Welcome, today is Thursday, January 26th, and this is the Arlington School Committee. I'd like to welcome Juliana Keys, who is our AEA rep, and Laura Kirchner, who's our student rep from council. Before we get started with public participation, I also want to make an additional announcement. The School Committee has an opening on the Human Rights Commission. As I understand it, there was an opening a few months ago that there are additional applications, so they had two openings, and they received nine applications. So we will be reviewing the remaining of those applications, but we also encourage, if anybody else is interested, to send us applications, to send it to Karen Fitzgerald. We're looking for a brief letter and a resume. And so that is from Arlissa Brighette, is stepping down. Public participation, do we have? No, okay. Okay, so next item on the agenda is the Arlington High School Trip Approval to Barcelona, Madrid, is Ms. Fassette. Tentative dates are April 12th to 23rd. It's Megan Bassett, who teaches Spanish at the high school, and Megan, you can introduce. Yeah, this is Maria Révalo, and we're both Spanish teachers at the high school. For the past few months, we have been trying to set up and connect with the school to start a Spanish exchange, and we finally, we're matched with the school just a couple of weeks ago. It's a small beach town just outside of Barcelona, so we are hoping to travel over April vacation in 2018. The students would need to miss two days of school in order to make this trip possible, but we feel like it's a really worthwhile experience for them, and the Spanish department, we've been working on a proficiency model where students are really encouraged to speak the language and use it in everyday life, and so we think this is an amazing opportunity for them to travel to another country and experience Spanish life. Since it's an exchange, the 25 students from Barcelona would also be coming to visit us and shadow students at the high school in September of 2017. And then after we finished in Barcelona, we thought we would take the students to the capital of Madrid just so they can experience a different type of Spanish life and see the capital city while they're there. Great. Questions, comments? Mr. Heiner. I guess the first question is for Dr. Bodie. When we have the exchange students here, do we quarry the parents of the homes? No, we do not. Okay, so then the reverse thing, okay, thank you. Are there questions, comments? Nope, yes, Dr. Ausnepi. This is actually, I think the trip sounds really interesting. The question's more for us. I had thought that we had decided to put trips in the consent agenda, and I'm just wondering why we've been pulling them out and not to say it's wrong, I'm just trying to understand why the difference. We have been, we will put trips in the consent agenda, but when it is a new trip, we've asked the people who are organizing the trip to come and present to you. You can take it out of consent agenda tonight and vote it while they're here. Now, Megan has taken a group of students to Spain, but that was, what, 2000? I think it was important about 2009. 2009, it was a while ago. So this sort of qualifies as a new trip because it's been a while since we've offered it. And you'll find that. If it's in the consent agenda, there's no presentation. It's because we've had a previous trip, for example, the student council trip. It's a good example of that. Okay, yes, Dr. Ausnepi. One other question. So something that came up with budget and policy is how we're handling the money for these trips and the account size, and I think this is probably too soon to be thinking about it, but whether we can have people pay directly, it would be preferable if people can pay the companies directly as opposed to us acting as a go-between. So I don't know what's happening with that. Yeah, Dr. Weing. This is something that was brought up at budget with regard to student activity fees. I think over the next few months, we'll be working with Rich Fiske, who is our controller and a high school principal and the budget subcommittee to talk about how this is going to go forward. But certainly this is on, when it's possible to do that, I think that's the preferable way to do it, but I don't know in this specific case whether it will be. That's something that we can talk about. Okay, thank you. Mr. Heiner. Just minding correction, it is policy, not budget, it's dealing with this issue. Oh, it's policy, sorry. Mr. Heiner. The other part, I guess going forward, going forward, did we ask those people doing these programs that that has to be a criteria to have the travel agent? I mean, if there's no travel agent to do it. But we didn't formally decide that. I think we were. I'm asking a consideration. I'm not asking for a formal thing. Okay. Dr. Alice Nampy. And I would disagree with Mr. Heiner. I think we should have a discussion. We'd hate to have trips not happen. Absolutely. You folks, what's going on is there's a cap on how much money we can hold in a student activity account and some of these trips end up needing more than that. And so we're trying to understand how we can do things the most fiscally responsible. And the easiest thing is just to outsource it and have people pay directly. Everything for this trip will be going directly through a company, so. There we go. We will not have any money coming into the school. Great. Thank you. I have a problem. I just have a question and perhaps it's for you and perhaps it's for Dr. Booty. The AHS International Scholarship Fund that we'll fund, will that fund a complete student for the full amount, for half the amount? What are we anticipating? Well, I can't answer that right now. Okay. But we certainly have, I have a commitment and I know Dr. Janger also would like to find as much scholarship money as possible so that students who couldn't afford these trips would be able to go. I suspect that the scholarships will be in the form of partial scholarships because what our hope is is that students who want to, who know well in advance that a trip is going to happen, begin some kind of savings plan on their own to contribute to it. I suspect that we probably will not have any full scholarships. And just ask that you publicize that so everyone knows that that's an availability. We will. Great. Any more questions, comments? Mr. Janger? Hold on to the motion until consent agenda. Not in the consent agenda. What? It's in the consent agenda. No, that's a different trip. Oh, that's a different trip. Oh, so we should vote on it then. Okay, so a motion. Move to approve. By Mr. Hainer. Second. By Mr. Schutman. All in favor? Aye. Aye. unanimous. Great. Thank you very much. Sounds like a great opportunity. Megan, thank you. Thank you. Beachtown, your bar so long. That doesn't sound too bad. I know. I've never been to a town. I've never been to a town. I love it. I can't believe this. Next on the agenda, we have the Arlington High School program of studies. And just introduce yourselves. Good evening, everyone. I'm Bill McCarthy. I'm the assistant principal at Arlington High School. And I'm Matthew Janger. I'm the principal at Arlington High School. Credit or credit is due, the beauty and structure and organization of this presentation and the program of studies is 98.7% Bill McCarthy. So I will let him take the lead in terms of organizing this. I'm here as moral supporter. And if we're giving credit, the reason it does look so formal is Ms. Brote and my secretary. It's very good at organizing everything for me. So every year, we come before the school committee to ask for approval of the program of studies. I believe everyone has received a copy of the updates in addition to the program of studies itself. I figured we would go over major changes. And if there were any questions, we could handle them as I go through them. The second page, if you go through that, is actually just a listing of the new courses. I'll talk about those in a moment because there are several we're very excited about. On the first page, we do have physical education graduation requirement. As you all know, next year, the graduating class next year, will have to have taken three years of PE, whereas all years after that, which would be the sophomores, freshmen, and rising ninth graders for next year, will be taking four years of PE. The way we have worked that out will be that ninth graders take a ninth grade PE class, 10th graders will take two quarter electives. And then before graduation, they will need to take two more quarter electives, usually one their junior year and one their senior year. Sometimes they will change that up based upon what's available and what courses we offer. Any questions on the PE requirements? I have a question actually. So right now, the current 10th graders are not taking quarter classes, they're taking a full year or what is? The current 10th grade class is taking one full year of 10th grade PE. That's what I thought. And then they will actually have to take one quarter elective junior year, one quarter elective senior year. Got it. The ninth graders next year will take two quarter electives as opposed to the full year, and then one quarter elective junior year and one quarter elective senior year. Okay, great, thanks. So the state has a four year, the state law is sort of odd, because what it says is we have to have a four year requirement. Our past process has been a full year, freshman year, full year, sophomore year, and then one quarter elective after, so we didn't actually fulfill that requirement. The challenge we had was to figure out a way that we weren't constraining the kids' opportunities to take other classes, as well as meeting that requirement. And actually the PE department came back with the proposal to do it this way, that by going to after freshman year, quarter requirements for everything, they really were able to have classes, those are the classes the kids like to take, those are the classes the teachers like to teach. There's a lot more choice and a lot more variety available. The other thing is that the way we teach PE right now is it's two days a week out of a four day schedule, which allows students in freshman year to have freshman seminar. We wanted for special ed, for student support, and for other reasons to allow sophomores to still have that for at least a quarter, but we didn't wanna stop up everything else. And you'll see actually there's been a push, we've been trying to have more of the electives be half year electives to allow students to be able to start taking them earlier and get more variety in their schedule. This provides another opportunity for students to do that, so there are more of those being proposed over time. Sorry, I think Dr. Allison MPS, doesn't it? Yeah, I just wanna, so it sounds like it's what I was thinking that they'll be able to have an elective and then PE being like half year elective and then PE being the other, so they'll get to take at least like one and a half electives instead of one. Yes, the goal behind this is that they'll be able to take more electives sooner. If you actually go through the program of studies and some of these items I've updated in here, some of our electives that have been well situated for multiple years, which were open to juniors and seniors, we've now opened up to sophomores. Great. The following four pieces are items, I'll go through each one, but they've been added to the program of studies. One is the learning center, which is a tutoring center. We have opened from 9 a.m. until 3.30 p.m. after school. There are two retired teachers who actually run it. They split the job. And our national art society students go in and tutor students throughout the day and after school. The program has existed for, I believe it's in its second, this will be its third year. So this is just a description of what we offer to students so that they are more aware of it. Students can be scheduled in there. They can also drop in for support services. These substance abuse services, we have added a line in there about our Jive Turkeys program, which is something we've done years ago, which we're bringing back. It's a student support group where students can discuss issues and stressors that they are feeling around alcohol and drugs. That's run by our social workers in the building. And it's a free forum for anyone to join. The other two pieces are, we originally had a program called the transition program, which was to aid students transitioning from hospitalization or into the building. We've since split that into two programs. One is the shortstop program, which is designed for students that will be, need a short amount of time, short amount of assistance transitioning back into the high school if they've been hospitalized for an extended period of time for illness or other means. And the other program is the harbor program, which is a program designed to help our students that have chronic mental health and medical issues that will be ongoing for a year or two years to help them get in the building, receive curriculum and make acceptable progress. Mr. Heiner, sorry. Either of these programs or is it a different program? What used to be called the Milbrook program? The Milbrook program is a separate program from these two. Okay. The Milbrook program is a- It sounded similar. Right. The Milbrook program is a transition and evaluation program for students in a number of different conditions, but that's only a 40 to 45 day program. So this is for students with chronic, complex medical and mental health issues that might require ongoing support. Might a student that's gone through the Milbrook end up in one of these as well? It could happen. Okay. Thank you. Great. Thanks. The next page actually lists our new courses for next year. You'll notice we've divided it up by department. There's a wide array of new courses being offered next year. I don't know if anybody has any questions about specific ones, which I'd be happy to answer. Okay. Mr. Slipman. I know this is a point where you're putting out offering as to see what the student response would be. Yes. And that you'll make your decision on courses based that are actually going to run based on the student response. So I understand, I realize this is a preliminary, to preliminary you really ask the question, but I'm wondering if there's things that are by nature going away from the course catalog that you would have been running before. Well, several of the courses that are listing here are actually renaming courses that currently exist, but they've decided to change the curriculum and they've changed courses to reflect that. For example, under music, the courses listed there currently exist under what is called music technology. They've decided to take a more focused program. So these courses already exist, they're just changing curriculum. In regards to courses that are no longer running, on the last page, we will be removing presentational speaking. Public policy will be suspended for one year. We're trying to get that on a biannual system to boost interest. Symposium has been replaced with a new title. Software English also has a new title and Rock Band has a new title as well. And as you said, ideally we run these new courses, we put them out there so that students can request them. And then based upon our staffing ability and the demands of the courses, we will shift courses as needed. If a course does not receive a required amount to be considered full, then unfortunately it does not run. We meet with those students and we move them to other classes. So this is really a revenue neutral operation to add the courses. We're not, by definition at this point, adding more sections or incurring more expenses. We are not incurring more expenses. I will say that we are requesting additional staffing just because of