So seeing the presence of a quorum, I called to order this meeting of the Amherst Polymer Regional School Committee at 6.34 p.m. The meeting is being taped and is not being broadcast live. I believe it'll be broadcast at a later date and people should look forward to that. What I would like to do with, so we'll take announcements in public comments, but what I'd like to do otherwise with the committee's approval is move up the superintendent's update. So I'd like to reorder it so that I've been called to order. I'd like actually like to move to announce the public comments, then superintendent's update, then resume the regular agenda, just out of respect for the public and the timeliness of the superintendent's update. Is that okay? So seeing no objections, so orderly. So we have announcements in public comments. Are there any announcements from the committee? Seeing none. If you think of something, you can raise your hand later. I'd like to open up public comment. If you have a public comment, please come forward to the microphone and please state your name for the record and you'll have up to three minutes to speak. Don't mind the counter, but it just gives a transparency around the time that's left. So anyone who'd like to come forward, please feel free to. I'm Lisa Kane. I live on 1310 South East Street. I have two kids in the system. Ruby, she's a freshman in the high school and my son, Alex, who's the seventh grader. I know Allison and a few of you, but I brought a visual aid, so I'm just gonna demonstrate. My kid plays field hockey. She started a freshman. That's actually not a field hockey ball, but it moves beautifully across the carpet. And unfortunately for the sport of field hockey, that's the kind of surface we're supposed to be playing on, a very flat short roomed surface. And right now, I don't know if you've been out there, but try that on the field. Try that last fall on the field. The ball didn't go anywhere. And our kids basically couldn't play the sport and that's when I got involved. A group of parents met with Rich Farrow in November to talk about the field. He said he doesn't have money to update the field. So we could work on it. We could try to help maintain it. We thought about it, whatever. Then what happened? The ultimate tournament came along. They played on wet fields in Sunday. The fields are a mess. I mean, a mess. And my job as Ruby's parent is to keep her safe. And the situation has gone way past whether that ball can roll across the field. The situation has gotten too unsafe for kids to play on the fields. Their ankles will twist. I played Ultimate for 10 years and I play it on crappy fields and my ankles all over the place and it hurts. And you end up in a boot and kids have ended up in boots on our fields. And the smallest thing that this committee can do and the school system can do is keep our kids safe and that has not been done here. Now, I would like to be part of the solution. I will raise money. I will mow. I will seed. I will do whatever. But I've been told I can't go on the fields because of union contract. So I know that there's other people who've been trying to work this out. I've been working with them to try to make a difference here. Basically, you guys can make a difference by making a priority, which I see that you've done by putting it on the agenda. But also, not only can you, if you had money to put toward it, that would be great to help maintain them. But then afterwards, somebody has to say, no, you can't play when it's raining. No, you need to get off the fields so they can come back. And it has to happen all year round. LSSE wants to play a lacrosse camp on those fields. It's not safe for them. And until it is safe, we shouldn't have people on them. And you can't throw money at it. You also need to maintain it. And none of this is happening. So I'm deeply frustrated. And I really, really hope you take a good look at this and try your best to make a difference. Because 2022 is when things are supposed to happen, but my kid graduates in 2022. Thank you. Hi, I'm Amy Sweeting. I live on North Whitney Street. I have a daughter who's also a freshman, Sophie, who also plays field hockey and has been playing since seventh grade. I'm just here as support to echo everything that Lisa says. And I also just want to give you a little anecdote to show the level of desperation among parents. My husband, not this season, but the previous season, when they were playing at the middle school and the fields were a disaster, the grass was so long, you couldn't play field hockey on it. So he went out several Saturdays in a row with the coach, with his tractor, and mowed the field. They didn't have any way to pick up the grass, so then the coach and her son were out there raking and bagging all the grass. And then they were, and it made it a lot better for the kids to play. But then they were told they couldn't do that because of liability concerns. I think he's, he's unfortunately out of town, so he can't speak to this, but he told me that he was told that if somebody got hurt on the field and he had mowed the field, he could get sued. So then, of course, he stopped doing it and didn't want to do it anymore because we don't want that to happen. But anyway, I just wanted you to, just as an example of parents are willing to help and we're willing to do whatever we can, but we, we can't for various reasons. So just know that we are a resource and we're here and want to do something because my kid graduates in 2022 too and probably will never see the turf field. Thank you. We welcome more comments. I'm Matt Kane, I'm Lisa's husband, my daughter played field hockey. I played field hockey when I was in high school. I also was part of the MSU Soccer Association until recently and I was in charge of the fields there. And I just want to emphasize, there's this, there's the committee that's been planning on the capital project, but the capital project is kind of one thing, but unless you actually maintain the fields, you're not going to get the full benefit of that. And the maintenance should have been happening currently, but can definitely start now and go forward. And some of the things that are part of the maintenance, as Lisa said, just keeping an eye, being aware and fixing issues before they get bad. For example, the main field behind Fort River, which is not exactly relevant here maybe, but a few years ago that was the best field in town, but it's been overused spring and fall and now it's been, grass has gone, it's been compacted and it's in a pretty seriously bad shape right now. So that's because no one's out there making, keeping tabs, there's no like central point of command, moving the usage around, moving fields around. Part of AYSA, we wouldn't put the fields in the same location spring and fall. We would rotate them, we would move them, even if the space here at the high school is a bit restricted, but you can still move the field 20 yards to the side, 20 yards to the other side and that will spread the usage out. Also, for example, it's unfortunate, ultimate they can play on not so great fields. I mean, it's not great for the ankles, but there's not a ball rolling on the ground. Some of the other sports like soccer and especially field hockey really do need that smoother field and someone needs to be aware of that to try and keep a good space for the sports that really need it. So yeah, we really need someone who's gonna keep an eye on all those fields and we need the maintenance budget to do things like seeding, aerating, fertilizing, filling in holes, not just mowing, which the mowing is being done but the other things are not being done and they need to be done to catch up at least once a year, probably maybe twice a year. Okay, thank you. We welcome further comments. I should say on this or any other issue somebody wants to address, of course. I come from it from a different perspective. My name's Michael Rudd. I am the boy soccer coach at the high school. This will be my eighth year. I'm also the Dean of Instruction at a charter school in Springfield where I've also been a teacher for several years I've been an educator now for 20 years. So when I look at the fields, when I think of it from a coaching perspective and a teaching perspective, I think of the overall experience of a student in that this is an issue of equity. How do we give a student the experience that he and she deserve? Our program has been one of the most successful over the last several years. Whether I'd be the coach or not, we'd still be one of the most