Hi, everybody. Welcome to the April 8th meeting of the Arlington School Committee. As people come in, I'm going to go ahead and do our script. Let's see. Good evening. This open meeting of the Arlington School Committee is being conducted remotely consistent with Governor Baker's Executive Order of March 12, 2020 due to the current state of emergency in the Commonwealth in order to mitigate transmission of the virus. I would advise and directed to suspend public gatherings and as such the governor's order suspends the requirement of the open meeting law to have all meetings in a publicly accessible physical location further on members of public bodies are allowed and encouraged to participate remotely. The order which you can find posted with agenda materials for this meeting allows public bodies to meet entirely remotely so long as reasonable public access is afforded to the public and follow along with the deliberation to the meeting. Ensuring public access is not insured public participation unless such participation is required by law. This meeting will feature public comment. In this meeting, the Arlington School Committee is convening by Zoom as posted on the town's website identifying how the public may join. Please note this meeting is being recorded. Some attendees are participating by video conference. Accordingly, please be aware that others may be able to see you and take care not to screen share your computer. I'd cast maybe captured by the recording all the materials for this meeting except an executive session materials are available on the novice agenda dashboard. We recommend members of the public file the agenda as posted on novice. I will introduce each speaker please remember to speak clearly for any response please wait until the chair leads the floor to you if members wish to engage in close with other members please do so through the chair. All votes taken all votes taken in this meeting will be conducted by a roll call vote. So let's do our attendance. Starting with the committee index thing here. Mr. Cardin is going to be late. Dr. Allison Pampi and I'll see her yet either. Mr. Tillman here. Mr. Schlickman. Good evening. Mr. Heiner here. And I am here so we have a quorum and I see Dr. Allison amp is here. Dr. Bodie here. Dr. McNeil here. I see Ms. Fernandez. Here. Mr. Mason. Here. Eagle. Here. Helmer. Here. Janger. Here. And I think that's everybody who were expecting. Okay, great. So the first item on the agenda is public comment. Ms. Fitzgerald said that there was nobody who had signed up tonight for public comment. So shortly we're going to turn to the first agenda item, which is Dr. Bodie and council around pool testing, but I wanted to start and take my three minutes of public comment tonight. This is my last meeting as chair of the Arlington school committee. I became chair like 10 years ago, or at least that's what it feels like it was 10 months, but it feels like it was 10 years back in June took over from Mr. Cardin. And I'm delighted to be passing along to Mr. Heiner as expected on at Monday night's meeting. So it's been a really, really long 10 months. It's been a very hard. It's been a really challenging time for our schools. And it's been an extremely, it's been, it's a, it's been an extraordinary experience for me to be the chair of this committee during this time of such extraordinary, extraordinary upheaval and change in how we're delivering education across Arlington. And I have learned so much from all of the people that we have been able to work with and see leading our schools members of the committee, obviously, but also Dr. Bodie and her team, all of our principals and administrators. We've never seen so much of them during my time on this committee. We've never seen our principals as much as we have over the last 10 months. And so I have, it's just, it's really been such a privilege and an honor for me to be able to learn so much from them and, and, you know, just, you know, think about and talk about how we are around each other and how we treat each other. So I, you know, I'm really, I'm really proud of the work that we've done as a committee over the last 10 months. I am so grateful to Ms. Fitzgerald for really keeping the ship afloat for all of us and keeping us in line and making sure that we're organized and following the rules. And we've had some good laughs along the way. So I've been really, I've been really appreciative of that. She's been so gracious with me and given us so much of her time. And also, you know, Rob and Rod and Michael, Dr. McNeil, Mr. Mason, Ms. Elmer, Mr. Spiegel, Kathy's whole team, you guys have all been so generous with your time with me. There have been many times where I've been confused or not sure what's happening and you have all been so willing to explain to me and bring me in and let me know what's happening. And I have so enjoyed working with all of you in this capacity over the last 10 months. You know, again, I've learned so much from you and from how you work and how you do your work. And I will certainly take that with me as a committee member as we move forward. And then finally, Dr. Bode, you know, we have known each other for many years. We've worked together on the committee. This has been an extraordinary time to work together as chair and superintendent. I don't think that this was certainly not what I expected when I ended up where I did in the in the line of succession for this committee. And I know that it wasn't certainly what you expected. When you announced your retirement a couple of years ago. So I have felt a lot of empathy for, but also appreciation for you and for your leadership and for, you know, how we've been able to do this