expansion of our student population and the constraints already on our core classes. But this is separate from that. Yeah, thank you. Okay, Mr. Steele. That was my question. That was your question. Okay. Sorry, Mr. Heiner. The early childhood for the seniors, at the end it says they're not eligible for the certifications because it's only a passion. You have to do so many hours or so many years? Yes, the state requires four years. The course that we are newly offering, we actually piloted this year, it's for students that could not complete all four years, but they still want to get the experience of working in a preschool or a daycare. It's an internship program. We were having to tell students that they couldn't participate in the internship program if they did not take all four years. This opens that to them. And what exactly does the certification, the student that does it for four years, they're allowed to work in a daycare center or something? Is that the, with? Fortunately, the department head. Okay. The lead teacher is here. It seems to be shaking your head. Do you wanna come up to the microphone? And currently our early childhood education program, if students take, okay, thank you. If students participate in all four years, they have enough content and contact hours to be able to apply to the state, Massachusetts office of, I always get them mixed up, childcare and education, early childcare and education. And they are able to apply for that certification, which would allow them to work in a preschool or daycare setting. We love that program because it gives them a little upper edge and I'll talk about it more in my presentation. But without that practicum year, they won't have enough contact hours to be able to apply for that certification. Thank you. Yep, thank you. Dr. Allison Amby. I was wondering if you could explain the difference between the current English 10th grade class and the new one that's coming. Of course. So the original title for the 10th grade English class, I should know the name of it. It's literary heritage. Thank you, thank you very much. I used to teach it, I should know it. So they've decided to revamp the curriculum offering new titles and to change the title to examining expression. I believe from my understanding, Ms. Perry, the department head for English gave me a brief rundown on it. It was more focusing on different authors and bringing in more of a concept around literary expression and students learning the art of expression in their writing. Okay. I have a quick question about the senior project that the course no longer offered. What was that, is that sort of a capstone project? Senior project worked as a capstone project. For a while it was quite popular. We actually had at its height 40 or 50 students involved and they would intern throughout the town. We have since evolved that to the academic internship program where students are, for the first semester, the first few weeks they are trained here on how to be business professional and they are placed in various offices throughout the town. So it was the natural evolution of senior project and now senior project is no longer necessary. Got it. Okay, great, thanks. Any other questions, comments? Do you want to? A motion? No, not yet. Do we want, do you want to present anything about the current, I mean you've talked with the new courses, but is there anything to say about the other document that we have? It's just the program studies. Yes, program studies. Okay. The other one is the complete program of studies as it will appear online. Okay, so Mr. Thelman. So I move that we accept the revised program of studies for FY18. Second. Seconded by Mr. Heiner. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Okay, unanimous? Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you both. And I hope to invite you back to talk about the internship program at some point this year. Family and consumer sciences update. And please introduce yourself, or do you want to? I can. This is Tricia Bellarosi, and she is the lead teacher for family and consumer science at grades six through 12. Thank you for having me. So I'd like to give you a brief overview of family and consumer sciences and what we have to offer in the town of Arlington, as well as what we currently offer and what our vision for the future holds. I guess I don't know which button to push. Okay. So in FACTS classes, students learn skills and obtain information that assists individuals, families, and communities to make informed decisions about their well-being, relationships, and resources to achieve optimal quality of life. This is taken directly from the American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences mission statement, which we try our hardest to live up to. Family and consumer sciences professionals all over the world are dedicated to this mission. I am often asked about what exactly is family and consumer science. They'll say, you teach what, what is that? It is true, our former name was Home Economics, but in 1994, the American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences voted to change the name to family and consumer sciences in hope that it would be a better descriptive of what we do. These are content areas that are defined by the American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences and their national standards. And many people don't realize that our field actually was born right here in Massachusetts at MIT. Our founder was the first graduate and professor at MIT, female professor. And she was an advocate for consumer education, child protection, nutrition, and application of the science of doing things to care for home family community. She really strived to help people understand not only how we do things properly, but why we do them properly, the science of it. And that's where the science comes in. So you can see that if you look at the fax umbrella, we address everything from career skills, healthy family, community connections, consumer and family resource management, financial education, consumer services, education, early childhood, human development, as well as interpersonal skills. We also get into health as well as community services, hospitality and tourism, housing, interior design, textiles, and facilities management and maintenance. So we have a lot of areas in our umbrella. So in Arlington, Family and Consumer Sciences teaches students the connection between setting, making a good decision, setting a goal, the process of getting that goal achieved, and then learning those skills so that they can have a better quality of life. By doing this, it's our hope that they'll make healthy decisions and have a more, a better quality of life for both themselves, their families, the community, their work. We teach independent self-reliance and resiliency. We offer students a lot of hands-on, self-directed and personalized learning. It is not uncommon for students to have a choice in how they show us what they've learned and how they show us the skills and that decision-making process and the goal setting. They are allowed to express creativity. They're constantly collaborating and problem solving. Family and Consumer Sciences helps students make connections between their core academics and the real world and how they relate. In some ways, we're constantly looking at them and saying, well, this is why you're learning this in math and this is why you're learning this in science and look, here's the connection here. And it is real fun to see that light bulb go off when they make those connections. To practice career skills and the correlation between school, home and work expectations at the high school, as a department, we developed a rubric for their daily grade and we called it their professionalism grade. And we have an activity that we do with them at the beginning of the term that helps them make that connection. So if you had your cell phone out while you were at work and you were supposed to be completing this task, how could that affect your work? Well, we're asking you while you have your, while you're working in here to keep that cell phone away as well because we want you to practice that because it could have severe consequences in the world of work. And we do that also with participation. We have them think about if their technology is out, not just the cell phones, but if they have their iPad or their computer out when it shouldn't be, what could the consequence be? We have them practicing real world skills through labs, scenarios and simulations. We're constantly giving them scenarios that are true to life. We are having them participate in simulations that help them understand how that skill is used. And so for example, we might put a whole group of ingredients out on the table. Well, in a lot of ways that is similar to when you open up your refrigerator at night to see what you have for ingredients and they create a healthy meal or they create a dish that goes along with the unit of study. We often will give them a budget amount and take them over to stop and shop and they shop for ingredients within that budget along with the unit. We also have them do financial scenarios at the eighth grade level where they talk about, where they learn about money management and those scenarios where they are given a certain amount and they need to pay their essential and their non-essential expenses where you're gonna make those choices. We give them opportunities to explore STEAM, Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics as it relates to multiple facets in life and career paths. We encourage them to explore careers within all of our areas and we also offer practical experiences and internships at the high school level. We are driven by both national and state standards. Our state standards for Massachusetts are the comprehensive health standards. That is our main area. But then we also expand upon those by going to national standards as well as other Massachusetts and national standards depending on what the unit of study is. So for example, Massachusetts comprehensive health standards has a consumerism health, a consumer health section. We didn't just stay at that. We also went to the national personal finance standards to make sure that they were getting skills that they needed. We focus on healthy foods for example in our culinary but we went beyond that and we went to the Massachusetts vocational technical education standards as well as the national family and consumer science standards so that we could ensure that they would graduate not only with skills for their health but skills that would give them an upper edge when they go to apply for jobs possibly after high school or even in high school while they're trying to pursue education and training. So some facts about family and consumer sciences in Arlington at Audison. We have 2.6 FTE at Arlington High School. We have 2.4. We are all certified in both family and consumer sciences and health. Massachusetts has combined those two certifications. That is the same certification now. Audison students participate in facts classes for one quarter. The sixth grade stays with their teacher for the full quarter seventh and eighth grade they switch due to facilities. We want all students to have the opportunity to be able to get some practice in the kitchen and we aren't able to do that in just one room for the whole term so we switch them and we give them a different experience. At the Audison, we are straw, well actually in both Audison and the high school we are really working hard to help support the district goals of the social-emotional health as well as teaching practical life skills. That's something that we work hard on. At the high school we offer elective opportunities. One of our courses, the Interior and Fashion Design meets the Fine Arts requirement. One course offers enough content and contact hours to receive certification with the Massachusetts Office for Early Child Care and Development. And we have been working hard to try and build some district and community partnerships. We, for our early childhood program, we have partnered with Monotomy Preschool and Daycare and we have recently connected with Whole Foods Market so that students can experience and see what food preparation out in food service looks like. We're gonna be going there for a pizza demonstration next week. So the students are quite excited about that. And then again, practical experiences and internships. This is a snapshot of our sixth grade curriculum. We took over the great body shop curriculum back in 1998 when the sixth grade came over to the Audison and we just recently, I'd say within the last couple of years have gotten, we've moved from the sixth grade curriculum to the middle school level one curriculum. As you can see, this curriculum includes a broad range of health skills. It includes decision-making, goal-setting and planning, nutrition, a maturation unit, social-emotional health, including prevention, recognizing and managing stress. We've expanded that unit based on the Youth Risk Behavior Survey results. Resiliency skills. We're always trying to prevent diseases and safety is a big thing with the middle school students. We are also working with a substance abuse prevention. We've expanded our unit on that and bullying prevention. We also provide enrichment to these programs. So for example, when we were teaching decision-making and substance abuse, we realized that the students absolutely know the right decision to make where they were having a difficult time was being able to get out of the situation and save face to their friends. And so we took a book by Sharon Stone called How to Say No and Keep Your Friends and we developed a refusal skills unit that we teach with the decision-making so that students have those skills and they feel more confident in being able to get out of those situations. We also instituted a unit, we expanded upon it from the Disease Illness Prevention Unit on the importance of sleep because in the Youth Risk Behavior Survey we saw that students were not getting the sleep that they needed. And so we started working on that. A breakfast, we saw a lot of students were eating breakfast. So with the middle school curriculum as well as the high school curriculum, we really look at all of our data to make sure and ensure that we're meeting the needs of the student and the community. In seventh grade, we split by quarter. They spent one half of the quarter in the foods lab learning about kitchen safety, food safety, healthy food preparation and they also explored food diversity from a global perspective. And then for the other half of the quarter they work on marketing, advertising, comparison shopping and consumer skills. And so the students take a good look at marketing employees. They take a good look at strategies that advertisers use to try and pull them in and they actually create advertisements by going into the TV, well at one point they were going into the TV studio and I think we may have visited you with a video of that. And now they're doing it with the iPads and the technology. In eighth grade, the curriculum for the foods and nutrition is similar but we also cover eating disorders and healthy eating. And then they get a unit on financial literacy and career exploration. So they talk about money management, banking, being fiscally financially responsible. They participate in a lot of financial education scenarios and we do a simulation with them where they're paying bills using beans and they have to figure out how to make those beans last by paying all of those bills and making choices. And the thing that's interesting about that is they actually complete a survey before about what they envision their life to be and so they start to try and pay the bills with that and then they realize that they've gonna make some changes and that we have a talk about how, you know, meeting your financial goals doesn't come instantly. It takes a lot of work and planning, goal setting and that also there's a direct correlation between education and socioeconomic levels. And so we explore that and then we talk about career exploration. They take a look at the program of studies for the high school and college requirements. At the high school, we have three main areas within our umbrella that we take a look at. Early childhood education, interior and fashion design and culinary arts and hospitality. We do provide them with career information and skills in all of these areas. They practice a lot of soft skills, so communication, collaboration. They also learn healthy living skills. They explore art, culinary and fashion from a steam perspective, a design process. We had a guest speaker from the School of Design in Boston and he came in and you would have thought that he was reading off the wall of the engineering and tech program over at the Odyssey and so they really go through that whole design process and they make those connections between engineering and design and design within interior and fashion as well as culinary. They do a lot of recipe development and test kitchens. The transition from school to independent living, understanding human development and early childhood education curriculum planning and teaching skills. Our early childhood education program is a four-year program.  