Welcome back everyone to the first school committee meeting of the school year. It's Thursday September 12th and this is I'm Len Carden chair of the Arlington School Committee. Tonight we're going to open with artwork. We have artwork tonight from the Monotomy Preschool. Starting with on my left preschool went to the zoo, preschool one went to the zoo. This year we spent a week learning about the zoo. We read multiple books and listened to a variety of songs focusing on our time. For art we made panda bears out of construction paper, pom poms and eyeballs. We made horses which the kids painted with blue paint and eyeballs. We made gorillas with the kids marble painted with brown paint. Marble painting involves the kids putting their artwork in a box and rolling around a marble so it moves all the paint around the paper. Lastly we made elephants which the kids painted using puffy paint which is a mixture of glue and shaving cream. The kids really enjoyed learning about the zoo and it even prompted some kids to visit the zoo with their families. We are back there. The very busy spider, the preschool seven class which is at the Pierce school read Eric Harle's classic story the very busy spider. About a spider who didn't have time to play with the other animals on the farm because she was so busy spinning her web. We had fun saying the sounds the animals in the story make and talked about how we all have to get our work done first and then we can play. In the end the spider's hard work plays off when she catches the pesky fly just like that in her web. Please notice how each child was given the same materials and each created a unique piece of art. On the right side so back in the back of board E was preschool five. Our classroom made a version of old McDonald had a farm. After reading the book and listening to the song we asked students to choose their own animals to decorate. We provided students with a variety of materials such as markers, crayons, tissue paper, foam shapes, pom poms and bingo dobbers in colors that match their animal. We also had a group of students decorate their barn to practice taking turns and sharing materials in space. And back pine Karen on the left side is under the sea. Students in our class this preschool six have been learning about the ocean. They made different kinds of ocean animals to put on our background. The background is made from a painting with a scraper to make it look like the bottom of the ocean in waves. We also cut card stock to make it look like seaweed. Our ocean animals include fish, crabs, starfish and seahorses. On the right side of board A is preschool two. They read The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse by Eric Carl. This book is based on Frank Mark's famous painting Blue Horse. After hearing the story read aloud students made animals in different colors and styles. And back behind over here B is Pond Life preschool three children learned about Pond Life this spring. We had an extensive book collection of fiction and nonfiction books created by library and at the children's room with Robin's library. The children's played in a pond in our water table complete with pond creatures and lollipads. During the unit the children use materials to create their own unique interpretations of flora and fauna around a pond. C, back there. Last one at preschool four we spent a lot of time this year talking about what makes us special kind and good friends to one another. In the beginning of the year we read books Be Who You Are and It's Okay to Be Different both by Todd Parr and created our own versions of our self-portraits given a choice of different colors and shapes paper. We repeated the exercise at the end of the year after reading Friendship Stories such as Lama Lama Time to Share by Anna Dudney and Rainbow Fish by Marcus Fister. The students had an opportunity to dictate a description of the illustration and we transcribed it for them to accompany their work. These reflect different levels of awareness of themselves and others as captured with their own words and interpretation. Congratulations to all our preschool artists. Thank you for brightening our room. It does not appear to be any public comment. All right, so we'll move on to the first agenda item and thank you Chris for showing up early. Jennifer, do you want to present? Sure. So the agenda item is appointment to the Arlington Human Rights Commission. The school committee has two or three? We have at least four. Four, all right. Thank you. To the Arlington Human Rights Commission. Five, okay. Yes. Thank you. So thank you. So you might remember last spring when we made an appointment, we talked about the embarrassment of riches that we had in the applicant pool and there were actually many strong candidates. And unfortunately for Chris, we chose someone else at that time, but he was very, very clearly our second choice. And so when there was another opening, he was a natural choice to have. So thank you very much. He comes highly recommended. He's been very active in town, but I'll have you talk about yourself. You can sit there. Oh, yeah. You need to talk into the microphone. You can stand. You just need to talk in there. First, I want to thank the subcommittee for its confidence and for the nomination and the recommendation to the full committee. Thank you to the full committee because I'm sitting here with no other applicants. So at least we feel really good. I have been involved in human rights and social justice for really my entire adult life. It's the passion that I have. Oh. We're not giving you. I don't think this is any closer. How's that? You can move the mic. Yeah. Yeah. How's that testing testing? Yeah. Are you bringing up a kind of personal subject? Okay. So let's not talk about testing and we'll talk about human rights and cool things like that. Sure. So I've been involved in human rights and social justice in a number of forms and changes. Organization with the most creativity level for most of my life, from college to the age action point and many of the early LGBTQ initiatives. I remember that if you look at my resume, you'll see I was graduating from high school in the University College in 1981 at the High School of AIDS and since then I have found the avenues to express myself both on the community level as an activist and community organizer. Most recently I have focused, many of you know that 11 years ago now my husband and I adopted an African-American boy, which has created a family that is filled with challenges in the same sex family with an African-American son. So I have dived in and studied and worked very hard in lots of issues that have affected us and other families that look like us. Particularly racial justice. You know the issues of equity, racial equality and you know the issues that those of us who are blessed with white privilege who live in affluent places like Arlington, now are being called to address. And I have observed the human rights issue in Arlington and very, very impressed with its work and have gotten to know several of the members. And about a year ago I began to think that this was a good place for me to do my community service that I've always valued here, right here in this community. And so that brought me to your doorstep. And I'm very pleased to be here. Thanks. Great. Thank you. Does the committee have any questions? I'm just going to make, I'm proud to make a motion to appoint Chris Lemao to the commission. Great. Second. Dr. Allison Ampe. Thank you for being willing to serve. We really appreciate it. Thank you all. It's a lot of work to do. Yeah. All right. We haven't voted yet. No, we have to vote. Those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? unanimous. Great. Thank you. I learned a long time ago. Stop arguing when they approve. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. The opening day updates. Thank you. I'll just start by saying it was a very smooth opening in all of our schools this year. It's been tiring. It's always hard to come back from the summer and begin the school year. But it went very well. And this is the second year we've also done this kind of an opening for kindergarteners where they had open house on Tuesday. Then half the class came on Wednesday. The other half on Thursday in the full class on Friday. And after being around a number of kindergarten classrooms, they've all said this has worked very well. So I'm pleased that that is the case. And they are quite adorable. Watching them get used to being in school, lining up, walking down to the lunch room, all of those things. As they practiced the routines of being in school. So it went very well an opening day. But actually for teachers, the opening really was the previous Wednesday when we had all of the teachers, staff, everyone in the auditorium. And when you were in the auditorium, it was actually pretty full. And I thank Mr. Cardin for coming and having an opening welcome, which was very well received. And on that day, we talked about the number of things, including our vision of student as learner and global citizen. And what does that mean in your own classroom? How do you begin? How do you help students to move toward this vision of what disposition, skills, and knowledge they will have when they leave the Arlington Public Schools? We also talked about really what is the focus of this year in just terms of big themes around our district goals. And one of them, as you all know, is aligning our curriculum to be very consistent with the new standards that have been promulgated by the Department of Education, including one which I know that Mr. Levy, who is here with us tonight, president of the ADA, knows that we've changed our whole eighth grade curriculum around the new standards for civics. So we'll talk more about that this evening, some of the major curriculum initiatives, but then also the work that we will continue to do for in making our schools much more aligned with good social-emotional practices in our classroom, continuing our own development for cultural proficiency. And using opportunities more and more for student choice so that students can learn self-efficacy independence, which is certainly part of the vision. So those were some of the highlights that we started with, and then teachers spent a lot of time in curriculum updates. Again, we'll talk about some of those a little bit later. But all in all, all the preparation that goes in during the summer, which is extensive really, really pays off when you can have such a smooth opening. And it's continued that way, except for, of course, as you know, the one glitch of Eversource, we're losing power at the odyssey. These things happen. But at any rate, other than that, as we've gone forward, it's been terrific. It actually might not be such a good, bad idea right now to talk a little bit about some of these big curriculum initiatives. And before Dr. McNeil talks about that, I'd like to say one of the things that is different this year, and there's a number of things, is the elementary schedule. Thanks to the increase in funding to the school budget with the operating override in June, we have for the very first time been able to have dedicated art and music specialists in our elementary schools. The significance of that is that it really frees up us being able to schedule time differently. Before we were, elementary principals are sort of subject to scheduling basically when they could get their specialist. Not all schools have a one point, oh, they're building, but they have somebody that's exclusively in that building. And one of the, there are a number of benefits from that, which I did write to elementary parents so that they are aware, is that it was hard in many schools to be able to have core math, writing, and reading instruction at the same time at every grade level. Again, because of scheduling. And so now in every school at least three days of the week, if not more, and in many cases it is more, those subjects are taught at the same time at a grade level. And why that's important is that it gives more opportunity for flexible grouping, for pushing with special education teachers and other support people, coaches. And we will see how that progresses through the year. We're certainly monitoring the success and significance of this. The other part of this is that it also allows the opportunity for team meetings at each grade level with the principal. While we had dedicated in the past time during that Tuesday early release for data meetings, what was happening is that while they occurred, the principal couldn't go to all of them. It might be six weeks before they could rotate into working with a given grade level. So we are beginning that in the professional development report, you'll hear a little bit more about what administrators have been doing over the last year, which is taking a course together in data-wise improvement cycles. So, in many schools it also meant that we could have more common planning time at grade levels. So all in all, this has had been a significant change that we see at the elementary schools. So I'm going to actually ask Dr. Neal if you could