successful. Certainly not patting myself on the back. But the reality is that we play a style of soccer now that is unrecognizable to me, the coach, because we train to do one thing, but we can't do what we want to do because of the conditions of the field. As you know, I wrote a note. I wrote a letter in October because I'd had enough. The fields were unplayable, completely unsafe. I've seen them at the best of times in August being a hazard for both boys and girls. I once saw in pre-season a few years ago when the field's actually in better shape than they are now, I saw a girl break her ankle. A boy lost his entire season from an injury two pre-seasons ago, all because of, it was a non-contact. It was all the field itself. Even when we won the Western Mass Championship a couple of years ago, we had nine injuries. Can I attribute them all to the field? No, I'm not going to exaggerate that, but it certainly plays a role. And then where do we practice when the field's completely underwater, where it's muddy, when the football field's muddy, we had to pull off of the football field. So this is a program, the boys team has 80 boys. If you do the math, that's a very high percentage of the boys of the school who try to get into this program. Girls, it's always between 40 and 50. So you're talking about a large percentage of the student body, a sizable percentage of the student body who are affected by these fields, who walk, who go onto those fields and at any moment they could slip. I've seen concussions happen because kids have lost their balance on the field and slammed into some other kid or slammed into the ground. I've seen this happen. So I'm asking you, when my 25 seconds to come up with some kind of plan where we can manage these fields, where we can keep people off them, as somebody else said before, there's a lacrosse camp every summer out there. The fields need to be managed now so that they're playable in the fall. Thanks. Yeah, I just want to echo a lot of what my coach just said. I'm a current junior at the high school. Next year I'm going to be a captain on the team. And I've been fortunate enough throughout my last few years to travel the world playing soccer on some of the best fields with some of the best teams in the world. Partly because I'm really good but also partly because I come from a place of privilege where I've been able to go on those trips and to play on those fields and to play that high level of soccer. And I can really say that that part of my life has contributed greatly to my education as a holistic person. And I think that that opportunity shouldn't just be limited to people like me that come who come from a place of privilege. And I think my understanding of the public school system is that it's supposed to be a place of equality and equity and a mechanism that mediates the discrepancies that are intrinsic in our society. And I don't see that happening with the current way that athletics are being managed at Amherst Regional Public Schools. Because I think there's a perception, I'm speaking from a student's perspective that athletics aren't really cared about here. And I know that we're a school district that really prides herself on academics and that's great. I love coming to school, I love learning. I think a lot, this school is a great school but athletics and the athletic experience is a huge part of learning as an individual because you don't go into life and sit in a classroom. You go into life and you work in teams. You solve problems and part of that, you learn playing sports in a safe environment where you can really fulfill your athletic potential. And again, that shouldn't just be limited to people who come from places of privilege. That should be, the public school should be a place where anyone can come and fulfill their athletic potential safely. And with the support of the administrators and coaches around them and their facilities, thanks. Thank you. Don't forget to identify yourself when you come forward. I'm Stuart Shulman, that was my boy. Obviously you educated him well. Speaks and thinks and writes beautifully thanks to the teachers he loves. The school system he loves. I seriously think about not letting him play in those fields because he's got college offer, break an ankle, he'll lose a lot of opportunity. As he said, he's already got a lot of opportunity because of who he is and what he is. But the reason I'm here, I don't know if, do you take documents? Sure. If you have one copy, we can do a copy later and share it with you in a minute. I can send you with Johnny. So I've been doing a little digging around to try and figure out why hockey players and baseball players are treated differently in this town than everybody else. I haven't done the math exactly, but it seems like it's because they're white boys. That's not a good look for Amherst. So Amherst takes care of baseball players and hockey players really well. Down the totem pole are soccer players, not very far but down in football players. But at the bottom are sports dominated by girls. All right, so you have a problem of gender discrimination in your school system, which I think creates vulnerability to lawsuits and challenges about the legitimacy of the school system from the point of view of gender equality.  Even if you don't do a damn thing for soccer players, you should fix what's happening to girls because from what I heard, this is something that gets talked about. Why are we treated as second-class citizens because we're girls and play girl sports? Or why are we treated as second-class citizens because we're not white boys? These are things that get talked about in your schools, by your students. And the connection to fields and safety and responsibility, I wanna echo everything everybody said, somebody needs to be in charge. I've talked to a lot of people lately. I was with Guilford today. He's the director, he's the superintendent of Public Works. We had a nice chat. It's interesting because Liam started playing soccer down at Fort River, which is a disaster zone. It's like, look, a war zone down there. And I asked for a couple extra minutes because I have a good story to tell about Fort River if you have the time. 30 seconds, a minute, 30 seconds. Correct, thanks. I coach down there with the Capacidad kids now, three days a week. I don't take them outside. We play in the gym where it's dangerous because there's objects in the gym that can't be moved away. So when I talked to Guilford about Amherst U Soccer and the little place that they play is you drive into the Fort River driveway on your right. It's where all the littlest kids start their soccer career in Amherst. The day it's mowed by Public Works, it's still up to your shins. I went down the day before the first day of soccer for little tiny children, four, five, and six years old. The grass was not only long enough to stop a ball from rolling. There were sharp sticks in the grass. There were holes in the grass.  And I came down with my mower and my rake, like somebody else in this town and against like snuck onto the field. I didn't have a kid playing. I'm not a coach. I'm not involved in the association. I was the first board member 11 years ago when we were still playing there.  I didn't know that. What? The director of Public Works doesn't know that the Amherst U Soccer Association plays on the Fort River grass to the right as you drive in. Are you kidding me? That's the state of the system. I like Guilford. He's a nice guy. He's listened. He agreed. He supported. He said, we're no money. Money, money, money. I tell you, I got 50 parents, 100 parents will come do the work. Just give us the license to get on the fields. Some of us are professional grade landscapers and some of us no professional grade landscapers. With due respect to the people who own that shed across the street from the high school field, they are not professional grade landscapers and they're not doing their work. Last moment. Okay, we'll close public comments. I'm assuming there are no announcements that came to anyone on the committee. I'd like to, we discussed at the beginning of the meeting. Yes. Sorry to interrupt, I'm just wondering if we're gonna approve minutes for. I was gonna do that after the, I literally was gonna do the superintendent update and then go to the approval moments, follow the order of the agenda immediately afterwards. So, I'd like to open up the superintendent's update, obviously particularly about this, assuming you didn't talk to this issue. Yep, I'll start with that. And there's, for people who are in