a brief period of really not having enough parking for staff which is something we've been working pretty hard to try to adjust and we'll get better after the preschool opens um and in this new building and even before the new building maintenance facility as I was looking back on every budget request I've ever made the last blurb about it was always that we really need to work on custodial and maintenance support we're in a brand new building ran a study that said how many facilities and custodial what's the support we would need to maintain that and we're not there um and our custodial staff are working I mean you walk through the building and it is really clean which is really pretty remarkable because there's a small number of people who are working very hard to do that we want to make sure the building doesn't fall apart and our custodians don't get injured um trying to keep the place safe um and then we obviously have these ongoing challenges we continue to see disproportionality for traditionally underserved district groups right based on race special legislation status ELL status we continue to work on those we see some positive trends but it's a it's an ongoing issue and we have a real desire to increase equity of access a higher level curriculum because we see disproportionality and how students are served in those areas it's one of the areas that we looked at in terms of heterogeneous grouping and then um we really want to move beyond just MCAS scores we're really interested in students learning deeply and being deeply engaged in the work and when we look at the panorama scores those remain the areas that are the lowest um and that is you know where students are not just learning effectively and saying that they learned a lot and that they like their teachers but they're really excited about what they're learning it's something we're really working on and as I said they're belonging continues to receive the lowest levels of favorable responses I will say that when you compare it to what we can see for comparison data we do pretty well for high schools in America but when you have less you know roughly 50 percent of your students really positively feeling that they belong that's not what we want to be um we would really like people to feel more a stronger sense of connection next slide so we've got developed four strategic goal priorities which each gets a couple slides so the first I've talked about a lot I'm going to have another presentation about so I won't speak very much about it now but that's the heterogeneous English nine pilot which we're now in year two of we've seen really positive outcomes and we're looking now to think about what we want to do to secure those outcomes and move them forward and so obviously the things under consideration are now what I refer to as inclusive grouping just having everybody together in the same class and then how we look at the grading practices heterogeneous grouping is the current practice but there's been discussion about honors for all as well as whether there are other areas in which we want to where it would be appropriate to use those strategies and to expand access so the purpose of that is right to increase equity of access to higher level curriculum and to consider those other things next slide and so again you'll see this slide you've seen these slides before you can see there's a really substantial increase in participation we see that across all demographic groups and then grades grades to maintain again relatively steady next slide so the next initiative which um thank you leo for giving us a shout out to um this is something that's coming from the work of our ilt over the last year which is particularly exciting because it's a real staff driven conversation um and so there's sort of three pieces to understand about what it is we're trying to do so first we're focusing on academic conversations in all classrooms so what is an academic conversation that's back and forth dialogues in which students talk to each other about a topic and explore it by building and challenging negotiating their ideas most interestingly academic conversations then effectively really focus on a lot of the things again leo was talking about which is not i teach you learn but i'm interested in what i think and i'm interested in learning what you think in academic conversations you can jump to the next slide for one second i don't know actually two slides down are really interesting because they combine the sort of two big focus points of our school improvement plan and a lot of our district efforts they are rigorous using rigorous skills that are taught directly to students and they focus on engaging students and understanding themselves and each other which builds belonging engagement and as you can see the overlap of those two things is really what we're talking about when we talk about deeper learning right it's learning that's rigorous and engages with my own identity and it changes in my own thought so you can slide back up two more slides make sure i didn't forget anything and so then the second piece of this is that the way we're doing this is through two cycles of learning walks and learning walks are opportunities for teachers to visit another teacher's classroom and to talk about in this case what they're seeing in terms of academic conversations is an anchor to that conversation and that's driven in part by our teachers reports 60 of teachers report that the most effective professional development is talking to their peers and working with their peers they also reported that they were not feeling connected to their peers and so this builds that connection amongst our staff um and then in many ways learning walks model for the teachers the same kind of academic conversations we're hoping to see for the students onto number three so number three was a little bit hard for me to describe sort of as an initiative but we talked again about how we've had these improvements in our results on culture and climate that's the result of a whole host of connected activities that we've been doing around school culture and around equity and we are you know a lot of those programs a lot of those efforts were sort of broken or discontinued over covid so last year a lot of them were relaunched and this year again we're recommitting to those and doing those in a more rigorous way the students talked about the wellness workshops we'll be doing the inclusion workshops um in the spring we are continuing to work on the voices united workshops that we did this fall the