talk a little bit about what the big curriculum initiatives are this year. I want to purpose by saying that these curriculum changes are also representative in our district goals. So they've been highlighted there. And much of the summer work that has taken place this past summer has been focused on making sure that these curriculum changes are in place in the year. So just looking at starting at the elementary level, we're looking at grades 3 and 5 where we have we're still implementing. We started last year of implementing new Lucy Calkins units of study for reading. And we have a couple of units in each one of those grade levels 3 and 5 that were still that we've rolled out for last years. We've also implemented Turk math resource investigations and so that was completed last year. So I just want to let everyone know that that is now complete. But they're still working on you know looking at some of the units that they're teaching and some of the professional development has still been focused on that this past summer. For at the social studies as you know we have had some major standards that were finalized last year. So at the eighth grade level we have a brand new resource that we're using and it's geared towards civics and then also at the middle school we've been working on delineating our computer science curriculum so we have a curriculum for sixth, seventh and eighth grade. Those are some of the highlights of the major curriculum changes also at the elementary level. For kindergarten we have introduced lessons for science and social studies that are aligned with the tools of the mine curriculum and then at the high school we continue to add various electives to the options that students can select. So those are just an overview of some of the major curriculum initiatives that have been introduced in the curriculum. Those are some of the ones I would like to highlight. Any curriculum leaders are going to be coming in over the course of the year? Yes. So we have put out a schedule for the curriculum leaders to come in throughout the year to give reports on how they're progressing with those major initiatives and some of the other things they're working on in their content area and that will lead to some of the things that are going to be included in the curriculum. So we're going to have a approach, Sarah Huber, to come in on October 10th and they can introduce themselves to the community and you can ask them questions. Yes. Questions, Mr. Huber? Lucy Coggins has been around quite a while. We've had an assistant for quite a while. It's more than just a training teacher or is it new things going on all the time in that area? Well as you introduce the new unit to study you have like new content so you have lessons that are geared towards a particular genre and then so... Just from my understanding and it's a matter of adapting the new curriculum to this philosophy and developing lessons around it. Lucy Coggins has devised units of study and in order to align our instruction with those units of study we have created lessons to go along with those units of study. Are we paying Lucy Coggins the company and stuff for this material? No, we send our coaches to the various professional development opportunities and they also have like what do you call it resources for us to utilize in order to write those lessons. So they're things that we read. I'm old school that once we got the philosophy we would be adapting the curriculum and stuff like that. I have faith in our teachers and stuff. If there's a benefit, cost benefit by sending these people out and doing it that's great but I think we have wonderful resources here in the community and stuff that you're the best judge in this and I trust that. It's just I'm going back 30, 40 years ago that once we got Lucy Coggins and stuff and it wasn't the big company that it is now. I realize that now and curriculum has changed dramatically but I just thought to take advantage of the people that we have here. Thank you. They wanted to say something but I'll say a follow up after that. I was just trying to clarify I think when you say we've been doing Lucy Coggins for a long time we were doing the writing portion right. We rolled that out for a long time and then we started the reading portion years later. Correct. So but yeah it's not the same thing. Yeah. I understand. Fine. Yeah there are Lucy Coggins who study for reading and writing. They are distinct. And one of the things that we've tried to do is be very conscious of implementation schedules. If we're going to do a science implementation in fourth grade or math fifth grade we're not going to do all of those at the same time. So there has been a very strategic roll out of these curriculums. We're now fully we are fully FOS all of our teachers have been training the FOS science curriculum complete training and implementation of the new version of TURC investigations. And so it's just it's a it's a very phased roll out that we've been doing. Thank you. I just want to say that in terms of whether or not you have a lot of capacity in the district to do anything which we clearly do it's always a good idea to do some cross palimization and get your folks with others who are doing this in other districts and and experience some of the higher level training that will just help bring things up to to a higher level. Also there's a lot of discussion that goes along with the teachers. And there's research that's done in order to identify the best resource to use for instruction. And so Lucy Calkins has been selected those units of study and they match the we just workshop format. So as it's a perfect merchant and we like the way that it emphasize independent reading and in a way that we can provide individual and group small group instruction as well within the within the we just workshop format. So the Lucy Calkins units you know help us you know and as we focus on the various genres of reading you know they've been selected because we feel like they're the best. I was meeting this morning with someone from ACMI and she's talking about her own child's experience and was surprised that in second grade they were already learning things like the the the five W's who what where when it is part of a journalistic approach to writing. Because that's the type of thing that you might even see much much later or used to see much much later in instruction. But I think that this year we'll have an opportunity at different meetings to have a little bit more deeper dive into a lot of this. I want to come back and then we can move on but I want to come back to the OMS dismissal this last week for two vantage points. One is that you know I've heard from people that they were contacted in so many different modalities. The reason that happened is that what we knew is that the people have not gone in and updated their their portal their information in the parent portal. There's a there was link letters sent out about the returning student. And so I'm using this opportunity to encourage people to do that because if your phone is wrong then we have to cut on your email. So I had to send out the message in different forms which meant that you got emails, texts, phone messages just to make sure that you got the message. So it's not an insignificant number of people who have not done the update so I would encourage people to do that because it's hard to know what other kind of unexpected event like this would occur that we would need to be able to contact people. And the second thing that came up is people a couple of people wondered about you know what you do in crises. And I do want people to understand that we do have crises teams in each school. We have crisis plans. We have evacuation sites. We just decided even though we could have brought all 900 students to the high school they were willing to have this happen. It made much more sense to dismiss. And we have found that the efficient way to do it is really to do it through telephones. So even if students don't have a telephone they borrow their phone what was remarkable and I give a lot of kudos to the teachers at Ottesend because in 45 minutes from the time the decision was made there was only 15 students who had not had their permissions recorded by a teacher. And in that 45 minutes they already come back in the school to get their things. So it was a stellar performance which I told them all what a great job they did. It was really great. So the last thing I would like to just say end this part of the I'll come back to some other things in my report. One of the cutest things that I heard a principal report about opening day was at the Gibbs and Mr. Francisco said one of the students when he was leaving said this is DeFrancisco. This was a great adventure and I'm going to come back tomorrow. That's great. So move on. Do we have any questions? I do have one question about the dismissal. One concern was whether our phone and safety systems feel on that went off of battery backups because the phone working and the alarm not to work. That's a great question. Well, it tripped it. And so we have to look into that too. And the other thing, I can't answer that question. We're going to look into why it tripped having the battery, the electricity go off because the battery should have been the backup.  So we have something in place but I don't, I can't answer that question but I think it's a great question we need to find because, you know, they would have stayed in their classrooms had that not, that sensor had gone off. Just one more thing about that. I think what would be helpful is it so because what happened was like as a parent, I got an email from you that explained to me everything that was happening. I got a second, I believe, like, like I totally understood what was going on. And then I got the like very cryptic phone call also by email. But what happened is somehow in the system, it called all of the kids' emergency numbers. So like my 76 year old dad got a phone call that said OMS, whatever it was, the like, and I understand that we have character limitations, but that was really scary for him because he was like her school is being evacuated, I'm the emergency contact, am I supposed to go and I'll tell you I love my dad but the last thing that we needed in this situation was him driving up to the Odyssey to try and connect with my daughter. So I think that piece, like if I understood when those emergency contacts were going to be triggered, I might pick different ones. So if people understand that might be helpful. That's, I'm glad you told me that. I have not heard that yet. I do know that parents that had younger children, you know, they didn't read the message clearly and they thought my kindergarten was going to be dismissed. So I mean there was some of that, but I didn't know that so I will look into why it went beyond the contact. So maybe you could go into the portal and just make sure that they're not in the wrong line. I'll try. I will tell you it took me two hours and 45 minutes to update the portal information for my four children. So. But I would be happy to go back and try that again. It's possible a copy and there was a lot, there was a very interesting glitch this year whereby it defaulted to all people being non-custodial parents and non, like, living with their child parents and nobody having pickup. So anyway, if you have a first grader, that's a big deal. I won't go into it a lot. In fact, David Good is going to come and talk at some point about technology. I think this would be a good time to ask him. But I do know that one of the things they were doing this summer, because we have different, we have different family arrangements that trying to change the name from, like, mother father to parent one, parent two. And you would think that would be an easy thing to accomplish? It is not. So why I couldn't tell you, but it would be, that's one of the things. They were trying to really update the system and then how things were entered themselves. But thank you for letting me know that. I will pass that on. Just also, I didn't get these messages so I don't know, but if we're sending out multiple messages for the reasons that you're saying, it makes sense, but it would probably also make sense to have in the message. We're going to be contacting people through multiple ways because it's early in the year and we are aware that a number of people have not yet updated their information. We're trying to make sure we can get everyone. In hindsight, I don't disagree. I'm sitting there with one of our network managers writing this long message out and said, you only have 140 characters go back and edit it all on the dime. But I think that's a good suggestion. So we've learned from this and there's a lot of lessons that showed some of the problems with our system and we have to make sure that we update, make sure that that's all updated before something else happens and knock on wood, hopefully not. Great. Thanks. So now we are on to the enrollment update. That's also me. Well, we are approximately 140 students more in our school buildings than we had last year. This number is not a firm number yet