They, it is very personalized and they have a lot of hands-on observation as well as interaction with the students in the preschool and daycare. They do a lot of simulations, journal reflections and things like that. There are five classes within that. They all are very structured, not structured, I apologize, they're scaffold and build up to that fourth year internship. As Mr. McCarthy was talking about, we did pilot this year. We had a student who was not able to participate in the practicum class and desperately wanted to complete an internship. She was very dedicated in her first two years. And so we have been piloting a hybrid of the practicum and internship. She goes out to the elementary schools but she also gets a lot of the content from the practicum. So it's a hybrid of it. She understands that she won't have enough contact hours to apply for the certification. Our interior fashion design program fulfills the fine arts requirement. Again, we look at the design process from the perspective of homes and fashion. And they're, this is very personalized, very hands-on, many guest speakers. I know that at one point they did a walking tour of Arlington looking at different styles of homes. They are looking at different types of fabrics and we were lucky enough to be sponsored by the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising to have a fashion club. Our culinary arts and hospitality class, we have both full-year course offerings and semester offerings. The semester courses did not run this year but those students moved into the culinary two and three class that we have. We are going to keep it in the program of studies because with the new PE requirement we feel like it would be great for them to be able to have the opportunity to experience some culinary. It's a very popular program. It is definitely our largest program. We do a lot to explore the connection between science and food prep and food and health and nutrition. We explore community resources. We practice meeting and budget. The upper level courses have more of a career in a global focus. We're in Italy on our culinary tour right now. The kids love pasta. They were very excited about this. And they really take a closer look at skills and what would be needed if they were gonna work in the industry. For those who are interested in it but also for those who may be working in it as a job when they're pursuing their education. So our vision for the future, exciting news, we applied for a grant with the Attorney General's Office for Opioid Prevention to purchase and provide training in the Botvin Life Skills training curriculum with Julie Dunn as well. We would like to continue increasing the simulations in all of our courses. We'd like to increase the number of semester facts classes at the high school level. We'd like to expand culinary and interior fashion but there are also other classes that we would be interested in offering. So for example, there was a class that had been proposed before, college survival skills one step ahead which is a course that addresses all kinds of different areas from finances to healthy cooking on a budget. We would also like to conduct some student interest surveys so that we can provide students with things that they are interested in learning more about. We'd like to continue building more community connections, incorporate more professional culinary skills, for example, providing students with an opportunity to participate in the online serve safe program which would give them an upper edge in the workplace if they were applying for a job. And we would like to continue to collaborate with the Young Adult Living Seminar and other programs at Arlington High School and Audison to help meet the needs of all of our students. I'd like to thank you for having me and for your support that you provide our program with. It really is very progressive just the other day. There was an article out of the Canadian Broadcast Center where the New Brunswick Medical Society actually put recommendations out for their citizens of New Brunswick and their number one recommendation that they went to the province and asked for was that home economics be mandatory in their schools because of all of the umbrella that we do offer. And so that, in my opinion, makes us very progressive that we have such a strong department in our school system and we're excited about what we can do for our youth and community in terms of helping them have a better quality of life. Thanks. Are there any questions? Yes, questions come in, Mr. Heiner. The internship at the elementary schools is that just done at the primary grades? Yes, yes. The students make the connections with teachers that they're interested in working with. Typically we find that they're teachers that they just loved being in their classes and would like to spend time in a different capacity.  They keep a journal or? Yes. The students go to their teacher's class, Miss Craigie. They sign out and they go to the elementary schools. Their roles at the elementary school really are different for all of the students. They all have different experiences based on what their cooperating teacher is interested in having them do. I've heard of them running and helping to run a circle time, working on projects with them, being a class assistant, helping them with the math and reading and things like that. As far as their work for the course itself, they do a lot of reading journals, journal articles, reflection on their experiences and relating it back to things that they've learned in their content over the years. Do they share with each other? Yes, they do. In a seminar? To my knowledge, yes. Thank you. Dr. Allison Ampett. I just wanted to say I was really impressed by how you identified the refusal skills and the need for that and then addressed it. I think that's really helpful for the kids. It is something they need to know how to do. Thank you. I appreciate that. I'll make sure that my team has that relate to them. Yes, Mr. Slickman. I know that the culinary program has been long time been one of the most popular things that goes on in this building. And the joy that you've provided to our students as well as I know we've had exchange students that they've gone through the culinary area and just had an absolute blast. Have you been thinking about what sort of facilities, programmatic facilities you're gonna be needing when we go to a newer building? Yes, I have. I have given that some thought. However, I do not have definitive descriptions. I would like to see more of a hybrid between a professional kitchen and a home kitchen. We definitely, given the size of the program, would need more than one lab, secure storage, really, I can't give definitive, I'm sorry. That's okay, what do you have? I would like to see facilities that would allow for students to explore multiple areas of the culinary field. I would like them to be able to learn how to properly use professional equipment as well as equipment for in the home. I would like to see the restaurant come back to an extent, maybe not to the extent that it was when Ms. Glidden was here, but I would love for the students to be able to share their products maybe with a display case for baked goods, soups, simple things that faculty could purchase. I would need to take a lot more time to think about that, but I do have experience with it. One of my jobs, I ran the faculty cafe at a school that I was at, and we headed down to a system based on their facilities. So I would like to see some sense of that so that students can practice those hospitality skills that we talk about and not just learn about them. Yeah, I understand that this is sort of a left field question from where you are, but this is something that we're been thinking about a lot. I mean, the new high school weighs heavily on our mind, and the more that folks can talk to us about their dreams for a new building and what they need in order to do their job well, be thinking, be planning. Absolutely. I'm sure that your input will be highly valued as we move forward. Thank you. Ah, Dr. Janger. Dr. Janger. Well, I can't recognize you. Excuse me, I heard you. Wait, Dr. Janger, come to the microphone if you're gonna speak. She undersells the amount of thinking she's done on this. We have memos and memos. I don't wanna go into it, we'll be here all night. Thank you. We'd be happy to expand out your square footage if we can justify the program. Absolutely, thank you. I appreciate that support. Thank you, Mr. Thielman. First, I can't remember a presentation on family consumer science. Maybe we've had one, but I've forgotten about it. So thanks so much for doing this, it's very, very helpful. Thank you for having me. I'm just curious how you got into this. I'm just curious to hear your own background. What got you into this field? Well, my mom is a home economist. She taught family and consumer sciences. And when I was in high school, I grew up in Northern Maine and I wanted to originally have a program, 14 parents. That was the type of thing that I wanted. And when I looked at home economics, it was home economics at the time. I felt like that had every aspect that would need to be covered. Everything from parenting to financial planning to healthy living. And I felt like it would be a perfect program for that. So I went to the University of Maine at Farmington for their home economics program. And I saw that they were closing all of the programs up there and I panicked. So I took some time off and I worked in early childhood for a while. And then I entered into Leslie College's human services program because I felt like that was a wonderful compliment to the home economics. So I finished in that. I had had all of my coursework in education except for my student teaching. And I was fortunate enough to be given a one year position over in Newton in family and consumer sciences. And my love just always went back to teaching versus human services. And I've been very fortunate in my career to work in many different environments. I've worked as the, you know, I mentioned earlier the faculty cafe. I actually started my career in Arlington back in 1997. And I did leave for a while when I had my family due to commute and I was fortunate enough to come back in 2012. So I love that I get to help students learn these types of skills. I love when you can see the light bulb go off when they make the connection between their core subjects and how it relates to their personal life and how it relates to those independent living skills. Yeah, great. Thanks for trying to get some background and context for the work again. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So next item on our agenda, we have the school calendar which we went, did our first read last meeting and this is our second read. And just as a reminder, not everything is on this calendar, right? So we have, we're working on school committee dates. We have beginning and end. We can actually fill us in. What else do we, what do we have and what are we missing on the calendar? What you have are the start and dates, vacation, major holidays. And school committee meetings which you may want to have more discussion about. What you do not have yet are the secondary early release days and conference schedules. And that will be something that you will be able to have. We want to have it to you earlier this year than we've had in the past. The other thing that I talked about last week, we've had some clarification this last week about kindergarten. I think the most important thing to say to parents is that kindergarten will start the first day of school. It will be a different program than it will be for the other students. One of the things we have learned over the last week as we've been discussing this and looking at various options is that in the contract it is mentioned that kindergarten teachers will be able to meet with parents in conferencing prior to the start of school. So we've modified this a little bit and this is our proposal at this time to you. We still probably will have more discussions on this as we go forward. But the important thing is that the kindergarten students will start the first week. We do want to make sure that this is completely decided by the start of registration which is going to be in mid-March. In fact, I can talk about that in a minute. But the plan right now is that we'll have open house on Tuesday and then on Tuesday and Wednesday there'll be an opportunity for parents who want to do this to have about a 10 minute conference with kindergarten teachers and it'll be signed up just like we do regular conferences. And then on Thursday and Friday half of the class will meet for the full day. I think that what was universal among not almost universal among kindergarten teachers they did like the having a smaller group go through the whole school day to learning all of the different routines not to learn them but they at least go through the routines of a school day. And then the first full school day for all kindergarten students will be the Monday following Labor Day. On the 11th. On the 11th. Dr. Alcinambia has a question. So when you say kindergarten students will start the first day you mean their week starts they don't actually have all of them don't have kindergarten every day that week. They do not. They'll actually be in school either Thursday or Friday that week. Okay so they. Tuesday they have an open house. Now yes it could a parent for go the Tuesday Wednesday. They could accept that if they hadn't done the screening that we require of all kindergarten students in June then they would need to have the screening done that week. I'm just trying to make sure that we communicate to parents because they're gonna need child care if their kids aren't in school. That's why this is really important to make sure that as kindergarten parents become more aware of registration when it's starting they're gonna want that information and we want to have it on the video that will be on the registration site and in writing and in emails. As many ways as we can communicate it. That does help. Mr. Heiner. Just for understanding this is listed as a second read. Normally a second read means we're approving it going forward. Yes. We're not approving the total calendar tonight are we? Or is that what you're asking? I'm just trying to. We're approving this calendar to what is said.  