the public, there's a, did a memo to the school committee it's about three pages long in the back, so I'm not literally gonna read the whole thing, but people wanna follow along. So the first thing is not in the memo, which I wanna start from the place of appreciating people who came in to advocate on this issue. I wanna acknowledge that it's a very real issue for our students and I come at this both professionally in my role, but also personally, I was thinking about this last night. The only time I was connected to a school, I grew up in a different state, so a school board or school committee other than my current role was as a 16 year old coming to advocate on very much similar issues of what I heard tonight, particularly to an asphalt track that we felt like was insufficient to support student needs and student health. So I do really appreciate people coming out and sharing their opinion and I wanna share in some of their frustration of where we are. Just for context, this is not a new issue. This is an issue that's been being discussed for the last several years. A couple things that the district did knowing that this was an ongoing issue, two things in particular were that we requested for athletic field study to be completed. The town of Amherst joined us in that and so that was two years ago, around this time of year when we're doing budget, to identify the sources of the problems, understand the drainage problems, and develop long-term solutions.  So when we actually have a project to complete, we have some savings in there to get started with. I'm not at all saying that $130,000 will replace fields with a turf field, as people have mentioned, but it was trying to scrape away funds where we could to get started on this issue because we knew it was coming up, we know it's an issue, we know our four towns are struggling in terms of the finances. So we were trying to do our part of looking at the operational budget and actually building in some capital stabilization in there. I think it was referenced earlier that for people who aren't aware the way the relationship historically worked is the Amherst DPW, the Department of Public Works, to take care of all the fields in the schools and we support them with what the requests are for funding. And that's been the, as long as I've been in the district, that's been the relationship between the schools and the town and the maintenance of the fields. We do have, some of our maintenance staff does come in and help out when there's particular situations, which I'll get into in a minute, I'll give a tangible example of that, but in general, that's been the relationship between the schools, the town and the district around field maintenance. This spring has been very challenging. I wrote a summary, mostly coming from Ross Beck, who's our trainer, was in the role of acting athletic director until today, Mr. Farrell came back from his leave. There's also on the third page a statement from Alan Snow, who's director of trees and grounds, who is an employee of the town who is most directly connected to maintenance of the fields. The long and the short of both of these, because I'm not gonna read them the full length of them allowed, is that April was one of the wettest April's that we've had on record in New England and created unique challenges for a community that already has drainage issues on all of its fields. And one of the challenges that we face as a community, not just as a school district, is that wetness. So for instance, Plum Brook, which was, I know that's a kind of a topic that has had a lot of consternation in the community. So we're low to bring it up, but I think it's relevant for this discussion. There was an attempt to fix the drainage problems. I'm not gonna go into the details and yet for much of the month of April, that wasn't a viable site for either youth sports or for moving arts sports at the high school and middle school to alternate fields to give our fields more of a break. So we do have a challenge in our community based on the wetness of where the fields are and what happened this spring. In terms of the ultimate tournament, you can see a description of that. There was more rain Sunday than what was forecast. It was attended, the forecast was to end in the late morning and that didn't happen. And unfortunately, the tent rental company drove a truck onto the girls field even despite being not told not to do so. We did communicate with that company and follow up with them. This is where our maintenance staff tried to do as many repairs as we could to the damage done not just by the student athletes that come from all across the country, but from the truck, which created significant damage on the field that was frankly more challenging to fix than some of the other damage that occurred. This spring, we entered in initial agreement with UMass to host our games that happened after their students were gone. They're much more willing to work with us when their student athletes are not present and vying for the same fields that we might be vying for. And at the end of this season, both the boroughs and girls lacrosse teams will each have hosted three contests on the turf at UMass and the senior night is for both will be held on the turf. So we've tried to make the best, the district has tried to make the best of the situation this spring. But I think rightfully many of the comments you heard tonight were not actually about this spring because that season is mostly finished. It's about the fall and how we're going to get to the next steps for fall. So I think there's two things at play. One is how are we starting to plan for fall and then what are the long-term plans? So I'll do it in that order because I think concurrently, as was noted, we need to improve the situation now as well as have a long-range plan for improving the situation more, I won't say permanently, but less temporally. So in terms of planning for fall, athletic director Rich Farrell, he'll be back here two weeks from now. He's meeting with the town DPW staff to try to identify a plan for late spring and summer field maintenance because you don't make those, you can't figure that out in the last two weeks of August. Actually, the work starts now in terms of both the maintenance and use of those fields. And so he'll be back, he'll be here on June 11th, the next meeting to share in more detail what that plan is. I think one of the things that everyone shares with me it's worth noting that the plan's only as good as the weather. So if the weather continues to be wet, a certain plan will be in place, the weather gets bone dry and we get closer to drought conditions like we had, I wanna say it was two years ago, then you have to adjust that plan. And that creates a challenge for the staff, but that's what they're trying to work on. What are the plans if it's wet? What are the plans if it's dry? And how do we maintain the fields in a different way so that we don't repeat these cycles that we've been under? I wanted to express the number of community members have reached out to me directly. And I'm not speaking specifically to this evening of being willing to volunteer and help for the fields. And that is certainly something that can be done. There's examples, we have positive examples where nonprofit organizations such as Amherst Baseball work to support the DPW in their work. And the DPW appreciated the person power and the volunteers to improve the fields. And that's certainly something that from the district end we're open to and interested in and talking of Mr. Moreing from the DPW end they also would be interested in having that. We just want to make sure we have the right structure and a plan is laid out so that the volunteer hours go towards improving the field and the overall, an overall plan instead of patching individual challenges. From our vantage point, it's not our staff, but we've been able to work around, any union contract issues because we've had successful partnerships in the past. So it has not been a barrier in the past. I think I'll just mention one more thing on the planning for fall because we'll do more complete update with Mr. Farrow two weeks from tonight. But I think the closing field's pieces, things that we've done, I think one of the challenges that we've had in this particular community is that where do the students go to? That the fields over at the university and the colleges are used all the time. They actually, some of the intramural teams rent our fields as in poor condition as they are because they don't have space for all