together. And so I know that, you know, the next few months, you will continue as you have always been. And I will miss our conversations. But I know that, you know, we will continue in your very, very capable hands for the next few months. So thank you so much to the committee for your patience and graciousness as we've moved through this. I've never chaired a meeting in person and may never, which is actually just fine with me. I feel like I came here and I did everything that I could possibly do for 10 months and I'm more than happy to step away and look forward to Mr. Heiner being the chair. So thank you so much. I want to move on to the first agenda item, which is pool testing. And Dr. Bodie has an update for us from her conversations with Mr. Heim and just their thinking around pool testing in the district. So Dr. Bodie, you can go ahead. Well, thank you. But I really do need to be before I move into the report on this. Thank you. We've had, I don't know if we can figure out how many hours we've talked this year, but a lot. And I've enjoyed the conversations. I appreciate so much your leadership during this time because you've done it with these these meetings with a lot of grace, sense of humor. And there's just been a very good feeling about all of that. So thank you to thank you as well. It doesn't mean we can't continue to talk. But yes, it's been a very challenging year for everyone. And I have to say, I think we've done a pretty darn good job of how we've gotten through this year. And you know, thank you to, you know, and you and Mr. Tillman are running on a post, which I think says a lot too, about the confidence of the community in terms of how the school committee has been a partner and a leader as we've gone through this year. So thank you to you as well. And I'm sure there's going to be many more kudos to you on Monday night. Yes, probably so. And maybe even tonight. So thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. So to pool testing. Yes, I have had a conversation with Mr. Heim on this issue. In fact, more than one in the last few weeks. So the issue is whether we should mandate pool testing for students that are in person. And let me proceed before my conversation about that. Is that one of the things that the Department of Education has said to districts who participated in the state program and who are receiving these shipments of by next or follow up and for testing is that we cannot require students to to it can't be mandate. We can't require students to take the pool, the pool test. Now, does that mean that you can't mandate it? It's a more nuanced answer on that one. And it's it's it's complicated. And I think that at this point, it would probably be wiser to continue our efforts in terms of, you know, encouraging parents to have a consent for their child that be pool tested. And I will say that, you know, a combination of this in our encouragement on the meeting, the principles and I understand there's been some social media around this as well. The percentages have really improved a lot. Literally, this is hot off the process today because we wanted to include this the results from this week. So I sent you for each one of the elementary schools, but if you look at K five all together as a group, it's a 90% participation. Yes, would be like to have 100% yes and we're going to continue to encourage parents to do this, like to sign the consent form. In fact, it's a little bit late, but the February newsletter went out because it takes a little bit of time to, you know, as a follow up to that month. But I also put in that newsletter, the links for both K five, six, six, eight and the high school for parents to sign a consent form at Gibbs, the percent is 83%, which is up from the last time. And I think the most spectacular rise is with Austin middle school, which has gone from 70% to 93%. So it, we are moving in the right direction in terms of the percentages. At the high school, as you know, we mandated pool testing for all athletes. And so in the fall two season, which is the third season of this year, presently in, we have a couple of hundred students, a little more than that, who are being pool tested weekly. When we get to spring athletics, that number really jumps up. There's going to be over 400 students that will be pool tested weekly. So there is also a plan for other students who are not athletes to be pool tested. And you're going to hear, we can talk more about that after we hear the report in what the plan is for the high school to return to a full time in person instruction. But I'm really very pleased with these results. We want to, you know, next time I report on this, I'm hoping it may be right after vacation, we'll see more of a jump than even this. But at any rate, I think at this juncture, because it's a little bit more complicated that we just simply not go forward at this point with any mandate with respect to pool testing. So that's basically where, where the issue is and happy to answer any questions. Great. Thank you, Dr. Boney. Questions for the committee around this. So seeing then, so, you know, I appreciate so much the efforts of the principals to encourage families to sign up. I do think that it helps to send out the, I know that some do and some don't to send out the pool testing results each week. Even if they're negative, it's still good news. It's nice to get them. And so I think it, you know, just helps people remember that it's, that it's happening and, and, you know, it encourages people to continue signing up. So I hope that we can continue to drive those numbers up 90% at across K five is great, but there are some schools that are lower and some that are much