affinity and anti-bias groups or something that we're supporting through clubs um an advisory program has some more structural work around this there's other things related to these initiatives but that collection of initiatives are part of the general team of folks who are working together in order to work on our culture climate and goals and you can see next slide these are sorted in order of which one's got the most increase and so you can see we've seen a higher level increase for teacher and student relationships and rigorous expectations their overall school climate and belonging are also close behind in terms of things that we've seen improvement in next slide and then our strategic family engagement goal so one of the things that we found last year and was and actually during covid was when we really were systematic about focusing communications around a particular area during covid it was around attendance last year it was around attendance we saw really significant improvements so our attendance last year was one and a half percent higher given a bit it's around 94 percent going to 95.7 percent is actually a pretty good thing to do and that's during a time when actually chronic um um chronic attendance remains a significant issue that's something that continues to be up and attendance overall continues to be an issue and so it's a real testament to the systematic work on the deans and the teacher's part to keep up on top of that so this year what we've been doing in sort of following up on that is to be a little bit more systematic about our communications about students who are struggling in terms of grades and so we formalize the midterm check-in teachers are expected to be up to date with their grades at that midterm check-in and then a whole series of communications go out generally to teacher to parents and students encouraging them how to check their grades but also then how to follow up as well as targeted communications so teachers you know so if you have a student who's getting this D or an F you would receive communication from the deans you'd receive communications from teachers and follow up on the counterpart of the counselors to see whether or not that's going that's seeming pretty positive it's helping us tighten up in a lot of ways it leads to really good conversations with kids about communication with staff about grading so our hope is that that's going to lead to an improvement in grade outcomes overall so what do we need um depending on our enrollment we need a few more teachers um you know and I think to be on the safe side you know I think having two or three more teachers to cover additional growth especially because we have an enrollment bubble coming up behind us and so really being prepared to you know built out in the spaces where we anticipate the largest growth so that that's not all hitting us at once is going to be important um the also the new building was designed to be built with four deans um dean our sort of general target would be the deans wouldn't have over about 500 students and the counselors wouldn't have over about 250 students right now our deans are about 550 students a piece and they'll be going up so we could wait until they're sort of bursting at the seams but we're really looking right now at a dean the idea would be that then the year after we would be adding an additional counselor so that we were able to keep on having those consistent levels of support I talked a little bit before about custodial needs we would really love to be able to get closer to 20 custodians and the new facility is really complicated we've got automated systems we have lots of systems that need to be integrated you can see what's going on in this facility we unlike most of the other schools have multiple users right so we are not one school we are three schools and the district offices and community education um we are in use 24 seven people are in and out all the time and so given all of the challenges of repairs and integration of systems and all of that we would love it to have what we call it operation specialist so somebody who supervises the entire site so that it's one phone call right now the educators do an awful lot of that integration and making sure that just things aren't broken and that takes away a lot of attention from educators towards the facility and there are people who are better equipped to do this and we would make better use of our training every day there's a point at which I walk down the hall and say for this I went to education school um and it's often something that has very little to do with education I think that's it great thank you um any questions Mr. Thelman thank you I went first a minute go ahead Mr. Thelman okay thank you so thanks very much helpful presentation as always um I do want to talk a little bit about the last slide uh you know I I I do think I think it's important we've invested you know $291 million in this facility uh taxpayer money state money so I do think uh it's important that we have a conversation here at this table about the exact number of custodians we should have in the building I don't think we should kind of like no one can commit to a number right now and can so I just want to say that thank you for bringing that to everyone's attention it should be a high priority because of the investment that the taxpayers have made my question about the operation specialist so is that's not that's not a position in this year's budget something you want next year's budget and that would be that I sent to to Michael but I didn't fill out my form so I think you haven't seen it yet okay so that's what you sent to Michael okay um and so right now so when right now when when an when an issue is raised they get some people go to their department head their department head goes to you how does it what happens like if you can't make something work in your class I mean for the most part yeah you can't make something worse you're supposed to go into asset solutions I think that's what it's called yeah I call the dude but right it's called school dude so student teachers should be entering things into school dude most of the time if it's time dependent they also shoot an email to me and mr. McCarthy yeah um and you know then we will often I mean if it's a custodial issue we'll get on the radio the custodians yeah um but we have a limited number of custodians in an enormous building during the day so this person would get those emails before went this person would get those emails yeah okay that's what I understand and that person