and it will fluctuate as we, over the next couple of weeks. But the thing, there are a lot of notable things in this which, you know, obviously just stand out in terms of where we are in the district, all of the classes in the high school are under 400 and some of them are even under 350. You get to the middle school and they're all over the high 400s and then when you get to the elementary, all but one class is over 500. With the first grade, being close to 600, goes up above and below 600 over each week. So we are, in our schools, we have virtually 6,000 students and making our total enrollment in the early public schools over 6,000. So that's, those are big changes and, you know, we have felt that this summer as we tried to manage classrooms, I think that this year we're not as successful looking at being able to balance them more easily. Some years have been better than others. This one is a little bit more off but it's not for lack of, for trying to do that for sure. So it's one of the things that, you know, we are looking at again this year is maybe take buffer zones and we can talk about that in another meeting. But the, the good news is that I've talked to a lot of the teachers and they're all very positive about their classes and very excited about having them. We have had to add a couple of large class TAs in various places. And I think the one thing that I will say, so people just know this, is that when both Dr. McNeil and I were around at all the schools looking at classes, the thing that struck me, one of the things when I was in elementary classrooms, that was the minority of classrooms that did not have more than one adult in the room. Just the way, you know, special education teachers were there or a special education TA or a large class TA or a building. There was, there were a lot of adults around supporting students. So we continue to grow and we welcome all of our new students. We will not have, as you know, the official date is October 1, but even when we have that snapshot October 1, we will not have verified numbers until later in November. Questions? I'll talk to the general process. So just to assuage parents who are worried about the high school, I know there could potentially be years where the new high school feels crowded, but in general I went back and did an analysis. The difference between the kindergarten number and then the ninth and 10th grade numbers, we retain about 82% on average. So, so we won't necessarily have high school classes of 600, you know, if historical averages are. Right. They may or may not. With the new high school they might. We'll see. We'll see. It'll be new high school. Maybe they will be higher. But, but it's just that, that we do lose some kids along the way to, you know, other towns, private schools, etc. Minuteman and increasing. Minuteman has a new school. We may lose more. I don't call it losing students. Not losing students. I mean, but just that it won't be quite as overcrowded as people are worried about. Even if it might feel crowded. In fact, we had a meeting today for transit, beginning transitions. There's a lot of meetings going on, which I'll talk about later for the high school, but we're looking at making sure in, in these, all these different phases that we are going to have, we are identifying additional classrooms in the high school through the phasing process to deal with the increasing enrollment because we, we, we see this as we go through this process. We're going to have, you know, 50, 60 more next year. And then each year, in fact, we'll probably be before we're even finished with phasing close, you know, close to 1600 in the school. And I think that that's one of the tasks, big tasks that Dr. Janger and Mr. McCarthy and I to some extent as well have as a task over the next month or so to identify all of these rooms in the phasing that we go through. So we are very conscious of that. And I'm, I'm confident that we're going to be able to accommodate all these students as they come forward. Mr. Hanna. Mike, looking at the Hardee fourth grade, that it's a very crowded class. There's three of them there, 24, 25, 25. The third grade coming up, couple, there's only four more students in its four classes. And I realize space is premium everywhere. But that class has had a lot. And if we just assume that all, all 74 of those students fall within the easy realm of a classroom, that's one, they're still very large. I'm concerned about that. I don't know the solution. I don't know if there's a, there's space there. We just added six classrooms there. But it's, it's tough. And that group has been big all along. And they've borne the burden of that. I don't know if there's any relief. I don't know what can be done. Morgan. So I just wanted to restate like I do every year that I find that this report is really hard to read because it doesn't include our students who are in the SLC. We have more than 30 kids at Stratton who aren't distributed to classrooms. The idea is that they are spending at least part of the day in that general education classroom. I understand that Desi has them with a different teacher of record. This isn't Desi. This is, you know, the, this report alludes to a level of accuracy that isn't really there, especially, well, for, for bracket down and Stratton, it, it doesn't because there are lots of kids that aren't represented on this chart. We put our Metco kids into their classrooms and into their cohorts, but we don't do it with our SLC students. I think it's fine to count them out like we do with Metco, I guess, and know how many we have. But the fact that we can't seem to get them into these classes is, continues to be frustrating to me. We have actually a new chart and I don't know if it got delivered and where we're actually do breaking it out so you can see. We'll send it along to you. Great. It's an issue of, of who's the teacher of record? The teacher of record is not the classroom, the, the fourth grade class. Understood. So, but yes, you are going to get that report. We've had our special education coordinators break that out for us and that will be coming, perhaps even tomorrow, so you can see it. As a school committee member, this chart, the way that it is for bracket down and then it's not useful to me. Did you just say that the classroom teacher is not the teacher of record for, for attendance and purposes? No. No, what I'm talking about is for students that are in SLC, their classroom teacher there is the teacher of record. For the purpose of attendance with Desi? For the purpose of attendance and grades with Desi, yes. That's changed since I was a lot of change since I was a teacher, but we, whether we had them for five minutes, eight classroom teacher was the person for record for the purposes of attendance, chapter seven and everything else going on because it was based like that. Thank you. Okay. First, I appreciate what Ms. Morgan said about not including that it would be good to have something that includes the SLC students because this is a persistent problem and confusing. And it's confusing to parents too because they look at it and go, well, my kid has 30 or, you know, whatever the number is in their classroom.  So it doesn't help instill confidence in parents when they read this and see the difference. You will get the updated. The thing that you won't be able to know is what the level of inclusion is. Right. Yeah. To do that just. Okay. Then my second point is I, I agree that it's unfortunate that fourth grade at hearties is larger, but I'm actually more concerned about Bishop first and second grades with 24 students. And then, uh, Dallin second. I'm sorry. Bishop kindergarten and first grades and Dallin first grade. Um, and I'm wondering, I know that kindergarten's will have AIDS. I'm wondering if we've been able to do something to help out the first grader first grade classrooms in those two schools. Yes. But I will also say that we have, and we'll talk about this with the budget, we have still a lot of vacant positions, but not the two that you just described. Um, in this economy where, um, there's, you know, 3.4 or 5%, I don't know, percent unemployment, unemployment, um, we're finding it very difficult just like to find, uh, teaching assistance. And I will say that the teaching assistance we have, we feel very grateful for. They, they frequently are teachers who are, people who are going back to get their certification. Many have master's degrees. Um, and this is an opportunity for them to get classroom experience. Um, but we still have some positions in our vacant, but the first grade there in the two schools do, do have extra support. Thank you. Mr. Spiegel, you're up with the hiring report. Thank you. So, um, just going to go through a brief, uh, overview of our new staffing for this year. So we have a few new administrators. We have a new director of funding in, uh, in October to present a new assistant principal at Bishop and a new athletic director. We are still looking for, um, assistant principal, um, for Stratton working on that. New teachers, we have a lot of new teachers. Anyone in the AA unit A, Bargain unit includes teachers and specialists, 71 new hires as of today. Um, most of them, the large place teachers who either retired, resigned or changed positions within the district or on a full year leave of absence. Um, and we have about 20 new positions. Um, and some of those are partial FTEs, um, with, which includes some of the, uh, new specialists that we are, music phys ed specialists or some of them are part-time. And again, as we, I say every year, we tend to hire a lot of people from within, a lot of teaching assistants, um, who are in graduate programs who become licensed educators. We've hired 10 of them. Um, if they've been teaching assistants, building subs in, in Arlington. Um, and we have others who have done student teaching here who have been hired as teachers. Um, I just want to, resignations come up. I, there's, I can get more data on this if you'd like, but just an overview of the, the reasons people do leave Arlington if they're resigning and going away. A large number are moving away from the area. We had several teachers who resigned because they moved out of state, either with a, a spouse or a partner, um, who had job opportunities that came up and, um, or for family reasons to move closer to family. So a lot, a large number moved away from the area. Another group decided to try to find a job closer to where they live so they could cut down on their commute. The commuting time is an issue in Arlington. Um, as it is hard for a lot of people to live, um, in this area, especially once they have families, um, and want to have a house and some space. Um, I'm not sure if that will even, if we'll see more effects of this next year when the middle school and high school schedules change, but we're going to be on the lookout for that if, um, if the commuting time makes that more challenging with the, with those schedules. Um, some people have career moves within education. Sometimes they, it's a combination of a career move and a shorter commute. Um, and sometimes it may increase, it may be increased compensation. We've done a lot of studying of our salaries and we've done some work over the last couple of contracts to increase them, but we're still behind a lot of, a lot of districts and not even just our 10-manager 12 comparisons, but other districts that aren't in that group who are, you know, their competitors in the region. Um, and then there's a couple of people who have decided to move out of education.  