Good evening, everyone. Welcome to another meeting of the Yerlington Board of Selection. We are not dealing with traffic light issues tonight. We are still in our, this is really the school committee. Despite rumors of a coup in town, we are not running the place. Don't blame us for the traffic light. We're here for the duration while we have a defective elevator at the high school. Our meetings must be ADA compliant, so that's why we've been hanging out here since the beginning of the school year. We've enjoyed these surroundings. Superintendent Voting, do we have a report on the elevator? How are they doing? We're in two weeks, if not one, we're out. We'll be here next week. I understand we had to contact the curator of the elevator museum in order to get the requisite parts to fix this thing. And how noisy is it? And you're right next to it. You're right at the center of the action. In any case, the first item on our agenda in these beautiful quarters is public participation. The rules are basically that people under public participation have three minutes to speak to us. We customarily do not respond in an open session. We may schedule things for an agenda item at a later time or refer them to subcommittee if we deem to need so, but we do not act on things that are not on our agenda tonight. So the first person is Jeff Haddon from Dallin. Good evening. My name is Jeff Haddon. I live at 190 Sylvia Street. And I'm the proud parent of a current Dallin first grader as well as two future Dallin students. To borrow a line from Dr. McKibb in September 24th enrollment presentation, my family and I are part of the enrollment problem. I'm here tonight to speak on behalf of Dallin first grade parents who remain concerned about our children's class size. This represents the third time this year that we've addressed the entire school committee. Having first sent a letter of concern signed by 50 parents through school committee chairs Schlickman and Dr. Bode on September 9th, followed by Barb Brandon addressing the committee on September 10th. Before I state our concerns, I'd like to be clear that we understand and appreciate the many constraints in terms of school facilities, budget, and increasing enrollment. As a group we've asked for and received the October enrollment reports from 2009 to 2015. We've attended the September 24th enrollment and space planning meeting. We've read both reports in great detail. We reviewed the school budget for fiscal years 2010 through 2016. And over the last month we've met individually with two members of this committee, our school's principal, and we have a meeting scheduled for next week with Dr. Bode. Our concern is that even with all the district wide challenges that our hometown faces, our children's first grade class is an outlier when compared to other K-2 cohorts, with no guarantee that it will improve next year or in their later elementary years. When our kids entered kindergarten last year, the October 2014 average class size of 24.7 was the highest of any kindergarten, first or second grade district wide. By the end of the year enrollment grew to an average class size of 25.7, which is two more than the next highest kindergarten, and 4.5 more than the average kindergarten. With our kids now in first grade, down class size continues to grow, reaching 81 students per the October 2015 enrollment report. The solution to this challenge was to add a combined kindergarten first grade classroom. While we agree that this one year stop gap has brought average class size down for the current year, if nothing is done for next year, the average down second grade class will jump to 27, representing the highest average class size of any K-2 grade since the buffer zone was implemented. Looking at down first grade versus the entire K-5 system, there are 10 grade cohorts of 80 kids or more, including Hardy and Thompson, first grade, who also have 81. All of these cohorts have four full-time classrooms, except Dallin, which has three and a half. If nothing is done for next year, the Dallin second grade will be the only grade in the system with 80 or more kids, but not for classrooms. We realize that class size is an important issue for the school committee as they look at district enrollment and plan for the future. Preventing these extra-large class sizes should be an ongoing high priority, given their impact on children's learning and development. Adding a fourth classroom for our children is an immediate step in the right direction. This is the change that we as parents are requesting. More importantly, this is the change that our children deserve as students in the Arlington public school system. Returning to three classrooms with an average of 27 children per class, be it next year or in their later elementary years, is not acceptable or equal. The addition of a fourth classroom will create an appropriate learning environment for next year and beyond. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Haddon. Next is Julie Rousio. Thank you so much for letting me have a chance to speak tonight. I actually wanted to touch upon two different things. So I work at the American Cancer Society, specifically as the community manager for Arlington. I've worked with the Arlington schools, specifically the high school for this little fourth year. And I've seen some tremendous growth and tremendous involvement from the school as well. The first thing that I wanted to touch on is something that's actually happening and taking place next Thursday, which is the American Cancer Society Great American Smoke Out. I know the school has a very involved Club 84. And I have shared this information with their leader as well. But just wanted to share it on a wider scale as well. We know that about 42 million Americans still smoke and tobacco use remains the largest preventable cause of disease and premature death in the U.S. As that number has decreased over the past 20 years, we know that there are still 3,000 children under the age of 18 who start smoking every day, whether that is cigarettes or any of the e-tobacco that is being promoted for younger students at this point. So the Great American Smoke Out is really a chance for people who are currently smoking to quit for one day and really start getting those benefits of not smoking. It doesn't take a lifetime to get benefits. It can happen in as little as 20 minutes. So that is just the first thing that we wanted to share about tonight. I have given Ms. Fitzgerald some information as well. We actually have designed programs for schools to be able to implement about tobacco prevention starting from grade kindergarten all the way through eighth grade. So just wanted to be able to share those with the school in general to hope that we can decrease that number even more and stop children from preventing smoking because that is such a huge and easy preventable thing that we can do. The second thing is Relay for Life. That happens every June at the high school. It has this year will actually be our 16th year. In year 14, the town of Arlington reached $1 million that they had raised in 14 years. And last year in year 15, we reached the $1.25 million mark. So very proud things for Arlington to be proud of as a whole and especially our youth because our event is about 85 to 90 percent students. So it's a huge thing for the youth to be able to be involved in and really show their philanthropic efforts and really bring the community together for a common cause that has hit so many of us especially with the events of this past year. So that was what I wanted to share. Thank you. Thank you very much. Ted Bowen. You might want to say, this was a sign-in sheet for attendees. Oh, okay. Okay, thank you very much. Anyone else for public participation? Seeing none, we'll go to the next agenda item, which is Technology Curriculum Presentation, Dr. Chesson. It's my pleasure to introduce Paul McKnight, who's a member of the teaching staff at Arlington High School. And we also have Kirsten Silverman. Perfect. Come on down. Yeah, you're going to start. So can you get Kirsten's first? As you are well aware through the generosity of the town and the Capital Building Committee, the Capital Committee and the Arlington Educational Foundation, we've had a significant influx of technology dollars into the district, and this is just, are just two examples of the many staff members who are really making strides at transforming their classrooms through the use of technology in order to better meet the needs of all students. Sure. So I'm Kirsten Silverman, and I'm currently teaching sixth at the Audison. And so we have iPads for every student in both the sixth grade and seventh grade in our cluster. Besides cleaning the filter. So one of the apps that I use often is Google Classroom. And so the nice thing about Google Classroom is that you can sort of share with students everything that you want them to do for a day. So this is one example of one day in my classroom when I had some students that needed to practice from a quiz and retake a quiz and other students who were able to have a choice in what they were doing. They were playing math practice games, and then I actually had other students who were doing extension of a different method for long division. So I had three different activities going on in my classroom at once, and I was able to manage all of them through the use of Google Classroom because the students knew exactly what they needed to do and where to find the materials. So it was all right in one place. And the other really nice thing about Google Classroom is that you can create digital files for students to interact with and then give everyone a copy of the file. So it automatically sends every student that's connected to Google Classroom a digital copy, and I'm going to show you on the next slide what this was. So I sent every student a couple slides with explaining everything and students were able to actually, you can't see it that well, use a protractor and measure the angles and label them and explain everything and they could record their voice and save it at the same time. So it makes thinking, students thinking a lot more visible because they don't just have to share their thinking and writing, they can also share it orally. So I could send it out through Google Classroom, students could take that file, put it and explain everything and then interact with it. And these are three other, they're not apps, but online places that I go often to get formative data from students. So Pear Deck is something that we're all using in the sixth grade right now, which is across between PowerPoints and the old clickers. And so students, we have slides that we present to students and then students can respond to them. As teachers, we can see in real time how students are answering the questions, which students are struggling, which students we need to work with more. It gives us data that we never had before and it saves everything that students are doing and then we can actually send it out to them and it creates individual files for each student. So they get the slides and all their answers and they can reflect on those through Google Docs and it all sort of works seamlessly without a lot of work from us, which we really like. Another one that I'm using a lot now is called Go Formative, which is really nice for math because something we always run into with math is that it's not easy for students to type their answers and so they really need to write them and that's something that's really nice about the iPad. Students can write right on the screens and so we can see their math symbols, we can see their drawings. And so in Go Formative, it can work like a quiz and it can work sort of as giving students feedback. Where students get a question, they respond to the question and again we can see their answers in real time. The nice thing about Go Formative is they don't have to wait for other students. They can advance to the next question on their own. So it's sort of a cross between Paradec and Socrative, which is the last one. So Socrative is again a student sort of feedback. We're getting formative data from students. It collects all their data but students advance to the next question pretty quickly. They're usually shorter questions, not something where they're drawing. They're just typing in an answer. Those are the three things I use the most for formative data, which is really nice. Mr. Heiner. Sorry. Let's begin with this last piece right here. Does it itself correct? Does it depend on you? Paradec does not. Go Formative can self-correct. And so if it's a multiple choice, it'll self-correct or if it's a short answer, it'll self-correct. I'm just concerned. When you say that they don't have to wait, they can go on. If they've made an error. Right. Do you don't want to reinforce negative? Well, Formative is... Paradec is something where you don't go on by yourself. So it's more of a whole class. I'll use that in the middle of a unit. So students will answer a question. We'll look at everyone's answers. We can see everyone's answers anonymously. And then we'll look at, okay, how do we do? Everybody picked the same wrong answer. So what are we doing wrong? Where are we making the mistake? Formative, you can do it both ways. So for example, I might use Formative for a quick quiz just to see how students are doing. So there I'm just collecting that data. But I can also have it immediately grade that and tell the students how they're doing. So I might do that right before a quiz. So it works both ways. Thank you. My other question, back to the very first slide, the multiple things going on. How do you manage that? Well, that's the nice thing about it, is you can sort of say to students, okay, you finished this. Now you can go on to the next thing, and they know exactly where to go, because it keeps it all in one place. And it stores this so that you can go back and look at it? Yes. And does it go into an individual file for them as well? Yes. Their results. So they know where they are individually. You know where they are as a whole group. Yeah. Any other questions? I talk really fast once I get going. Great. Thank you. Thank you. So while we're having Paul come up and get set up, one of the things I want to call to your attention is, so this is Kirsten's cluster is half sixth grade, half seventh grade. So not only does she have three things going on at the same time, but she also has two grades. The grades are not at the same time in the classroom, but she's prepping for two grades in multiple activities with the same group of students in the class at the same time. It allows her to do what we call high ceiling, low floor, so that those who have already mastered the standard can get enrichment. Those who are in the middle can practice the standard, and those who need some re-teaching in order to meet the standard can get that at the same time. Mr. Hinner? Just a quick question on that. You said sixth and seventh graders. Are they in the same class? No. She has three classes of sixth graders and two classes of seventh graders. But they have the same four teachers. Okay. I misunderstood. I thought you meant you had two classes in the room at the same time. No. She's good, but she's not that great. I misunderstood. I was going to say she is really fantastic. And she got all of that. She's awesome. You are anyway. Okay. Thank you. My name is... I'm an English teacher at the high school. I teach ninth grade and eleventh grade. A little background before explaining how... I'm using Chromebooks. One of the things that we've appreciated so much is the ability to have some input into the tools that we use, where other departments favored... other levels have favored iPads. We really wanted the Chromebooks. We felt that that really worked in the English language arts and some