higher. So I think we want to, you know, just keep driving those driving that participation up because it's such an important part of the mitigation strategies that the district has invested in to keep everybody safe at school. So, yes, and we will continue to do that. I will say the elementary numbers also include in the base, the returning students from remote this week. Actually, there was a something I sent out to all staff, but maybe interesting for those listening, really what our pool testing has looked like. We have processed to date. Well, actually to the end of March, 2,150 pools, which means that this represents nearly 20,000 individual samples. And of those 2,150 pools, only nine pools were positive. So the, you know, the it's a partnership with everyone. Parents are setting their children to school sick. We have great protocols in place for safety. And I think all of these things are working to keep everyone safe as we go forward. So, thank you. And by the way, Dan Sheehan, who's the interim director for technology for both town schools is joining us this evening as well. Great. Dr. Allison Amby. Thank you. Dr. Bodie, when you spoke with council, did you ask about the possibility of doing it as an opt out as opposed to opt in? It's not me and dating, but saying you're in unless you opt out. I think that that can be a school committee decision. If you want to do that, we've done that with other kinds of permissions. And this, you know, we have that on our portal for different things, but they are different permissions for, you know, getting pictures in the newspaper. That's different. So I think that's a great idea. To be honest, we did not talk about that. But I think that that is sort of in that narrow range of, with Desi, think that we are mandating it by that process. But you know what? I can follow up with that and let you know when we get, maybe even Monday night, I can, I can let you know if, if we have an agenda item for new business. But I think we do. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Great. Okay. So the next one is, is a really beefy one. I'm, I'm trying to talk while we wait for Dr. Jinger to come back. Here he comes. And I, I put all of your items, Dr. Jinger in here all together. We have Italian. We have heterogeneous classes. We have semesters and we have full return. We have a full return plan. We have a full return plan. We have a full return plan. We have a full return plan. We have a full return plan. Until tomorrow, probably if we gave all of these items, they're due, but I think a couple of them are just sort of brief updates for the, for the committee and the community around where you guys are on this. And then the full return plan. Is obviously the, the, the crux of the whole thing. So I defer to you on how you want to, how you want to work through this list. So, let's go from small to big because I, otherwise we'll get to the end of full return. And I will not even remember what we're going to say about the other ones. So let me just start with Italian. So. There's a longer explanation kind of of where we are in the direction with Italian. But the simple version is. The Italian program is the only language that we teach. And we've been seeing over the last four or five years. At the high school that does not have a pipeline going into it. And we've been building out on the Italian. Over. I think it started right. Right as I came in. So eight or nine years. And what we've been seeing over the last four or five years. Is that the numbers have shrunk. And more importantly, what we find is. That when you get. Let's say 20 freshmen in. The first year, the first year, the first year, the first year, the first year, the first year requirements. So you'll usually go 20 to about 18 the next year. The third year students don't have to take it, but it's a requirement or an expectation in many state schools and many other schools that you take three years. So the numbers drop down at that point to about 15. And by the fourth year. We regularly have sections of 10, eight, 12. We try really hard not to run sections that are under about 18. And so we're trying to get that requirement to those students. Or because we're trying to build a program or because we're trying to build it into another pipeline. But over the last four or five years, we've been looking at this pattern in Italian. And seeing that it doesn't sustain the numbers. So it becomes an expensive program to run. And a programmer. We have not made. Until students arrive in high school, a commitment. So if a student. You know, if you're in high school, they didn't take another class. If a student's taken Mandarin one in sixth grade, our expectations, we really have to provide the full program. So, you know, six through 12 because that student has made the commitment of time. We told them we were going to have a program and support that over that time. So as you guys saw. The Italian one option. And there are years when we, for example, don't offer Mandarin one at the high school because we don't have enough interest. We don't have enough time. We don't have enough time. We don't have enough time. We don't have enough time. We don't have enough time. We don't have enough time for Mandarin two. Because students are coming out of the middle school. So in the program of studies, we did not include Italian one this year. There was not a lot of conversation. I was not at that meeting. But subsequently, there were some folks that contacted. I know you and me and Dr. Bodie who really felt strongly about. Their interest in Italian. So we reviewed the program. We went over the numbers. We went over the numbers and we got over that for, for