the fields and all the varsity athletics of both genders and intramurals for both genders at the universities and colleges. So it is a real challenge for us when some of the community fields are in similar condition as the school fields. And that's really some of the thinking that Mr. Farrow has to do and will do with the DPW. If we do need to close the field, where do practices happen? Where do games happen? And where are there fields that are maintained well enough where we don't take a two week break from a sport? And this will really segue into some of the long term work which is the turf field won't solve all the problems. The one turf field won't satisfy all the athletic teams that we have in the fall or spring seasons. So we have to get both work on the long term solutions but also work to know that one turf field does not resolve the field conditions for all of our interschool sports student athletes. So I wanna talk about long term that I can open up for questions for the committee. And I apologize, we'll be in more detail in two weeks from now. So I think you all have worked with me long enough and kept in a former life, right? We worked together in my old role to know I rarely express frustration in public meetings just not typically how I respond to things but I do wanna publicly say I'm incredibly frustrated that we are not looking at a completed athletic field study today. That you all had two presentations but one was back in October with a public presentation. And the fact that we asked for this two years ago and we're not in the place of having a completed study really hampers our ability to organize you for the school committee to say, yeah, what makes sense? What are things that we would wanna work towards so that the community can then gather support and actually work towards long term solutions? I've communicated my frustration to the chair of that committee who's working on that. I've offered my support of sharing that frustration with consultants and hopefully they will resolve things quickly due to a meeting on Thursday as Mr. Sullivan hopefully knows. I think that was communicated out. No. I was told that you would have a meeting on Thursday. I'm not part of the recreation working group so hopefully that's in your email but that's what I was. I will be there. That's what was relayed to me, I'll put it that way. And so the challenge is the report's not gonna have all the answers but it's gonna identify a number of the problems and more detail than what we have now. And it's also gonna identify a number of potential solutions that the community and you all and staff can respond to so that we can work together of what do we wanna bring to the community? There's many people who said I wanna start fundraising and the challenge is fundraising for what? Any kind of fundraising effort has to have a really clear objective and outcome before it really can take hold. So it is holding us up. I'm doing everything under my power to move this forward. I'm not gonna stand this longer because I think I've already expressed my feelings on it. I could go on but I don't think that's productive. Once that report's finalized you all need to see it and gather feedback from the community, from staff, from coaches about what make the most sense because you all understand the fiscal reality of our four towns as well. And I think that's the next step on the long-term piece that needs to happen. And I say at the end of this that in my opinion it's likely that both public funds and private fundraising will need to contribute to a final product. So both the school committee and the community need time to marinate over what do we think the community needs? What can the community support? And that conversation is not an immediate conversation. I really wanna suggest that my frustration comes from not being able to get that going. And then we get to summer and momentum is really challenging to build over summer months in the larger community. I don't mean just school committee but it's just people are the ability to tend to major projects over the summer for the larger community. Every time we do public engagements in the summer our attendance is lower and that's a real challenge. So what I will come back with two weeks from now is Mr. Farrow will share about his plan for the interim time period of getting ready for fall. And I'd like for whether it's Mr. Sullivan, Mr. Mangana or someone on the recreation working group to come and present where that group is and so we can plot out both timelines, both the interim plan and then the long-term plan because I think that's what's required for the condition of the fields that we have. Sorry, it was a little disjointed tonight. I apologize, I am not feeling so well but I wanted to at least communicate a summary of what was in writing. Right, so this is on the agenda as we typically know under the superintendent's update. Typically, as you well know, committee members will ask questions or make comments for the feedback of the superintendent. He's mentioned that he thinks that this is gonna be, if you know what you think, that this will be an item at the next regional school committee meeting. So knowing that we want to both, I think, have the discussion we need to have but also then do it in a timely way that feeds into the next meeting, I'd love to open up for any questions, particularly clarifying questions and then comments, the feedback back to the superintendent. Mr. Franch and then Mr. Goddard. Are we allowed comments? Yeah, yeah, yeah. As a former coach here, I can sympathize with, sorry. As a former coach here, I can sympathize with the coaches and players in the audience and understand the importance of what they're talking about. But for me, what leaps out in no uncertainty are the issues of safety and equity. These are matters, particularly equity that Amherst toots its own horn. And I think on this one, we need to, if we're gonna walk the walk, we need to talk the talk. And it's long overdue to address the issue of field. It's not just a high water level. They've been seriously, what's the word I wanna use? Injured, I suppose, over the last decade. And it's really time to step up and deal with the matter. And when I read this report, Michael, it's great and your backing this up is fine. And I understand where you are as superintendent. What I have trouble with is I'm reading here that it's taken two years for this report. What's up with that? And what can we do as a school committee to say, hey, it's time to put up this report because kids' health and safety is at risk. What can we do to do that? So I think what I can do is communicate that the frustration I have communicated is shared by the school committee. And I'm very, I think, if the school committee was comfortable with that, I'd be happy to do that. So Ms. McDonald, let's just hello them as they're done. Make sure you pull the microphone. Yeah. Sorry, I'm distracted because I was just thinking about that. I think I totally agree and share the perspective of this being as much of an equity issue as a health and safety issue. They're completely entwined. One of the questions that I have, though, is so there's the long-term plan, the recreation working group, which is the long-term plan, and it would be a phased, in the ideal world, it would be a phased implementation and funding wouldn't be an issue over that time. And we all know that that's going to be a long and slow process. So that's, to your point, about long-term, but what are we going to do now? And even with that long-term, let's say, STARS align and we have that perfect funding scenario and things go up smoothly all the way, we still have the problem that one of our community members raised, which is just baffling to me that we don't have a mechanism, or at least a clear mechanism, for managing the usage of the fields. And I think that that's something that doesn't require a huge capital budget in order to figure out how we do that. And I'm a parent of athletes and I've always wondered how decisions get made about this field or that field and they play multiple sports and one kid's game is canceled and we drive by and we see another team actually practicing on the field that we were supposed to be on. So it is baffling to me that we don't have, and I have some sort of central clearinghouse that makes those decisions and balances the needs of both the local youth sports teams that are independent organizations, town-run camps and clinics and school sports. There seems to be a need, I don't know that it's the district that