of the humanities. A year ago, we had 30 Chromebooks available for distribution among the English department. We signed these out whenever we wanted to use them in our classrooms. On the basis of the success and the popularity of those, we decided, myself, the Nicolets and Justin Barossa, two other English teachers applied through the grant process and each to have a set of the Chromebooks in their rooms. So now that we're really starting to pilot some one-on-one and different uses of the devices, this also came about because I participated in the EdTech teacher T21 course last year, along with a lot of the other high school teachers, which was really great for also introducing us to new apps at the same time. What I'd like to talk about is some of the different ways that we're starting to use these and ways that we feel that they're really transforming the student learning, making our lives easier and essentially also ways that they're not just word processors that we're learning to use them in different types of tools, which I think also came about because of the EdTech teacher course. Just an overview before I want to focus on a particular method I've been trying out with discussions, but some of the various applications that these are really useful for. So a big part of that is classroom management, as Christy talked about with the Google classroom, the ability to communicate with students, the ability to send them each a file that they can edit and work on and collect, just even as a way of submitting and papers and assignments and having those all sort of in one place. That's good for us as teachers. It's also, I think, good for students because many of them have several teachers who are all using this application. Obviously, you would expect that we'd be using it for writing, but as you know, the Google apps have all of the collaborative tools of editing suggesting, commenting. There's even apps for audio commentary, as well as written comments. Reading, digital reading, I hadn't really thought about that as even a thing in and of itself, but there are ways in which we can use certain applications to really transform even the reading. I'll briefly show you one of those. There are ways to change the ways that we have discussions in the classroom which are a staple, and as you know, whether it's iPads or Chromebooks, it opens up a lot of tools to have students different ways of showing what they are learning. The more what is making, ramping up the facility and I think the rapid increase with which we can use these are the way that the apps themselves are changing. I think what we are finding with the great thing about so many of these cloud-based or web-based apps is that you can get to them from anything. Students can even go on their phones and submit an assignment to Google Classroom because it's there or they can go home and work on it, desktops, laptops, iPads. So they're very convenient, they're very accessible. Most of these apps are now talking to each other, so there's the integration, or many of them are talking to each other. Of course, a benefit for students is that things are not lost as you were asking that the work that they do gets saved in many formats and can be saved and is auto-saved, so that's not so great because it gets harder for students to say, the dog ate my homework because we know where it is in the cloud. And this, I think for student learning, this idea of being able to see what students are thinking, making that thinking visible, knowing what they are learning where they are stuck in ways that we couldn't see before. We were making educated guesses or looking at just heads but not knowing what was in them. This is a real wonderful benefit of so many of the applications that we're using. And then as with this particular process, you'll see there's a novelty item, of course, with some of the technology with students and some of them are just engaging in ways because they are visual, they're dynamic. And of course, anytime we get students excited or engaged, they're involved in their learning. I know that you have been introduced to the SAMR model, which we learned about in faculty meetings and in the T-21 class. And this is this idea of, at one point, it would be very easy just to sort of use these devices to substitute for an old task. And I think especially in the English classroom, we said, well, you know, we can paper and pencil, or we can still read the books. Why would we want to read it on the Kindle, et cetera? Why, you know, do we need to have a Chromebook in the classroom instead of going to a lab? Well, I hope that I can give you an idea of the fact that some of these applications really are letting us do things that we couldn't do before and enhancing, if not fundamentally changing, learning. I have not used this. I played around with it, but I just learned about this from one of the middle school teachers, this program called Actively Learn. And this would be an example. I'm going to try to focus on things that I would do in the classroom. Actively Learn is an application, a digital reading application. So what you can do with Actively Learn is take from a catalog or embed with your own classic texts and what you can embed here are questions, open response questions, short answer questions, multiple choice questions that can act as gatekeepers so that students can work through and then they stop when you want them to at a question and ask for that check of comprehension. So if you can imagine, I have a couple of classes of the curriculum A level students and many foreign exchange students in there too who are all reading the Scarlet Letter or Huckleberry Finn. I know that these are challenging texts for students. And if you imagine them all, not just in their books, where I don't know if they're reading the books in the classroom with what they're understanding, but if they're navigating through this online and they're reading and then they come to a question and they have to answer a comprehension question. And I can, with my device, monitor how they answered. I can see all of their answers to that question. They can progress through as they are. Of course they could probably open up a browser page and look for the answer but, you know, we'll... But I would walk around and make sure that they weren't doing that. But this is an idea of... You can sort of... And you can use this application to actually assign to push out reading assignments. But it's an example and, of course, they can click on any word and look it up. They can select the text and do text to speech if they want to hear it. And these are some of the ways in which digital reading can be fundamentally have enhancements that the text itself may not. Of course, I don't expect them to read the whole thing online. I wouldn't want them to. They still have the novels and they can read at home. Something I definitely plan to try. So the very method I would like to talk about in a little bit more detail is a discussion, a way that I've changed up some of my discussions using several applications. It seems like a long, maybe a cumbersome process. It's amazing how quick this is based on the ease which these applications are changing. So very quickly, an overview. As a reading assignment, students read a text, a short story, a couple of chapters. I have a Google form that I just kind of replicate maybe once every week I can use this. So the students after reading just... There's some places where they can put in questions that they have about the reading. And then using an application called Today's Meet, I create on the spot a discussion, a chat room. Using the Google Classroom, I can quickly share a link to that. And then working in groups of three, I will use their questions and the students will confer and share their responses using this chat room. So I have some screenshots here just to kind of elaborate on this. Here's a shot of what that Google form looks like. I'd like students, even though I'm touting technology here, I also want to make sure that students aren't being asked to spend a lot of time looking on a screen as part of their homework. So this is a very brief response. Again, I have a copy of this that can easily replicate it. This is an AP class reading, Nathaniel Hawthorne, short story. So there's a place for them to fill out and further down, they have options for summarizing the reading of three words, posing a clarification question and posing discussion questions. We've also worked with, as a department, on teaching students how to ask better questions and more sophisticated questions. I was using this last year as a way of knowing before the lesson started what my students had struggled with with the reading and knowing ahead of time what some discussion questions that they might ask, as opposed to my own, and using those as the basis of class discussion. At the same time, that's an additional level of preparation and reading before I get into the classroom. And so it can be a lot to catch up on to make sure you take that extra preparation step, but it's still that idea of making the thinking visible and the formative assessment. Here's an example of what that chart populates. The timestamps show me when students complete the assignment, that they've done it on time. The second circle here shows some of the words that they would have come up with for the story. I've turned these into the word clouds so we can see what are big themes. And then here's the view where I can actually see their discussion questions. This is what I will have, the pages that I will have open in class. Once we are in, so that I can see if there are clarification questions and then look for trends in the questions that they ask. When class starts, you do not need an account for this application. Today's Meet, you very quickly make a name for your room. You can decide how long you're going to have the conversation open for. That's as easy as it is to set up. This is what the interface looks like. You enter your name. I ask the students to combine their first names to be a team name. And you have a 140 character box to post a message. In the classroom, group students, I think the key to this is not one-to-one, which would be too many voices in the discussion, but three-to-one. And so then as a team, they are sort of responding to the discussion. While I'm making that chat room, they're logging on. Someone's checking their email. Another feature of a classroom is how quickly you can just send out an email. You've got all your students, so whoever logs on to that Chromebook goes to his or her email, follows the link, and then they are, and then this is what happens. So what I found is really useful here is then I'm moderating the discussion using their questions. So if there's a clarification question, I'll put that out as Q1, and they will respond after a few minutes post another question, and I can keep going back to that chart. But also run with a question depending on still moderating discussion, see where the flow of conversation goes. Prompt for evidence. You can see that there's several quotes here. We had good answers, but not enough evidence. And then you see students here working as a group, going back to the short story. So they are having really two levels of discussion. I could take their questions and I could throw these out as class discussion questions, but you've got one student talking at a time. Here you could have 21 students talking at a time. Or I could have them work in small groups, but then, yes, they're all talking at a time, but there's no central class discussion that they're all contributing to or that I am keeping track of. So I can see what they're thinking. And that's essentially sort of how it runs. Another advantage of this application is it creates a transcript of the entire conversation. I thought that this works best if it runs for about 25 minutes or so, not an entire period. But it's amazing how much you have here. And here's some students working from what is the central symbol here to the central question of, is it better that we come clean about the sins that we have within us or keep them buried? And you can see that there's different points of view and it nicely set up a closing discussion. And there are things you could do with that transcript, provide it, have students go back and read through it, pick out ideas, write about those ideas. And this can be also a precursor to an actual follow-up class discussion. So there is still that level of participation. I have done this with all of my classes. I've asked them what they have thought about it, but the feedback has been entirely positive. They feel it is very engaging. They like it, it's fun. If you walk in, they're having a good time, but we're talking about the stories. Students have pointed out that this is less intimidating for the students that might otherwise refrain from speaking up in class. They have the benefit of conferring with other students, which helps clarify their thinking at the same time and see what other people in the class are thinking. And they all have felt that they've walked away with a better understanding of what it is, of what we've been reading. So that's basically the process, just one of many tools we could be using. Dr. Seuss. Oh yes, I have a few clarification questions and I'm going to throw them all together in a picture of the classroom. So I'm just sort of curious how many teachers are using these methods? How often? Also questions about are they all using Chromebooks or some of them using their own devices? Just sort of just a picture of what it looks like across. Right, so I would say in the English department I would say that probably over half of the department are using Chromebooks on a fairly regular basis. Again, there are three of us who have those in our room and we use them all the time, but other people are constantly asking to borrow them. The extent of which they're using them for apps like these is very, we're in the process of other people are trying this particular method. They might be using, I think it works when we talk to each other and other people take on the ideas. So I know several teachers have used that similar type of Google form for reading responses. They've been using today's meet for what we call a back channel during Socratic seminars, types of things. And for other tools instead, I think most probably two thirds of the teachers are using Classroom as a management tool and I think just sort of getting their feet wet I think with these different applications. I think that the level of exposure and integration is growing but varies. Are there any bring your own device type of things? Not really, not yet. I know there was some tough experimenting. I'm not sure if we've rolled it out yet. That's in the middle school. Bring your own device? Yes. At the high school? No, we started at the middle school this year. There's a few people that get on the high school but not very many. Okay, the principal had made an announcement last year saying that it was going to get to high school. We've been talking about it as this is being kind of like one step towards that. What would it look like if we took these, each had some of these devices and then we had students to bring in. I think one of the things that we found, as I said students can use their phones for some of these devices certainly to tweet 140 characters but at the same time they wouldn't be able to see a screen where you can see the whole conversation. I think we're still trying to figure out what that might look like. Okay, great. Mr. Thielman. Thank you, this is a great presentation. I'm just trying to get a picture of what the classroom looks like. I saw that, I don't know what slide it is, but there's a slide in there. Three students are on one Chromebook. Yep. And then you project on a