freshmen. But in order to be able to maintain that program, we're looking to have 20 freshmen enter so that as we can see, you get that 2018-15. And we want folks to understand that if we're having numbers in the neighborhood of 10 or 12 in four years, we may not offer. Italian for that. We can't really make that commitment right now. And we want folks to understand that. But our goal, and this is important is not. trying to have as many rich language options as possible. One of the ways in which Italian was sort of envisioned as we went forward was as an opportunity, you know, it's the fourth European romance language that we teach in the high school if you count Latin as they romance language. And so what we had been looking at and our long-term plan was next year and then the year after to look at offering what we call Italian intensive, an option that some schools have experimented with. And the idea is a student who's taken two or three years of another language could either double up or transfer into Italian one, two. And the idea of that, it's a one-year class that prepares you to go on to the second class in college. If you only took Italian one, for example, right now as a senior, when you went to most colleges you'd have to retake Italian one because there wouldn't be a college class that would fit into the amount of content you had. So the simple, that was a long explanation but the simple answer is we put Italian one back in the program of studies. Unfortunately, I think Ms. Morgan pointed out to us that I guess the letter did not go out from the middle school, it's now gone out. We will leave the program of studies open if somebody calls us the day after it closes and says, I didn't realize that was out there. We'll open it back up for them. But if folks are interested in taking Italian they should go into their requests and make sure that they request Italian one so we can get an accurate view of the numbers and interest. So that's Italian. Do we want questions about Italian before I go on to heterogeneous grouping? Sure, because otherwise we'll forget where our questions are about Italian. Does anybody have any questions about Italian? Dr. Allison Ippie. Thank you. I was wondering if it's not possible to do a combination of Italian three and four which would bring up your, I mean, they'd have to readjust the course but it'd bring up your numbers. It would offer the ability to continue the languages for the people who wanted to and it would keep the classes going. So I will say that that is something we have done in past years in order to keep the program functioning. The numbers still get problematic if you've got two sections of 12. It's not a long-term great plan, right? And I know our Italian staff have really not wanted to do it in terms of the way they feel like it works. One of the other challenges of the Italian program is, you know, it never gets to AP because we don't have students coming in at that level. We have a much lower participation in honors level. Very few students take it for the honors level on level one and two. So there's a lot of ways in which it's hard for us to create a program that doesn't have the full commitment to the district all the way up through the middle school. But it's a conversation we've now got a year to continue to have a conversation about. And, you know, we should probably come back to that early as something that's not waiting for the program to study since clearly there's an interest there. And my one question, Dr. Jinger on this was that the email that we got from Mr. McCarthy didn't say that Italian, I'm not, my kid's not gonna take Italian, but that the direction was to email Ms, to email Don Carney or Don, I'm looking for her name here. Yeah, Don Carney to put their names on the list if the course is offered, but that it's, it doesn't imply that it is possible to select it in power school right now. Is that what you're planning to? It is, my understanding is that both of those things are true, that it is possible to select it. But I think some folks have put in their submissions and may not be able to go back in again. Okay, so, but the directions that are in the email from Mr. McCarthy to email Don, email Don Carney is the way to go for people who are interested in taking Italian. Follow Mr. McCarthy's directions always. It's what I do, but just, you know, double check it. All right, great, anybody else for Italian? Great, all right, what next, Dr. Jinger? So I don't have a long conversation about heterogeneous.  We got those surveys just about written and then we started working on the return which came right after that. So the surveys have gone out to sort of get information about next year. But in the conversations that we've been having in planning those surveys with the staff, talking within the district level, we made a determination that although we haven't had that longer conversation that I promised, we're really not prepared at this point to do the heavy lift, to do heterogeneous grouping next fall or to be perfectly on a semesterized classes. So in the surveys that have gone out to eighth grade parents, eighth grade students and then high school students and high school parents, the notes explain that what we're really trying to get is people's input and feedback so we can look at the experiences we've had. We've gotten pretty good responses at the high school, particularly from parents, but we really do encourage folks to get in there. We would like as much feedback as possible so we can feel like the feedback we have as representative. And what we are seeing in the high school experience, which is a lot of what we were really interested in, right? Our students