would try to troubleshoot and figure out the problem and solve it okay I like that you do okay thank you that that was extent of my questions mr. flip so we're interested in the enrollment issues because I I've had the task of trying to project enrollments and it's difficult and I think the fact that we have a new building that is going to be attracting people who might have avoided the construction zone changes the dynamics I notice that we've had an uptick a minute man enrollment coming out of the district then again they've got a new school uh so when we're looking at changes in enrollment as a function of the ninth or the eighth grade numbers I'm sort of curious how many kids are coming in who were not in our district eighth grade and such as at a private school or moving into town and how many kids within that group in the eighth grade are going off to private schools a minute man are those numbers you're talking about the going right yeah you know so obviously we've got say 500 kids in eighth grade we're not going to have 500 kids in ninth grade we're going to have some other number right and I'm just wondering what the deltas are on the in and out so I have never been able to track that I don't know if you can um what we have tracked instead is the net right so that you know that you know 95 we you know if there's 400 kids we get 95 percent of those kids they're not the same 95 percent yeah we get about 92 two percent of those and three or four percent more I think we have had last year and this year um a substantially higher number of students transferring back in a substantially higher number of students transferring back in after the year started we got more students back from Minuteman than we have in the past and you know I think we had something like 10 students register just in the last few weeks and so that's different right because it's a higher mobility rate which also affects students ability to be supported because as you've commented in the past sometimes some of our data if you break it out by how long the students have been here you know very different outcomes for students who've been here for a while that's that's really a critical number for me for me because that the way I'm looking at the publicly facing data yeah a child who's starting off with this in ninth grade is really on track to to graduate in four years it's the students are coming in during those four years they tend to need extra time particularly EL students which is very understandable it's a good thing to stay for a little while longer and get a better command of English language um the central spine I'm sure the biology teachers love the name building I'm thinking now look I showed pictures of the school to people I went to high school with we went to a high school that was very similar in in feel of this of having the four wings and a central area which we called the commons I like that term yeah I mean let's let's get out of biology and I think commons is kind of a new English name or students have to live with it and love it so if they come up with a better language name I'd much rather have them name it but it seems like a destination in the in the pinball machines over there sort of add to that common area feel to it I came through here the other day and after school and kids were hanging out those machines it was just such a positive environment that you know and you see kids in here in the in the music area rehearsing and just being involved in the building after dismissal and you know often the spice you know it's it's it's it's working the way it should which is what's really exciting I mean again we are still here I keep waiting to understand I mean one of the things it's not just the individual arts um facilities that's really exciting it's the way in which they're creating interdisciplinary and connections that people are just running back and forth across the hall we you know we just the other day figured out all these really cool things you could print on the giant banner printer that's in the cab lab and so they you know went out and bought all kinds of fancy paper they're now making stickers on the walls that of banners and posters and planning murals it's really very exciting yeah the educational design that was a function of the architects work to design the building was very well done really nice communication and a really good vision to start thank you thank you any mr. thank you thanks for that great presentation so I didn't get a chance to look through the whole plan today but I wanted to ask if there was something in there or if there's something that you're thinking of that's addressing the issue with the focal groups in our strategic plan narrowing the gaps um so yes I mean so first of all heterogeneous grouping obviously has a substantial positive impact on focal groups academic conversations is a tier one intervention so it's not targeted towards particular groups but as a as an intervention sort of focusing on explicit teaching of conversation explicit teaching of behavioral skills it's one of it's some one of the strategies that is seen as being really positive for marginalized groups as well as for Yale students because you're building through vocabulary and the conversation skills into the conversations I mean one of the things that often happens right with groups that feel less welcome in school is if the conversation is let's try to figure out what the teacher wants us to understand and let's try to sort of take this information that is not something I see myself in then you're not going to have the same kind of connection whereas if the students are really probing and exploring their own ideas in the same way they get it in the arts you have a higher level of engagement um and then the targeted supports to students in midterms is very particularly focused on the students who are underperforming and so it's going to make a particular difference for the focal groups I can't remember but they're women the culture and climate events are almost entirely focused to be honest on DEI initiatives and diversity great thank you thank you anyone else nope I think we're ready for step two step two all right we also have Mazette's in here on Zoom I'm not sure if she's able to she's there able to unmute and talk her she's otherwise occupied yeah I'm here I was able to multitask and put my kid to bed and I made it in time I'm here fantastic so if you need an assist um Dr. Danger she's there and I'll drive for you go ahead so this is we often have long conversations about this but a relatively