Yes. You will be adding other things going forward. We'll be adding other things and I don't think we'll be amenity to anything but if we did that would come up in the second time of calendar. We've been doing this in parts. Okay. Partly because rather than wait on the full calendar toward the end of the year at least we can do the ones for things we know right now. I just want to be clear that we're coming along with you in approving parts as we go along. Thank you. Yes. We were asked the question by email about the school committee dates and okay I can't pull up the calendar and talk to you guys at the same time but when I looked at the calendar I personally agreed that I would rather have the dates of February 8th, March 1, March 15, March 29 than whatever's on the calendar. Right. Itself and I would like to propose that as a motion. Okay. Wait, do look. Say that again please. Okay so the proposal is to have the February 8th meeting but not have a meeting on the 1st or the 15th to have a meeting on March 1st, 15th and 29th but not have a meeting on March 8th and 22nd. Is that right? I'll second that motion. Okay motion by Dr. Sampy seconded by Mr. Slickman. Let's discussion on the motion. Do we want an explanation of why this makes sense or why the proposal? It's a vacation all over the place. That's what's going on. Well one, it creates a two week spacing but more importantly if we look at what our budget cycle is this year this puts the meetings at a point when closer, it just makes the whole budget cycle a little bit tighter. This year we would, we've normally in the last few years anyway gone to presented our budget to the finance committee's mid to late March. So this gives a little bit more time to get the budget in full fully, fully approved. Okay, so okay Mr. Slickman. This is clarification so the meetings will be February 8th, March 1st, 1st, March 8th, March 27th. No March 1st, 15th, 29th, 29th. So three in March, one in February. Yes, Mr. Hayner. I just want to bring to everyone's attention taking a look at November and December. This November has back to back and December has back to back just so we're aware of no surprises next year. Yeah, we talked about that last time. That's fine. I just want to. Do you want to mention something about the budget? I mean, do you want to add anything? No, just that's when I look at, I just feel like that date spacing works better. Okay. And that's why I'm proposing it. Yeah, Mr. Hayner. As on this calendar, we're keeping the 21st of June on the calendar as. Yes. We usually schedule it. We don't always use the second one. So we now need a vote, right to vote. Okay. All in favor. On the amendment. On the amendment to this. Is that right? Yes. Yeah. So the amendment was made by Dr. Allison Ampe seconded by Mr. Slickman and the amendment was to change the. February and March dates to. February and March dates to the ones. Really talked about. To February 8th, March 1st, March 15th, March 29th. Right. Okay. All in favor. Yes. Aye. Aye. Aye. It's unanimous. Okay. And on the main motion. And on the main motion, we have not had a main motion. So that's. Okay, cool. Okay. We'll move approval. So we knew. We only amended the motion. We've amended. Okay, so. Motion to adopt the calendar as amended. Second. Okay. Motion by Mr. Slickman seconded by Mr. Thielman to adopt the calendar as amended. All in favor. Aye. Aye. It's unanimous. Any post? Okay. Okay. Anything else on calendar? Is that? I think that's it for right now. That's it for right now. Okay. So superintendent report. You're super early right now. I have quite a few things. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, let me start out with school building updates. But this time I'm going to start with the high school. We have, we have now submitted all of the documentation required for module one and have been invited by MSBA to attend the February 15th board meeting for approval to move into the feasibility study. Part of the work of the last couple months has been working very, very collaboratively with MSBA to arrive at an enrollment number that we both feel meets the methodology and consistency required by MSBA for building projects as well as meeting the needs of the high school. And that number, that design enrollment number is 1,755 students. I think that there is, people who've been working on this field, this is a, an adequate number. There'll probably be times when we, the number of students in the building might exceed that. But the point is that this number determines the number of homerooms that would be in the building. It does not determine the number of other educational spaces. And as we were talking about tonight, what kind of space do we need for our family consumer science program? And this is the kind of work that's going to be happening in all departments in terms of what, what the space requirements are going to be, to be needed. And of course there's a whole, a lot of other things we need to take a look, take a look at when we look at the high school and, and of course one of the big ones is security. So we're, so we're not in the feasibility study yet. We are being invited to the February 15th board meeting. And I think we're feeling very good about the work we've been doing with MSBA so far. Can I actually ask a question about the modular? So I know that the feasibility study is a modular three, right? Is that right? And then, and then we have modular one is what? Module, so module, so yeah, I'm used to saying. And then there's a second module, that's sort of a, we're, we partially satisfied. And then, which is? Yes, like, what we could do at another meeting, if you would like, is do it, after we get through February 15th, I think I would prefer to wait until we go through that milestone and then we can talk about what's next. That'd be great. And all of what we're going to be doing. That'd be great, okay. Just clarification. Once that milestone has been met, the timeline is something that you can predict somewhat better. Maybe, okay, I'll wait. Maybe, maybe, okay. Feasibility studies can have some variance in terms of how long they'll take. For what I understand, there is really no the time restriction on the other ones. The only one is the first module. You have to complete it within 270 days and we've completed it quicker than that. Our, I think our date was sometime in March, early March. All right, so the other building projects, because we've agreed that every meeting will get a little update. The good news is Stratton is just moving along just fine. It's on time and moving forward. And I was over there the other day and it's really quite remarkable how well they have adapted to these modular classrooms and they're just really making it work and they're doing it in good cheer as well. Just quite commendable. Moving with Thompson. Thompson, both by the report of our owner's project manager and the company. We are still slated to be able to open in September. But we're watching that very carefully as we go forward. I think one of the necessary parts of this will be, there'll be some Saturdays that the contractor will need to work, but what I do want to let the neighbors know, and we will, is we will make sure that we will send them a letter. They'll be delivered to their house, telling them when those Saturdays are required. One was supposed to happen last week, but they were able to complete enough work due to the weather, so that wasn't necessary. That's good. The Gibbs School, again, is moving forward quite well in terms of the matching, the things that need to be accomplished by the timeline. Again, the intent is that we're ready to really begin renovation on July 1 this year with opening of school the following September, September 18. Tomorrow, in fact, the architect is here to work with each one of the curriculum leaders to talk about what their requirements are in the building, both in terms of storage and finishes, because as I had said to you and in emails to parents, we really need to be finished with the schematics by the end of January, and so we're getting very close to that. So for example, the architect will be talking with Family Consumer Science in every single department. In fact, these department chairs have already completed a fairly detailed survey, and then it's just going over these tomorrow. So that's moving forward. So Dr. Allison might be, I think. Does that include special education? Yes, well, I mean, we have the, I mean in terms of finishes, I don't, I don't. Programmatic needs, is that just the question? Yeah, just are they involved? I'm still concerned about the transition, multiple transitions for these kids who don't handle transitions as well, and just anything that can be. That would be in the planning process. This is the building, the spaces. Allison Elmer and I had worked on that quite a bit. He also shared with the, should I turn your, he also shared with the architect, an outline of, when you're talking about finishes, that would make, from a universal design perspective, to floor finishes, to, you know, things that would dampen sound and things like that. So we had shared that with the architects very early on. Very early on, including, you can tell me the exact name. Is it, it's an audio, that's the audio wiring that's going to be in the building. Sure, so hardwiring the Red Cat system into the thing. But also we've worked with our teacher who's visually impaired to get recommendations around how to design a space that would suit people with low vision and things like that. Great. So the Red Cat system is? The sound amplification system. So for students who require it, it's, you know, they need it, but then it's what a side effect that many districts and classrooms have found is that it amplifies noise or sound and many students benefit from that. It's easier to focus in on the person's voice. I think lots of these things, many students benefit from, yeah. That is what the research has shown, and I think that teachers actually choose this when they can. Yes. Yes. Do we know about bells, or is that too early? That's too early. Will there be a bell system wiring for all of that? Yes. So we're really right now on the physical part of the building, but there are some things that need to be decided now in part of the whole costing of this is if there's built-ins. And one of the issues it gives, if I had fairly lively discussion about this just this week, and that is technology. Whether we're going to have carts that are charging carts or that we're gonna do built-ins for charging. And then how, you know, we do the built-ins, say we did built-ins now, will the space allocated, if we did built-ins, actually conform to the kind of devices we might have in five years? So, and what kind of amperage do you have to have, and what will that be? One advantage of having the built-ins is that space. It requires less space to have the built-ins. On the other hand, possibly a disadvantage of it is the ease in which the devices are put in for charging. The carts are fairly easy to have everything charged at the same time. You basically just have a push-in system. So that is being discussed, and we'll have to be decided. The cart part, if we go carts, it does not need to be decided right now. It's part of the technology budget for the school, which by the way, it is $600,000 for technology, and it's $600,000 for F&E, the furniture and equipment. If we go carts, we'll come out of that. The built-ins have to be decided now, because it's all part, because once we finish schematics, then we go into construction drawings, and it needs to be in that. One of the other talks about finish, we're gonna have some more discussion on, is when we were talking with teachers, they felt that they needed to have some built-ins for materials for the kids when they come into a class. Where are they gonna put all of their things? And so we're looking at that as well, and possibly it might even be that it's in the furniture, but again, if it's decided to have it be a more mobile kind of storage, then you don't have to have it in the schematics. So that's where we are. We're really focused on the physical. There's so many other things that we need to talk about as once we get over this piece of it, and we will. The good thing is that it has a rhythm to it, and there's a lot of things we do have to figure out, but we have a year and a half. Which is great. Okay, do you wanna talk about Hardy? Yes, let me talk a little bit about Hardy. As you know, the School Enrollment Task Force has recommended that there be a six-room addition. So where we are right now is there's been a rough estimate of what the cost of that could be, I'm not even sure I should say what it is right now because it has some, it's a tentative. And a reason why I say it's tentative is one of the things that the School Enrollment Task Force also asked about should we be looking at any ways to increase core spaces, specifically around the cafeteria in Hardy. And so we asked the architect that had been doing the study to take a look at that issue, and in fact they just have a cost estimate with three different options for what we might be able to do about the cafeteria. So this report will go to the School Enrollment Task Force and some discussion about that and that meeting's in a couple weeks. So we will take a look at that. Also going on simultaneous, we're having a second, a peer review on cost estimates because we need to make sure we're pretty set on what these costs are gonna be because as you know, Hardy is going to be funded primarily from the capital plan. Do we, what type of dates are we looking at in terms of starting? We do not know that yet. No. According to the paper, it's 100% in the capital plan. Yes. It was in the paper today, 100%. They've decided. Did they put the- They've decided, huh? They put the amount in it. Yeah, well there's some of this- Good sauce. But they have a number, I don't know if they published the number because they did, they published them. Well the number that was on the plan. In the capital plan, yeah. How much did they- It's three and a half. It's in the capital, it's already, it's in the capital plan. I mean it's, that's pretty widely known. No, it's in the capital plan. It's in the capital plan. Is that in the capital plan? Yes. Yes, but that's being peer reviewed right now and we haven't discussed the cafeteria piece as well. So there's a lot more work to be done on this. But you have to be able to see if the magnitude of this kind of renovation could be managed within our planning. Just a clarification, you're saying the 3.5 is just for the construction, not the additional? It's everything, but that is it. But including the cafeteria expansion? Does not include that. We don't know if that can be included in it yet. What I'm just saying. That's the amount that the capital plan is. No, no, I'm not questioning that. I just want to make it clear that what we're talking about, what the capital plan planning is talking about is the addition on the building not expanding core spaces, am I correct? The 3.5 is an estimate of what the entire cost would be. There may be capacity within that number for some renovation of the cafeteria space. But as I said, right now that number is being peer reviewed and I can't, I don't have the information to give you. I'm not trying to hold you there. I just want to make it clear. Thank you. Okay, I do have a couple others. One is I, we would talk to Allison and the central office, give it a little bit of a report on where we are with the, I don't know if, is that possible tonight? Just an outline of where we are and the timeline on the committee. The savings board of schools? Yeah, savings board of schools, yeah. So we received the grant from the state and we have worked with a consultant from the Asabit