screen, is that what you do? You can, I haven't. You don't, okay. No, I've got my own, I'm watching my own, for my own screen I'm watching the conversation going back to their questions and going back to see how the conversation is. You can have it on a screen, there's no need to in this case because they're all looking at the same. Oh, they're looking at the same. Yeah, they're all looking at the same conversation. Okay, so you have three, and it's three kids are on a Chromebook. Yeah. Thank you. Mr. Hayner. I think this is fantastic, and as a retired teacher, I envy you both with these awesome tools that you have. One minor question, the literature using is 18th century literature. Is your dictionary giving them those definitions? That's a very good question. The reason I ask is, I had an exchange student from Japan, and she was an AP class, and she was dealing with early 18th century language, and all she had was a 20, at that time, a 20th century dictionary, and it was not serving her well. Yeah. So just something to think, it's a minor thing. Yeah, no, it's a great point with the, especially with, yeah, the dictionaries built into the digital reading programs. Yeah. Is it, which level dictionary is it? I have to find out. I'll let you. Thank you. Dr. Allison Ampe. Thank you. So I understand, I see the last slide that has the student feedback. And I saw that the advantage of having the transcript of the conversation, but I'm just wondering, why else is this better than just having discussion, you know, open-ended with all the kids talking? Well, I certainly still do that, and do plenty of that. I think, again, in this case, when you're having a class discussion, you know, you've got one kid talking at the time. You may have three or four students who have their hands up ready to talk, and seven or eight who are listening, and nine or 10 who look like they're listening and not really present. And so I think that idea of, I've always tried to engage as many of them at the same time as I could. And so I think it's better in that. And as I said, the other alternative is, well, just put them in groups and have them talk about the questions and their small groups, and I do plenty of that as well. I think, again, what this does is allow me to, them also to be having a class discussion together and me to moderate that class discussion and really see what and respond to it by follow-up questions, probing for evidence, guide it a little bit. So I think it's getting more of the students thinking through the questions I want them to be thinking about. Thank you. Mr. Thiong. This is the first year we're using this, so we don't have any data to show if there's an improvement in grades or other assessments. Yeah. Right, right. So I think that that will be, that's something I'm definitely looking at. So this is largely about understanding, like in terms of the standards we're looking at, it's comprehension, understanding. A lot of this is about probing for better evidence and explaining those things. So it'll be interesting to see to follow-up. For me, the assessment that matters is when they write essays. How sophisticated are their ideas? How much of the evidence do they come back to? Do they come back to use? So this is the first quarter we're using this, right? Yeah. So you have no real... Do you have any... Do you have a sense as a dears of your instincts telling you anything or it's too early to tell? They... Anecdotally, I mean, again, I think the higher level of engagement in the class has to be benefitting their understanding of the text. They say that they understand more. I've been posting a question of, like, what has your group learned from this discussion today? And it's... The things they're posting are very insightful. So... But I'll be looking for that to see what... Thanks. The committee did get a report last... Many of these techniques were also used by the 610 cluster that did the one-to-one pilot last year, and the committee did get a report last year from that cluster that gave some evidence of increased student achievement, particularly time in learning. There was something like 12 or 13 additional hours that people had gotten in math last year because of the work that they were doing. But the thing I also want to caution, and actually Mr. McKnight and I were having a conversation about this beforehand, is that I actually asked him to come because he was being observed for, as part of the teacher evaluation system, and the director came to me and she said, I didn't know what to do. I said, what do you mean? She said, I'm... You know, I didn't know what to do. I went into the classroom and all the kids were working and the teacher was conferring with somebody and the kids were working in small groups and some kids were working by themselves. And there was nothing up on the board and how did they know what to do? So I went over to a kid and I said, so how do you know what to do? And they brought up Google Classroom and they say, see, we're going to do this and then we're supposed to do this and then we're supposed to do that. And she just said, boy, the world has changed. So if we keep trying to... This is a different, definite paradigm shift. And I think that we need to be cautious to not use an older paradigm to determine what success is. Well, if they're all engaged, that's usually... The step in the right direction. It should get a good evaluation if they're all engaged. Dr. Seuss. I was wondering if Dr. Cheson could speak about our plans for the future in terms of what seventh grade are going to look like, for example. What's going to happen at the high school? We're in the process of setting up the capital budget request for next year. A lot of what will happen will be dependent on that. We've shown some good interest in parents at the sixth grade level through participating in BYOD. The more parents that would participate in that, the more quickly we'd be able to spread things throughout the other grades at the school. We've put Chromebooks in and iPads in seventh and eighth grade. I'm waiting to get feedback from those teachers as to which device they will ultimately prefer. Again, at the high school level, the teachers could pick, and depending on the subject area. Also, the availability of... Biology really wanted iPads because of a book that they wanted of the ability to do online labs, simulations of dissections, et cetera. They really wanted to be able to do that. We'll have to look and see whether it's by department. That's definitely BYOD is the way we're looking to go. The BYOD is confusing to me because I know in sixth grade you can bring something but only a certain kind of iPad. I remember last year at the high school, they were saying that they were experimenting with the idea of students bringing different platforms and seeing if that would work. We're continuing. Little by little, if a student comes to the tech office and asks to have their device put on the network at the high school, we'll let them do that, but we didn't openly solicit that. We may not be experimenting with that as much. Not as much, but however, the teachers at the high school, particularly the class that Mr. McKnight talked about, really is a course in how to use technology on a device independent. So a lot of web-based tools so it really wouldn't make any difference which device the students brought in, but we didn't really want to stress the teachers out any more than there are stressed out, so that's why we kept it to one device in a classroom right now. So why do utopias need prisons? I love the question. I was just sitting there watching that slide go by and saying I'd love to hear what students have to say about that. It's really fascinating. Yeah, yeah. Slides. No, I was just wondering about the question that. Slide 16 showed a picture. Is this your classroom? This one? Yeah. Yes. That's a partition? It is a partition, yeah. How's that working for you? What's on the other side? The prison. Seriously, we're talking about facilities in the high school and seeing that we have somebody who's actually working in the building. This was actually old, old hall in the high school. I think at one point it might have been divided and it was actually Stacey Kitzis, the current librarian who we turned that into a classroom when we needed the room. She was the one that actually wanted to create that, not only a classroom but also a meeting room. Hence the seminar tables and it was one of the first rooms in the school that had the ceiling mounted, still the only ones that had the ceiling mounted projector. And then the partitions were set up because the room could be shared. I think there were two teachers and one had desks behind there. From what I understand, the English department has some of the best rooms in the school. Yes. Although it's cubicle dividers. Okay. Any other questions? One thing I noticed is, and only because I'm worrying about this about my own students as well, the time stamps on when these students put their stuff in, I'm noticing 11 o'clock, 12 o'clock, 12 o' eight in the morning. We got to talk to them about that. They should be asleep at 08 on 1 6, 11 6. By the way, Just saying. I never... I know it's not your fault. I'm not in any way saying it's a bad thing. This is... Right. We were doing the same thing at our school. We're noticing that more and more, as we have more things, and kids are checking them in online, and we see kids submitting homework at 10, 11, 12 o'clock at night. Those are also having... It's good because we're starting to have those conversations about what are you doing at midnight hosting your homework? Like, come on, go to bed. If you have a discussion post or any online post, I usually give them two or three days' notice. I usually don't like to say, here's something I like you to post by tomorrow. Rare. So that's on them. Even with two or three days, they're still posting it for the last minute. That's another little piece of information we didn't have before. Yeah, exactly. I think it's very interesting information. Thank you. Thank you very much. Next order of business will be the superintendent's annual evaluation. I just want to remind the committee, and probably more than just the committee, the public that this is a string in the accountability network for the district and for any good public school system. The fact that the superintendent is accountable to this committee and this committee is accountable to the voters of Arlington who review our work. This is one of the most important things we do and this committee has taken this assignment, as always, very seriously. One of the things is is that we are operating under the relatively new state evaluation system and I was at a conference today and yesterday pertaining to your evaluation and I think the analogy is that it's a rather rigid system and it feels like a new pair of boat shoes and until you break them in and get them loose and move off the rigid dot the i's across the t's into where everybody's comfortable with the thing, I don't think we're going to be in the proper place and one of the things that you'll notice when we get through here is that we were hanging up on the superintendent goals and there was some variance between the members in terms of how we set that up and did that evaluation. I tried to bring commonality into the concatenated document but I think that just a note for the future chair of the committee, Dr. Seuss is that the one thing we should be doing when we do this next year is pre-populate the superintendent's goals within the form before it is passed out to the committee so that we're all on the same playing field. Other than that, I think there was a lot of thought pertaining to the instrument and Mr. Hayner asked to make a remark before we proceed. Thank you. What I'm about to say relates to me and not a statement on my fellow members. In order for me to be objective evaluating the superintendent, I relied on the evidence that the superintendent provided and limited my evaluation to the evidence the superintendent gave to the committee. This evidence does not relate specifically to each of the subcategories in each area, therefore I did not rate them. I provided an overall rating for each topic. Thank you. Okay. Any other comments before we get started? Now, Dr. Allison Ampe. Can you just explain how you're going to go about this? That's exactly what I'm about to do. What I have done is I have prepared a summary document by which I have concatenated the individual responses of all members of the committee. This will be the official document going forth and the documents that you submitted to the Karen and myself will remain as evidence as well as part of the official document. But this is going to be the public document that is most readily available to people. I have tried to be very faithful in terms of representing everybody's viewpoint on this and concatenating everything reasonably. What we are going to do is we are going to start on page 6 of the Concatenation. Concatenation, that is a good word. I love that word, yes. It's one of my favorite words. Let me finish the explanation and then I'll entertain questions. We're going to start with standard one. We're going to work through the four standards. Then we're going to come back to the superintendent's goals and then the overall. The thing that I want to do through this is to first before I read off the sub-scores and the overall scores in each area is to check with you and verify the ratings that I put forth here, representing the ratings that you inscribed in your individual forms. At the conclusion of this I will place in something in the overall column. Now, unfortunately or fortunately for what it is, is that what you say in this part of the meeting becomes part of the public record for the superintendent's evaluation. We have traditionally limited ourselves to reading the comments that you have made in your evaluation document, as Karen will need to revise the words within this if you say something new within the process. You do not need to read all of your comments for it to remain because this is the public document, but I would invite everyone to read the comments that you made under each standard in the overall summary allowed so it is a visual record that people who are watching the meeting can understand where we are at. Are there any questions about how we will proceed? Hearing none, Dr. Allison Ampe, did you have a question or a comment? Can you just fix my name in the column? Oh, okay. Yeah, we are short in L, aren't we? I apologize. And then it just repeated itself through the whole thing. I did this about, you know those time stamps? Okay. Standard one is instructional leadership. There are five sub areas. Standard one, and I will note how people evaluated over the sub areas and then the overall ratings. Mr. Heiner did not rate any of the sub areas. Among the rest of us on curriculum, all rated the superintendent proficient with the exception of Mr. Thielman who rated the superintendent exemplary. On one B instruction, all rated the superintendent proficient. On one C assessment, Dr. Allison Ampe rated the superintendent needs improvement. Dr. Seuss rated the superintendent exemplary, the rest rated proficient. For evaluation, Mr. Pierce rated the superintendent needs improvement. Ms. Darts did not rate that the rest rated it proficient. Data informed decision making, Dr. Seuss and Mr. Thielman rated the superintendent exemplary, the rest rated proficient. For the overall rating, the six members with the exception of Mr. Heiner rated the superintendent proficient. Mr. Heiner rated the superintendent unsatisfactory. Does this reading reflect your views? Okay, fine. We are going to go in alphabetical order and read through the documents. We'll start with Mr. By the way, Mr. Thielman is not with us