should be sort of leading that, but we should definitely be asking for that because those fields impact all of our kids. And so I think that there's some other, the other comment about sort of the maintenance also, which I hope that Mr. Farrell will be talking about when he comes here in two weeks, because again, that's a short-term, mid-term, long-term issue that needs to be tackled that sort of waiting until we have these fabulous new fields is not gonna solve the problem because we still, even with those fabulous new fields, will need to figure out how we're going to be maintaining it. So I'd love to know, and maybe not tonight, maybe not answering that tonight, but maybe when we come back to it in two weeks that we talk about sort of the governance and how we can centralize that and make that work better for everybody. Thank you. So? I'd like to answer Mr. Fonche's question first. The Fields Committee, two years ago, we were supposed to meet for one year and then we were all released and then re-enlisted for another year and then we, the members themselves, we were released in February, I believe it was, when the presentation was given here and now it sounds like we're being re-enlisted tomorrow or Thursday. So I'm not sure where the holdup was, but it wasn't with the actual committee. And as far as the, that speaking to the varsity field in the middle of the soccer field, three years, I'm just saying make sure you have it. Okay. Three years ago, Mr. Ferro and the DPW set out to really try and revive that field and they core aerated it at least twice, they overseeded it, they were watering it, and then the following summer was the drought. So the field became hard as a rock, the grass just about died, turned brown, and then this, and they kept, except for senior night, last year there was only two games played on that field and then last fall it started to rain and it hasn't stopped yet. And so that just, it has destroyed that field and it is a giant sponge, but they really did, they tried and the weather just hasn't cooperated.  And then one other thing is as a dad of a female athlete that played in the middle school and in the high school was I had to ask a question early in my daughter's seventh grade because she would drive by and watch the boys baseball field be worked on and the softball field at the far end looked like it was being just ignored and I had to ask a lot of questions and find out that it really is, it's the baseball leagues that help get the baseball field to the shape that it's in and so I've learned that every new seventh grade set of girls needs to be educated to the fact that it really is, it's the baseball leagues that do help with that baseball field and every time that something comes up I do like the boys locker room was repaired first even though both were leaking it just happened to be leaking worse and this spring they've redone the girls locker room in this high school and same thing with the baseball in the softball field over in the middle school they chose because the balls seem to hit the parking lot from the boys baseball field first but the girls backstop is also in the docket to be replaced. Thank you. Mr. Dennis? I find what I think what Mr. Sullivan has said to be and what another community member said earlier just about the impact on the perception and the reality of girls that are experiencing the fields differently than the boys are to be particularly egregious. I think that if we can name it we should be fixing it there's something there that should be done about this. I've expressed my frustration to the superintendent previously about the town not doing I suppose what they should be doing in terms of maintenance and I will say this publicly as well because I think that this is something that is impacting our students and we've had numerous conversations on this committee around the safety of these fields and the impact on our students. It absolutely 100% is an equity issue and I also think that if there are things that we should be doing as a school committee to help move this along I would love to hear what that is. We have been waiting for a very long time for this report. It's also one of those things where it feels like sometimes we're putting out so many different fires metaphorically speaking that until something like this flares up that it just kind of falls by the wayside and the town, this committee, none of us are paying attention to it the way that we should and that's really unfortunate. I've also raised I think to the superintendent other issues regarding maintenance around the high school in the past, it really just I think strikes me that there isn't someone or someones that are constantly looking to see if there are things that can be fixed or that should be fixed or addressed before they become a crisis, right? And so what can we do to put those measures in place to make sure that it doesn't reach a crisis point? I think that's the conversation that we should be having on this committee, like what are the things that need to happen in advance? And if it's conversations that we should be having with the town, great, we should do that. If it's conversations that we should be having internally in our district staff, let's see if we can make that happen. If it's budget related items that we can be doing to ensure that regular maintenance is taking place. If we don't have the staff for it, do we find additional money to help pay for additional staff, equipment, whatever it is? But we can't just keep ignoring this kind of a problem, right? And these are problems that clearly have preceded this current administration, this current committee, but it seems like that always keeps happening, right? It's the problems that just keep proceeding that keep sort of getting grandfathered in and then nothing really happens. So I'm hopeful that at this point it's becoming enough of a concern for enough community members and for this committee and for this, and for you too, Dr. Morris, where we will take urgent action on something like this, because it's not okay for us to just continue in the same pattern over and over again. The fields are not gonna get better. And I think as Ms. McDonald stated, waiting for that perfect field to materialize, right? The money, obviously these are millions of dollars that we're talking about in redoing these fields, but at the same time, we can't just ignore the fields until that money comes to us, right? So what can we do to ensure that there are measures put in place before we hit the next crisis point and what can we do now to help mitigate some of these effects? How can we advocate? Who do we need to talk to? How do we continue to raise this as an urgent issue that should be addressed as soon as possible? We cannot allow this to continue. Ms. Pitzer. Thank you. I just want to echo everybody's frustration here, but also kind of look forward to some solutions. And I think one of the things that I'm most concerned with is to say in a couple of years, we do get these new fields. If we don't have the infrastructure and the planning and the coordination in place, we're gonna end up in the same position in just a few years. You know, and clearly it's not one thing, it's maintenance, it's weather, it's everything, but it seems like the things we could do now in terms of creating, and this isn't something for the community to do, but for the community to do like creating a nonprofit, creating the infrastructure for fundraising are things that can start now before we even have fields in place, or maybe even before we have a plan in place. So I also just, I feel like there's coordination between the town, between the region, and then I'm also thinking about the schools here, UMass and Amherst College. It seems like we've been talking on this committee about relationships between UMass and the, excuse me, and this town and also the school system in terms of the Donahue Report and things like that. And this almost seems like more pressing to me is because if we're relying on some of their fields and they're relying on some of our fields, there just must be ways that we can coordinate better and maybe leverage some of the resources they have to help us even more in the immediate term because it's going to be a couple of years. So I'm happy to run my support for any of these efforts. Thank you. So, yeah, go ahead. Nice question. You may. I wanted to make my own comments.  