short presentation um so this is just revisiting the fall um data that we had before now that we have more complete day so um you know where we I always recap the outcomes evaluation plan so I can remember why we're having the conversation we're having this review so we have the quarter one grades that's new information and then the quarter one participation rates that's old information um but I figured I'd keep it on the same slideshow so as we said we were going to look for higher levels of honors level participation steady grades um improvement in rigorous expectations um and outcomes on the panorama survey future enrollment and honors and then we'll look at the end of next year at MCAS scores to see if there's anything we can discern from those um so what we are that's where we are now the December presentation I'll talk a little bit about items for consideration and next steps and then there's a slide later that's a better next step slide I didn't add it into that one so we'll come back to that so quarter one grades um so that is the chart the table is a little bit easier to read um I scrunched down I had an old boss who always made you whenever you did percentage points go from zero to a hundred because she felt that it really um distorted it when you just squeezed it all in but if you went from zero to a hundred that just looked like a scrunch of everything in there together I apologize for the fact that the year labels are in the middle I could not figure out how to get them out I did it last time but I couldn't do it this time um so the one thing to remember as you look across these is that they are not each button is not a year um you're comparing as you go from right to left I'm going backwards the most current grades is for the end of term one of this year the next dot over is the end of last year the comparable grades are the ones before that which are the end of term one last year and then going back two dots would be the end of term one the year before that so there's a small decrease from 90.9 to 89 for the collective um no I'm sorry overall there's a small decrease from it's the yellow one the yellow band so it's the yellow band from 87.8 to 86.8 um and you can see that that impact was um primarily in this case coming from a small decrease in the honors level grades um and there was an increase in the A level grades which is interesting because one of the things that changed is that um when we were when they were flat flat grades actually meant that you had a large number of students that were now doing honors even though the average was the same what it looks like right now is that that you know a small cohort of students moved up to the honors that didn't do quite as well um so that those grades are sort of converging on one another but overall those are relatively stable grades that's easier to read in terms of the numbers so you can see the overall grade is 86.8 up from down from 87.8 grades for honors went down a little bit and grades for H went up A went up a little bit and that is the punch line if you break that out by race and ethnicity the patterns are relatively similar there was a drop for um African-American students um which was you know again higher than most years but not great um this is accompanied by the same group of students this year being lowered percentage than last year some of that I think has to do with the shift to for higher performance amongst multiracial students so I think some of that has to do with how students are reacting I actually I'm going to sit down with Matt Coleman he doesn't know this but I'm going to sit down with Matt Coleman because I actually really want to reanalyze all of these based on making sure that we looking at the way in which race and ethnicity is calculated because race and ethnicity the way it's calculated in all of these is as if they add up to a hundred percent and they don't add up to a hundred percent because of overlapping groups of students and so I think if we're trying to look at the impact on African-American students we need to look at how we break out our multiracial students as well so I'd like to come back over all the years and do that consistently for our final presentation so those are average grades by race and ethnicity as you can see what yeah I want to talk about that and yeah well so we already talked about that and then by gender that was relatively flat if you go to the chart it's a little easier to read the grades went up for young women and they went down for young men but they averaged out again to the same as everybody that's just there for reference so that is basically that next slide and so then just a quick tool for the participant rates do you guys need to hear the participation rates again or have you all looked at them before okay all right so that's our participation rates and so that takes us to the very last slide so items for consideration as we've talked about before there were three I took one bullet out in terms for based on some of the conversations that I've been having with Dr. Holman and well with Mizets and with the English department the English department's feedback is that the 10th grade teachers are enthusiastic about inclusive grouping and that there is also a conversation for the English 9 teachers about moving from the heterogeneous model as the grading structure to an honors for all structure in the conversation we had we felt like doing two things at once was going to be a little bit complicated right because right now if you're going to roll it from ninth grade to tenth grade you want the ninth grade teachers to be able to educate the tenth grade teachers and what we've learned and where we're going but if at the same time we're changing the curriculum and grading structure we're kind of doing two things at the same time so what we're sort of indicating right now is looking at piloting sort of rolling the pilot forward for another year and considering the honors for all format and Dr. Holman wanted to talk I think a little did you want to talk a little bit about the timing if we were gonna yeah so I think what I think that goes actually to your next steps but one of the so these are the two items up for consideration whether there is a continuation of inclusive English 9 grouping as it is currently formatted and structured which as you recall puts two groups different groups of students who have opted into a different credit level and level of curriculum in one classroom or whether to remove that sort of structural distinction and say who will teach the rigorous