tonight so Mr. Thielman will be reading Mr. Pierce's part. Dr. Allison Ampe. My comment applies to all standards although evidence applied did not always speak to requirements. I base my assessment not just on it but also on my observations of material presented in school committee meetings etc. I would recommend in the future that significantly better evaluation evidence be provided to enable the students to understand the needs of students. For example, see the desi provided suggestions at the bottom of the forms. I can show you later where they are. It's on the form that we have. One C was marked as needs improvement because we didn't have any evidence about it. Thank you. Mr. Heiner is next. The superintendent provided seven documents for evidence in this program. It was a document from department of elementary and secondary education and does not support how the superintendent accomplishes the goal. Another document was the Alice spring 2015. It was a schedule of initial rollout of the Alice program. It lacked follow-up to show the goal had been accomplished by using summary statements of each event. The next document was an administrative meeting. It lacked follow-up to show the goal had been accomplished. Another one was a list of agendas for administrative team meeting. Again, lacking follow-up. There was a project-based learning conference done. It was an email to the superintendent inviting the teachers. This was very satisfactory as far as I'm concerned. The last was an exhibit chart showing the schedule of visits for the superintendent to the schools throughout the year. Superintendent was told last year for this to have any meaning, a simple one or two line summary about each visit would show the value of this visit. Thank you, Mr. Pierce. I feel that Dr. Bodie has performed proficiently in standard one instruction leadership as a parent. I have seen the types of curriculum that my children are exposed to. I have been able to utilize to allow for a strong 21st century education for all learning students. I believe because I have witnessed and seen evidence of that, Dr. Bodie along with Dr. Cheson used data from DBMs and Mcast results to inform a K-12 educational growth plan and a vision for the district. I remain unsure that evaluations are done timely and this may be due to a lack of hours and resources rather than anything else and it is my turn. There is significant evidence of proficient in the area of instructional leadership. The district's efforts to reorganize the elementary school schedule in order to provide more professional development in common planning time is a recognition of the value of the practice in Arlington. It is significant that the realignment of the schedule was supported by the teachers and union officials were also described as changes supporting the superintendent. Having attended the summer meetings with principals and administrative staff there was considerable evidence that the superintendent infuses administrative meetings with content that pertains to the continuous improvement of curriculum instruction. Presentations of the school committee by department heads have also shown an understanding of standards and they work strategically to improve teaching and learning in the district. Professional development in the district teachers is evidenced by the offerings of our full day professional development days. 14 of 16 administrators responded in the superintendent's questionnaire that the superintendent is proficient at giving effective and timely supervision and evaluation data use and presentations before the school committee are adequate for a high performing district. Growth scores still lag in certain schools and grade levels among high need students a focus that is being implemented by the superintendent Ms. Tharks. From everything I have seen in red Dr. Bode is strong in her instructional leadership in our district. She has helped our district to grow and enabled better teaching and decision making through the implementation of systems that allow teachers and staff to gather and analyze data to inform their practice. I did not have enough evidence to make a rating on one D evaluation. Dr. Seuss. For two of these categories assessment work is exemplary. The DDMs district determined measures we have seen are impressive so I believe that the material in novice is from the prior evaluation year. The commitment to PLC's professional learning committees and the goal of using some of the time afforded by the elementary level half day for interpreting data shows a clear commitment to data informed decision making. One area for which I would have liked to see more evidence is our commitment to experiential learning. I know that we have seen that we are committed to this goal is a brief student directed video about one particular project. In the future I would like to see what we are doing at each grade level. For our summative assessments the MCAS Arlington remains a high achieving district with impressive growth scores. However we can do more for our high need students. At only one school Audison was our median SGP student growth percentages for ELA English language arts above 50% for high need students. On the high needs students were exemplary especially at the high school. Mr. Thielman. Fostering an environment in which teachers can reflect on their practice and collaborate with colleagues to improve their teaching has been a hallmark of Dr. Bote's instructional leadership. We have very strong professional development in the public schools. There's a lot of attention to data analysis DDMs were administered and reviewed at most levels and schedules are modified to allow more common planning time for students. The staff survey of Dr. Bote's work and instructional leadership corroborates her self-reporting in this area. There is good use of data in the district. Staff appreciates the scheduling changes and most of her staff feels that she has created an environment of high expectations and results. While the MCAS results continue to be strong overall there were some concerns that I encourage the district to address including SGPs below 50% in ELA in the Bishop fourth grade and in Math in the Hardy fourth grade Thompson fourth grade bracket fifth grade and Stratton fifth grade. In addition district-wide SGP did not meet 50% but 10th graders in ELA. I understand from our last meeting that the assistant superintendent is reviewing this data with teachers and principals and this may lead to changes in instruction. I would caution against overreacting to this data but I hope and trust that it is taken into account as we assess ways to improve. Thank you and as a result the overall score for standard and all sub scores and overall rating would be proficient. Number two, standard two management and operations. There are five standards and an overall rating Mr. Heiner did not rate on the individual sub scores. Two A, environment Dr. Allison Ampey rated needs improvement. Dr. Seuss rated exemplary the rest of the committee rated as proficient and excluding Mr. Heiner who did not rate the sub scores. Two B, human resources management and development. I rated the superintendent exemplary the rest rated proficient. Two C, scheduling and management information systems. Dr. Allison Ampey Dr. Seuss and Mr. Thielman rated as exemplary the other three members rated proficient. Law ethics and policies. Dr. Allison Ampey myself rated as needs improvement. The other four rated as proficient. Fiscal systems. I rated as needs improvement. The rest rated as proficient. All members of the committee with the exception of Mr. Heiner rated the superintendent overall as proficient. Mr. Heiner rated unsatisfactory. Are there any revisions or corrections to this rubric? Seeing none the overall rating in all sub areas and the overall rating for the superintendent is proficient. Dr. Allison Ampey. C, comment and standard number one. Two A was marked needs improvement because of the confusing roll out of the strength and renovation rehousing. It would have been much preferable to have all solutions on the table during discussion so that parents would know and also to provide more information why the original suggested solution was educationally reasonable and acceptable. To see was marked exemplary because of the recommended change to the elementary schedule and expected improvements to teacher professional development and thus to student learning. Thank you. Mr. Heiner. The superintendent provided two documents in support of this standard. The first was an executive summary for the public school population enrollment. Dr. McKibbin's report on enrollment projections. This report was long overdue after relying on figures from a non professional in the area of demography. These projections could have been foreseen by taking talking to local realtors as members of the committee suggested over the past three years. This last statement was confirmed by Dr. McKibbin staying just that in his presentation. The second piece was the Alice spring. It was a copy of the Alice initial rollout schedule. I've already addressed that in my prior statement. Thank you. Mr. Thielen will read for Mr. Pierce. I am pleased with the negotiations with our many unions and that we were able to complete these satisfactorily within one school year. Dr. Bote suggested that we move in a collaborative fashion via an IBB approach and it worked to everyone's liking. I am impressed with Dr. Bote's knowledge of the law and a willingness to check with council support. I feel that our grasp on budgetary managers is strong and a cooperation with the CFO works well for the district. The stratinary location plan for the remodeling of the school was approved by the school committee a few months ago and Dr. Bote deserves a lot of credit in getting it moving smoothly and quickly. The move to Novus for meetings has been successful and helps to eliminate the need for wasteful paper copying. I am pleased with the superintendent's goal to make a decision to turn the district and moving forward with what the community wants to see for its educational system. Thank you. It is my turn now. The superintendent's effort to work with the committee in our collective bargaining units to successfully conclude contract negotiations was exemplary. The use of IBB which is interest-based bargaining in the context of a strong relationship and mutual respect enabled the district to come to a priority with like communities and with adjustments to the elementary work day. The district with the budget subcommittee the district provides a substantive orientation program for new teachers. The superintendent works effectively with the school committee and with the budget subcommittee as we develop a budget that is aligned with the stated priorities of the school committee. This work is supported by the superintendent's prior participation in the district meeting. The superintendent has openly acknowledged errors pertaining to the awarding of stipends and worked with the committee to include contractual hourly rates into the collective bargaining agreements. Care should be taken to fully comply with district policies rather than relying on past practice. Ms. Starks. Management and operations is a strength of Dr. Bodes and I think she does an excellent job of leading by example in this area. In addition to safety, health, and emotional and social needs. The roll out and implementation of the Allish protocol is a welcome step to improving safety at our schools. Our commitment to retaining social workers in our elementary schools even after the success grant money was exhausted is a reflection of the value we put on the social and emotional needs of our students. Implementation and training in a variety of social emotional programs including open circle, positive reinforcement, equity and equity programs is welcome. I think it is worth exploring whether we should adopt a single district wide social emotional program so that everyone is speaking the same language. Teachers have the opportunity to learn from and collaborate with each other. The new elementary school schedule was explicitly designed to give teachers more time for peer level interaction and collaboration. Our constrained finances has forced us to look forward. Our approach has the added benefit of creating opportunities for leadership and development of our staff. On understanding complying with laws, agreements and ethical guidelines, the superintendent to my knowledge is doing her job. There are however process level problems when it comes to areas that involve school committee oversight. Last year several important items were presented to the school committee for vote at the last minute which effectively meant that the school committee did not have enough time to talk to the committee at the retreat. With no time to talk to each other in an open meeting before our last scheduled meeting, we were forced to adopt only a schematic version of our goals. More egregious, the contracts for the CFO and assistant superintendent were negotiated with minimal school committee involvement. Afterward the claim was made that the school committee had made decisions made exclusively by the superintendent. I also commend the superintendent for depositing money to our special or to the town special education reserve fund last year. Thank you, Mr. Thielman. I applaud the superintendent for hiring substitutes to provide coverage for elementary teachers to participate in data team meetings for restructuring the middle and high school schedule. I also commend the superintendent for providing the support to data teams to analyze student performance data and to monitor design and modify lesson plans to support all learners. In addition, mathematics coaches provided in-classroom coaching sessions with classroom teachers with the intent of providing the transition to the common core. Thank you. We now move on to standard three family and community engagement. There are four members of the community. We will now move on to the community engagement. There are four sub-areas and an overall rating. Again, Mr. Heiner did not rate in the sub-areas. On 3A engagement, Dr. Allison Ampey rated his needs improvement. Mr. Thielman is exemplary. The other members rated proficient. Sharing responsibility, all members rated proficient. Communication, all members rated proficient. Family concerns. Dr. Allison Ampey, Mr. Pierce, Dr. Seuss rated his needs improvement. Myself, Ms. Starks, and Mr. Thielman rated his proficient. For an overall rating, all members rated his proficient with the exception of Mr. Heiner, who rated needs improvement. Are there any corrections? Seeing none. I declare the overall rating and the sub-scores as being proficient. Dr. Allison Ampey. C comment on standard 1. On standard 3A, I wrote needs improvement because I just don't know what was done toward that objective. On 3D, I felt some parental concerns, for example, with the threatened rebuild and re-housing concerns were not addressed in a time-way fashion. Mr. Heiner. There were 10 pieces of evidence provided by the superintendent. Several of them were basically calendars with no supporting evidence of how this call was achieved. Another piece was called Design of the Website. This exhibit is a copy of pages from a commercial webpage designed from the Internet. It was referring to AC in the standard. It had no way of understanding that. There was another one on the document referring to the school committee agenda. It does not support the goal. That was repeated twice. There was a link to the superintendent's newsletter, which is excellent and is something that both the public and the school committee benefit from. I commend her on that. The last piece was a timeline regarding website changes. This was well done, but continually refers to notes that should have