Valley Collaborative to develop what the consultation will look like as the teams roll out their work. So we're looking to have building level teams with representation from each grade level, content area cluster, depending on how the school is organized as well as representatives from special education and other specialties, you know, arts or besides. The teams will meet to work with the consultant around completing the savings board of schools self-assessment, which is part of the requirement of the grant. Once the teams complete that for their individual school, they will then work at the building level to develop priorities and then devise action plans to implement those priorities. So we're looking to start with these sessions in February, going through the end of June when action plans will be due. If for some reason they're unable to complete the action plan by June, there is some resources in the grant so that they can continue work in the summer. If they do complete the action plan, then we can begin implementation in the summer as well. Okay, so we're beginning, we're going to be putting out the stipends for teachers at every single school. Well, I showed the K through eight at this point. The K through eight. Pre-K through eight, right, pre-K through eight. And we're moving forward. So you're going to have, I don't know if we're probably midway through this, we'll be able to give you some more updates in terms of what's happening with this. But then at the end of this period of time, we should have a report in terms of actions going forward in the next year. And AEF has already indicated interest in supporting implementation activities. Great. So there's nothing in the original grant for implementations. It's specifically a planning grant. If there is remainder after you've completed your action planning for the summer, you can move into some implementation, but it's specifically a planning grant. Moving forward. All right, I sell more. Yeah, yeah. All right, keep going. All right, administrative searches. We have three searches that we know of at this point. We will be beginning, we've already posted the position for a chief financial officer. And probably usually you'll have three or four weeks. So we expect that we will be beginning doing interviews if not before February vacation, certainly right after. We mentioned, we're the actual hiring agent for that position after you do the clearing with Robinson. You and I talked about how many people the committee might want to see. Do we wanna have a quick discussion? I mean, to keep it going as fast as we can, would you? The start, what we've put in the posting is that it's July 1st or earlier. We certainly don't wanna be in the position of disrupting another school district in the middle of a school year, but it may be that somebody is available. So we don't know. We could, my suggestion on the number would be to wait to see what the applicant pool is like. And if the committee would like to interview two candidates instead of just one candidate or three candidates, we can talk about that. Just keep us informed that how it's going. And our timing then is we're hoping to interview. It would probably be not until March sometime. And maybe later, what we're gonna do is keep this open until we hire someone. Whatever it takes. Thanks. So we also have an interim principle at the middle school, which I know you're all aware of in the community as well. We will be, we are going to be posting that position. And as we have in other principal searches, we will have an advisory committee that will be consist of administrators, teachers, counselors, and parents from the middle school. And actually I've been thinking about whether maybe we'd have at least one representative from the fifth grade class since they will be entering the school next year. So that information will go out to parents asking if they're interested in serving on a committee. And I'm actually gonna have them send them to Mr. Spiegel. So we will put that committee together. However, the committee will probably not meet until early March. Right now, our timeline for this is to post it three to four weeks, but that puts us right at February vacation. And then we will do some preliminary interviews that week of March six. And then we will go into the next phase of it after that assuming that there are candidates at that point. We will, again, like any of our searches that we've done in the past, we'll just keep it open for a period of time. If we don't have many applicants by after February vacation, we may extend it a while before we actually create a group of candidates to be interviewed. The compensation for this, the way I understand it, it would be more or less like a stipend for going forward until the beginning of the first year till July 1st of 2018. Are we talking about the Gibbs or are we talking about Audison? No, it's Audison. So that position would be starting on July 1st. That's right. So I guess for this part, we don't really have any part of the hiring, but we have the issue of compensation. Yes. So we would ask you in a future executive session bring a proposal for that to the committee. Thank you. We'll do that. Do we need to look at the job description or do we already have something that we... We've had a job description. That we're not hiring. You will need it for the Gibbs because that's a new position. We're gonna bring that to you. But I will say is that what we've done, if people recall when we hired a high, a middle school principal, when we hired a high school principal, we, when we got to the point where we had finalists, we did create opportunities for parents and teachers to meet with those candidates and provide some feedback. So at this point, it remains to be seen where that will be. And given some history here, we, when we hired, the last time we hired a middle school principal, it took us two years to do that. We went out the first year, did not find the candidate that we wanted, then we advertised the second year. The same thing happened with down school. Now, in other searches, we were able to do it with one search. So I do want to say that what's more important to me, and I'm quite certain to all of you and to the school, is that we find the right person. And of course, what is that right person is hard to say? I mean, everybody has a different, certainly probably some common attributes and then some things that might differ. But it's a process, and we'll keep you informed as to where we are, but this is the rough timeline, is that the first, potentially the first time we would do any interviewing would be that week of March 6th. All right? And then we will have the Gibbs, and because we've got these other ones going on, we're gonna push that a little bit later, but that also will have an advisory committee, and we will be inviting teachers. In fact, I believe already, we have teachers that are going to be on that committee. When, by contract, when we hire someone who's an administrator, who does evaluations, the teachers that serve on the committee are elected by their colleagues. And so that has happened. I don't think that the one for the oddest in middle has happened yet, but I know that's going to happen on the next week or so. So we will have that committee as well, and we'll probably have something a little bit further along in the process for that. So when are we thinking of starting the process then? Well, we have to get the job description done, has to be approved by you, probably would not go out until after vacation sometime. After some time. Okay, okay, Mr. Einer. So going back to my original question, do you see this as a stipend part-time position for the upcoming year, and then a full-time position starting in July of 18? I do see it having a stipend with it because it's going to be more... For the overlap part. Right, there'll be more work during this period of time, yes. And then the full-time position would be starting for July 1st. July 1st, 2018. Right. Okay, so you're talking about a job description for that for our approval. Yes. The stipend and stuff, that would be a new stipend position as well. So we'd be looking at that as well also. The stipend would not be in the job description. No, no, I'm seeing this as two separate things, maybe with the same person in other words, the stipend and the requirements are going to be getting it together through June 30th, 2018. And then the full-time position starting. I don't know what the amount of the stipend would be, it will require a little bit more thought. And the reason why, should the person that is chosen be an Arlington administrator, there are days that they're gonna be working anyway. And so we just have to look at it. I don't have a preconceived idea right now what that would be other than the fact that I do think it merits some kind of stipend. Thank you. All right, and then budget. Budget. At the last school committee meeting, there was a presentation and some discussion about where we are with the FY17 budget. And we've been talking about the fact that we do have a projected deficit for FY17 in the amount between 800 and 900,000. And there was, the feedback I had received is that there was a lack of clarity after that meeting as to, first of all, what were the drivers for this deficit? And secondly, and probably as importantly, how would we fund this deficit given our current budget? So I wanted to clarify this. The two drivers for this projected deficit, the most important one is our out-of-district tuition. And last year when we budgeted for out-of-district, the amount that we budgeted was 7,112,000. $565. That number at the time we did the budget was based on really what the actual costs were at that time. That's pretty much how we've always budgeted out-of-district. But things change. And that number was in January last year, so things do change and they did change. And right now our projected out-of-district costs are $7,889,103. So there is a difference there of $7,616,000 over what we thought they were a year ago this time. Longevity is the other driver. It is not as significant of one, but it was budgeted at around 190,000. It is this year turning out to be $303,000 with a difference of 113. So the total amount of the deficit projected, I say projected deficit is $889,000. Mr. Hiner. I accept that you cannot predict special education and expenses like that. That happens. Periodically we get a reminder and get hit hard and we did this year. But I've got to say categorically, in my mind there's absolutely no excuse for the longevity aspect. In this time of the year we know exactly who's in our, for budgeting time, who is going to get a longevity increase. And by budgeting that number, the upside, if that person doesn't decide to stay here, the number will be higher and not expense. $113,224 is an expense, in my mind. I'm sharing this where they are. We have to live with it. But I don't think there's any excuse whatsoever for that being there. And I'm not laying this on just you, Dr. Bodie, but it just shouldn't be there. We have a deficit. We should be $113,000 less than our deficit. Yes, I don't completely understand why we have the longevity deficit ourselves. So, but it is what we have. I'm glad that we know it, rather than have a surprise in May when we're reconciling everything in June and find that we're in that position. We know it right now. And so we're able to identify how we're going to be able to offset this amount of money. So, in the second slide I'm giving you, looking at where the sources of revenue would be for this. We have, as you know, a special education stabilization account that was, that has been established by town meeting. Several years ago, we were able to fund, put this amount of money in terms of savings that particular year. And to Mr. Hayner's point, there is a lot of peaks and valleys over a long stretch of time in special education spending and particularly determined by out of district. That's just the way that it is. And we've given you many graphs over time to show that. But in a particular year when we had some savings, the money went into the stabilization account and this year we're going to ask town meeting to move that money into the FY17 school department budget. We also have a tuition in revolving account that has been growing. We have not been needing to tap into it in the last few years and you have the amount there. That fact is almost identical to the amount in the stabilization account. So roughly speaking, we have here now $700,000. In the legal, and this actually might be a higher number, but if you notice in the sources of reductions that we would be thinking about, which we will talk about a little bit later, think about in terms of for next year from the FY17 to FY18 budget, we believe that given our actuals, we could reduce the legal budget by around 100,000. That's because this year we're gonna need to spend less. So that money that is budgeted could be another offset. So that leaves roughly 140,000. And if necessary, we can go to the foreign visa account. I'm not sure that it's going to be necessary because as we go through the second part of this year, we may be able to find additional savings and other line items, which we are watching very carefully. Now, not included in this analysis are other potential sources if should we need them. One is the extraordinary relief fund, and Ms. Elmer's gonna talk a little bit more about this. There's a mechanism under which if you anticipate that your circuit breaker claim will be 25% greater than 125% greater than the previous years that you can apply for extraordinary relief for this year. So we have been essentially doing our circuit breaker claim now to see if we meet that and we do. And at the end of February is when you can indicate your intent to file for relief. There is $5 million earmark for the state for extraordinary relief. So depending on who files what the claims are for, the state will then determine if they release funds back to you during the last quarter disbursement. So this isn't 125% of the spending, but 125% of what the circuit breaker would give us. The claim we made last year. The claim for circuit breaker. Yeah, right, right, right. So thanks to the people, to Andrew Campbell. Andrew Campbell largely has been doing that work to do the circuit breaker claim. So that's one possibility. And again, as I mentioned, there could be savings in the FY17 budget we'll see because we're being very careful about spending as we go forward. And then, not that I'm suggesting that we would use this money, but rather to know that we always have circuit breaker money from last year sitting in an account. That money is used for next year. That's how we've been budgeting. And there's some discussion about that whole issue as we go forward. But that money exists, that money sits there and we will, the money that's sitting there is the money we will budget for FY18. So I am confident that we're going to be fine at the end of the year because of these sources. And I wish we didn't have this deficit, but on the other hand, this is what the needs of the children that needed to have out of district placements. And that's, we put children in out of district placements when we do not have the resources and the programs in district to meet their needs. And that's what, that's why, but that's what makes this a valid because you don't know which children are going to be needing that kind of service when you're budgeting in January. So that's where we are. And yes, I think we'll be fine at the end of the year. So I just asked this to get put into Novus because it's not yet. No, his child is not in Novus. It is not Novus, but we can put it in Novus. Let's put it in Novus, yeah. I have Novus. Yeah, yeah, actually under the superintendent's report. Dr. Allison Ampe. So going back to