have now had experience with heterogeneous grouping with semesterized classes, with different uses of remote instruction. There were a couple of other pieces with longer block classes. And so it was really helpful to see how different folks engage in it. And there's a, I guess, my simple version and we'll come back and I'll present on those responses next time, whenever you'd like me to. But after the staff have had a chance to go through those and talk about what we're doing with them. But we are seeing a sort of a modestly positive majority, sort of the hump is more in terms of people having had positive experiences at the high school with particularly with heterogeneous classes. And at the same time, what you see is a lot of concern about it at the eighth grade. So it's like one graph looks like this and one graph looks like that. So clearly in terms of understanding why we're doing it, how we're doing it, communicating that out, making sure the teachers are prepared and able to speak to it, that's some work we really have to do. Great questions for the committee around heterogeneous classes, just the info that was presented this evening. Okay. Semester schedule. Semester schedule. Whether we're gonna do semesters or... Oh, that was this. I think I just said that. That was a note of... Okay, okay, yep. I mean, the simple answer right now is that we will look at the information that we get back from the surveys and have a conversation with the teachers. But at this point, the larger lifts are on things like semesterized schedules and heterogeneous classes as the requirement for all ninth graders are not things we're planning on pursuing. Great, all right. Full return. For all the marbles. So I always struggle with, you know, you wrote it all out and now do I have to talk through it all? But what I'm gonna do is kind of talk through a little bit of the sort of the preamble to that memo, which is the table. I apologize to folks, especially folks at home who are trying to read the table which is trying to do two things at the same time. One, summarize the plan that we are proposing but also putting in there this sort of comparison option so people understood why we were proposing that plan. I hope folks so far seem to have understood that part. I've gotten some good questions in the last 24 hours some of which I've updated actually in the memo and which will continue to update as we build things out going forward. But just by way of sort of context. I mean, one, this is the fourth time I think this year at least where I'm presenting a proposal about a completely new way of pivoting instruction in the next month on relatively short turnaround. And that's been a real challenge obviously particularly for our teachers who've had to figure out a new format. And I think one of the things we were discussing with the teacher group, I said, look, I was a teacher moving across the hall is a major disruption in the middle of the semester because everything is where I wanted to do and I maximize every second of my day. So to move the schedule, the time 10 minutes here five minutes there is a big thing to ask. And I will say one that I'm very proud of the work the staff have done in terms of responding to that challenge and rising to that challenge and keeping our students engaged. I'm extraordinarily proud of our students who have kept on coming and plugging away and being engaged, worried and stressed very much but really engaging in that. It really is a testament to what a strong school we have. And it's been a privilege, I'll be honest to lead and carry this community in this school through the time. And I am excited about the prospect of having kids back in the school. It's, you know, the emotions are difficult because it's also an awful lot to do. And for many folks folks are saying, you know to do this with six or seven weeks left there'll be about seven weeks left in the year when we come back, is it worth it? And so I guess what I wanna say is this, I mean, we have remained and this is to the community and to you in terms of my perspective and I think for the perspective we wanna bring the book to this. We've remained predominantly remote this year primarily because of space issues. And those are primarily created by the six foot distance and a building that was already overcrowded. We were about 90 plus percent capacity going into this fall before any of this happened because of the small building and well, not really the construction project but the space. So now we have a change and we have had throughout the year I think a tacit agreement with the community that when we could return larger numbers of kids or an in-person when we could do so safely and logistically that we would make every effort to do so. And to me, that's why we're here today because we've had that commitment. And so we now have this CDC and state guidelines and the research that shows that this three foot chair to chair distance really is something that appears to be safe to do and that we can do safely. We have low levels of community transmission which are one of the requirements for that according to the CDC at the high school level. We've repaired the ventilation and people keep asking about the ventilation because that was a big conversation in the fall. Ventilation is now working where it's not working, we're not using those spaces. We have overwhelmingly vaccinated staff and we have testing as an option in place that really helps us to keep things safer. Those things make me comfortable saying to the staff and to the students, come on back, we can make this work. It's not gonna be easy. We'll still be fitting like a Tetris model exactly into the building. I remember when we did the Tetris model the last time and we said we got 90% of the way there, three feet chair to chair gets us 99% there. Like it gets us to where we can do it but it is going to be a really tight squeeze and we know we can do it but it's gonna be a squeeze. So the determination and this is a question, right? For many folks, we have been doing well academically.  