Maybe they'll come back to teaching at some point, but they've left education. So people leave for a variety of reasons. We have a highly mobile um, workforce, especially the younger workforce can go different places and aren't necessarily tied to working in one place for many years. That being said, we do have a lot of veteran teachers here who have been here a long time. So some of the highlights of the new teachers we have, so we have a new, with part of the new budget we have a new elementary library specialist and a new elementary instructional technology specialist. So, um, we decided, um, we have some challenges finding people who had, um, both elementary library, the library specialist and the technology specialist combination to really focus on the library specialist we have does have a very strong technology, um, background. But then we decided to, for the second position to go for the really focus on instructional technology to make that, to increase that capacity at the elementary level. Um, we have a new elementary science coach and a new elementary social studies coach. The elementary social studies coach was, um, a grade three teacher at Pierce who has moved into that position now. Um, we have, as I said, new additional art, music, phys ed, uh, FTEs is part of the elementary schedule and we've hired, um, to add to, to, we filled out that half cluster at Audison. Those are just some highlights that we have, um, so it's two additional staff because of that additional half cluster. Breakdown by the, by school, Arlington High School has quite a few new hires, um, based on, um, both increased in the, increases the budget and some, uh, resignations and retirements. Um, and then you can see down the list of where there's a new hires in most of the schools in the, in the, in, among the teachers. I think only, um, the preschool didn't add a new teacher, um, this year. And then we have quite a few people who are split between school, some of the specialists, um, and, uh, related, special ed related service people and team shares. We've hired, so now this slide, which I've prepared a couple days ago, is now even outdated. We have probably 45, uh, new teaching assistants, BSPs, tutors. Um, we do have some vacancies still in that. These, again, are hard positions to fill at this time. I think the contract is helping a little bit, but, you know, we obviously couldn't make as great a salary increase, um, the first year as, as, as would be necessary to really, to attract, um, the wide variety of candidates that we can. We've gotten some great candidates. A lot have master's degrees. Um, others are in master's programs. Um, and I think the new contract is helping that we, you know, people can see there is a progression now where they can move up, uh, as they stay here. Um, and I think it also helps that, you know, we have hired other teaching assistants to become teachers and people who get into that know that it's a stepping stone. Other new employees that we've hired in the district, we have new faculty and desktop support people in our technology department, um, cafeteria and recess monitors, substitute teachers, after school program, the after school program has expanded a lot. Um, we, you know, we now have Pierce as part of the Arlington after school program. Um, and I think we have at least 65 staff in all, in Hardy, uh, Thompson, Pierce, uh, and Brackett and Gibbs, and it's just a growing program. It's, uh, it's almost its own getting all of these new hires in, because a lot of them, the process is interesting with the teachers, I probably started meeting with, you know, of the, of all the new teachers I met with the first new teacher hire for this school year in April. So we had hired someone, you know, people in April, May, June, like all summer. So it was spread out. The after school hires kind of come all at the end of August, beginning of September. So they're kind of, we have to get them payroll and everything. Um, so it's a little more, uh, more condensed. Again, the process, they, uh, everybody, you know, the, the schools hire, do the hiring, they do the recruiting and, and interview process. So it's a busy time for everybody, all the administrators, a lot of teachers sit on these interview committees and, um, and spend a lot of their own time to, to come in and, uh, interview, um, their future colleagues. Um, and then they come in and meet with me. We go over all the paperwork. Um, they do their benefits and they get their benefits information. Um, and we get into payroll. So there's a lot of work for everyone up here in payroll and, and our administration and, um, secretaries who are typing letters all summer. Um, so we are, and then the IT department has done a lot of work to get devices into the hands of all the new places, especially the new teachers who really need, um, devices to be able to, to do their jobs. So, um, the IT department's worked a lot to make sure that that's happened, um, as quickly as, as they can. We have, start the mentor and induction process over the summer with the new teacher training and orientation. Marie Janiek, um, is still leading that and does a great job making sure that that we have mentors for all the new teachers. Um, and that program is an excellent program as you know in Arlington and will continue all year. And some teachers have a second year, um, mentoring if the, if it's, if they need to. And so, um, that's something that will, is a top notch program and the principals all meet with their new teachers in their schools as well. So, that will continue and does anyone have any questions? Mr. Heiner? The, the initial part where you said there were 72, uh, people that have left. Did we, uh, I don't know how to say it politely, evaluate people out? People, did we ask not to come back? I, I don't know that I can, um, speak to that. I think that would be. You can give us a number. You don't have to, I'm not looking for specifics and the reasons why. Um, there were some. Okay. Thank you. Going to the, uh, you can give a report on how many are voluntary, how many are involuntary. Right. Um, I don't know. Um, I would ask you, I would ask you to ask council if you do have, I will say this. We do have, uh, an evaluation, um, procedure that every school district has that's part of the, that's required by the department of education. We work collaboratively with the union to create and maintain that program. Uh, and our evaluation system and our principals, um, you know, the purpose is to develop educators and to, for, um, improvement continually. And then, you know, there might be a few who. Choose not to avail themselves of them. Well, for whatever reason and I'm not going to, there's a lot of factors involved. I'm just saying that 71 that you gave us, does that reflect? Well, somewhere, tirements of the, I have to give you the, I don't have the number in front of me of all the resignations per se, but, um, of the resident, it's a smaller number than that of resignations. On the, on the chat that you did for us, new teacher, highest by school, could you break that down into columns in the future of, uh, retirees. And, uh, the numbers, the first sheet that you gave us. Oh, how many people retired? Right. Showing the retirees and those that decide to move for whatever reason. That can be a total number. Okay. That's all. Yeah, I can do that. Thank you. Uh, Mrs. So, well, I want to thank you and your team for what sounds like a very involved and work and, and sounds like you guys are doing a good job. So, thank you for that. Um, I have a similar question. So, just a, just a ballpark idea of the 51 teachers who left what percentage, um, leaving for professional career move slash money issues. So is it 10%, 25, that kind of thing? Um, maybe 20 to 25. I think, Okay. And some, so when you look at that, that list also includes people who change positions. So this is, this is where it gets complicated here because we have, um, some teachers who move from one position to another in the district, they didn't leave the district, they just moved into a different position. So that includes, that number includes those people. Got it. Um, I, yeah. Okay. So they're not necessary. So that 25% isn't necessarily all leaving the district. No, no. And I think, um, I think we have like eight, eight retirements from Uniday, eight or nine, uh, this past year and, uh, and then quite a few, I think the majority were not professional moves within education for more money or to, to get out of here. I think the majority were, if you took the combination of the commute and the moving away is probably the majority. Okay. Um, and then one more question. So do we have assistant principals now everywhere? You didn't mention Thompson. So Thompson, we have not filled the assistant principal position. Continuing to look for that. Okay. We've hired successfully at Bishop. We, we're not able at this point to hire successfully at Stratton, um, some challenges with that hiring process. So we are back looking for someone and we're still looking for Thompson and Thompson. Okay. And then obviously we still have assistant principals, halftime at Dallin and, and Hardy. Right. And Brackett. Brackett does not have an assistant principal. Not currently searching for one. Got it. Okay. Thanks. So, thanks for this report. Mike, my question when the onboarding happens in the, they go see you for benefits and all that stuff, is it just you doing that or they go, they go across the street or how does that work? They don't go across the street. It's, I have, I met with every new teacher in the district. So to go for, because I have to put them on the salary schedule. So I have to look at what their education level is. Sometimes it's a little bit of a negotiation, but you know, it's basically based on years of experience and education level. And then, you know, I present the benefits, but Kelly Piggott, who's our benefits coordinator, can also, also meets with a lot of new staff on benefits. And she meets with a lot of the new teaching assistants on, on benefits. We do still have one of the vacant positions that we is in the assistant. We just had, there were other priorities to, to fill over the summer, including the administrative assistant for, for Rod, needed to be filled, which we did successfully.  Well, there, that was a vacancy that needed to be replaced. That was, that was a current position that was a different position that we've been, but we will get to it soon. So we do need some more help, but, but it is, it is a busy. Yeah, it's a lot of volume. One, one, two people. Yeah. Thank you. Ms. Morgan. The other thing that I think as we look into next year that would, I would just be interested in your sense anecdotally is that when I look at elementary class sizes, right, where we have like, we go from three to four to three, like where we're jumping around a little bit, right? Like right now, the only place that's like really stable at four across is Thompson, right? So what I'm curious about is when we have, when we, like for example, we had three, we had four kindergarten at Hardy last year and we have three kindergartens at Hardy this year. So that to me in my head, without getting into specifics, obviously breeds instability, right? At some point in the future, we're going to go down, maybe, right? Like there's going to be a tail off. And so I'm curious just, you know, sort of, I'm curious about your sense, not tonight, but just as we go into next year, if, you know, how that instability is impacting our hiring and if people are being moved around or if they're saying, oh, I really don't want to go and teach second grade if I can't teach this. So it's, it's a concern of mine when I see these boards. Yeah, I get that. I mean, that's, there were a couple changes this year that where people were moved and we thought it was okay, but then people actually ended up leaving the the district for other reasons. I mean, for different reasons that may have been partially related to that, but may also have been related to other reasons. So, it is concerning. It is interesting that Thompson, as you mentioned, is four and the old, there's only one teacher and that's, that's in kindergarten for a teacher who's on a year leave of absence. So, that just may be coincidental. I don't know if that's the reason, but it's, yeah, it's one new classroom teacher at Thompson. There's other new, there's new PE and other other staff, but, yeah. I mean, yeah, I don't know if that might, it's hard to be, as, as we grow. I mean, I do tell new teachers that we are, we're a growing district and so, especially middle and high school teachers have sort of that cohort to look, even though we might lose some of them along the way, but it's still going to be growing and we'll need those teachers, at least those positions. All right. So, my request is actually to, to, to try to get more data from the reasons on the breakdowns for reading, for leaving, if you have it for prior years also. And also, sort of, we always, we get a list, we don't always get it from you, it's always, it used to be in the newspaper, but we get a list of all the new hires, right, the 71 new hires. Oh, okay. It would be interesting to also see the list of who left. All right. So, I know that, you know, two of the other people in special education that left. Maybe that's just anecdotally, I don't know, but that would be interesting to see. And then you can't give us the reasons by position, but get a sense of, is turnover higher in special education, which is sort of anecdotally what people think, is that factually correct? And if so, is there anything we can do to help that? Is it people just burning out? Is it special education or are people our turnover is hurting us as a district? Yeah. So, I, yeah, that's, anecdotally, that's probably, you know, there's some truth to that, that there's, especially this year there was a little more turnover. Yeah. So if we could get some more data, you know, before we go into the budget process, then we can see if there's, you know, we do have more resources. Is there something that we should be doing with supporting that? Is there something that we can do financially if it is a problem? So, thanks. All right. Now, professional development report. Dr. McNeil. Yes. So, I'm not going to go over each session that occurred over the summer or we would be here until tomorrow because we had a lot of things happen this summer. The summertime is the best time for teachers to get together with coaches and curriculum leaders and directors and work on curriculum and go to PD and refine their practice. And so, I just want to highlight some of the things that I think really align with our district goals. The first thing I want to focus on is the work that we did around SEL. We had two elementary professional development sessions with responsive classroom. One of the classes that was offered, courses that was offered was the basic course and we had quite a few elementary teachers attend that as well as TAs and other support staff and we even had some district administrators such as Margaret Thomas our MECCO director go to that particular course.  