been attached. Thank you. Mr. Thieman will read from Mr. Pierce. It is most difficult for one single person to continuously collaborate, but Dr. Bodie does as much as one can reasonably expect of a superintendent. She meets regularly with the town manager, numerous town committees, community meetings. She is often seen at events at schools and sends out monthly newsletters to parents and guardians. Sometimes I wish that she was able to get back to families and community members in a more efficient manner, and my suggestion would be to have a director of communications that would allow for an immediate response that the query or concern was received and a reasonable period for the superintendent to get back in touch. That is why I marked a needs improvement plan. The superintendent has built an infrastructure and expectation for communication with parents in the community. The district uses a phone system and school e-mail lists in order to communicate with families, as well as notifying parents about emergencies or unusual occurrences in the schools. I feel confident that when I refer a parental or community request to the superintendent that it will be responded to in a professional and courteous manner. Given the constraints of our budget and facilities, the superintendent is put into position where she frequently needs to say no to parents, and the superintendent responds with a calm demeanor and a well-reasoned explanation. I will note that one of the superintendent's great strengths is her ability to maintain calm perspective in the midst of a challenging or emotional argument. The superintendent has been proactive in presenting evidence to the community and key decision makers pertaining to the intense facility needs being faced by the district, Ms. Starks. While I believe that Dr. Bodie is proficient in this area, I would like to see in next year's goals more work on how to better engage the community in solutions and improving, not just getting information out to the community and parents, but collecting it and taking in suggestions. The improvements are down to individual schools, so that information on each school's website is easily found and parents can easily navigate from one school to another. We need to have more public forums on the schools, the curriculum, and changes in education to educate and bring in parents and community members. Dr. Seuss. Communication by the superintendent has improved in recent years. The superintendent's monthly newsletter is a valuable source of information for many families. According to a recent survey, families felt welcome and engaged in the community. 89% of parents said that they are kept up to date on school activities and events. 78% of the school information is commuted effectively, and 85% said that they know how to get school information when they need it. The superintendent's effort to better organize the district website and to create visual representations of data through dashboards is laudable. A continuing area of concern is that families do not always receive timely responses to their inquiries. It would be helpful if there were a process that would allow them to respond to parental inquiries, which may involve empowering additional staff members to answer on behalf of the superintendent. As our district grows, it will become increasingly difficult for the superintendent to personally answer all communications from parents. The superintendent could do more to assuage parental concerns in times of high stress. For example, when stratton second grade parents were worried about housing their 2B fourth grade children at Audison, the superintendent could have to understand the hard choices need to be made, even if they do not like those choices. As a public face of the school district, the superintendent has the responsibility to treat parental concerns seriously and to be honest about our decision making process. Mr. Thielman. The superintendent has created a district-wide culture in which families are welcome in schools and able to contribute to the classroom where appropriate. Communication has improved dramatically in recent years. The monthly newsletter and Dr. Bodie's frequent presence at the school district and the community I urge the superintendent to hold a forum on the common core standards in math and ELA after the State Board of Education takes its vote on a new test for Massachusetts students. Improvements on the website went a long way towards improving communication and I look forward to the completion of the district dashboard. We now welcome to standard 4 professional culture. There are six sub areas and an overall rating. Mr. Heiner did not rate any of the sub areas. The description of the ratings for the sub areas will be for the other six members. For commitment to high standards, myself, Dr. Seuss and Mr. Thielman rated the superintendent as exemplary. Dr. Allison Ampe, Mr. Pierce and Ms. Starks rated her proficient. For cultural proficiency Dr. Allison Ampe did not rate the rest rated proficient. For communication Dr. Allison Ampe and Mr. Pierce rated needs improvement the rest proficient. For continuous learning all six members rated proficient. Oh, I missed that. Mr. Thielman rated exemplary the rest rated proficient. For shared vision Dr. Seuss rated needs improvement the rest rated proficient. Managing conflict Dr. Allison Ampe and Dr. Seuss rated needs improvement the rest rated proficient. For an overall rating of proficient by all members with the exception Mr. Heiner who rated needs improvement for an overall rating in all sub areas and for an overall rating of proficient Dr. Allison Ampe. See comments and standard one and also standard 4B was left blank because I didn't know what had been done towards the subjective. Mr. Heiner the superintendent provided three pieces of evidence in support of this standard. The first one was a copy of the Alice rollout. There was no statement as to what was done regarding the standard. The second one was listing the administrative team and the third was list of organization conferences the superintendent belonged to and participates in. I found that commendable. Mr. Thielman will read for Mr. Pierce. I sense and have observed that at times there is a top-down approach and a lack of resources ability to communicate to shareholders. That is why market needs improvement enrollment number 4C. This is improving however as seen recently in the over enrollment committee. I have seen first hand her involvement with the superintendent's advisory committee and participating in their meetings and taking in their recommendations by expanding today's students tomorrow's teachers program as but one example. Thank you. Through her interactions with the school committee and the professional staff I see a superintendent who demonstrates a commitment to high standards of teaching and learning and expects those who work with her to embrace her expectations and strive to meet them. She has worked with the school committee and school leaders to develop goals and strategies that are consistent with the overarching goals of the Arlington Public Schools. The administrative survey indicates that a significant majority of district administrators rate the superintendent as proficient or exemplary on topics covered by the board of directors. I am pleased to welcome Dr. Desi Rubrik for professional culture. Ms. Starks. Dr. Bode strong relationships and open management style have not only helped in managing conflict but have helped to reduce conflict. Her commitment to high standards and continuous learning for herself fosters those ideals in the district and I believe that it is important that she lead by example in these programs. I would like to share with you the website newsletters but also in forums and meetings with parents in the community about education and learning in our district and the state. As the educational leader of her district I would like to see her play a more integral role in shaping the vision and importance of education in Arlington. Next. Our instruction I have seen in the last couple of years is that the superintendent has listened to and respond to feedback about prior years professional development and has worked to improve the value of those programs. The superintendent has created a professional culture that values and respects educators. Internal communication to my knowledge works well. However communication to parents in the larger community can sometimes be awkward. The superintendent could do more to better understand the importance of education. So the school may ask for a projective model for long-range multi-year planning but what we saw instead was a projected budget. Certainly there are some long-range planning details in our technology plan but I suspect there are not many people in Arlington who could articulate our educational vision. On our most pressing issue the strain that our increasing enrollment is placing in our facilities the process it is our hope that decisions will be made in an open and transparent manner with input from all stakeholders. Thank you Mr. Thielman. The superintendent survey provided useful insights into the professional culture the superintendent is trying to create. Nearly 90% of respondents said the superintendent was proficient or exemplary in enabling instructional staff to create effective and rigorous units of instruction ensuring high quality content work and ensuring that principals facilitate practices that cause teachers to modify their teaching when students are not learning and for a long time for collaboration to better inform teaching and learning in the district. Thank you. Now turn to page 5. Yeah. This is where it got a little tricky. The agreement was that we would go for goal 1, goal 2, goal 3.4 and goal 4.3 as being the focus areas within this. Some members rated beyond. I did not include that in the document but those ratings still exist within the individual members. There is no comment section in this portion of the evaluation. However, Mr. Heiner has made extensive comments on the superintendent's performance goals which are the appendix in the back of the document. Mr. Heiner. I will let the document stand as written and not take the time of the committee at this time. The superintendent will have a copy of this and anyone else that seeks it, they have a right to have that. This will become a public document as soon as we fix the typos. I just want to comment that, I don't know about the rest of the group, but it went beyond the ones that we had agreed on based on the evidence given by the superintendent. So I reacted to that. I know there was inconsistency with the group and that is the reason why I mentioned that we should pre-populate this next year so that we are all consistent in how we are rating it and what areas we are rating and what we are looking for. The superintendent will have the benefit of looking at the individual and the folks who have gone beyond the four that we came to consensus on is communication. The value of this process is that it is one of our ways that we can communicate with the superintendent pertaining to her performance. Go one in order to effectively supervise and support principals as well as support high expectations for learning, teacher consistency and common focus on instruction. I will visit each school a minimum of 2 December 2014 in November 2015 that will include a meeting with the principal in classroom or meeting observations. I am continuing this practice goal from last year because the importance of school visits by the superintendent to support and ensure a consistent focus on district and school goals maintain visibility in the district support principals and understand first hand the needs in each school. Dr. Allison Ampe rated a significant progress. Mr. Hayner rated did not meet. Mr. Pierce myself and Mr. Thielman rated the superintendent having met the goal. Dr. Seuss did not rate this area for an overall rating of met. Number two, superintendent performance on MCAS 2015 for high need students at all levels at each grade tested will improve from the MCAS baseline in 2014. Dr. Ampe rated significant progress as did Mr. Pierce myself Ms. Starks and Mr. Thielman. Mr. Hayner rated did not meet. Dr. Seuss did not rate it for an overall significant progress. 3.4 develop a plan to address space issues related to enrollment growth anticipated over the next 3 to 5 years to be presented by the school committee by June 2015. Dr. Allison Ampe rated that as met. Mr. Hayner and Ms. Starks rated that as some progress. Mr. Pierce rated that as significant progress and myself and Mr. Thielman rated that as exceeded. This is part of the range. And I think that we all view this a little differently, but I view that as an overall significant progress. And 4.3 the district website will be analyzed and changes will prove the communication of information to parents and the community by June 2015. Dr. Allison Ampe Mr. Pierce rated significant progress. I rated and Ms. Starks rated some progress. Mr. Thielman rated met and Mr. Hayner rated did not meet for an overall of significant progress. Are there any edits corrections to this portion of the document? Seeing none, we'll move back to page one. We have now left before us the overall rating summative performance. All members with the exception of Mr. Hayner rated the superintendent as proficient. Mr. Hayner has a rating of unsatisfactory. Number four, rate impact on student learning. Mr. Pierce, myself and Dr. Thielman rated as high. The remainder of the committee rated as moderate for an overall rating of moderate. Any corrections or changes to that portion? Hearing none, we get to the final portion of the process is to read the overall comments and we'll start with Dr. Allison Ampe. I thought this part would be first. Mr. Hayner, I commend the superintendent on her hard work and dedication to our schools. She goes above and beyond to be present for our community from attending meetings with parents to school functions to joint school town meetings and more. She shows her caring by her presence. I feel her collaborative approach to working with our teachers and our unions is seen in a couple of accomplishments. Our negotiated contracts that address issues of substance such as increasing and in the Renny Center choosing Arlington is one of four districts that model early career support for teachers. In my evaluation I do list a number of areas where I think improvement can be made. This is not done out of disrespect but because I believe our schools deserve the very best possible and I'm trying to help make this happen. In regards to certain goals, professional practice, it appears that some schools did not achieve the desired number of applications were done. I was unable to assess whether any meetings were announced. Meeting agendas were not detailed and there was no information about whether better collaboration by evaluators was achieved. Student learning the state has not yet released subgroup and cast results that would address the goals. There is evidence of strong professional development addressing areas of concern during the school year and over the summer and it is my hope that this is translated into space and enrollment was completed and presented to a claim in September. This will enable us to move forward in our handling our expected increased enrollment allow questions remain about which rooms are counted or not for space usage. Goal 4.3 website improvements appears to be underway but we haven't seen results yet. Comments for standards are listed separately. Overall assessment, if I was basing my evaluation solely on evidence provided I would have given an overall performance reading of needs improvement. I feel the evidence provided was inadequate and sometimes not applicable to the goals. I also felt an opportunity was lost to provide clear cut information about our schools information that would have been helpful for advocacy and for educating the community about APS needs and accomplishments. However, I feel a rating of needs improvement would do our school system a disservice over the past year and our meetings and all. We have heard of many initiatives and accomplishments. I feel the sum total suggests our school system is moving in the direction we want to see and that a good portion of this movement is due to the superintendent. It is on this that I base my rating of proficient. I also feel the school committee itself and I'm talking to you guys now needs to have a serious discussion about evaluations including how evaluations are conducted the role of evidence and the evaluations and examination of the document used for soliciting feedback. We are trying to manage as a group and to ensure that our superintendent is doing everything to improve our schools. In my opinion, the current evaluation tool does not adequately capture or convey the information needed to facilitate improvement. Thank you, Mr. Heiner. I've decided not to include a comment. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Thielman will read for Mr. Pierce. Mr. Pierce says Dr. Bode exhibits strong decision making and hiring those who improve student learning. So many community members have praised the quality of our teaching staff. MCAS scores show that we are operating with moderate to high student growth. Dr. Bode is to be commended with the quality and quantity of professional development offerings, professional learning community, communities for our staff and curriculum initiatives. Dr. Bode deserves credit that our high school students continue to perform well in AP classes and with their SAT scores as much of her leadership and professional development curriculum has led these students to achieve in high school. Dr. Bode is a proficient veteran superintendent who is respected by her peers, the Arlington community and the professional staff of the Arlington public schools. The superintendent is proficient in the day-to-day work of running the school system. She interacts with the school committee in a respectful and collaborative manner. The administrative staff of the district is indicated by our evaluative survey view her as a proficient or exemplary leader. The district is facing many critical issues pertaining to our increasing enrollment and the substantial need to improve our facilities. The success of any initiative to rebuild Arlington high school and to provide a sufficient number of classrooms at the elementary and middle school level requires tremendous community outreach. We cannot meet this challenge without a superintendent who has credibility and trust with a diverse group of decision makers including fiscal leaders in the town government, state officials and the taxpayers and voters of Arlington. It is essential that our superintendent is able to advance an aggressive building program involving many schools and stakeholders while continuing to run a school system that is focused on excellence in teaching and learning. Dr. Bode has demonstrated her skill and dedication to the children of Arlington and she will have a lasting positive influence on our district that will endure long beyond her tenure as superintendent. Ms. Starks. Dr. Bode continues to lead and foster a district where teachers love to teach and students love to learn. The collaborative and open way that she leads allows all voices to be heard and foster a sense of teamwork where students, teachers and staff work together to further the learning that goes on in our district. I have seen much growth in the past year in communication out to the community and her work with other arms of the town government. Dr. Seuss. For many of these categories we have insufficient evidence in which to evaluate the superintendent. For categories where I have no access to evidence but which I have not heard explaining what I did. The superintendent excels in creating a professional culture that values and respects educators and in data driven decision making. The superintendent has focused important attention on the social and emotional needs of our students. There is still work to be done in this area but that is because it is such a hard problem. The superintendent could do a better job at addressing parental concerns when they emerge and creating a brighter process for decisions that require the superintendent demographer and architect to start the conversation about the strain that are increasing enrollment displacing on our facilities. The community has some hard decisions to make. We need to ensure that those decisions are made transparently and honestly. Mr. Thielman. Dr. Vody earns a rating of exemplary on management and operations because of her efforts towards addressing the district's enrollment growth. She hired McKibbin and associate to do a forecast of enrollment displacement of students during the rebuild of Stratton and submitted a high quality statement of interest which was modified from the school committee to the MSBA for the rebuild of Arlington High School. She has been very strategic in analyzing and planning for the district's growth and for involving multiple stakeholders, members of the public and members of the boards in the town in this discussion. Thanks to Dr. Vody's leadership, the school department has done a good job of educating the community on our space challenges and she has worked with the school committee. The way Dr. Vody has handled the issue of enrollment growth in our facilities needs is a model for other districts. Dr. Vody's leadership of the design and implementation of a new elementary schedule, the development of an updated technology plan, the improvement of the educator evaluation system, the implementation of the literacy lab initiative, the focus of her K-12 math director on improving instruction at all levels, PLCs, the extensive professional development opportunities, the effort to ensure that all of the students in the community have the ability to acquire it, the full implementation of Lucy Calkin's writing in all elementary grades, the introduction of connected math, the middle school, the updating of curriculum maps for all disciplines and the expansion of common assessments at the secondary level are examples of the superintendent's high impact on learning. She did not do this work alone, of course. It is a collaborative effort, but it is an effort led by Dr. Vody's leadership of the design and implementation of the design and implementation of the school, or no, 2015-16, had the potential to accelerate the district wide move to the common core and had the potential to have a high impact on learning. The student learning goal called for high needs students to improve on MCAS in 2015 over 2014 scores. The data shared showed all high needs students improved slightly over 2014 in math and ELA, but there has been a lot of improvement in that area. And other areas communication has been strengthened by the improvements of the district website, the regular monthly newsletter and all the work the superintendent has done to educate the community about our space needs. I urge the superintendent to complete work on the dashboard, which can create even more transparency and community engagement in the district's work. I would like to hear a motion to approve this document by Mr. Thielman, seconded by Dr. Seuss. Any discussion on the motion? Hearing none, all in favor? Opposed? Mr. Hayner. I move in accordance with section 2 of the existing contract between the school committee and the superintendent that a subcommittee be formed to make a recommendation to the full committee no later than the first school committee meeting in December 31. Motion on the table, is there a second? I'll second for discussion. Mr. Hayner. The superintendent's contract section 2, article 2, I'm sorry, specifically states that if there is any decision by the committee not to continue, the superintendent needs to be notified no later than December 31. We skipped this the last time and it became an automatic renewal. Not that we wouldn't know whatever later in the year. So I just think this needs to be done. I think a serious discussion has to be done. I suggested a subcommittee. I would also ask the chair to find out if this is basically a indicted as a contract. Can this be done in executive session? I think it's a gray area because of everything. The superintendent's position in this state seems to be outside of that. Mr. Hayner. To answer your question, the committee can enter executive session for the purpose of preparing to negotiate. But decisions that we make pertaining to this is a public discussion. In fact, there's something that the community has a right to see us do. If we continue, this subcommittee would be basically a negotiating preparing for negotiations so it would be an executive session. Based on what you said. Well, the subcommittee would post a meeting and then if there was a negotiation, it was going to take place in the subcommittee. We would go into executive session. I thought he stated in preparation. We can do that in executive session and I would propose that we do that just to have a subcommittee have the sense of the full committee before entering into negotiations with the superintendent. Then I would recommend putting this maybe on a agenda right and for executive session next week. I would draw the motion and just ask the chair to put this as an executive session discussion for next week. Okay. Dr. Seuss. Just to say it does make sense to talk about this altogether. The subcommittee seems like the wrong sort of approach. I have no problem with that. Mr. Heiner, do you withdraw your motion? I did. Any other discussion under this topic? We will talk about this in executive session with our next meeting. Mr. Sterl, do you have that? Yes, I do. Thank you very much. Anything else under the topic of the superintendent evaluation? None we go on to the monthly financial reports. Ms. Johnston. Good evening. The elevator required to be drilled out like a bad old cavity down at the end of the month. We are still not fixed yet. For that little tidbit. Not much to report on the financials. The main thing that happened between last month and this month is we were able to make finally in munis all the adjustments for the contract increases. We finally reconciled munis. When we go into munis, when we start the fiscal year, we upload the approved budget. And we didn't show the increases in all the places they actually happened. Now when you go into munis, you have the original budget which was approved and then you have the modified budget that shows the increases in the appropriate places now. Other than that, we are in about the same place. I am still not projecting any savings at this time because it is too early in the year. I see nothing to suggest that anything drastic is happening. It hasn't started to snow yet. So one, because I am still served so new to this process, the expenses that are being moved, are those expenses typically moved or is this something? This is standard procedure. These are the expenses. I sent you. Can you tell me where they are being moved? It comes in and it sits in its own revolving account. At the end of the year, I will move the entire amount of circuit breaker out and into circuit breaker. Right. At this point in the year, I wouldn't be showing that whole transfer because that would show we have all kinds of money to burn and that would give a mistake and impression. One other small question. I noticed that salaries and wages are under budget but then the temporaries are above budget. Is that related? Temporary salary and wages tend to run hot because so much of the summer PD goes in. They are in the same kind of way. They are really front loaded. There is a lot of clean up work that we need to do in the whole stipends, additional comp area and stipends fall under that code most of the time. Also what we call green sheets when somebody does the hourly additional compensation that would also appear in there. Professional development, money that is paid out for attending professional development would also fall in there. One of the things that we plan to do for the next fiscal year for FY17 is to really parse out the stipends in a different way so that we can come up with some different coding so we can see different kinds of stipends. Right now the only stipends that are really nice and clean the way I would like them to be are the athletic stipends. They are in 81202 which is additional salary other and they fall under cost center 02 which makes it really simple to find them. That is where the athletic stipends fall but other things too. So we want to clean it up. We want to have it very clear what is athletics what is teacher leadership what is special projects what are student activity stipends we want to really make that much clearer than it has been. Okay, thanks. Mr. Hanger. The original cost estimate for the elevator was $220,000. Am I correct? It is 80 for the breakdown of the high school but there are also contracts involved for standard testing and fixing of the elevators as the year goes on. So all of our elevators are maintained throughout the district and there is a contract for that. I keep forgetting that. Line item 8406 carpentry we are in the hole for 20,000 right now. One of the things we built was a new tech lab at the middle school this summer. So part of those expenses would be that we also built out the office suite for the it was a 13,000 if I am reading this right increased between September and November 3rd. That would be when the expenses for the middle school and for the student enrollment the student enrollment center that was all in-house carpentry that was done with supplies. Thank you. That elevator isn't that big enough to be a capital expense or the repair? The way capital works in Arlington is you have to request it ideally five years in advance and you have to plan for it and you can't show up at the capital budget committee and say hey this just blew up that's generally not how they will do it unless it's a true emergency. I believe our budget can bear this repair. It just seems like it should qualify as capital. Well yes the whole high school needs to be gutted that will certainly be the capital expenditure. And had we planned for it were we not going for the whole enchilada on the high school then that's an elevator we should have had in a capital plan for repair. This is where I hope the new facilities department is really going to plug a gap because we've had capital on the one hand emergency on the other and that mid-range preventative maintenance has been a weakness. Right anyway it just seems like we're at a disservice because we were trying to hold out when an emergency happened and so we're having to eat the cost because we were trying to I'll be sure to make that case when I'm defending my capital budget. Thank you. Hopefully they'll have mercy on some other requests. Is that your elevator speech? Working on it. Any other comments or questions regarding the financial report? Thank you very much. Next is class sizes. Dr. Bote. You received in your Novus I should call it a Novus package. The information on current class sizes we have reverted back you see class sizes both in the new template that our current registrar has created but then also we've reverted back so you could actually see what the individual classes are at individual schools. One of the things that happens even though principals in the summer or in June when they're doing class sizes try to make them quite equitable in size you have students that leave or students that leave and so rather than trying to re-equalize the class they just stay with the differentials. That's what happens