curriculum with supports and differentiation to all students which functionally the teachers have expressed and I'm sure Mazuddin can speak to is the way teachers feel they're approaching the curriculum now and that has resulted in a much higher opt-in for honors English these items for consideration are restricted to English they're restricted to English 9 and I think any further conversation about leveling practices at the high school need to be dovetailed with conversations about deeper learning at the high school about instructional models at different grade levels and about the feasibility of rolling out comprehensive common planning capabilities for different groups of teachers whether that's interdisciplinary or disciplinary which would require major structural changes and obviously a lot more planning so why don't you talk through next steps because I think this lays out kind of how we're thinking about timelines right so with those things under consideration I think it would be really helpful for us to hear from 9th and 10th grade families who have been through the pilot and can give us their information about their experiences as well as 8th grade parents to hear about sort of their concerns and questions going forward and then the 8th 9th and 10th grade teachers would like to get together the 9th and 8th grade teachers in part to have the 8th grade teachers better understand what's going on in the 9th and 10th grade so that they can give some of the guidance that Morgan often sort of refers to in terms of making that really clear to the students but also I think to build back preparation for the classes that the students are going to go into based on a better understanding and then 9th and 10th grade teachers because there is work that can and should still be done in 10th grade that can learn from what was successful in 9th grade around having more consistent high expectations for all the student and more consistent and effective practices even if the students are remaining in leveled class structures so we would do that and then in June I thought I yeah so I said January through March at some point then in June we would come back and share with you the final information and in either March or June that would be when we be looking for a decision from the school committee probably March that's it that's the last slide okay questions go on Ms. Morgan um so in terms of the timing I personally as somebody who's watched three kids now make that 8th to 9th grade transition I think it's really important that we know at the time that we're doing that we're putting course selections out for 8th graders what the structure is going to look like in 9th grade in English so if it is going to be an honors for all then um I would like the message to the 8th graders to be you are all taking honors English next year you're going to do great right as opposed to having those 8th graders make some sort of artificial selection in power school which they for whatever reason even this year they still had to do it last year they still had to pick a level which starts to reinforce that sense of like well I'm an honor student or I'm not and if they're all taking honors next year if the current 8th graders are all taking honors in September I want the message to them to be when they're doing their course selections that this is the only choice for you and it is the right choice for you so I guess that's why I don't depending on what happens I would I think that that course selection time is really important actually for 8th graders because I think it starts to set their sense of like am I am I not what am I doing so I hope that whatever is decided is sort of really clear my preference would be that it's really clear at that point so that the messaging from the 8th grade teachers who are are so important to these kids right and how they perceive themselves that the 8th grade teachers are clear about what's going to happen and they can give a clear message to the kids so that that's that's my feedback in terms of the timing and the next steps would be my strong preference okay um Miss Eitan you're muted sorry about that I I agree I think that's one thing that we as 9th grade teachers wanted to make sure that we had the meanings with the grade teachers as early as possible to make sure that they that all the messaging was aligned so that there was no um discrepancies or confusions around what it would look like so that the teachers could confidently talk to the 8th grade students about it other questions comments so I you know I I couldn't help but notice the percent of honors students by gender there's been a 50 increase in female students entering the honors and there's been an increase by male students but it's been about 20 percent I don't know right off the top of my head so I'm just wondering do you are you talking about that at all as a as a faculty about the problem with boys yeah um I mean yes I mean there are a lot of indicators right of boys having a harder time right now in schools right they have a little disciplinary issues they've hired um there's been a shift in the last 10 20 years if you look at the very top students in terms of you know representation of the different genders um it is certainly something we're interested in and tracking um and to be honest academic conversations is not a bad strategy for addressing that um as well in terms of engaging are there strategies you're pursuing I mean academic conversations is our big strategy right now I mean the strategies that people are working on for belonging and engagement are strategies which particularly are effective and helpful for boys yeah um I don't know that we have a magic bullet or found something but I don't know what he does I think right now but I mean I I think um the strategies that deeper learning focuses on are strategies that are very much about like because a lot of the research about where boys are struggling right has to do with issues of identity and connection and who they are in school um and so strategies that are about making a personal connection to learning and having learning that more deeply affects your sense of identity and connection I think he's going to be where we're going to get the most results do you think honors for all would be would be the right thing for for male students do you think that would actually have a positive outcome I think and maybe just elaborate why why do you think that I mean in general these inclusive strategies work best for the people who are least feeling least included right and so um