longevity, what I'd like to ask, but we really can't because of the situation is how will we present, how will we prevent something like this from happening in the future? You know, what, what are we going to change in our processes? But maybe after we hire a CFO, and after they've been on a job for a while, we could revisit this question and talk about how we can prevent something like this from happening in the future. I guess. Mr. Slickman. Yeah, I'm concerned about the same thing. And I would like us to consider moving forward that we don't have a longevity line in the budget because the longevity is really the same as another stepper lane calculation. We know when we hire the people, we should program that into the system so that we know what we're paying each and every employee in the following fiscal year and calculate that into the annual adjustment. That would certainly solve the problem. And when we get a new CFO in, we can talk about looking for the flags in the system so we know when the longevity steps are due. Mr. Hinner. I have a line item in that because I've questioned that several times during the budget reports. That's another reason why I got upset over it. It's been in a couple of our reports, but it needs to be done better. I agree with you on that. I actually have to say, I like the idea of having a line item in our budget so we just know we can track what the expenses are. We can see what they are. Well, we don't track lanes and steps separately, and it's really the same sort of an automatic mechanism in that we do know who our employees are. We do know their date of employ. We shouldn't be estimating that at all. That should be something that we know the exact number of what we're gonna pay this person the subsequent year unless we're in contract negotiations and we don't know that number. If we're in contract negotiations, we don't have a new contract. We put money in reserve. We plug in the old number with the step and lane and longevity increases in. So we have that as our baseline. To have a separate item for longevity just doesn't seem appropriate to me. And to have that estimated rather than being calculated in unreal data. I mean, how many employees do we have that would be possibly eligible for that? Shouldn't be too hard to figure out what our longevity is going forward. Now, I understand that we've done it this way for a long time and it's never been a problem before, but I don't wanna go to the point of belaboring the situation, but it's certainly something we can improve. We should improve and I think best practice would be to just include that in the base calculations based on steps and lengths. Mr. Thielman. So could you just kind of summarize how this is informing next year's budget so how would our district tuition? Yes, I can. So how this informs next year is that first, with respect to out of district tuitions, we've been talking in rough numbers of $800,000. So that has to be in the base budget of next year an additional 800,000. But we've also talked about perhaps having 200,000 additional one million should there be other students that have been placed from this point through next year. Now, there's pros and cons to that. I mean, what we're seeing is that when you do it on the actuals at that point in time, you very likely could have a deficit. You could also have savings because people move, placements change. So we've had our own discussions about that too, whether we just go with the actual costs. But I think that the actual costs probably right now might be higher than the 800 or potentially higher than that. I don't know if you could comment on that at this point for out of district placements. For the projection next year, when we did the projections for next year, we base that on not only the current students, but if they're leaving the year because they're aging out at the age of 22. So it is a exact account at that point in time. Exactly. It's an exact account at this point in time. But when last year, we were in January, we did it at that point in time. And maybe that's what we do, because this is something that budget can talk a little bit more about on this because what has been proposed by our CFO is that we actually add 200,000 to that amount and you have that informed FY 18. You could simply go on in terms of budgeting for next year. What we know are the actuals at this point in time. Which is about 800. Which is about 800,000, yes. So I mean, if we end up incurring more expenses, then it's going to impact next year's budget. But if we have the cushion, the impact would be less than having to absorb it in some way next year, should that be the case? So the argument, it's a question that we're going to have to wrestle with here over the next couple of weeks. Where we are right now in the budget document is that today, the superintendent's budget went to the printer. So you're going to have that fairly soon. And I think probably another week. Certainly a week before, certainly a week before we have the presentation on February 9th. But then we have a couple of meetings where there's going to be some discussion about this as to what assumptions you want to make. And then what we will be doing is making changes in the budget as presented. So that at the point we come to in March where we vote on the budget, it will be your budget. And so some of your thinking has to come into this as well. And it's just really, it's an issue. Do you want to put the 200 into the out-of-district line item, or do you want to put the 200 into something else? Knowing that full well next year, we could be revisiting this again. Does budget have recommendations on that specifically at this point? All right, anything? Is this something to go over, or is this? I was going to go, but we're talking about the reduction. And do you want to talk about it now? In my report, do you want to wait to budget subcommittees? It's totally up to you. Well, since we're talking about money, maybe we'll just keep going here. Is this all that we have left for the superintendent? So there are other? I had one other thing, and it's very quick. Why don't we do that other thing first? Yeah, and the other thing is, David Ardido is going to, who is our director of visual arts, and who helps inspire our teacher for these wonderful exhibits, is receiving an award from the, from ACA, Arlington Council of Arts. This coming Saturday night, it's the Allen MacLennan Art Award, and it's being given to him for his tireless advocacy on behalf of arts and arts education, both in the schools and the community. And I want to congratulate him. It's certainly well deserved. He's done an amazing job as our director of visual arts. And as I said, well deserved. So congratulations, Dave. And I also want to thank ACA that they have offered four tickets to this event, which is a fundraiser.  They've offered four tickets to four art teachers to be able to be there with Dave when he receives his award. And there was a quick response to that, I might add. So we do have four art teachers that are going. Pardon? Medical. Yes, thank you. And then the other thing, and Mr. Hain to talk about this, last week we had a potluck in Boston with our medical students and their families.  Students from the high school came to the event. Maybe you might want to hear some comments from the student council. Yeah. Presentative. That'd be great. Mr. Oh, sorry. Oh yeah, take this. Yes. So a group of us went to the event. We met here and took the bus in. It was definitely a great experience because we got to meet a lot of the families who are involved in the community. We know personally a lot of the students who go to the school, but it was great because we actually realized how large a community were involved in and it really united us and we did different mixer activities and it was definitely a great experience and it would be great to do it again. Well, I have to say the student council students really got into the activity.  Yeah, so there was a bingo, a person bingo sheet and we all went around and met different community members and I know there were a lot of teachers and different staff members there as well as parents. And then we all ended up sitting at separate tables based on stickers that they put on our name tags, which definitely gave us the opportunity to talk to people we might not have reached out to before. And then there was a lot of young children there as well from the community and the little boy who won the activity, there was a category that asked for a twin and there weren't any twins there and so he just simply drew a line from this free space into the twin space. So it was a great bonding activity overall. It was a lot of fun. And I wanted to thank Mr. Haynor, he was there and actually was a contributor to the food of the event. It was a great food and we had plenty of it and plenty of desserts, but he did a terrific job of organizing it and you actually were sort of the emcee with Ms. Thomas. Margaret Thomas, our Metco director, she put tremendous amount of effort in organizing it. She got the building for us, she ordered all the food, the major part of the food, the desserts were, is what each of the contributors, the families brought, I had to start a diet a week before and I ate two tangerines the whole night with all this food, it was horrendous. You know how great the food was. The people were wonderful. We anticipated 60 people participating, we had over 80 people come. Right in the middle we ended up adding tables and stuff. It was a wonderful social event at the end. There was a sign up sheet for those people that wanted to move forward. We had 15 people from the Boston part of our community and as much from the Allington part and we're looking forward to getting together and having another social here in town within the next month or so. It was, and I want to thank Dr. Bodie for providing a bus, one of the rare times when we bused into Boston instead of busing out of Boston. And they timed it really well. Just at the time for cleanup, the bus had to leave. But it worked out well. It was a wonderful, exciting experience. Thank you very much. All right, so that's the report and if we want to move into. After the feel good, we're talking about budget. Yeah, so why don't we just go right into budget right now and discuss it a little bit more. Should we do the consent agenda? Well, so I mean, this was a continuation of the super intense report to go into this discussion or we can do it the other way. It doesn't matter. To the consent agenda. Okay, so we'll do it in the regular order. Okay, so that's it for the. That's it. That's it, okay, great. Okay, so consent agenda. All items listed with an asterisk are considered to be routine and will be enacted with one motion. There'll be no separate discussion of these items unless member of the committee so requests in which event the item will be considered as normal sequence. Provolve warrant, warrant number 17108, total warrant amount 903,000, or million, sorry, thousand and $78.15, dated 112, 2016. Provolve minutes, none. Provolve trip, Arlington High School Mass School Council Association trip, March, 2017. So moved. Moved by Mr. Hayner. Do we need, moved by Mr. Hayner? Second. Okay, second. All in favor? Aye. Aye, it's unanimous. Any opposed? Okay. Policy to review none. Subcommittee and liaison reports and announcements. So then we go into budgets. Okay. Yes. So budget met on one day Tuesday, I don't remember, yesterday, Wednesday. And we discussed the FY 18 budget. The administration had brought to us, to this meeting, a list of budget reductions, which you have a sheet of, looks like this. Which is on Novus as well. Yeah, and it's on Novus as well. That's the top part of this sheet. It's listing things that either, like the photocopier lease, it was an estimate before and the actual turns out to be less. So there's available funding. So these are things either unfilled positions or the TAs are reductions to bring all the TAs across the district down to parity. Because right now, there's actually significantly more in some schools than others. And this is trying to. Do to enrollment numbers. Do to enrollment numbers. Just doing a reset button on this. Yeah. Et cetera. So we reviewed those. The administration also brought the additions to the budget that they would like to see. And that's the second part of the sheet. And so we discussed all of this. We didn't really have any significant questions or changes about these parts of. I wouldn't say that. No, I mean about this part. No, I mean, so this will be presented in the superintendent's budget. And then we'll have opportunity to comment on it then. Right. As far as whether we feel maybe a different priority is more important than some of the priorities that they've come forward with. But this is what the administration team has put together. Okay. But I think you could comment. Significant questions weren't raised yesterday. They may exist, but they weren't raised yesterday. So the other thing that we discussed was the use of part of the circuit breaker, which we had discussed at full school committee last meeting. So first, the administration is very much against this idea. However, the budget subcommittee still feels that it's something that we would like to consider. We weren't able to fulfill Cindy's request for something that would give you a financial projection of what it would look like next year if we did that. We're still working on this, some of. Circuit breaker would look like or? I'm sorry, what? Financially, what would it look like if we use some of the circuit breaker this year and then moving forward what would happen in the future? And without that documentation, I didn't feel comfortable bringing a specific recommendation to you all because I feel like we haven't done our background work. But what we'd like to do is just get a sense, sort of a straw poll of where you folks are thinking. Do you feel like we've made enough headroad into the four million or so of asks by addressing $800,000 worth of them? Or do we want to try and go further using some of the circuit breaker, understanding that the administration is very much against this idea? They feel it's risky. I personally don't agree it is as risky as I'm hearing it discussed. And I don't think the rest of the budget subcommittee does either. But I'm just telling you, there's very different views here. So we can work on getting numbers and stuff for you. But first, I just want a sense of where do you guys think it? Yeah, so Mr. Cardin wants. Just to get a little bit more clarity. So we can continue working on it and three of us feel that it's worth continuing to work on. But if you want to get your sense of that. So once Andrea completes the estimated claim for this year, if you could give us that number that will help with our calculation for what the circuit breaker will be next year. So if you could provide that to us, that would be helpful. So then we'll have a more concrete number as to what our increase is going to be in circuit breaker. And that will help us run the numbers in the future years to see what the impact would be of moving some of that spending for some of that funding forward. Right. If enough people feel it's worth pursuing that. Okay, Mr. Thielen. So I guess how would you respond to this question? You know, we're operating in a deficit this year, which we'd cover with reserve and other funds. And the budget subcommittee is proposing that we go above the administration's recommendation next year's budget.  How do we make, why should we do this? So we will stick. Yeah, no. No, no, no.  