No, no, go ahead. Just that I recall years ago, there was a 10, I think Sean put together a 10-year capital fund plan because that still exists? Yes, and I can have that. And we went over it, but I know you're back in the committee. You guys are on it? Yeah, and I will, I'll send that to the committee tomorrow. Yeah. Thank you. So, I mean, I have a couple of thoughts that I'm echoing a lot of what has been said by the members of the committee that I've, for quite a while, I've actually, I mean, this is kind of a funny comment. I really appreciate the work of sort of booster clubs and foundations and things like that, but I didn't actually know how the baseball field was maintained. And I actually thought it was because it was the town's field and not the region's field. And so like the town took care of it because it was the town's field and the region had to figure how to do it. And I actually thought it was like a management issue. Like, you know, we don't know who's taking responsibility for certain fields. So that's not the case. Apparently it's because there's a good booster club. I, you know, I have to admit, I've been troubled by this for years. And number one, I was going to grad school in California where there's a really fragmented low public school system out there. You have really radical differences between the school districts on the level of resources they have because some communities are rich and the rich communities invest in themselves and they raise private funds and they invest in really beautiful fields and really beautiful libraries. And next story of a town that may not be poor, but they just, they're a working class community. They don't have the resources to do that. And you go to the schools and they don't have those fields. They don't have those things, right? So there's, so the challenge is if the schools are replicating the inequity of the existing society as a whole. So baseball is really pop, I love baseball. I suck at it as a kid, so I couldn't play it, but I loved it and still love it. It's a really popular sport in this country. You can probably raise a lot of money supporting baseball. Probably there are other supports, other sports that maybe people who are passionate about, but they're less popular in a way that can attract lots of dollars, right? So does it make any sense? And by the way, you could replicate this with a variety of other electives and programs you have in school. Does it make sense to actually have the quality of your facilities and programs based on whether or not people self-organize and raise money and if you don't do, and by the way, all of the offers for help are appreciated and someone I'm sure will work with you to take you up on those offers. So I'm not saying you shouldn't donate, I'm not saying you shouldn't volunteer, I think that's great. But I'm really deeply troubled about the idea that we would have inequity in the quality of our fields because some group just hasn't gotten the attention or it's not popular enough or maybe the families who are playing it don't have as much money as the other families that do, right, who play some other sport. And that's offensive, however it tracks. And I think it's the job of our schools to try to figure out where are those areas where there are gaps to fill where public resources, in addition to any raise from the public, public resources have to provide a baseline of equity and access and quality at a minimum. And obviously, and so I'm just saying that as a blanket thing and just as a different committee with different buildings that we have in the same corporate jurisdiction, when we found that we had issues of cleanliness and of maintenance, we decided to come up with a plan for it, right? And it was so there was a long range plan to replace some buildings that were considered to be outdated, which mirrors this notion of having a new field study and a new plan. There was also the immediate request to understand, do we need more resources? Like marginally, when an extra 30 or 50,000 bucks or whatever the amount is, make a difference in terms of staffing to improve that the, in that case, was whether the schools had mice in them or not and were clean, right? In this case, it's whether there's a good management plan in place for the use of the fields and are they being maintained at a minimum level in which they're safe for the students who are using them and other people who are using them? And so to me, it's utterly, I mean, to me, it would be utterly irresponsible of us as a committee if we didn't ask you to come back with some response around whether or not there are any immediate resource needs, I recognize it's not a million dollars, it's not a, so where we can, what do we need to do to get a better handle on the management and the safety of the fields? And in particular, when we think of safety, we can't, it's not acceptable. That's why I'm mirroring that other situation because in another situation, people on that other school committee immediately said, including me, because I was on it, immediately said, we need a plan, we need to know what the response is, we need to know who's in charge, who's gonna be following this thing, we need to follow up reports on it, and I don't see how this is any different in that regard. Particularly, this goes back to what Donald was saying, particularly on the issue of safety. We can't go in, because September and October, wondering whether the fields are going to be, accidents happen, right? But they shouldn't happen if people are navigating terrain which is itself by its definition, unduly challenging, right, or unsafe. So we gotta get a bit of a handle on that. I also think that we need to understand how are we making decisions and what are the policies in place, or practices in place around who's utilizing the fields and when, and is there a hierarchy of who's allowed to use the fields and not? And I mean, meaning, and I'm personally saying since I don't know this, I wanna be open to what you tell us what we learn because I'm not trying to say, for example, they shouldn't be able to cross-camp this summer. But my immediate thought is when you hear, not even know what the camp is, whether it's a non-profit or a local part of the schools or not, but when you hear about different groups and organizations utilizing fields that then break down their ability to recover, then your immediate thought is, well, do we need to manage them differently or can we actually have all these organizations utilizing these fields or not? Or if they are, are they paying any sort of recharge fund that goes back into resodding it and doing the other kinds of aerating and seeding that needs to happen, and who's accountable and responsible for that? Who's on point for these things? And so what I, pardon me for going on about this, I'm gonna stop. But my point is that for, and this is gonna be, I recognize this as challenging, it's challenging for the town, it's challenging for you, it's challenging for Mr. Farrell. But whether we have this at the next meeting or a combination of the June 11th and June 25th meetings, I think what I would be more satisfied knowing, and I think this echoes what we're hearing from everyone else on the committee, is understanding very specifically, let's just open this up, because also I really don't want people in the public, parents and others, guardians and others, worrying and wondering what's gonna happen between now and the fall to make sure these fields are safe. So I think a high level of transparency, like again, analogous to what we did out of the situation, is what we really need here. And so, I think that if the members of the committee want to give you other feedback offline individually as you're preparing for the next one, that'd be fine, but I just think we need to chunk out what we'd like to understand around how the fields are existing managed and how they're being maintained, are there existing needs that need to be better filled? And then that goes all up to suit the nuts to the question of how do we engage volunteer actors and others. But being part of the nuts and bolts of this thing is I would be very upset if we didn't find out, in a literal practical sense, how are these things gonna be managed going into next September or October?  And then come September, we find out we're in the same boat we were in before. I'd rather be in at least a new boat, not the same one. Right. That make sense? Mm-hmm.  