The grades have continued to be relatively strong actually somewhat higher. Attendance continues to be consistent with past practice. Student stress is much higher than usual but the determination to return in person comes from the belief that that in-person instruction for the majority of students is worth a disruption to the academic and the existing programs. And I think that's an important thing that that really high level of student stress and concern is something that lots of people are telling us is worth this disruption but there will be some disruption. And so in the next seven, eight weeks, what we're focusing on primarily and putting our bet behind is building relationships with kids and being safe and getting them back into school for the interpersonal piece of instruction. And our teachers that I wanna say this are aware of the challenges including both groups. And I'll talk about why we're including both groups and we're gonna work hard to keep those connections and engagement. It's going to be a change since the current model and this is the thing. The current model really maximizes the remote experience. Like everyone has gotten themselves set up to do this really well. And when you split that up, it adds a new dimension but people really are gonna work very hard and I have great faith that we will be able to make it work. Many other middle-sex league high schools have been doing this and are doing this in comparable ways, many of them with comparable technology. And so they are able to do it. They won't tell you it's easy but they're able to do it effectively. So the plan, the current plan, the plan that we are proposing keeps students with their current teachers, grades and expectations. And we think that's valuable not just to the students who choose to come in in person but to the students who choose to remain remote. Because if we were to split, when that's the whole point of that sort of first colony we were to have to split to create a remote academy, we would have to pull 20% for it's looking more like 15% at the moment but in all of our other documents it's been about 20%. We would have to pull those students out of other classes. And that would require pretty much, not pretty much, it would require every single class to be reconfigured. Some would have to be collapsed to create other sections. And an enormous number of classes would essentially not be able to run because they couldn't run for both programs. So I'll just give an example. The most commonly offered class is freshman English. There's about 17 sections, eight or nine one semester, eight or nine the other semester. So this semester there's about two classes every period. So in order to accommodate 20% of the students you'd have to shut down two of those sections, redistribute those kids across the other six sections and take the kids out of those other sections and move them in. So everybody's getting new kids and kids are moving to new periods and imagine that's happening in every single class. And then when you look at art classes we have one section of painting we don't have two or three of those. So students are gonna end up in art and they'll be in-person art and out art because we couldn't offer all the different programs. All the APs, all the standalone computer science you name it, almost all of those would have to go one way or the other or be simplified. So it would be a significant change of breaking relationships, breaking routines. We don't think that's good for anybody in terms of their social, emotional health whether they're at home or in person. So that's why we made that decision. And so there are a lot of logistical challenges to work through. I've tried to hit the highlights as I go through the memo. Each one of those highlights has a memo being written behind it and a lot of logistics to go through. And we've been working in the past month as soon as we heard that this was the direction we were going to be primed with the list of questions and the list of decisions. But we can't really move forward with the final decisions until we A, had an agreement with the teachers to change the way that they were teaching and B, until we had really a deadline to work towards and could start asking parents to make the commitment. So it was sort of a chicken and egg and now we're moving very quickly forward. So I'll ask a question, I'll pause for a second because I could now bore you to tears going through the memo and sort of hitting the points but there's a lot of them and I'm not sure that you necessarily need all of them. So would you like me to sort of hit the two or three? I think the ones people have been most interested in has been, well, we've had a little question about lunch. We've had some questions about, well, yeah, to some extent I feel like if I went through all of them I'd kill you. So can you give me a sense of how you'd like me to proceed to go into the weeds as it were? I think, you know, address lunch because I suspect people have questions about that, certainly. And then, you know, I think probably the easiest is to give, to give the committee a chance to ask the questions and let that drag because I don't want to speak for them necessarily because what I'm interested in may not be what they are. So I think lunch, there's no way lunch isn't going to