Resilient, do you want to answer, do you want to talk to that? Yeah, I would talk to Mr. Thielen's point in that we have an extraordinary spike in special edict expenditures this year. And we're seeing that in terms of the deficit presented to us. A lot of that we hope will be reimbursable under Circuit Breaker and through the extraordinary relief program this year. So essentially what's happening, we have a spike in expenditures this year. And if we take 100% of our Circuit Breaker money and park it next year, we don't get to access it until fiscal 2019. And I understand the need to be conservative with the Circuit Breaker amount, so we don't get into a situation where we estimated a larger number than we're actually going to receive. However, at this point, we do know what the number is in House 1. We know how much Circuit Breaker money is the bare minimum to come out, which is in the neighborhood of this year's amount. So we're not going to get a big increase in Circuit Breaker percentage rates over this year, unless the legislature really goes aggressively to add to it, and they might. But at least we have a baseline number that is not going to fall below the number that's being put out in the House 1 budget. So we have a sense of the amount of funding for Circuit Breaker. We will be getting a spike in reimbursements next year due to the increase in costs this year. Now, to take, that expense is going to roll over to next year, and it's going to be more expensive for us to educate those children. And I think that we need to be taking some of the money we're getting from the reimbursement to align to the expenditures we're making for Special Ed. Remember, the purpose of the Circuit Breaker is to reimburse us against high-cost Special Ed costs. If the high-cost Special Ed costs are increasing, and if we don't use the additional Circuit Breaker to cover that, we're essentially moving costs from our operating budget to cover the difference at a district's spend cost. So I think that it's prudent to us to figure out what a conservative number is for next year's Circuit Breaker number. Not budget that out, but take a look at that increase that we're being hit with. Otherwise, we're hit with the increase this year, we're hit with the increase next year, and we're not getting the increase in the Circuit Breaker until two years out. And to be hit with a significant additional expense for two years before we actually are able to go and recover some of the reimbursement for that, I think is not the right thing to do. I'm just trying to understand. I'm just thanking Paul. I'm just trying to understand that that's an opinion. That's all I'm trying to do. So I didn't, don't need too much explanation. We had a pattern the last few years, fortunately, where we are always able to have some clarity, some surety when we budget the next year based on the Circuit Breaker number.  And then sometimes even when we got the percentage on a house one budget, it could change later on. In fact, that happened to us more than once, unfortunately. So there's that uncertainty as to what you'll have is your revenue sources. We have clarity about town appropriation because we work well together to figure out these formulas. We know that. The only thing that's always been a wildcard is Circuit Breaker and then of course grants. Title I, if you look at the pattern over 10 years, it goes up and then it goes down. And so maybe we're just following that pattern in next year to bring it down. But Title I isn't such a big chunk of our budget like Circuit Breaker and special ed costs. So it's just our experience from years ago when we didn't have this budgeting tool. Now that we have it, if we start taking the cream off of it, that's due to the bump, we still are gonna have those costs potentially in FY19, but now the Circuit Breaker that you're moving into in 19 may not have the sufficient money. So that's why you're opposed to there? That's why I'm opposed to doing it and that's why we spend time and see, we agree that there are some things we need a lot and so we spend a lot of time trying to figure out where can we make some cuts that would have minimal impact. So actually, can I get for the public's benefit and explanation of what Circuit Breaker is? Cause I know that probably we all know what it is, but there might be some people out there who don't. I'm gonna give it to over here to the expert. I don't know if that's what I'm trying to explain, but so when they set the foundation amount, there's a mechanism for the state to reimburse for high cost special ed, which is set at four times that, so roughly this year it's in the $43,000 range. So for expenses over that amount, we get reimbursed at a rate of up to 75% of that amount. And what Dr. Bodie's talking about is, it's been around 70% for the last few years going up to 75 at times and if they're gonna fully fund it, the last disbursement we get that year will be a larger disbursement. So it is typically unknown and so the fact that we're carrying over the full amount, it's a fixed amount that we know. So roughly if you had a tuition that was $100,000, take 42 or 43,000 out of that, that remaining percentage, 57, you get up to 75% of that $57,000. Okay, thanks. Okay, Mr. Hanna. We have become dependent on a lot of our grants and going forward. As Dr. Bodie just said, we can't depend on them. They go up, they go down, they're at the whim of the legislature, federal and state. My concern about touching the circuit breaker money is that it opens the door going forward, treating it as a revenue source, a regular revenue source, which it is to some degree, but again, it's at the whim of the legislature as a lot of our stuff. I would not support this at all. Mr. Hanna, can I ask some questions on this? Yeah, I think, yeah. It has here music, where is that? What is that for music? Half of a $80,000 person. Is that elementary, middle school, high school? That's for the, this is for the director. This is for the director. The performing arts director. Performing arts director. Yes, I don't know why it got chopped off like that. It was, it should say performing art director. Yeah. And the idea is to fund the administrative part of it, 0.5, we already have in the budget right now, 0.2. We could either hire someone that would be half time like Mr. Ardido, or we could have somebody come in and have a half teaching assignment and half administrator because we would have probably that capacity to need the 0.5 teachers. So we have some leeway there. Okay, and also I noticed there's no high school dean on here. There is no high school dean on here. Would the high school like a dean, yes, but they also need 2.0 FTEs to cover core classes. And the director of social, emotional learning and guidance is going to be able to take away some responsibilities from one of the deans. A significant responsibility which is oversight of the guidance department. So it'll be freeing up some time there. In addition, we will be able to do some contracted pieces to get some special projects done. So the idea is to sort of help there. It doesn't completely solve the issue. Next year, the increase is about 60 students, but I think that the following year that would definitely be on our radar screen as one of the top priorities as dean at the high school. And my other question is, if I remember correctly, the asks were for more TAs and we're cutting almost eight TAs. Yes, we have some reserves. So I don't understand that at all, yes. Well, how we've worked it out at the elementary and we have to do a reset button. We do have some reserve TAs in the budget still. But what can happen if you're not, if you don't do this reset every year is that you get a large class TA, which can happen in kindergarten, and then they roll over to the next year. And so what we do every year, and we're doing it again this year is just look at it. So the way elementaries are staffed for TAs, there is the halftime TA for all the kindergartens. Each special education teacher has one TA they work with. We have a building sub and in two large buildings, we have two building subs, and we have the paraprofessional library. So I cover everything correctly. I think that's, and then- The programs. Pardon? Plus the program. And plus the program TAs. I mean, I'm not talking about the program TAs. That's sort of a separate look at it, yeah. Now, does it mean that we won't be putting additional TAs in? If we highly learning specialists, yes. If we have large classes, we do that. We try to make that work. And same thing with the kindergarten. So yes, there's the need for that. We don't doubt that. But then what we're going is, okay. It's like, what do we really need from our point of view as administrators? And of course we're gonna be looking at what do you think too? We have to find some ways to have some economy and some reductions in order to get some other things. Because there's just no, once you do the rollover of steps and lanes, longevity, everything, and special education costs, there's $100,000. No, I understand that. But I'm, so is this mean that Brackett will have a kindergarten that doesn't get a half-time TA and Hardy will have four kindergartens without TAs? No, no. Every kindergarten will have a half-time TA, every kindergarten. I don't expect any careers in kindergarten teachers next year. Our needs for classroom teachers are gonna be at other grades than that. Okay. All right, so I guess when I think about whether or not to use Circuit Breaker, I think that part of what I need to think about is what are the absolute must-haves? And if we can't fund the absolute must-haves, then I would back going after some of that money. If we can fund the must-haves, then I feel like we don't need to go after that money. I think that the high school dean is a must-have. So at this point, I would certainly back going after some of that money if it can't be added in here or we can't find that funding, but that's the way I think about it. I absolutely would rather not go into that money at all, but I think that we can't really, I can't make that decision until I have a list of the things that we absolutely have to have in order to run this school system next year and the amount of money that we have to do that. And if they don't add up, then we have to get the money from somewhere. So that or we should start a class in how to make money. Print it, print it. The online line for that class. Printing, yeah. I think we spend a lot of time, we have a lot of discussions going on and as far as I know, over the six years I've been on this committee, we've deferred to the educational experts. I think it's important to hear the education experts and their feelings on this. And I'm not asking them to come forward. I think we've already heard it. They're not supporting the idea of going after the, using the circuit breaker. And they're the ones that are gonna be impacted on this as a result. That's my opinion. Budget's ours and it's a policy document. I've got questions. Budget's ours, it's a policy document. It's our decision. I think it's the role of the superintendent to give her best recommendation. And I'm very appreciative of that. And I'm reluctant at almost any time to step on that and go in a different direction. But I think that this has to be an option we have on the table. Now I'm not ready to vote it right now. And I don't think any of us should. But as we move forward, we should take the budget as it's presented, take a look at where we're at, take some real careful looks about what that circuit breaker number might be coming into the subsequent year. Look at what needs we're peeling off and know that this is an option for us that should be on the table. If, as Starks is saying, we're making cuts in services that we shouldn't be. Because to make cuts for must haves and put extra money in the bank, I think it is short changing the students in the subsequent fiscal year. If it is a prudent methodology, I don't wanna be reckless about this. I don't wanna go past a very safe and conservative number on the circuit breaker. But we're in essence spending money this year taking the reimbursement next year and holding it and not spending it for another year out. And I understand why we do that. And it was a good move to do it when we did and we had enough of a cushion in our budget we could afford to take one year's worth of circuit breaker and put it aside and have this revolve out. But given the fact that the circuit breaker, the out of district cost went up significantly this year which we'll trail into next year and we're not gonna take the reimbursement for those additional expenses. That delta, that difference, it's impacting what else we can do until two years out. I think that has to be on the table. And let's do a budget now based on not changing our circuit breaker practice but that should be an element in our toolkit that we have and when we come down to the end of it and we look at the final budget and say, oh my God, we need more reserve positions for enrollment or we need, there are unmet needs in the budget because this budget's looking very tight right now. We should have the option to go there and be informed about the amounts and the projections before we do it. Right now we're having, in essence, one of the best conversations we've had at this table in a long time. This is a really thoughtful conversation. And that we have an interesting range of opinions. And this is what the public is entitled to see and I'm so proud to be a member of this committee right now because of the way we're discussing it. But the fact that we're having now a discussion based on what might we do versus when we get the numbers and look at it is setting the stage. It's giving the superintendent information. It's alerting the community that we're struggling with this and I welcome the clarity of sharper numbers later in the process when we have a better sense of where we're gonna land up. So thank you to my colleagues. Thank you to the budget committee. Thank you, Mr. Cardin for bringing us on the table. This has been a great discussion. Mr. Cardin, oh, I was gonna say that. Don, go ahead. So the kindergarten TAs, both times kindergarten TAs, are the highest priority last year. We didn't fund that, but we were able to add some of them because of class size. But now we're saying that's just not a priority anymore. Is that correct? And that is- So the sense is a higher priority? Exactly. There are a lot of priorities. There's a $4 million with the priorities and that's not even counting the other things that might have been, well, we would like to have these. There's a lot of priorities. But then when you look at it from another lens a year later, you see other things that, frankly, have a higher priority. So that actually was one of the things that's made it very challenging to do that striped list that we've had last year. But yes, and would we agree that having full-time TAs would be desirable? Absolutely. The other two other points, I do feel that the secondary level continues to be neglected. And I think part of that is because you've got seven principles arguing for their elementary schools and two principles arguing for their secondary schools. And I don't think, you know, they were asking for four FTE, two for last year they didn't get into this year. So I still think we're underfunding there. So I see a lot of critical needs that we're just not meeting. And the question is to simplify is, are we going to park 2.1 million next year, if that's what the estimated circuit breaker is? Or are we going to park 1.8 million next year? This year we're parking 1.7 million. So we're still, Jeff, going to have a lot of money parked. But the question is, are we going to park all of it? Or are we going to skim some of it off the top to fund these critical needs? Because part of the largest reason we can't fund any of these critical needs is because the out of district costs went up, the reimbursement for that doesn't come till next year. And our policy, this is completely our policy that we came up with, that