I don't think, I don't perceive it that way. All right. We're gonna need a new boat. Huh? We're gonna need a new boat. We may need it because it's wet. Yeah, weather aside, we may need it. Any other questions or comments or those that wanna move on? I realize we're taking a significant time, but it's important to people. Okay, anything else you wanted to say? I'm good, thanks. Okay. Do you have anything else in your update? Um, I'm just... Or you wanna wait? We're 30 minutes behind schedule, so I'm just conscious that there's both public and staff who are here to do other things. So maybe at the end if we have time, but thank you. I am fine. There's a lot of good news in the other update. Your desire to defer is perfectly accepted. Yeah. So the next order of business back onto the regular agenda is approval of the minutes of May 14th, 2019. The committee's had a chance to look at the minutes. They're not gonna have any potential... Yes, Mr. Marshall? Yeah, I mentioned in the attendance twice in the second person's meeting with my brother. So that should be sticking from the minutes. Ah, there you go. Okay. Any further edits, people have found? Otherwise, I'd entertain a motion to approve. Yes. I move to approve the minutes of Tuesday, May 14th as presented. Is there a second? Second. It's been moved and seconded. Any further amendment, any further discussion of the item? Seeing none, all those in favor of approving the minutes. Yes, Mr. Marshall? I think the motion should be moved as amended. Can you say that? Oh yeah. You're right. You said it presented. As presented, yeah. So I can amend my motion. Why don't you amend your motion? Okay, so I would like to amend my motion to approve the minutes of Tuesday, May 14th as corrected. Which will get rid of the second farge. Getting rid of the second farge. Did you use the seconder? Is it amenable to the seconder? Second. It is amenable to the seconder. Any further discussion, saying none, all those in favor, to my? It carries unanimously with one, two, three, four, five, six minutes. Okay, subcommittee updates. Are there any subcommittee updates today? There appear to be none and we'll move forward. So on the chair's report, I just wanted to, you have a letter that's been shared with you, that's somewhere in my packet, from Amherst Media. And the first, what the letter does is the letter requests a dialogue or consultation with the regional school committee about as a potential alternative of whether Amherst Regional High School might be able to incorporate Amherst Media as a self-contained facility within the high school building and grounds. And people, the committee should be aware that there's been some initial outreach that's occurred to the superintendent into the committee's liaison to Amherst Media. And the thing that's really helpful, I think, in this regard is that the Facilities Use Study that was recently completed gave the district a really good view of how we're currently using our space if we have potential access space.


Welcome to this talk entitled A Comprehensive Study of Deep Learning for Section Analysis. My name is Lurik Mazur. I'm a PhD student from Seva-Gonab in the French arts, and I am supervised by Emmanuel Pouf from ANSI and Cécile Dumas from Seva-Gonab. Cécile and I are working in an evaluation lab. We are in charge of evaluating some physical devices. And as an evaluation lab, we always need to be at the state of your art in terms of physical attacks. This talk is devoted to side-channel analysis. In classical cryptanalysis, an attacker is given some pairs of plaintext and sci-fiotext with the aim to recover the secret key denoted by K, year after, used for the encryption. In addition to that, in side-channel analysis, the attacker may have access to some non-purpose communication channels, such as the power consumption of the electromagnetic emanations denoted on the right by the measure trace X. The idea is to use these observations that carry some information about the secret key used for the encryption through the computation of a sensitive operation denoted here by Z, which is the result of the computation involving some chunks of plaintext P and secret key K. More precisely here we are considering the profiling attacks, where the attacker may have access to an open sample similar to the target device with full knowledge of the secret key. The profiling attack is decomposed in two steps. On the first, called profiling phase, he knows the secret key used for the encryption and he tries to characterize the behavior of the measure trace X depending on the value of the sensitive intermediate variable Z. Then during the attack phase, the key remains unknown and we must infer it thanks to the accurate traces X during the attack phase on the real target device. During the attack phase, the key recovery is done thanks to a distinguisher. Assume that we are given NA attack traces during this attack phase. We have a model F that returns for each trace a score vector, one score for each hypothetical value of the sensitive variable Z. Or in other terms, one score for each hypothetical value of the secret key K. By combining the scores returned for each trace during the attack phase, we may see the emergence of one score in particular, which will be our key hypothesis. Our goal is to find the model that minimizes the required number of traces such that our key hypothesis key hat equals the real value of the key key star with probability higher than a given threshold, typically 90%. Let us denote by F star the optimal model and NA star the corresponding number of traces. So as a variable, our goal is to know this value of NA star. So how to find this optimal model? The good news is that we know an analytical solution to this program, namely by taking the conditional probability distribution of our discrete random variable Z given the observation X. The bad news is that this optimal model is unknown, and instead we must estimate it with parametric models described by the parameter vector theta. For example, with Gaussian templates, theta denotes the mean vectors and the covariance matrices. Over the past few years, we have seen the emergence of new parametric models from the class of deep neural networks. They have been shown to be particularly sound against implementations protected by counter measures such as masking or desynchronization. How to train a neural network? During the profiling phase, the profiling traces will be given to the model denoted here by F and set by the parameter vector theta. For each trace, it will output a score vector, one score for each hypothetical value, and we will compare these scores with the expected value of the output here denoted by Z. Namely, the higher the score at the ZF entry, the better the quality of the prediction. Therefore, we need to compare the expected results with the actual results of our model through the computation of the loss function. Since the higher the score for the good entry, the lower the loss function, actually training a neural network consists in minimizing the loss by adjusting the parameters theta. The choice of the loss function depends on the nature of the problem that will be discussed hereafter. Last year, at chess 2019, Pizzequeta raised an open issue with machine learning-based SCA, namely how to evaluate the quality of the model during the training. They considered the accuracy metric. In SCA, this can be seen as the probability to recover the secret key with one trace. Pizzequeta told that accuracy does not seem to be the right performance metric in SCA. Indeed, they trained several machine learning models and those with high accuracy always denoted a successful key recovery. Whereas the models with low accuracy got sometimes some successful key recoveries and sometimes that. So a low accuracy is non-conclusive. The problem is that the latter case often happens, typically with high noise or in presence of countermeasures, so that the accuracy is not informative about the success in SCA. So as a side question, is there any of the machine learning metric related to SCA once? That's a question Pizzequeta tried to answer and apparently no, since they tried several machine learning metrics in their paper. But actually the goal stated so far in the previous slide is a bit different. By computing the accuracy, we want to find the threshold beta such that the minimal required number of traces to succeed the attack is one. But remember that our goal is in a sense due to this one. Rather, we want to fix beta and to find the corresponding number of traces such that the attack succeeds with the probability beyond beta. Our claim in this talk is that we can actually accurately estimate any storm with deep learning techniques. In particular, we suggest the use of a loss function known under the name of