So I stopped by those sessions. They're very successful and the teachers and the staff that were attending it gave a lot of positive feedback about the presenter and the things that they were learning. Moving on I would like to focus on the work that we did as I mentioned before we are unveiling new units of study for Lucy Calkins the Lucy Calkins units of study for reading at the third and fifth grade so teachers in third grade and fifth grade got together in order to learn about the new units and I will say that the Lucy Calkins is a pioneer with the introducing the workshop model for instruction and she's created lessons to go with that and there's a lot of different reasons why many districts have adopted the workshop model and the Lucy Calkins units of study and just a couple of like I mentioned before it gives the teacher an opportunity to have small group instruction and one-on-one instruction it emphasizes independent reading and it gives the students choice to have rich interesting text that they can choose from because we're getting away from the the we used to have the the basal readers and the the literature and the basal readers is not that interesting because it's focusing on word choice and things of that nature so there's many reasons that we've chosen the Lucy Calkins units of study that have helped with our instruction and provides the one-on-one instruction so I think and thank you for that it was so long ago that we use basal readers I couldn't even remember but that's that's the instruction you know when I was in school so that's how the reading instruction has involved over the years and in focusing on more what it's going to engage a student and make learning how to read enjoyable so I just want to emphasize that moving on to middle school as I said we have a new civics course at the eighth grade level and they're introduced to new text and we also have the electronic version of the text so students can do their reading at home without carrying the textbook home so we know we always worried about having to you know carry those heavy textbooks and the book bags back and forth so a lot of the resources that we're purchasing now have an electronic version so we just buy a text set for the classroom and so students can access the online version at home also along with social studies we've introduced new like I said new lessons for social studies that are aligned with the tools of the mind curriculum at the kindergarten level so you know looking at that that's another highlight that we and the teachers look at the tools of the mind curriculum and identify where those lessons can be inserted in the curriculum the social studies lessons also we offered a course on cultural competency at edco where we had one teacher one social worker and one nurse attended that and we did finance that because that's aligned with our district goal of cultural competency at the high school this past summer where English teachers and special educators came together to examine content curriculum in order to make explicit connections in ninth and tenth grade reading and writing and investigate alternative and supplemental titles for students in those classes so that goes along with our emphasis and we're trying to provide the co-teaching opportunity so we have professional development geared towards that at the high school level over the summer that those are pretty much the highlights that I've starred again the list is extensive and so as we had a very comprehensive offerings over the summer for teachers and our curriculum leaders and directors did a great job at making sure that our teachers have professional development that they needed to as they transitioned into a new year Any questions? Mrs. How many of our elementary school teachers are now trained in responsive classroom? What percentage? I would have to come back to you with that information I would say over the majority of them The majority probably well over 200 At one point it was like 60 something percent but so that was when I asked the question at one point so I was just curious what the number is now is it 80 percent 90 percent We're going to continue to offer it next year and I will say our entire faculty at Gibbs have been trained in responsive classrooms so we are going to also think about how we're going to market this to our seventh and eighth grade teachers and so it is becoming something that we're going to invest in over the years and we've already made a major investment into it and so I think I'm excited about it because it does help with the building of classroom communities and with building expectations for students I just had one point this summer for the very first time we offered the advanced version and we had immediate sign up so there's a tremendous interest as well so I think we go forward we'll discuss this year we'll probably offer both next year and they do cap it at 30 so you can't go beyond 30 participants per class so that's also challenging for us as we move forward because the courses are quite expensive and so you can only offer so many at one time and you can't offer it it's a process but just sort of where we're at through the world that yeah Dr. Allison Ampe I had a question about the elementary math under developing mathematical ideas blah blah blah at the end of the description of what happened it says this course was chosen as the domain of geometry has consistently been an area of improvement I just didn't understand is it area in need of improvement I didn't understand that sentence I'm you know I would have to go back and look at the data as it relates to that but so I would have to come back and be able to answer that question in order to clarify that statement I could add a little bit to it I think we'd have to look at the data DMI is of course been around a long time and it's it's a exceptionally good course we have lines and weaknesses in geometry over the years and that kind of data has helped spur some more professional development in this area and more and certainly encouragement to take this course but I'm not sure that we're seeing that in this year's data as much so we can tell you more as we dive deeper into the MCAS this year I'm just saying the sentence that's in here doesn't this is one of the way it describes it yeah it says it's described as this course was chosen as the domain of geometry has consistently been an area of improvement and it's been one of the weaker areas yeah that's just missing it's the type of it's probably yeah I will clean that up for you I'll clarify that and clean that up that statement alright so this summer professional development is it all voluntary sign up is there ever like for the specifics civics was being in the new curriculum was that mandatory for all eighth grade teachers how does that work no we all the offerings that we give over the summer for teachers is all voluntary these are teachers that take time out of their schedule they do get paid for it for coming and we have a set stipend but they are taking time out of their lives in order to come in for these various trainings and so I just want to applaud the dedication and the passion for our teachers because it's not always easy in the summer time especially when you have families to come in and be a part of this professional development so our curriculum leaders do a good job of making sure that the students are doing in the classroom and so that they're getting this and they're finding it to be valuable so and I think that the comprehensive list that you see before you is a testament to that because we couldn't do this without the teachers and their dedication they also available to get professional development points towards their recertification as well thank you for doing this it makes life with all the complexities that these teachers have to go through it makes it a little bit better for them thank you you're welcome great sounds like a busy summer anything else alright thank you very much for that and for all the hard work over the summer alright Mr. Mason your turn financial report so this is not a financial report it's just a piece of the budget update which is basically we're still early in the school year to give you kind of expenditures as we're just opening up but this basically report is that a fun level view and it shows a projected expenses for just salaries so most of our budget is grants so in this report you'll notice that there may be a deficit on essential school health grant which was we originally had level funded all of our grants and this is a grant that we were not awarded this year but as a service provide services so that will essentially be part of the town appropriation part of the budget which then nets to a balance that's shown here so what we're projecting with all salaries for the regular town appropriation is around 77,000 but the other funds of all the grants they're basically in line once the spend is there was some savings on people that swapped out so there may be some recalibration on the salaries on that particular fund and the others where there were replacement of higher salaries we will be recalibrating to ensure that those will be balanced but in general that in the projected expenses sorry that I didn't really clarify is that it also includes vacancies that Rob was talking about earlier and in the vacancies where positions that we still haven't filled there are cost savings that are prorated which drives part of our balance which is not a major balance where we can decide to do something going forward but as we are seeing our proration of these the balances these will show up on the month reports but the district leadership team will definitely reallocate resources to provide you know we would recruit in higher where is needed to provide instructional support in the classroom and I think that's basically that would sum up where we stand if anybody has any questions in terms of where we stand in terms of the budget in terms of the salary side I can try to answer as many questions or get back to you with anything I think you said this is I'm just might be I'm not understand it so the projected balance savings is in many cases just the fact that there's a vacancy that we haven't filled yet I'm sorry repeat yourself the projected balance savings that we have the extra money is in many cases just that we haven't filled the position is that right there's turnover savings as well so there are a lot of positions where we have hired people who have been to the prior employee that were at lower wages but as well there's a net to the other side there are times where a lot of the new addition positions we've hired above what we thought was the estimated salary amount was so they they kind of net out but in the end yes the vacancies do provide most of the savings here instrumental music fees is that just three, four, five in elementary and the private lessons after school or what's in that bucket those are the private the in-school private lessons we fund two positions out of that all right so my question is on the essential school health grant correct I didn't know about that grant it was not listed in the budget okay so I know that wasn't you know you're doing because you inherited most of the budget before you got here but it would be useful to make sure there's not other grants I mean if it's just the AEF grant or whatever that's a little bit different but these regular grants that are funding positions that we may have to fund ourselves if they go away it would be good to include them okay on the list of grants in the budget noted it was at a normally if a position is funded the grant goes away the position goes away it's happened with some of our Title I positions just this year even it's just in this particular case we just decided that it has been so difficult to have the nursing support that we needed to fund this it was disappointing that we didn't have to go back and look in the old budget sheets whether it wasn't there or not I think we've been a little bit inconsistent like safe and supportive school grants sometimes it's there sometimes it's not we're not getting one now I don't think right safe and supportive schools no not really yeah but yeah so we've been a little bit inconsistent I think the state funded grants have you typically been in there I don't know what funded the essential school grant school health grant state state it's odd that that one wasn't in there yeah so we'll add all of the grants that we know at the time when we're developing the budget to be part of the budget thank you alright so I have other things working on that report with the transition of the new facilities director so the next meeting we will have a presentation or a report to