if people are getting the message of I am this or I am that and they're making those definitions of themselves in eighth or ninth grade based on the experiences they have then saying to those boys I expect that you can do ninth grade honors level work and that's the expectation we have and we're going to support you to do that and you're going to be participating in that and you know you talk to students and a lot of what make they think about correct me if I'm wrong but it's like who the peers are in those classes do I have a right to be here there's this a place I should be are these the kids I want to be with and so making sure that we're not dividing those students up right and when they walk in the gate and slotting them into a set of expectations so all of those pathways that are disproportionately occupied by boys or minority students or I see all students um the students once you're on those pathways it's harder to get off because you're not making the connections you're not having the peer relationships so I mean the strategy like honors for all is going to be particularly helpful for students who are less successful overall but it's also going to be particularly helpful for those students who are already doing okay but not really feeling belonging and engagement thanks mr. minute excuse me um in my in my experience um I found that having like a lot of different options for learning is really important and I think getting rid of a level I think it would just it would take away options from people who like like find that as the best fit for them and I think one of the things that's really important about learning for me is like being able to like learn your own pace do what's best what you like find is most comfortable for you and I think just take I think only having honors could really negatively affect some people thank you mr. I'm really interested in tracking the improved success of students across the board and in the current HGI the one caution I want to hit is that when we have the graphs breaking broken out by demographics school has a 3.2 percent african-american population so that if it's equally distributed across all four grades and you have 432 ninth graders that's 13-14 kids on average that you'd have which is really small for too small to have a cohort you can analyze on its own so that I'm not saying we shouldn't do it I think it's important we take a look at it but I think that there has to be a tremendous grain of salt in there because the the numbers are small enough that any one or two kids in the cohort that are substantively different than kids in the preceding or following cohort are going to make the numbers look funny yes for some of those small groups the numbers fluctuate very very broadly from you know so I just want to make sure that we're understanding that there's cohort error in there because of the small numbers and that we shouldn't really be drawn it's something to be aware of but not something we should be drawing conclusions from I think that what's happened here I think we've seen and I also let me ask another question philosophically in terms of teacher grading I wonder if as we're moving forward teachers are thinking differently about how they're how they were assigning this number grade which really doesn't make a lot of sense in a lot of aspects onto a kid what does that number grade mean and has that sort of changed over the past couple of years grades are a mathematical solution to a philosophical problem and we could take a lot more than tonight to talk about grading I actually want to respond to what you said because I think it's important to note that part of the reason why actually the fundamental reason why we did heterogeneous grouping the last two years was because when we had the study group to students many of them felt the way that you felt right that there was a real concern about sort of being even within a heterogeneous group class being able to choose the A level of curriculum and so you know the result has been that the participation in honors level curriculum in those classes has gone from around 50 percent to around 65 70 percent but some students are still choosing the A level curriculum so if we're going to structure an honors for all curriculum it needs to be one which takes into account and what is the level of adventure the student is choosing in that class and that is going to be that's part of why there needs to be substantial work done honors for all does not mean that you just flip the switch and everyone's in what they're currently experiencing in other honors classes honors for all is not just you can't go to any class anymore right honors for all is a different way of thinking about sort of how you're doing the standards so that students know clearly what their expectations are to hit you know meet standard grade which would be and it's built on sort of more standard based approach to what it is you're doing grading on and I can't go into much more detail on that because there's a lot of thinking that would have to go into on in on the part of the teachers about how that would look and what that would do so that students are supported appropriately and have an opportunity to move at the pace that's appropriate for them because a lot of our current honors classes are very focused on pace and retention and independence of work and if that's what you're doing in honors for all that would not be really successful for the students that we've often talked about who are in curriculum a want a higher level of support and don't want to move at that level please other questions comments I guess I just want to respond to things one I think I appreciate what Mr. Minnick said because I'm thinking about my children that at times they would have they would want to do a tough science you know a higher level science and a lower level English because they were trying to balance their schedule and balance their life and so I think that's a really good point to be able to have some and also doing doing it without destroying their GPA which for right now still holds weight with colleges and and stuff the other thing I wanted to ask and I apologize that I didn't bring this up before and maybe we can just get the information later is I think one of the purposes that we heard of this when we first started discussing it was that there was an anticipation that students would continue to take honors if they had had it and I'm just wondering what has been the experience this year at the sophomore level you know how what are the splits there so