with respect to why there's some differences in each one of the classes. So one of the questions that was asked of me today in terms of class sizes Ms. Starks asking what has been the history of different classes and I think this is a discussion that she would like to have very much this evening in terms of an acceptable class size in which what happens if a particular class sometimes will go over where we started in September. That's not uncommon and you might have a class that started at 24 and before you know it it's March and it's now up to 26. That's not how we necessarily started but even when we have a class size at 25 at the onset of the semester what is our response? How do we manage these class sizes which some people would feel 25 is certainly too large and certainly there's even disagreement as to whether it's okay at fifth grade versus kindergarten. One of the ways that we have been dealing with this is when our class sizes have gotten or pushed 25 at kindergarten we've gone to a whole day teaching assistant that has not been necessary this year. We do not have any whole day teaching assistants at the kindergarten. We do have some large large class TAs at other schools at other grades in the district and you know a good example of that is the Thompson fifth grade. As the numbers at one point in the summer they were still large and even this decision of a large class TAs was made in the summertime the numbers have creeped up a bit. Not a lot but it creeped up enough that they're really at a level that had if we had another classroom and we had that classroom in September we probably would have gone to three sections at the fifth grade but that was not an option without at the very last minute taking the art classroom out of use as an art classroom. So I it's a very it's a very difficult thing and in fact maybe it's a good time to even bring in the buffer zone report I was going to put it in the superintendent's report but it really is germane to this issue with the report that you have on this I think that you can see that from grades one to five the buffer zones make some difference and when you look at average class sizes there's usually a decimal point difference what that means is that probably one or two students at that grade that have been moved to another school just to even things off. I think where you see the most effect is at the kindergarten level and compare what the class sizes would have been without the buffer zones compared to what they are with the buffer zone and again it's a little bit it's not significant I hesitate to even say this but honestly in terms of being able to really do this at a much more macro level we would have to have very large buffer zones even have just as they do in Cambridge you basically get assigned you get your preference but you get assigned to the school based on the class sizes so it's something that we should all discuss for sure and in terms of how we want to move forward with this and what I have an internal number in terms of when we go to our large class sizes large class TAs but I think that this is definitely a discussion for the committee to take on it certainly has a strong relationship to the number of classrooms that we need in the district but on the other hand if you as an example I wanted this afternoon about if you take for example a couple of the classes that are 25, 25, 24 and you decide that you want to make that into four classrooms one you have to have the space but two you have to look at the district level in terms of whether that's equitable to what's happening in all the other schools so it's not just a single focus on a particular number it's really looking at these numbers in the relationship to a whole district I just want to make one comment here before we go on I mean you're referencing email and I want to point out the fact that Ms. Stark sent an email to the superintendent requesting information which is certainly something that school committee members can and should do and the superintendent responded to that in terms of providing information exchanges between members and the superintendent in that nature seeking invitation are never deliberative in nature no there's information they are informational it becomes correspondence and the superintendent appropriately shares the information she sends to one member to the entire committee now the committee then restrains itself from commenting on it because if any other member of the committee is subsequent to that email back from the superintendent engages in a discussion it becomes a deliberation which would be a violation of the open meeting law and the committee is knowledgeable of the open meeting law and does not do that on a regular basis sometimes we make a mistake and we try to acknowledge that but the exchange between Ms. Stark's and the superintendent received to the rest of the committee is considered as correspondence and will be available as such as a matter of business so I just wanted to lay that out because there was a question of whether or not this was deliberative or informational it was definitely informational and giving information back and providing some additional information tonight I think it's a really important topic to talk about and particularly in light of the discussion that we're going to be having over the next couple of months about space Mr. Hayner in light of what you just said if something magic could be found I'm not suggesting anything at this time in the fifth grades we're removed from all the elementary schools that solved the problems going forward at the elementary it's a hypothetical that's all it is space-wise for the potential growth that we're looking at well I'd have to qualify that answer really because I'm sorry for putting you on the spot I don't think there's a quick answer to that perfectly honest I know the issue of class sizes is always a significant concern of the committee the folks from the down first grade is part of our constituency that we certainly care about more for that and that's sort of the reason why this topic pops up on the agenda with tremendous frequency it's not easy we don't have the space there are a lot of challenges before us and I just hope that the public knows that we're doing it the best we can to work with the superintendent in order to appropriate resources to budget the appropriate resources and to give her the tools she needs to go and provide the best possible education on her elementary level where this can be an issue Ms. Starks so after looking at all of these I had a couple of concerns my first concern is that while the McKibben report also pointed to Thompson and Hardy and those obviously stand out because not only do we have for example the Thompson two fifth grade we only have two fifth grades that will exit and we have four kindergarteners plus four kindergarten classes plus incoming and no class space so that's an obvious one Dallin we have a similar issue because we have four fifth grades leaving our kindergartens but we actually have four and a half kindergartens with no three and a half we get an extra class but we have to break that up as they move forward and there's no extra classes there so Dallin I feel like is also kind of on the brink I'm also quite concerned about Bishop Bishop's class sizes in every grade are bigger than anybody else particularly the fourth grade and I notice here that they do have one what we'll call I'm not going to call it an extra classroom maybe an available classroom but I feel like that should be used almost immediately to fix the fourth grade problem I mean a class of 27 26 I mean Thompson ones I know we don't have any space to do anything about and I I am apologetic for how huge those classes are I cannot imagine 30 students in a classroom I have a class of 23 this year that I feel like is unruly and they're sixth graders so in my mind we actually have four schools next year that are in what I call crisis two at level like gosh the bells have to be going off and two where the bells are going to go off right after those two are fixed and I know I'm not I don't want any of this is none of this is meant as criticism I know that we are doing what we can with what we have I'm not saying anything like that I just I really feel like the problem lies in the fact that we have for too long thought of keeping level service meaning that it's the level of staff that we have instead of meaning level service meaning every student is going to be in an equitable class size and we're going to keep the student load even because and so what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to come up with a formula where we can define what student load is for a teacher and it has to take into account the number of students the age of the students the number of subjects that a teacher has to teach the number of students you have the special needs as well as other duties that those teachers have to do depending on the school they may also have to do other things and what I would really like to see us do is come up with some formula and agree that we have whatever that formula is and then agree what we will do if a class has to go over that because we know because of funding that sometimes that happens that's not necessarily in our control but that we will do what we can to mitigate what those circumstances are but I feel like I feel like it's all of us I feel like we need to start pushing back and say to the town you know what we can't just keep shoving more students into the same classrooms it's not working and it's really going to start breaking and you know we have you know over if my count is correct three, six, nine, ten we have ten classes of 25 or greater I would hope that every single one of those has some kind of an aid or an extra person in them I also believe that in kindergarten there should be no more than 20 in a classroom so almost all of our classrooms except at Dallin every school has at least one or two of those that exceed that even though I know that they do have part-time aid so I don't know this is something that I'm just I mean I'm really concerned about class sizes I feel like when you think about I was trying to think about why is this so worrisome to me and I think that because if you think about the top five things that we have to have for great education although the first one is great teachers, the second one is student load and we can have fabulous teachers but if we give them too many students the load that they have is too great there's almost nothing they can do it really I mean like I said I'm feeling it myself in my own school we are also going through a growth in Lexington and I just feel like we really need to start thinking about what we are going to find acceptable and I'm getting a lot of parents who are telling me that these class sizes are unacceptable not just Dallin, everywhere and so I know that it's not our fault we're doing what we can with the funding and the facilities that we have but I really want us to be open to listening to all of them and trying to come up with something and we are going to have to go back to the town and say this is unacceptable not just from us although it should be unacceptable to us but also to our parents and the community I really want to thank you for all this information it's really kind of gotten my head around where I feel like I want to take this and that's really exciting to me because I have something to kind of hang my hat on and work on so thank you very much and I really hope that we can mitigate some of this as we move ahead but I do want to know then I know that we have said and you know as this group gets together for starting to deal with enrollment issues I know that we've said that next year we have to do something at Thompson but to me we have to do something at Thompson Hardy-Dallin and Bishop and that I'm like now what I know it doesn't help but I feel like the problem is actually much bigger Mr. Hayner I agree with you 100% I think the idea of coming up with age formula it's going to be difficult but when it's done I think that we are aware of it and hopefully we can do something about it going forward with the new committee for space and stuff of that nature we have to look at the whole thing and I appreciate also you're mentioning I was afraid I was going to have to do it one more time and the committee is going to hit me on the head that we have to look at the type of student in the room as well they can, it's time that it takes the teacher to work your class of 23 if they were all self-motivated and go for it you could probably get it up to 26 and no problem and 18 that aren't, or like me if you had 18 like me you'd be in trouble so thank you Mr. Thielman I agree with that last comment my question is we've been talking about this commission this space committee this town white committee on space where are we at on that the board of select when need to approve the two representatives and I they have okay so then there was a couple of other members my understanding is the town manager would like this committee to meet probably in the next week or two so doodle is going to be going out very soon so the people on the committee it'll be a very open under there'll be an opportunity for public participation on these committees I think that one of the first things that we'll have to do is to see what the timeline is decisions that need to be made this year and that will be will involves quite a bit of discussion thank you any Dr. Seuss yeah I have a couple things so I'm going to the Bishop PTO next week and I'm going to talk about the commission numbers very closely and I realize what I'm anticipating to be their frustration I haven't talked to them yet that they are not a school is being mentioned as having a big problem but if you look at it they basically they don't get better right so for the next 10 years they're in the exact same situation they're in with fairly large classes and so I understand that frustration we need to talk about larger buffer zones potentially that's not an immediate solution but that just might need to be part of the solution in the long run you can refer that topic to the community relations committee at any time the buffer zone this year I think we have a lot on our plate and as a community we have a lot on our plate but I'm saying in the future I think we need to do that one of the things I emphasize to parents whenever I talk to them who express their concerns when they talk about equity is that to achieve perfect equity you'd have to move five students here we can't do that the tools of our disposal are very crude we can add a classroom we can take away a classroom we can add aid but there's no given the tools that we have without say this universal buffer zone there's no way that we can achieve perfect equity we just can't we can get better from grade to grade and we don't say you're fourth grader you're not exactly so it's basically impossible to achieve perfect equity even if we had other tools and because like they said people move in no control over that just when you think you've got it you're just a chair saying one at a time so actually I had one question about something else as presenter we talked about that later I have a question so the question thank you very much for getting us this sort of overview of our space what's available in the district and what's needed that was really helpful and great and I just have a question how many schools still have computer labs I mean so as Bishop has one Hardy I think might but they're going to lose that here here says so Bishop and Pierce at this point and that's it and Hardy does still it does but we'll not but next year they definitely won't have it that's just curious about that thanks can make a comment on that the number I think the chart is helpful in thinking about