present to the school committee but he is transitioning well and they hired someone they hired an interim at the current moment actually was an internal employee on the town he's been great but I also wanted to think the facilities teams for all the work that they did in the summer to help prepare the schools it was also a great pleasure I didn't get to work with Mark initially but when he came back to help during the summer Mark was very great Mark Miano was very great helping the successful completion of the summer projects as you know he's director he came in acted part-time to help consult and provide support to the team and mentor but the facilities team did do work at all buildings at all schools the facilities team painted some capacity at every single building whether it was hallways, classrooms and they had the help of the student workers which we normally provide for student workers to help the team paint and they actually moved at a remarkable pace this year the custodial team was commending the performance of the students so that was great besides the flipping of the classrooms and obviously the normal wax on the floors they stalled various whiteboards and prepared converting of classrooms they converted the day care classroom at the hearty and as well as from here in the high school and they did also complete a lot of preventative maintenance work and did a lot of electrical work to set up things such as stowing like new iPads in the media center or assist with that all while the facilities department was doing their own central move in the high school to accommodate space for high school some other high school space for services for different team members of the facilities team so we'll provide a full update on facilities projects in the next meeting and then lastly is I just wanted to present what we submitted to are requesting from the capital plan so that did not necessarily make it into Novus but it's the table that you see in front of you so I will just basically explain the chart and it's separated by the categories of the town using the capital planning process we at this time of the year at the end of August we're submitting the request for the upcoming fiscal year as well as setting up additional four years of what we're anticipating and then it goes to a process where we meet a few times throughout the year to try to vet all of the submissions and see what will get approved or be proposed to bring to town meeting necessarily get approved not everything on this list may not get approved some things get reshuffled around based on priorities or based on other emergency needs of the towns or schools and so on here I'm showing the five-year plan that I propose actually there's a ten-year plan to this within is the funding sources that I add to this particular document to spell out this is the first year getting some energy efficiency projects Ken Pruitt is one of the coordinators on energy efficiencies in town and so we collaborated in trying to determine how to fund projects at the same time get most of the project that he works on uses the Green Communities Grants and so they've been awarded year after year to Arlington but they may not be getting as many awards because the town has not necessarily always contributed a portion to a matching part of it so the idea is a lot of these projects are capital related is to try to get some funds that will be supported from the town to make the payback look better so we can get more likely get awarded for some of these projects at the same time it will also in this capital plan we planned last year we had two playground projects that were approved they were under well they were estimated lower they were the estimates were low compared to what the bids came in when we actually went after the design phase and got the construction documents and put it out for bid this year we are going to request additional funds to try and other things are just general equipment like school buses changing or vehicle changes we are requesting some additional vehicles in the next few years not additional vehicles but replacement of vehicles in the facilities apartment to try to actually make vehicles able to do plowing to bring some more of the snow removal back in house versus relying on an outside vendor that's basically something well another notable is the hardy roof I think that some people have heard that there's been problems with the hardy so the hardy roof is out in 2024 but that's due to we have to complete the replacement of the roof top units at the hardy first so before actually trying to install or fix the roof and that's all in this plan I could have just speak first so first thank you for presenting this previously we hadn't been presented with the plan at all last year I think we got the plan after it been submitted I guess this has been submitted I think it's maybe it's worth reaching out to MASC but I'm still uncomfortable with a capital request going to the capital planning committee without being reviewed by us first it's a little bit uncomfortable given the other project we've already requested and I think that would have been a useful conversation for us to have we can still have that conversation at another meeting or we can send it to budget subcommittee but I guess we need to think about I know this is due in August and so it's hard to prepare it in budget subcommittee could do it as well but I think we need to think about as a committee should we be having a role in this request process or is that really something that's typically delegated to administration so I would like to look into that I said this last year and you weren't here but I think both the roof replacement projects are very good projects for building already MSBA repair projects you may even want to do one at a time or package them or whatever and pull them earlier to at least start submitting those requests so something to work with the new facilities director on yes thank you Mr. Schlegman the energy efficiency projects are all lighting upgrade no well that's what we're putting under the energy efficiency projects for other projects that would be related to energy efficiency like the replacement of the boiler that's at the school location was that we put that on but it's on the hearty school the hearty boiler also in 2022 but there is a limit on how much the town can be awarded so we request a maximum of around $200,000 worth of the schools and towns so it's it's kind of a easy grab to do some of the projects that have easy bang to do that and the easy implementation and install but that does not mean that we are not going to work with Ken Pruitt on the another energy efficiency project with the hearty boiler which would save the district money as well so my question is how long does it take to recover the cost in terms of electricity savings so there's a formula that when you fill out the grant it calculates all that Ken Pruitt is better to answer that question so I'll try to come back with more information for you with that Mr. Heiner just for clarification of what you were asking for the issue on modulus for the bishop is in the upcoming fiscal year 21 that would be dealing with the capital planning budget coming up so we should I think we should be discussing that as soon as possible on that part with regard to Gibbs that's several years down the road I'm not saying we shouldn't discuss it but the priority should be those things that are affecting the 21 capital budget and where it is and things of that so I support the chair on that as soon as possible if I could say something that these projects are like outgoing years of placeholders right but if we may not get approved it we're still early in the game if we need to make a change we can still change that I probably we can't add anything but if something needs to be removed off of it so it's better to kind of request in versus and plan for instead of being in a situation where we're backed against the wall and we can't we'll be reacting in part in more complexться it's quite difficult to address but but there's a quick talk . I don't see I.T. anywhere on here on the the capital planning process I.T. is done in a separate And second, I'm wondering about the water penetration at Bishop. I thought we've done that once already. We have done different things at Bishop already, but the full range of updates, upgrades that we're gonna be done have not been completed. For example, the hill, if you look at it on the side that hasn't been done yet, I will say what we have done on the driveway side, at the parking lot side has been very successful. We put in a submarine door there, truly. It's designed for submarines so that water would not penetrate that area, but there's still more things that need to be updated with Bishop. Okay, so this isn't like the envelope. This is other things, right? Because we did the envelope, didn't we? We've done some things with it, if I may. Yes, okay. One of my concerns is Bishop is an ongoing issue. And if we had all the money in the world, we'd pick it up and move it away from the puddle that's sitting in. So every spring the water comes up and it comes up. We fix a spot, it comes up somewhere else. We fix a spot, and this is another indication of where it is. What we've done from what I've been told and what I've seen has been effective, but it has not solved the total problem over there. I think I was thrown because it says water penetration. We've used that term. And that sounds like envelope to me, and I thought we've done that because I'm pretty sure we have done that. But this is, I understand now what you're talking about. So it's more the description isn't. Yeah, I'll get clarification for you. It's all been planned out. This is something that was submitted prior. Yeah, okay, great. And part of the plan before I got here. No, I just, okay, those are my questions. Oh, is she coming? So I wanna go back to the modulars. So our goal is to try to get modulars at the Bishop for FY21 for the next school year, is that? Yeah, can I speak to that one? Yeah, whoever wants to. So we have a situation where if we added one more classroom at Bishop, we would have to eliminate an art or music room. Now, that's a possibility that that could happen. And we're developing a plan for next year in case that did happen. But if we look long term, we have this Bishop sort of sits right in the middle of the town and has three buffer zones, different schools that we have to look carefully at. But this is really putting the ore in the water. So the capital planning knows that this might be a possibility as Mr. Mason was saying that we have to, I think having a discussion here is really quite appropriate. Maybe it's facility subcommittee on this, perhaps earlier discussion. What we're going to do to alleviate some of the pressures that we're starting to see increasing there. If you look in the chart, they have sort of consistently mid-20s, you know, 24, 25-size classroom. And that, they would prefer a little bit fewer students, but they're fine with that. It's really that you can't have, we don't want to go into 27, 28, so we'd have to have another classroom and then where are we going to put the other classroom? So would there just be one unit or would you purchase two? Well, that's also part of it. I don't, it's possible to have one. I mean, that may be all that's necessary if we needed one more classroom. But it may not be, when they investigate, it may not be financially prudent to do it that way either. Okay, because I see we have, there's a meeting of the Facilities Subcommittee coming up, right? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yes. Yeah, so who's on that? It's you. Two of us. Okay, so. Left notes. Oh, just, oh yeah. So I just feel like it opens up a lot of questions about space that's comprehensive. It's sort of a district-wide, it feels like it's the beginning of a district-wide conversation. We have to go back and do a space analysis. Yeah, by the way, I'm not opposed to putting something in a plan as a placeholder to try to alert the Capital Planning Committee that this is what we need and to start thinking about this. And I totally support the idea of just putting things in there and starting to put our request in so they know what's coming. So that's not the question. That's not what I'm, that's not the issue I'm raising. The issue I'm raising is I think is a more comprehensive global strategic process that we may have to consider if we're talking about modular classrooms of the Gibbs in a few years and then modular classrooms at the Bishop next school year. So it just feels to me like with this, with this, these two, which is, I mean, these are, you know, the whole expenditures of the Capital Project of the town over, you know, $600,000 over, you know, several years is not a lot of money, but if there's a larger issue about school enrollment at the elementary schools, which I think we all know there is, there should probably be a more comprehensive discussion. I totally agree. Yeah, that's my... Yeah, that's what we did. We need to do a space analysis. We're looking at, I've already begun the process of trying to do an analysis on buffer zones, which we'll engage in more as we go on. Now this, when we had the last demographic analysis, we saw more growth on the east side of town. There's been some growth, but not at the level that we're starting to see now on the west side of town. And we need, for example, in the, that forecast, and even in our own forecast, we didn't see Pierce going to three classrooms as quickly as they have, and staying there. And they get into that number where they're, you know, they get smaller classrooms as a result, but at the same time, there would be huge classrooms if we didn't do three. But we need to take a look at all of that. And I think that that is something that facilities would be a good place to have that work done. Just mentioned, where are we on the getting information on demographics? We're still looking for a, Yeah. We're looking at the references of that furrow. Thank you. We don't have a big choice. I understand, but we're also in a spot. We need to have good figures to make good decisions. True. I will tell you that doing some of that already internally, working with Adam Kuroski, he and I have been working on it for the last month. So more to be talked about on this one. Yes, Morgan. I just, I want to just reiterate, I really want to go to capital planning with as good of a plan as possible.  