sophomore level it has maintained there the percentage of students that went on to take sophomore honors is about the same it's about 65 percent as it was last year so six last year so the percentage of students who took honors last year in English nine right that same percentage is taking honors at tenth grade right but what did they do before which was a higher than the cohort before was more of tenth grade yes yeah so the percentage in tenth grade is going up tenth grade year over tenth grade year but the cohort rate maintained is what you're saying right okay yeah and yeah okay like this is like to thank you I think another thing that we wanted the teachers also wanted to get some feedback from from the current tenth grade students to see what their experience had been between because because the current tenth grade students went back into the the leveled classes when in ninth grade they were part of that first year of pilot the pilot so we wanted to get a sense of if there was some sort of survey or some way that we could find out how their experience from the ninth to tenth grade you know going back into or going to leveled from unleveled if that makes sense what what that's like what that's been like would be helpful information for us that's cool for you I guess I'm just a little bit confused because I'm taking a like a mixed level English class right now as a senior and I took a mixed level French class last year as a junior so if it's not just in grade nine why is the focus on grade nine that's a great question um so the reason the focus is on grade nine is because that's an interesting question so the reason the focus is on grade nine is because in terms of the response of the community to the proposal that we start to expand heterogeneous grouping there was a large concern the idea was that we would start in grade nine during I mean the back the back history was that during COVID ninth almost all of the classes were heterogeneously grouped um and that after that teachers in ninth and tenth grade English history and science requested to maintain that to continue to do heterogeneous grouping at that level but there was a lot of concern in the community about whether curriculum or teachers and our grading practices were really ready to do that um and so there was a conversation then about you know where that might be most appropriate to do where we might be most successful at it and part of why we ended with heterogeneous grouping as the structure was because it was like you said something that we're already pretty familiar with elsewhere in the school and lots of other classes if I may one of the other things is the ninth grade English initiative was a core course that every student coming through our only in the high school has to do as opposed to being an elective where you don't have to do it and if you want to take it you can do it and with the understanding of those are the conditions that you'd be working in and you folks are welcome to leave when you want but you're also welcome to stay if it's we're glad you're here thank you thank you okay um so any other questions comments um I guess I'm just concerned about the timing that if we're making decisions in March I'm concerned that we're getting a lot of information in June and I'd like to I'm just worried about I want to see the information before making the decision so maybe a few in Dr. Holman can talk about how that might be managed it's an awkward timeline because there's certain information that we simply won't have until June and then there's the need to decide what the plan is going to be for next year we kind of knew this when we walked into a two-year pilot that we wouldn't actually have results from MCAS for this group um and there's definitely a desire at the very least to move the pilot forward and to assess the impact of trying out a curriculum that gives everybody access to the higher expectation I will point out that I think some of the impetus for that comes both from conversations with the ninth grade teachers about what the next phase of this is and from conversations we had when we first started this and the committee was divided on whether or not to go with an honors for all proposal or a heterogeneously group proposal similar to what we're already doing in the high school and the fact that we're hearing from our EL educators in the pilot the elementary level what a huge impact it has to give all kids access to that rigorous content and then really examine how we're making sure we scaffold and close gaps for students who may have skill gaps that they weren't quite ready for that level of content because they hadn't been taught tenses before fifth grade so we're trying to learn from all of that and crafting a proposal for this and recognize that we need to have some conversations with families and students and teachers in the interim before we can craft a really well done proposal I think we will have a proposal in March for how to move forward with this for exactly the reason Ms. Morgan mentioned which is that eighth grade students need to not be confused walking into their ninth grade experience and that that will be for the committee's vote and consideration and then we will still continue to collect these data probably add some data points that we want to continue to track if we move forward with any adjustments to the model and get the committee's feedback on those data points so that we can keep coming back and reporting on them as we move forward and then I think there's a desire for there to be a shift towards a way you know from thinking about this as the HGI pilot into next year and towards thinking about what the next phase of deeper learning at the high school and instructional models at the high school needs to be if I misspoke all sound good to me I mean the only thing I would say is in terms of timeline students really start doing those decisions January February so if we're waiting on the there's two conversations we could be having one is the if conversation and one is the how conversation the if conversation if we want to be able to tell people what we think we're going to do next year needs to be January February the how conversation it's is one that we can take a lot more time in a more reflective way to explain sort of what the rationale and logic behind that is and that to be honest is not for me a particularly educational like the educators have been working on this for a long time we have some pretty good experience with this I think we know where we think we would be going but there is sort