come up. So let's do lunch and then see what other people want to hear about. Does that work for you? I will go through this and I'll hit lunch but I'll go through what I think sort of a quick overview then. So one, the plan that we have for phasing in is to take that, the PD day which we've been holding in reserve and put that on Wednesday, May 5th. So that is 10 days after we return from break. That would give the teachers an opportunity to really make sure everything is set up. And then our plan is to bring first just the seniors in. So the seniors would come in in person. Other students would attend remotely. That one is something that people have been asking for all year an opportunity for just the seniors to come in and see each other. It also gives us an opportunity to look at how the movement patterns work when you put them in place to explain them and review them with the seniors who I think are really going to be leaders of this in the school. And then the next day, which is Friday, we're planning to bring the freshmen and transfer students in, students who have really never been in the building. Trying to find your way around the building on a good day is challenging but in a one-way pattern. When you're not supposed to backtrack and you're masked, is something we want them to be able to do in a building that's not super full. Plus we'll have just trained the seniors so our bridge builders and senior volunteers can be there to help them out. We're looking for folks to make the decision as we've talked about by Tuesday. I know it's a fast turnaround. If people don't contact us, we will go with their default, which is their current status under the departmental shifts because we need to fit classes in based on their size. Folks who are currently in the school and in-person programs, those folks will stay in their programs as they are. They should tell us that they're opting in when they fill out the form. So PE classes, remember Wednesday has been a special PE time. So the plan is to shut down 9th grade PE at the end of this quarter, which will be Wednesday. The 9th graders have finished their wellness curriculum. They accelerated in preparation for that. So the 9th graders would finish their 9th grade PE requirement and get that credit met. And then juniors and sophomores who are signed up for PE classes are being shifted into the regular program. So it's a four day a week schedule. It's basically the same schedule we've had before. I'll pull that up actually for a second because folks have asked about it. Let me just pull that up. Do you mind if I share my screen here for a sec? Go for it. All right. So. People have asked for it and I understand it's buried in there. So. This is the bell, the planned bell schedule. It looks an awful lot like what we're doing now. It's got 85 minute periods with a five minute break. We'll be using some buffer time in that period to shift people through the hallways. So it'll really probably be more like 80 minutes of instruction and five minutes of getting everybody sorted out to get from class to class. The plan and we'll look at that at this point is to have four lunches. But with PE. In the normal schedule, PE classes meet twice a week. And so the plan is to get rid of the, the P one in the middle of the day, which created that big break. We don't need that because nobody's gone home anymore. And so to have the four periods. And PE classes will go into students open blocks if they have them. So those students right now are being scheduled into open block classes and then they will be contacted. If they don't fit into those and we'll have conversations. And once there's room available, we'll open up PE classes to everybody. There will be in person PE classes and remote PE classes. Those won't be blended. So going back to here, I'm going to skip over the performing arts because it's not a big change. I've talked about ventilation. There's a lot of information about how we'll do hygiene around COVID. We'll testing. But let me go back to lunch. That looks like the big one to hit. So lunch. So the plan is for us to run four lunch periods. If there's a thousand kids in the school, that's 250 kids eating lunch at a time. And that's still a lot of kids to space six feet apart, sitting down at a table. That's considered a mass break because they're taking their mask off. So they're not supposed to be walking around. Any student is available as has eligibility. Remember to free lunch. The students will be able to pick up lunch in the cafeteria. Our plan is to use the cafeteria space, the blue gym space, all of the courtyard. And in the courtyard right now, we have a large tent. It's a large tent. I think it's 30 by 60. It's a pretty large 10. In addition to that, we have under what are called the links. A few thousand square feet of covered space. And we've actually got patio heaters that are in there. If we start to still have cold weather after that. So there is some outdoor covered space as well. And we are letting students, and this has been something we've been doing all year long. When students are not. Assigned and lunch would count. They can leave. They can go out to the field or the parking lot. Or, you know, they could go for a walk during that time. And so that's something we've been doing all year long. They can be otherwise they can be in study hall spaces, which we'll have in the pit or old hall. Or in the gyms during other periods. And. Sorry, people are walking behind me. And I lost my train of thought with walking. Yeah, but so that's, that is the plan there. And the way we do for lunches is students. And this we've done this in the past, usually it's been three. Some students have