They are plan oriented people. When they see something in a chart, they think that's what's oftentimes they're like, well, this is what's going to happen. And so I just, you know, it makes me really nervous to see, you know, modulars at Bishop, well, is that one? Is that two? Is that buy? Is that rent? And, and, you know, is that number even a good number? Because we, we were here, you know, four years ago talking about modulars at Stratton. And it was, like, we couldn't even get to a number. And so it was, it was just, it was kind of an unfortunate, it just, it didn't, I guess we're better than going with a, like, I don't want to go with a bad number because we're too good for that. So I just want to make sure that we're having the conversations, we're asking for what we want. We have good numbers because we have good people. So I just want to make sure that they're, that's reflecting who we are. So I did contact a vendor to get a rough estimate. So the cost of the modulars, this would be for two modular classrooms, whether we was to buy or to lease over the, the period of time that we were looking for, was going to be around $250,000. Now, if there's any prep work or whatnot, there's some buffer in there. But we won't know that information without a plan in terms of looking at where the modulars would go. Mr. Chippin? Do you have a modular number lower than what we were looking at a couple of years ago? Because I remember them just spiking when we were looking at what to do when we ended up going to add the permanent classrooms to Thompson and Hardy. It was, that's in the ballpark. Yeah. Yeah. They're expensive. Yeah, they're really expensive. And so if we don't have to go with modulars, we can work on our space issues a different way that would be ideal. The purpose of this is to put the four people that we are, we have space issues, continue to have space issues. And there's going to be some perhaps decisions that we would have to make together in terms of what we're going to do about that. And I agree, it's a good placeholder, but that number was very scary the last time I saw it. I'm wondering if I've become anesthetized or it's become more reasonable. That's why for the high school, we're very clever, not going to have modular classrooms. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we look what we have, we just try it and how expensive that was. And that's money you don't ever have any value in. Mrs. Yeah, so actually one question I'm wondering if I have a couple other questions. So you said it was the same price to buy or to lease? No, it was similar prices to buy or to lease over the period of time when we need the modules. Okay, got it. Yes, so obviously if we were to lease, it wouldn't be the $300,000 question that particular year. Okay, yeah, so just some small questions. One, the LED lighting upgrades, I assume that Thompson, Stratton and Gibbs have LED lights because they're new. So that leaves Audison and Hardy, are they LED at this point or? So Audison on the plan has phase two of the lighting which will wrap up whatever is going on. Oh, Audison's in there, okay. Actually then the only question is that Hardy then. And Hardy is being completed this year. So what you don't see is the projects that they're working on this year. Yeah, yeah, I just wanted to, okay. That's one question. The Audison step repair, which has been in the budget for years and keeps getting pushed out, was always in at 20,000. And now there's an extra 30,000. So what is that, what are the two stages? That was just a recommendation of Mark Miano when we were talking about the plan, but they had started work this year on some of the Audison step repair. And then some of the information that they got said, you may need some additional money in the outgoing year. So I just put the placeholder in. I haven't got a complete plan. I see, we don't know exactly how much that's gonna cost. Okay, and then that Hardy playground number, it looks pretty specific. What is the total cost then of the Hardy playground at? Well, the bids came in, the lowest bid came in around $874,000. Okay. Yeah, so after the design and whatever was less than that particular capital fund, this is the additional funds needed to meet that lowest bid. But we're not sure, and we're still working out what methods are we gonna do? Is it better to go out to rebid? Maybe we'll get more bidders and maybe something more competitive. It's like a lot of money. Yes. Yeah, I mean Magnolia costs like a quarter of a million, right, the whole Magnolia playground. So, although they didn't have a rubber surface, so I don't know if that's the issue, but. That is probably more than half the budget on these all of these projects. Right, which I know is not recommended by some people. The part of the reason we think that it came in high, but I think they're gonna come in higher than what was estimated is that the qualifications they put on the bid in terms of being completed by November and so there were different specifications. Got it. That was a big part of it. So that's why the question is, should we rebid this? Right, right. And when should we rebid it? Got it. Great. Is that complete your report? That is it. All right, thank you for all those updates. You're busy too. All right, well, I only have two additional things. You've been having lots of reports tonight. I recognize that, but I do want to talk a little bit more about the high school. And again, take this opportunity again to say thank you to the town because we've been moving forward quite earnestly over the summer. There's been lots of meetings, many different subgroups and as you get, we're in the design development phase. And we are, the reason for these meetings is a lot of details that have to be worked out in this design because we go to cost estimators for this stage in November. And then following that, we will perhaps have to do some adjustments based on how the costs come in versus what the budget is because we have a budget for the high school. That's our budget. And so it's not, we adjust to what we need. And sometimes it's not, just some small adjustments can make a big difference too in cost. So at any rate, we're not quite there yet on making decisions about value engineering, but that is happening and there's going to be a community form. It's going to be on October 30th. This will be a chance for the community to come and hear updates about the project. Have a chance to ask questions. And we'll be advertising that more. Dr. Allison Ampe who's on the communication subcommittee and might want to say a little bit more about the forum. Now the forum's still underway, but much earlier than that will be at town day. And we're going to have a booth. We'll have two members of the building committee at all times, plus members of the construction team and architects and the construction, the owner's project manager. So if anyone has any questions, it's a great time. Come by, find us, talk to us, we'll have pictures, we'll have models, we'll have a couple laptops to show our fly through. So there'll be lots to see. All that materials are being gathered today, ready to be ready to go. And it's in the same place that was last year. So it's sort of halfway down toward Pleasant Street from town hall. And at 11 o'clock, I'll put another pitch in for our music groups, the jazz bands are practicing and we have magicals that are gonna perform on the steps, on the stage at 11 o'clock. So you can go to the music and then you can walk down to the booth or booth and then the music. So there'll be more updates as we go along. I also have one last report and this is actually from Dave Goode because being ready for a smooth opening involves many, many people in many different ways. And I think it's important for you to know the extent of the IT involvement this summer because you asked the question about the IT budget. Um, I don't know if we can see that too well. So in the current technology plan, the third, fourth and fifth grades at the Pierce Bracket, Dallin and Bishop receive new Chromebooks and carts for each classroom at these grades. So that involved having a thousand Chromebooks to the above classrooms, which all had to be imaged and set up by our IT staff. So that was an amazing accomplishment this summer. In addition to that, they outfitted a two new high school science classrooms with laptop cart and Chromebook cart and short throw projectors. Those two science, we've had some rearranging of classrooms because our enrollment is growing and last year we were in the situation with science that we had like 95% usage of our classrooms which was almost impossible to schedule all the classes into them. But anyway, that's happened over the summer. The high school math lab was upgraded with two new Chromebook carts and new Chromebooks. And all schools, except for the high school, which will be a huge challenge, have been upgraded to the new VoIP, voice over internet protocol, telephone system. It's in high schools in the process of being scheduled. It's been a little bumpy, I won't say it, but it definitely has been a huge accomplishment of the technology department in getting this accomplished. So we're also replacing aging PCs in the Odyssey Media Center with Chromebooks. And we've had more Chromebooks given to the ELL department and we've added 25 new iPads and carts to the new first grade classroom at the Stratton. We've increased, now this one's really important actually, we increased the district's internet bandwidth capacity to six gigs. Couple years ago I had gone to a conference and heard that really the recommended ratio was one gig for a thousand students. And at that time we had one gig and in these few years we've been working steadily to getting us up to six gigs, which we now have accomplished because we now have 6,000 students. So this has been a terrific piece of work. And so then there's just the upgrading and the removing of Chromebooks and it's just a lot of devices that they keep track of in the district, both in terms of just keeping track of them, imaging them, repairing them, distributing, ordering all of that. So I wanna thank the IT department and all of this is in the IT part of the capital plan that they get money for. So Dave Good, who is both the town and school director of technology is going to, we're gonna schedule him sometime this fall to come in and talk about a number of these initiatives and just the big picture of technology. So that completes my report. Mr. Schumann? Question popped up on the Erellington list over the possibility of some little critter hanging around the Gibbs, a conjecture had it at baby possums. But I wonder if you heard about that or know anything about. Haven't heard about possums at Gibbs. Wouldn't be surprised that I haven't heard about. I've heard about rats. Well, I've heard about the rats, but then the conjecture said, well, they don't really look like rats, they look like baby possums. So I don't know, but there was something over there at the start of school. Possums are good, they eat bugs. Yeah, they are good. So if we got possums, we're happy. If we got rats, hmm. We have more rats. The town has a major problem. The town has a big problem. Yeah, no, there's a lot of rats in town. Four-legged we're talking about now. Yeah, I know. Just want to clarify. I have a quick question about the high school project. Everybody keeps asking me, are we still on schedule to start July 1st? Is that still under review? Or the plan is still the break ground in the spring of 2020. Great. Today I was at a meeting with all the phasing diagrams. When we're going to do what? Actually, we start doing some geothermal and we do some work in the front lawn. There's just, it's definitely on track. What do you have for flax? We've been working on the