of a political and community conversation that we've been having for couple of years now in terms of what people are comfortable with so that I mean for us we can have a conversation about what sort of information we could give you in a timely fashion but it's not going to be everything if it's something that has to happen by February okay just to clarify so I mean we would be the vote we would be taking would be in the approval of the HS handbook on honors for all for right or not so I mean I think I'm not sure I'm not sure what political considerations mean I think what we we'd want I would want anyway is a recommendation from the superintendent and the team that this is the best way forward and why and I would like it vetted by the curriculum committee before it comes to us that's like the process that I would like yeah so I mean is that so I'm not sure the political considerations is I'm not sure what that means or community considerations so I just want to say that go through our process recommendation by the experts dr jager eighth grade course selection comes in when probably no better than I do um they used to ask us for before the end of second term which was when they asked teachers for recommendations okay which was and before the end of January um they're not doing recommendations anymore so February I mean we meet with we have our parent thing where we explain to the parents the January we do our eighth grade presentation to the students um end of January and then the information starts coming in February because um and it's some of that doesn't matter just how quickly we can build the structure of the decision thing as a parent of two ninth graders the email came from Mr. McCarthy on Sunday February 19th and the portal opened for scheduling on February 20th okay that's more the timeline I had on my mind okay so I I said March but that's that that's not right so okay I had early March in my mind and that's not early March either um so I think we would like to get it out earlier which is sometimes yeah we we've felt strongly that it's important that we do some engagement with families with eighth grade families ninth grade families um about whatever the proposal is going to be before we nail down a proposal for this meeting which is part of why you're getting the possibilities not the proposal at this meeting I think we need to convene around timeline and talk with Mr. Merringer and Mr. McCarthy about when they need to get those ninth grade course selections in so that we can make sure we're in front of that in our discussions with families and so then we will figure out a timeline talk to Dr. Alice Stampy about when we will come back with a proposal for the school committee's consideration it probably won't be with the program of studies there might be a placeholder in the program of studies and a separate conversation a couple of weeks later except when are we when are you going to do the feedback from grade eight grade nine in between in between okay so yeah which is which is to say we don't have time between when we do the high school program of studies to do that and so we need a little more time to do that okay just just one clarification so the superintendent talked about the idea of giving everybody access to higher level materials and and curriculum that's what's happening in the whole HGI initiative right so we're not changing that or deciding how to change that we're talking about the assessments that they're being given and the work that they're being given to do and whether that's going to be uniform or split because that's the only difference right now between A and H are the assessments is that right I mean it's not the assessment it's the structure of the standard yeah the grading standards no the learning standards there's a difference in terms of what the expectations are for student learning and one of the reasons why I think the teachers and and Nicole is much better talking about this than I am so I should probably stop but I won't one of the things for that the teachers are talking about is that they're sort of this mental gymnastics we've been doing it they it's like I'm doing honors but I'm not doing more we've sort of had this decision that it's not supposed to be you're doing a lot of different work or an additional project it's we're all working towards a common standard and so then what does this mean that you're doing it honors and I'm doing it A and that in many ways is a lot cleaner to have everybody participating in the same thing with different levels of performance um and clear a sense of expectations it's not a fluid choice right now it's a structural one right the the latitude and I would invite miss Edson to add to this that you give when you make that a fluid choice within a classroom gives a student a lot more opportunity to opt for the higher level learning when that's when it's connected to their passions or the choice they've made around a topic and it also gives the teachers a lot more ability to differentiate and I think they've experienced what happens when you structurally differentiate within a classroom and thinking through this and then we end up doing this and mental gymnastics Dr. Jain was talking about and is Edson do you want to talk about it a little yeah I mean you fit on a lot of the points so I don't I don't really um I don't want to be too repetitive but I think that the whole idea of trying to separate something between h and a like okay what's an a what's what's an what's an a right like what's an a at a level what's or what's a b at a level versus what's a what's an a at honors level um rather than like this is the standard of learning that we're that everyone is participating in and then some you know some people or some students are hitting this level of the standard some students are hitting this level of the standard um to use Dr. Jain's word as cleaner when you have the idea like we're all working in the same curriculum um this everyone has access to this this rigorous curriculum with supports in place um but we're not trying to figure out like what does it mean when you're an h level student with this versus an a level you know it's especially when we're not making it about um pacing or the amount of work right that that's we've really gotten away from that completely when it comes to h versus a level that's not what um honors level work is is more work so ultimately we're looking at a situation where the current eighth graders are going to either be unless we go and scrap the whole thing which I don't think we're going to