negative log likelihood that we'll describe hereafter. To make the link between the loss function and our SCA metric, let us consider this axis on which we plot the entropy of the random sensitive variable z. The distribution of z is typically known and is uniform, so we know the entropy. Since we have access to observations of x giving information about the sensitive random variable, this entropy can be decreased to the conditional entropy of z given x. The gap between those quantities is typically denoted as the mutual information between z and x. Last year, at chess 2019, Cherizet and Grofer emphasized the fact that this mutual information could be linked to a ratio involving both ANA star, the minimal required number of traces to succeed the attack, and the threshold beta. So first we have a link between ANA star, our SCA metric, and the mutual information. Unfortunately, computing the MI requires to have a perfect knowledge of the leakage model, which is not the case here. Instead, the SCA community has introduced the notion of PI for perceived information. This extends the mutual information, but by considering a non-perfect leakage model, here the leakage model given by the model F, parameterized by the vector theta. An interesting property of a perceived information is that it is always lower than the mutual information. The core contribution of this paper is to remark that the PI can be expressed from the value of a loss function widely used in deep learning, namely the negative log likelihood function. Its expression is given here at the top and can be straightforwardly completed during the training of the model. So what does that mean concretely? During the training, the operator will try to minimize the loss function denoted by L here through the time thanks to an optimization algorithm running iteratively. What is interesting here is that at the end of the procedure by the optimization algorithm, it returns a parameter vector here denoted by theta hat underscore 1000. For example, if we are using 1000 traces in the profiling set, this gives an estimation of the PI here. The machine learning theory states that the more traces used during the training, the higher the PI corresponding to the train model. So in other words, training a deep learning model is actually equivalent to tightening the lower bound of the MI, which gives an alternative technique to estimate the mutual information compared to other ones developed through the mutual information analysis, for example. To assess the quality of this MI estimation through this lower bound, we may decompose the gap into three kinds of errors. The first one is the approximation error. It comes from the fact that our target model F star cannot be perfectly expressed as a neural network. The second error is the estimation error. It comes from the fact that we have not an infinite set of profiling traces. So instead of maximizing the true value of the perceived information, we are actually maximizing an empirical estimation of it. The last kind of error, namely the optimization error, comes from the fact that our optimization algorithms cannot return the perfect optimizer of the PI. Indeed, the last function for neural networks is always non-convex, which makes the optimization problem really hard to solve. Instead, some heuristic algorithm, here for example the SGD for stochastic gradient descent, can return some approach solution. So as an evaluator point of view, it would be ideal to know to what extent those three kinds of errors would affect the quality of the evaluation through deep learning. And that's what we will try to discuss with the following experiments. To assess those kinds of errors, we propose here some simulations. We consider here a leakage model with arming weights and an additive Gaussian noise, ranging from 0 to 3.2. And based on this simulated leakage model, we draw an exhaustive data set. In the sense of we assume that the number of profiling traces is high enough so that we can neglect the estimation error. Based on these exhaustive data sets, we can compute first the mutual information, which is estimated with Monte Carlo simulations, which is possible since we know the truly leakage model in our simulations here. And on the other hand, we trained one-layer perception, which is the simplest architecture of neural networks, with only 1,000 neurons to minimize the NLLOS function, or in other words, to maximize VPI. And we also consider different kinds of simulations where countermeasures are considered or not. The first case is when considering the higher-order masking, where the sensitive variable is split into the independent parts, according to a secret sharing scheme. And the second case is by considering shuffling, namely where independent operations are randomly shuffled. So our goal is to know whether the PI can be a good estimation of the MI in an SCA context. So now we present our results. First, we plot the estimations of MI here. So on the left, you have the estimations for the masking and countermeasure. And on the right, you have the MI estimations for the shuffling case. And what we see is that the crosses here denoting the computation of PI, according to the training loss of our model, is indeed almost superposed to the curves. So in a sense, this can be interpreted as the fact that the PI is a good estimation here of the MI, no matter the masking order or no matter the nature of the countermeasure. And since we assume to neglect the estimation here, there remains only 2 errors, the approximation error and the optimization error. But it turns out that those 2 errors are always the same sign, they are negative errors. And since the gap here is negligible, this means that the sum of these 2 errors is negligible also. And since we have the same sign, both are negligible. So this is the good news, since any more complex model should have a lower approximation error, we have also run some empirical verifications and other experiments. You can check the details in the paper at the end of these slides. Finally, those results may be of great practical interest for the evaluator, since we have a method to approximate the MI according to the PI. But since the MI is linked to the number of traces required to succeed the attack, namely NA star, we may substitute the MI with the PI in the computations, which would give a current estimation of the number of traces required to succeed the attack. We tested this claim on 3 public data sets, using the architectures proposed in the recent papers. And we compute the relative error at the final step of the optimization. So here are the results. First, when considering the AES-RD data set, RD is standing for Random Delay. So this is a microcontroller, namely a software implementation protected with miscellaneous by the insertion of some random dummy operations. So in orange, you have the estimation of NA star with 50 attacks in a row. Whereas in green, we have the estimation of this ratio directly based on the results of a training loss during the profiling phase. You have another example here on the ASCAD data sets, which is a microcontroller protected with a masking control measure. So the range of NA here is much higher, typically here of 100 traces. Here we have about two or three traces. And what we can see on those two plots is that the relative error is rather small, here 16%. So we see here that our estimation method is sound. And this result is also confirmed on hardware implementation, namely the AES-HD data set, which is an implementation on FPGA, but without countermeasure. But still, the range is rather different. Where here, the record number of traces is of about 400 or 500 traces. But still, the relative error remains satisfying, which is 18%. So as a conclusion, here are the take-away messages of this talk. Minimizing the NLL loss gives relevant estimation of the mutual information, and thereby provides accurate estimation of the SCA metric, namely NA star. The NLL as the last function is sound from an evaluator point of view. And our method enables to quantitatively measure the impacts of countermeasures through the estimation of the mutual information. Thank you for listening. And if you have some questions, I would be delighted to answer. More generally, if you're interested in deep learning-based set analysis, I am soon finishing my PhD, and I am currently looking for postdoc position. So if you would be interested in working with me on this topic, feel free to let me know. Thanks.


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