timing schedule, so that's why I'm just checking. So my understanding right now is that we'll be doing what's called pre-work, which is enabling, and that's going to start in spring 2020 and go through the summer and then construction is going to start at the end. But it's all, it's on schedule. It's just, this is what the schedule is. But ground breaking, plan for a ground breaking like a ceremony sometime in the spring. I'm not. I'm not with the MSBA, I'm with the MSBA though. Yeah, I'm just not sure if you're going to do ground working for the pre-work or for the. Well, it'll be a ceremony, right. Yeah. You get your goals in shovel once. I'm being picking. Do I see you have a community forum scheduled for October 30th? Yeah, okay, then you've got a community forum scheduled for October 30th, market calendars. All right, anything else? Go for it. All right, so the next item is appointment of Dr. Bodeat as the voting member of the EDCO collaborative board from the Articles of Agreement. Each district member executing this agreement shall annually appoint the superintendent of schools or one school committee member as a voting member of the collaborative board. Dr. Bodeat's traditionally served on the committee. I did note that there are three towns that send school committee members as their representative instead of their superintendent. So just in the future, if anybody is interested, that's something we could think about, but for now it's Dr. Bodeat. So can I get a motion to. So we'll second. All right, to appoint Dr. Bodeat to the voting member of the EDCO collaborative board. Any discussion? All those in favor? Aye. All those opposed? Any abstentions? Unanimous, thank you. The consent agenda, all items listed with an asterisk are considered to be routine and will be enacted in one motion. There'll be no separate discussions of these items unless a member of the committee so requests in which event the item will be considered in normal sequence. Approval of warrant, warrant number 19279 dated 71219 in the amount of 553709.45 warrant number 200020 dated 81819 in the amount of 687685.38 warrant number 2041 dated 82719 in the amount of 446784.40 pool of minutes from June 13th, 2019 regular meeting minutes and there's no trip for approval. So move. Can we pull the minutes? Sure. Okay. Which minutes? Oh, there's only one. There's only one. So approval of the other items, the warrants. All those in favor? Aye. Yes. Any opposed? Abstentions? All right, that's unanimous. Then the minutes. Dr. Pallas-Nampi. I'm sorry, I hadn't downloaded them. And is this where we, are these the minutes that Mr. Spiegel took? Okay. I didn't, he had asked me to send him my comments to add to the minutes and I didn't. And I'm wondering if they could be approved with the understanding. I'll submit my comments and they'll be added. We can pull them the next time. Okay. Very comprehensive. My tail. I'm not the, I'm not a very different style. Yeah. Try to catch everything. All right. Okay. So next item is discuss vote appointments to subcommittees. So that, pull up the list. So we have a non-voting representative on the town election modernization committee and Ms. Seuss has generously volunteered to serve on that. We had discussed previously that with the announcement from Dr. Bode that we wanted to put together a search process committee for the superintendent's position just to be clear. This is not the search committee. This is a committee to help us design the process for conducting the search. So where we have plenty of time, we have fortunate the luxury of time that we can very carefully select, typically select a consultant, design a community input process, create a position description, do all of that in this school year and then hit the ground running in the following school year with opening the position when the consultant decides that's best. So I am proposing that Mr. Schluckman be the chair, Dr. Allison Ampe and Ms. Seuss be the members of that search process committee. And also I had left the negotiation subcommittees empty because I didn't know that didn't expect to have negotiations, but we do expect to have some issues to negotiate with the AA. So Mr. Schluckman and myself are proposed for that. Is there any discussion? Yes, Dr. Allison Ampe. I think we have a motion to create the search process of committee. Yes, yes we do. Yes, Mr. Hanner. I mean, just a brief discussion on, you just mentioned the idea that having that process committee put the process in place for us to start next year. I personally feel that we need more than a year. We should have more than a year to do it. So I guess I'm suggesting a report date back from that process committee, probably the end of February, the beginning of March. I'd like to suggest that as part of the motion. Sure, sure. All right, so we do need, let's take each item separately. Let's get a motion to appoint Ms. Seuss to the election modernization committee. So moved. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Who seconded that? Oh, sorry. I will. I can second. Anyone? All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Unanimous. And now a motion to create a search process committee with the members, Paul Schlick, Minister of Chair. We need to say what the committee's supposed to do. Yes. Yes. Do you want to do two motions for a establishment committee and then? I think we can do it all in one motion. Doesn't really matter. Thank you. Establish a search process committee with Mr. Schlick, Minister of Chair, Dr. Allison Ampion and Ms. Seuss as members. The purpose of the search process committee is to design the process for conducting the superintendent's search with an interim or with a report back to the committee no later than March 30th. Early March? What's it? March 15th. Thank you. No later than it can be earlier. March, in March. Mr. Schlickman? Yeah, I'd like to get going with this pretty quickly. What we really need to do is establish what sort of community process we want to do and then come up with an RFP that would cover what we're envisioning. And that's the task in the end product that I would deliverable, so to speak. I would like to have by March so that we have that all voted on. We've got an RFP ready to go and we can then go and put out the RFP. Secure a consultant in the spring and be ready to go in the end of late spring, early summer and be able to advertise the position in the beginning of September. So you've been the most so moved. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. All right, is this? Sorry, just one more thing. Further discussion? Yep. So I've been collecting some documents. Mr. Schlickman has given me some stuff and Susanna Osvedo has given me some stuff from the search that was done in 2005. And so I will have a packet to share with people for just to help us know what this process is. Mr. Schlickman was involved in that. Oh yeah, yeah, I was sure. You probably remember it well, but you may remember that well, yeah. But they're very, very comprehensive documents. It's helpful to look at. So I'll share with everyone. 2005 search was exemplary. All right, any further discussion? Okay, all those in favor? Aye. Any opposed or abstentions? Great, unanimous. And then finally to have Mr. Schlickman and myself serve on the AEA negotiation subcommittee. Second. Any discussion? All right, all those in favor? Aye. Any opposed or abstentions? Unanimous. Great, thank you. Now we have some reappointments. So we have some existing members of the Arlington Human Rights Commission and the Rainbow Commission who have agreed to continue to serve.  Just that I reached out, we were supposed to do this in spring, but we sort of ran out of time. I reached out to each of these members, had a brief conversation, and they are all excited to continue, so I'd like to recommend their appointment. Yes, the select board does this as a consent agenda item, but we haven't really had that practice, so I just put it as a separate item. I think we'd be building a motion to do that. Mr. Sir, do you mind? So I move that we reappoint Christine Kearney, Sharon Grossman and Nick Minton. Isn't it? Oh, yeah. To the Human Rights Commission. No, Minton, yeah. And Anna Watson of the Rainbow Coalition. Any discussion? All those in favor? Yes. Any opposed or abstentions? Great. So we should send them notices. Thank you. Subcommittee and liaison reports. Budget. Budget has nothing to report, but we'll be meeting soon. Can you two tell me what your schedule is so that I can set up your... Yeah, just give us the times of the weeks you're in. Yeah. Policies and procedures. We received correspondence from Dr. Seuss, asking questions about some of the newly adopted policies. So I guess that'll be on the agenda next week. Thank you. Off the page. Who's next? Curriculum, Instruction and Assessment Accountability. Ms. Morgan. Nothing to report. Okay, community relations. Ms. Seuss. Yes, we had a meeting on late August. We had a discussion on the Oriental Human Rights Committee documents that we've been working on for two years. The school committee made some suggestions that those suggestions are back with them. They're meeting soon. I hope to bring them to us next meeting, so. And I'll fill in a lot more detail when we do. We also had some parents. We had a, so I met with a superintendent committee this summer with some after-school programs. They were very cooperative, understood the frustration that the community has. These are, I met with the in-school programs that are not under district control. So these are the private programs that are not under district control. They understood the community frustration about different deadlines, different processes across schools, and we came to an agreement that there would be a common calendar and that there would be common procedures for applications and a common sort of approach to dealing with the waiting list. So that was great. We also had some parents, so come to us and express frustration about the programs being too small, communication still being poor. There are some decisions that have been made by a town program, Arlington Rec, about busing that they were upset with, which isn't really under our purview, but there was some discussion about that. So just to say that this is still very much a concern for the community. This is not something that we are done with, that we have still met a lot of discussion to do, and that we've made some progress. We've made some progress on the easy things, and we need to go back and really grapple with the harder problems. So that was what else did we do. There was a very brief discussion on the buffer zone, just sort of the understanding of the process that we were sort of beginning. The superintendent and her team were beginning to look at buffer zone issues that will then be brought to some committee, that may be community rights, maybe something else, and then brought out to the community over the course of this year. That sounds right to then be potentially, the understanding I got, and the correct is that there won't be any changes for the 2021 school year that we're really looking out farther to the 21-22 school year, but it is a pressing problem to look at. And I think that's it that we really, we didn't get to some things on the agenda. Okay, facilities. First meeting of the year will be on September 18th, 6 p.m. in this room. Okay. Legal services. Nothing at this time. Active. Online and high school building committee, anything else? So it's not listed, but the calendar committee. Oh yeah. Actually, I was gonna report that out in a different place, but we had a meeting, what was it, Tuesday? Is that Tuesday? Yeah. So the calendar committee, which is a superintendent committee, though I'm sort of the school committee person on that, has decided to focus this year only on the question of religious holidays. So they could have discussed the labor day issue with the timing of the contract with teachers that doesn't really make sense to discuss this year. And so the focus is gonna be on religious holidays. And the question really is whether we need to add holidays to reflect the diversity of our community or whether we should remove holidays and if that's a decision, how to do that in a way that makes it very clear to the community and to teachers the importance of these holidays for our community and how that gets respected and honored. So there's going to be a forum in probably late October, early November, where we wanna hear from as many people as possible before any recommendation is made to the school committee. There will be a recommendation coming back to the school committee, I'm thinking December around that time. Great, thank you. Liaison reports, anybody? Announcements, Mr. Heiner. Please stop by the rotary booth on town day to purchase a flag for your hero. These flags will be on display in front of the high school from October 24th to November 12th. Last year at the high school for a while. All right, any future agenda items? Do we have an executive session? All right. Yes, Mr. Heiner. Move to adjourn. Yeah, great. Second. Second. Second. All those in favor? Aye. We're adjourned.