Kierce came up with, was to hold on to that money. And that is the most prudent thing you can do. But it's not something we've done in the history of the circuit breaker until two years ago. So it would not be to me. So extreme, or risky, or unusual to take some of that money to do this weird timing thing that we have with this sudden large increase, more than a 25% increase in special education costs in one year. Yes, ma'am. So is Kierce's fault the important thing? Yeah, it's my fault. I'm glad to have clarified that. That ends it right there. Dr. Rody, and then. We were able to do this exactly in a reverse year. Well, actually, it's sort of a similar year where we had high costs, then the cost went down, because that's how it works. I think that this is a policy decision, something you need to think about very carefully. And there's also, yes, you might fund the positions next year, but you have to think about sustainability too. That's why I'm bringing this now, because I think it's going to take a lot of thought as we go forward. The other thing I called your attention to earlier tonight, and that is the recommendation from the CFO to budget $1 million for next year is a little bit of a departure from how we budgeted out of district in past years. We've actually budgeted them at the cost that they, at that moment in that time. Now, if we were to have clearer figures probably in a couple of weeks. I just wanted to comment that. So when you actually do this circuit breaker, I don't know if people know how it's actually calculated. It's literally going through each IEP, calculating the service delivery, the type of provider for each student in each line in their grid. So this isn't a, Ms. Campbell has other responsibilities. She's working on this and she's devoting a certain amount of time to it, but it's not something that is, it's typically done in, it's released in May and so that districts use May and June to submit it by their deadline. So I mean, we're going to ultimately be doing it twice this year. So it's gonna be hard to find clarity. We can tell, you know, there's an estimate of what that increase is gonna be. I believe that was provided to you, but if you're looking for the exact number, that's going to take a while. Right. So one of the things that you could think about is whether you want to budget to the actual costs that we know will be necessary for next year and not build that in. So, Clarity, the extra 100,000, that is assuming that we're budgeting a million dollars for specialized. Almost 200,000. 200,000. So if we were to budget to actual costs, we would have how much? Well, right now you have the actual costs that we would have to add to last year's cost that's right here. Yep. Now, that might change in another couple of weeks as to what the actual costs would be. But right now, the assumption of, you've heard our CFO say, that she would expect the cost to go up in the spring, which they will, they will go up. But that's exactly why we're here with overruns because the cost exceeded whatever costs that may have decreased. I mean, because sometimes students age out, sometimes students leave the district. That's happened. And so what you sometimes may not see is you might see a closer connection between the numbers in January to this point in time, not because we don't have more out of district placements but there's been some other offsets that have sort of washed that out. That didn't happen this year. So sustainability is an important thing to think about. But I would not be uncomfortable thinking about budgeting to actuals going forward with special education on a district. I would be okay with that. Because we do then have the backup of Circuit Breaker. And another thing that we might have some backup on for next year is that one, as you know, Mr. Chapellein has said that if there's any money over and above it was budgeted for chapter 70, we can have this like we did last year. I don't think it's gonna be as much as last year at all. It's not, but it's gonna be a little bit. The other thing is if we get this amount of money from relief this year, that money that's in the tuition in will not have to be touched. So we're using that as a reserve so that you have a little bit more cushion. So just think about this in terms of what we're doing. Right now what you're gonna see in the budget presentation on the 9th, and I'm getting ahead of it because usually we don't do this, but this is so tight and has so many policy pieces to this. I wanted you to be thinking about it, is what you see here. That's what you're gonna see with the assumption that the Circuit Breaker is not touched. Okay, Dr. Allison Ampe. Okay, so two things. One, I wasn't sure it was clear, but the 105 assumes an extra 200,000 on. So if we don't do that, we have 300,000. So we don't that we would have 300,000, yes. Okay, so that's helpful to know. All right, okay. So then, okay, so this is me either reading into, reading between the lines of the administration and or projecting into it. I'm not sure which, but my sense is that some of the concern about using Circuit Breaker is that it's the start of a very slippery slope and there isn't much trust that we have breaks or that we have stopping power. And I know myself, I have good confidence in the rest of budget subcommittee. I feel like we can set a line and not go beyond that, but I think you should be aware of that, that that's really, I think, a lot of the concern. And also that there is volatility because the special education costs very so much and also because the reimbursement sometimes varies depending. I think when it dropped to 35 or 40%, I think that was a real exception and that was because of other economic forces going on and that we could have read that better, but we didn't at this point. I don't think that's going to happen. We would know if it was coming, I think, because everything else would be crashing down around us too. But if we were to do this, we need to also be aware that if our costs go down, we need to be squirreling some of the money away potentially as opposed to spending it. It's absolutely. We can't because we won't be feeling that if we're not spending it, we're not getting it back in Circuit Breaker. So, okay, so I've heard from some of the community. So just to summarize, it's a, I'm sorry, I'm going to turn here, but it's a $300,000 difference of opinion in a $50 million budget. $60 million. $60 million. So it's a $300,000 difference of opinion between the school committee, budget subcommittee in the district leadership and a $60 million budget. Well, no, there wasn't a proposal yet of how much of the Circuit Breaker, right? I mean, that wasn't, you don't have an exact number. Talking around $300. That $300,000, okay. So just on that, all right. Yes. Not having actual numbers to work with. Okay. That puts it in perspective. But yes, it's small in perspective of the entire budget, but it's almost 10% of the asks that are out there and it could go a long way to fighting. No, I'm not denying that. Okay. Not denying that it can have impact. I'm just talking about in the grand scheme of things. Yeah. Right, but we're talking impact. Yeah, very good. That helps clarify. I've taken no opinion on this. I'm just trying to get information. Okay, but I need a pin. I mean, at least I need it. Well, you need, yeah. Well, I'm just explaining. Here's leaning, no. All right. I think you have a majority, so. Well, here's my opinion. I worry about some of these things that are being cut, the reductions, that they are too crucial. And actually, one of my concerns are the subs because we're projecting.  So I mean, I think that's, that it's something that's easy to overlook but it's something that seems really crucial. We're proposing increasing their pay because we recognize it's been hard to find people but the same time, the proposal is to reduce the building subs and to reduce the use of subs about 60,000. So I worry about that. And I also worry about the TA reductions because I suspect that we are going to get some large classrooms again next year and that we will find ourselves needing that for education, just to make classroom management easier to give kids individualized attention. And I worry about those too. My opinion would be to come up with the numbers slightly smaller than the 300, maybe 200, you know, given that we have the 300, if we don't increase the special education costs by that extra 200,000, the extra 200 would give us about half a million. We'd also have to rely on some reductions to meet our need, but maybe not as much. So that's my opinion. So I would look at it, this is how I would approach it. I would approach it as we have identified the following X number of things that in our opinion, based on conversations with the superintendent and the school committee, are the most, are the highest, dean of the high school, whatever it is. And because of that, we're recommending $300,000 to be used for these, these things that are needed to make the schools run better. So I would kind of approach it, that's how I would approach it. So I would say the school committee said, we listen to all the presentations by the high school and the middle school and the elementary school principals who listen to the superintendent, we listen to the teachers, we've done our own research. Our position is that we need a dean at the high school, we need this, it's not in the budget, and we want to fund it with $300,000 over the circuit breaker. Then I think that's a good way to frame it for me. That's how, that's that. Okay, we'll go back to the table. That's how I see it. I don't want to make people do more work because that's how I kind of see it. I would love to know what the priorities are. And then it makes it simpler. Do you feel you have a sense of the committee? Yeah. That makes a lot harder to vote against. All right. So we're not, we're not taking a vote now, and there's, yeah, Mr. Harding. I'm calculating the out of district costs for next year. Can we make sure we include expected tuition increases because I think they'll have been missing past. When they're available, they have been calculated. So, you know, they petition for a tuition increase. And typically we do know about that in the fall. So if we are aware of it, but we also do a rollover of a three percent, a standard three percent increase. If an individual school has petitioned for a larger increase and it hasn't been decided, we've also put that factor in just to point out that if we do have to deplete this bed stabilization fund and the tuition revolving account and we don't fund the 200,000 for next year and we're only going on actuals. We have, yeah, it's it. Yeah, no, not a lot of what I'm going, yeah. So. Well, we should move the question on this one, I think. Well, we're not voting on it. There's no vote. We're just going to discuss it. No, no, we're going to discuss it. Don't open the door, Jim. No, no, no. I mean, it's time to run. It's time to run. It's time to run. Next committee. Okay, so I think this is potentially a happier one. Committee of Relations. All right, so we have. She's all excited. Go for it. We had a meeting on Monday and we talked about the dashboard and the forums and wanting to work more with the Vision 2020 folks. So. And the chat. And there is actually a date. Yes, and the and the school committee chat. Sorry. Yes. So the dashboard is being worked on. You guys saw what has been available and we are working with the administration to try to figure out the other things that are still under construction. And so work is continuing on that. As we know, the next school committee chat is Paul and Kiersey. They're going to be there on February 4th. And. Kickstand Cafe, 11 o'clock. Kickstand Cafe, 11 o'clock. And we, thanks to Jeff and Bill who did the last time and you saw in Novus where there are notes. So I think that that's just a great. Just a list of things people talk to. Because what we're trying to do here is just get some idea of what it's on people's minds, right? We don't want the conversation that happened, but just kind of the items. And I thought that was great. So I really appreciate you guys starting that. Given that no one came the day that Jennifer and I. Well, we hadn't advertised it as well as we did. But just for future, it's the first Saturday of the month. It's always the first Saturday of the month at 11 o'clock. 11 to 12. At Kickstand Cafe. And we have gotten better about our publicity about that. We will do better publicity. And then also talking about forums and working with Vision 2020. We have set our next meeting to be February 13th from five to six here. And that is going to be a joint meeting with the Vision 2020, or at least part of that education task force to talk about how we can work together and about how we can support each other as we go forward with any forums or anything that we want to work on. And there is actually a date of this forum that Dr. Chestin is organizing. It's a date we have a meeting. No, no, no, I'm sorry. This is the date of the actual forum, which is March 9th. March 9th is a school committee. We don't have a school committee meeting on that date. I have that as a school committee. No. No, I think that was next year. No, no, this year we don't have a meeting that day. No, we do have a meeting during their planning. They have a planning meeting that they're doing, but not the March 9th. So when I have it on my calendar still as March 9th, we have a school committee meeting. Yeah, no, I have it. What's March then? I do too. I have it on mine. We don't. I have it on mine. I have March 9th and March 23rd. First 16th and 30th. That's next year, Paul. No, 17, yeah. Second, I have the second and the 16th. We move it. Yeah, I don't have the 9th. Second, 16th and 30th. March 7th, yeah, that's right. We move it. I don't have those changes. And so I think, I think, keep her the calendar, I think we can be sure that we don't have anything on the 9th. We don't have anything on the 9th. OK, great. So what that is, the meeting's in March. So that is the meeting. You just said the second and the 16th. The second, the 16th, and the 30th. February, we just have a meeting on February 9th. So the forum on innovative educational initiatives in Arlington is on Thursday the 9th. And I think the timing is still yet to be determined. Thursday at Town Hall. March 9th. March 9th. Thursday, March 9th at Town Hall. And but as Ms. Stark's mentioned, we're going to be meeting with Vision 2020 to work out more details. And that's it. Thanks. So district accountability, curriculum, instruction, and assessment, that's another big. Well, it's not so big in that we talked about, we had a brief meeting before the school committee retreat talking about some of the calendars and scheduling of the various goals and evaluating the goals, which really led into the discussion of the retreat on the same topic. So the full committee is fully aware of where we went on that. We have minutes in the novice, which showed us passing a resolution and rescinding it in light of the conversation within the retreat. And that's our report. So do we want to discuss, though, the proposed superintendent evaluation processes and procedures? Certainly. Mr. Thielman submitted it. And because it was, I didn't include it in our subcommittee report because it was really a result of the full retreat. So if the chair who led that process would like to discuss it, I think it's totally appropriate. So, yeah, I think this time it's appropriate to look at that document and discuss it, because we didn't actually have time to fully discuss it in our retreat. And so Mr. Hennar, is this about the document or about something else? Yes, it is. I've been thinking about it. My understanding was the subcommittee and then the full committee talked about sending it to policy and po