because when we had our architectural firm look at space the thing that they were that Ms. Coles was doing was looking at it from the eyes of an architect so if she saw a bank small offices in a corner as an architect she's looking at well we can knock those walls down and that would be another specialist space that could become classroom the only issue is that where do those specialists go because we have ELL responsibility learning center we have reading programs we have there's OT there's PT so you can solve it architecturally but don't solve you create another problem so the chart that I gave you looks at it from a different point of view it is just simply leave those small offices alone and what are really the available classrooms that we have and what will be the case next year and I've gone over all of the data in there with the principal that every single person has approved what has been given to you I'll start with this also so I appreciate the list of the extra classrooms but I still would like to have the additional information from the space study just how is she when when you look at the floor plans of the different schools you can see little spaces here and there and just how all of those were counted you know this this room is too small for anything you know there's a lot of spaces that people were bringing up even at the forum and we don't have anything to tell us what's in the room and I was hoping this was going to be part of it and I understand the usefulness of this as you're discussing for next year but I'm saying we're still missing this chunk from the space study of what are all the spaces in the schools and the ones that aren't used you know why are the ones that are deemed not usable not usable you know they're too small or what they're all being used I mean being used as a classroom there was a lot of spaces and there's things that are kind of close to the border and it would be helpful to have the list of how all the different rooms are classified to have a floor plan and have it marked this is for ELL this is for SLP this is for OT as a classroom space I understand that there's the other needs that will happen and that those come in too but part of the questions that were being I mean part of the big question for the space study was how many classrooms do we have in our district and there was a lot of rooms that fell into a gray area that were essentially not usable but it wasn't explained why and I just think we should somewhere capture that on paper so we can communicate because we were getting questions other people are looking at the plans and saying well why can't we put something here and I'm saying we just need somewhere to say we can't put something there because it's below the you know it's in this footage category or because on the plans you can't tell some of the rooms look pretty close to big enough you're still not looking like you understand well I think that this probably you'd have to sit and show me what you're talking about I have and the McKibbin report and the Spacer report all of the floor plans are there the floor plans are there what helped is Dr. Sessman saying actually say this is OT this is PT because those have to be somewhere do you want them also marked too small or small yeah some say I think that would give you all the information you need is to tell you what's in it and then why it may be a classroom so TS are too small SLP TS I think it's potentially we could do that but as I said Ms. Coles was looking at well what about if we took a bunch of those little rooms and knocked the walls down and that could be a classroom because the classrooms usually should go between 850 to 950 square feet that's the range that you would look at yes you could knock down walls but the problem is fine you could create a classroom but then where do all those services go because there's not another space to put them in I understand that it can just push the problem you know change the problem that you're trying to have but part of it was just it's helpful to be able to tell people why we're doing some things and some of the stuff we didn't have the information about why we couldn't use this as a classroom you know it might be helpful if maybe we could be more specific and do this at a subcommittee meeting to see exactly we could go through the floor pans and show me exactly what what there you would like more explanation about okay okay okay so that was one thing the second thing was the buffer zone information I would still like to I understand that we got the information about what the class sizes would be but I think we need to be doing an actual analysis at least comparing what the class sizes would have been with the buffer zone and what they would have been without the buffer zone and looking at those two numbers on the same sheet of paper and I threw something together but I don't know if I used the right comparison well we didn't do it by individual classes because there's no way to project what the class would be but you have one you have two charts I know but I'm having to go back and forth between the two charts and it's very hard to see and when I pulled it up myself it actually doesn't look like the buffer zones are doing that much and that's we should be able to see this and we should it should be on the same piece of paper do you want to overlap the charts is that what you want I want on the same piece of paper you have Bishop and then without buffer zones this is what the class sizes would have been and I mean you can do the overall groupings like you did this is the cohort size and this is how many classes and so this is the average and then with the buffer zones this is what we ended up with two columns and we should be able to see if we're seeing differences or not and part of this I'm not sure which months enrollment data we should be using to look at so that's why I'm not positive the numbers I'm looking at are correct but we should be reporting this out well on the are you talking about using this particular chart and putting what the class sizes would be on next I'm sorry I can't tell which one that is no I'm saying you just want these two documents to be put on the same page on the same page column by column so that we can see this or that this or that on all of them well that's easy to be done and we can do that for you as I said in my opening remarks about this there isn't much that would be showing up here on averages there are decimal differences you might have like a 25.3 and then a 25.7 or something like that it's a decimal difference at the grades one through five so that indicates one or two kids that would then move between two schools where you can see the difference the most is at the kindergarten and again it's not a lot we have only and actually corresponds to the percentage roughly speaking of the buffer zone area 23% of the town land area residential area is in buffer zone and roughly speaking that's almost about the number of students that are we look at placing so you're going to see the most difference in kindergarten because there's a little bit more work that's done at that level one students move into town you already have established class sizes and it's really just moderate changes that could happen I understand all that I'm just saying that we should be looking at what we got and whether we think it's worth the hassle that we're putting everyone through for and I'm looking at the kindergarten sizes and yes they're somewhat different but there's outliers there too and I just think we should be all looking at these numbers and we need to have them all in front of us the same data so that we're all looking at the same page the one thing that strikes me when I look at the class sizes the chart that is sort of been the traditional one we used is you look across a grade level across the district and there's so much variation and so we were in the situation of going to buffer zones because of our work with Thompson this was a condition of the larger school that the MSBA would contribute to and it has a very minimal it has minimal impact but on the other hand when you've got to take the fifth grade you've got the 2930 at Thompson but it appears you have 19 and 20 and you take a town and move everything move students so that that doesn't happen you could create equitability here and not large class sizes at almost every grade virtually at almost every grade you create more equitability if that was the first priority but if the first priority remains in town to have neighborhood schools not necessarily solvable that inequity is going to remain and the buffer zones is only going to minimally change things it's inherent in having seven small schools I just want to thank Ms. Darks and Mr. Heiner for bringing the topic up and asking for this to be on the agenda tonight I think it's just the whole topic of class size and enrollment it's critical and just my sense and I don't have the data to back it up but my sense is class size has been creeping up a little each year sort of like the frog in the bucket of water that you put on the stove it doesn't realize it that's false actually it's a nice metaphor I think most self-respecting frogs would probably hop out and feel the pain but that said are we ready to go on? here we go we're going to superintendent's report I can't begin the report without making a comment on the the evaluation I want to thank all of you it's very clear that you spent a lot of time thinking about this and looking at evidence in the we have this electronic file but one of the things that did strike me too is there's a lot of discussion around evidence and when the committee that was formed for the evaluation when we talked about this my understanding was that we would be looking at the standards and not the individual indicators that I would provide three pieces of evidence for each standard not necessarily a piece of evidence or several pieces of evidence for every indicator which is what we don't do that with our teachers and administrators they do three pieces of evidence per standard so in some cases you had a lot and I understand your comment about wanting to have a little bit more maybe explanation of it and I think that's actually going to be one of the positives that will come out of this going back to curriculum and instruction because we can get some shared understanding of how many, what are you looking for how you want the evidence to be presented which as Mr. Schlickman was saying this is a I don't know is a rigid boot you're talking about this is something we're growing with and trying to figure out how to do and we're doing the same thing growing with this but all in all I think it's a there's more positives in the process and not so I appreciate the time you spent on that and I think people should know in the community that you spend a lot of time and you take your jobs very seriously and I think that that's that's important and it's a compliment to all of you that you do so thank you for taking the time to do it and so we'll move forward and I think there was some good suggestions that came tonight and you know we're all growing it's all it's all about how you do what you do better and it's helpful to get some constructive comments on that so I appreciate your efforts so I have a few things one of the big news off the that came out today in a press release which I forwarded as fast as I could to everybody in district as well as to all of you is the press release today from the commissioner regarding his recommendation going forward on assessments there's been a lot of discussion as you're aware that the there are people that want to make sure that the high standards in Massachusetts remain high standards and that our assessments reflect that and want to have more control over what those assessments are going to be so what he has suggested and it actually came out at a meeting that Dr. Cheson and I were at two weeks ago is having a Massachusetts park like assessment he calls it MCAS 2.0 it's he wishes he called the next generational MCAS but the fact is that he's looking at a way that we're going to move forward with this feeling making the point that the current MCAS is really at a point where it's time to move on that we can have a much better assessment in terms of critical thinking skills if we move to an assessment which is more rigorous and more aligned with the top of the common core so his recommendation is to have this next generation assessment that the state would eventually commit to computer based state assessments with the goal of implementing this statewide by the spring of 2019 and that Massachusetts would stay part of the park consortium in order to have high quality assessment development by sharing the cost of this development and might be able to use some of the park databases on this if you were if the state was going to do this from scratch probably it would take three years and that was the case and then there would be revisions as we go along so by sort of having a Massachusetts part of it and also being able to use what have been very well done and I have seen samples of the questions on parks which everybody can see on the website the other part of this is what is going to happen this coming spring and the he is saying that districts that have done MCAS this year can continue doing MCAS, districts that have done park can do park but he's also putting a carrot out to districts that want to try a park exam this year that they would be harmless in terms of accountability of course we haven't seen our accountability ratings right now but at any rate we would be held harmless the thing about this proposal is that the following spring spring 17 we would be moving into the Massachusetts park like assessment so one of the issues we have and we're going to next week present where we are and our recommendation to you is to think about what we're going to do this coming spring and we need as much lead time as possible to move forward if we're going to go with the park. Did I understand that and I think you just talked, I'm sorry, I apologize. Mr. Hayner. Thank you, I'm sorry that if we chose let's say we're going to go park we wouldn't be held accountable? Correct, there'd be no harm. Okay Mr. Hayner. Let me just say that the process would be to hold harmless the scores for a district that moves to park so that if our scores go up they go up, our canopy level would not go down. But my concern is those school systems as we were this year we stayed with MCAS the pool got smaller because there were those that were in there we're held accountable and if more do this and I'm not saying we're going there but if we stayed with MCAS 100% the pool even gets that much smaller there's a suit out there to be happened I mean you're heard if you stay with MCAS you're punished if you're given a freebie for a whole year or two years which I find one year those that will go on it for a second year which is probably not fair. The year after you moved to park so the ones that moved to park this year would not be held harmless next year. That's philosophy. Is there anything in this discussion for the seniors coming forward that are still going to have to pass an MCAS no matter whether you've gone to park last year? The answer is no the park is not in a high school test. I scanned it today. I'm concerned about those that have to stay with it for X amount of years. 2019 is the first time that they would consider it being a graduation requirement. Thank you. This year they have to take the MCAS. Miss Starks. The one thing that had me actually most concerned was number four on this list of things of his recommendations which is that as an adjunct to the test development process we will convene review panels comprised of Massachusetts K-12 teachers and higher education facility to review the current ELA a