lunch right before their C block class. Some go to C block class for half an hour. Then have a 25 minute break. Some go for 50 minutes and then have a 25 minute break. And then some go after their class. So there's four lunch blocks with a little break in between them to let the students transition. So I think the other big piece, which I've gotten lots of questions on is how does this look for a blended class? And, you know, I think what I'll start with is the simple, right, because kind of what you can expect. And then teachers have all kinds of creative ideas. They've talked about beyond that, but the basic setup that we're envisioning is that every teacher already has a MacBook. Every teacher already has a MacBook and every teacher for a second camera. As the basic setup will be issued a Chromebook. And so, and I've actually done some staff meetings run this way. So the teacher can be teaching like this with their main device in front of them. And their Chromebook as a secondary device can potentially be pointed at the class or potentially pointed at the white board as a place to be. And they actually, I mean, there were other more expensive fans of your cameras, but actually that setup really works pretty well. In addition, we've purchased these sound lips. We've been using them for the last semester, which are just hip-worn with a little personal mic that talks like this that raises your teacher voice. So when you're masked and trying to be picked up by a microphone and trying to be heard by a class, you can be heard pretty clearly. And those work very simply. Just put them on and turn them on. We've asked teachers, they can sign them out or we can issue them to a teacher if they want to have them. So that basic setup, remember you've got an 80 minute long class allows a teacher to be teaching in person. Students who are, you know, watching at home or either are projected up on the white board or the PowerPoint you're using is on the white board, or they're watching what you're writing up on the white board over there. And there's a lot of configurations of that, but that's the basic setup. Now, in terms of envisioning that there are things that are great about that and there are things that are challenging about that. One of the challenges is it's not a great setup to have lots of large in-person class conversations. If there's a lot of cross talk in a whole class, the students at home, they may be able to hear we have fancy microphones that will bring into folks that are doing that, but it's harder for those folks to see and participate. Most of the time when you've seen teachers doing this kind of instruction, they stick with more of an interactive lecture or what's called IRE where they ask questions and students respond to them so they can then repeat or make sure the students at home heard or the students in person heard the students at home. And then when you want to have cross talk among students, you transition to group work that then can happen amongst remote students on Zoom classes, on the Zoom, or in class amongst students. Now, another question that's come up, and Dan probably can speak to this much better than I can, but I can speak about it instructionally, is what is our capacity within the building? And so the idea there is you're not going to have 20 kids all on a Zoom call. There's no reason to bring 20 kids, 15 kids into the class and then have them all staring at the screen. What you're most likely to have is a couple of Zoom calls running here. You may run a couple of Zoom calls with students who are in person or talking to kids who are remote, but for the most part you're going to be running two to four Zoom calls in every classroom. And my understanding is that we have capacity for that. The big issue we have to work on is making sure that everything is maintained and stable. So that's kind of the main piece there. And we're looking to get videos and examples from other folks who've done it in other schools. And I know our staff are already department by department reaching out because they're, they're very rapidly asking questions that are much more complicated, right? How do I run a lab? If we're doing a fetal pig dissection, which is a plan for biology, how do I make sure that I maximize the involvement of the kids at home? And so I know people are working in that direction. I think that is it. So questions. Great. Dr. Jinger, can you stop sharing your screen just for right now? So I can see. It makes it easier for me to see who's here. So I see Mr. Heiner. Go ahead, Mr. Heiner. Thank you very much. First off, just a comment on the lunch. The idea of letting students be free to go out of the building makes me extremely nervous. I come up there once a week to sign the payroll warrant. The traffic behind the building is constant. Going on. The geography there is just not what it was a year ago. So I'll ask you to reconsider that and put some limits on it. There's trucks, there's vehicles going back and forth. There's a lot of stuff going on. That's just behind the building. Quick question. I guess I'd like to hear from Mr. Sheehan. Do we have the capacity to do all this? As far in the technology aspect. To provide a consistent program. Thank you, Mr. Heiner. What we've looked at, we do. We've checked everything from our internet connection to our firewalls to our in school network. And everything seems says we have capacity to do this. We've worked with Dr. Jinger and come up with a model. We think is acceptable and we'll work. Yes. Great. Thank you. And I don't want to speak for the rest of the committee, but I know the question has been asked by several people. Do you need more from us to make things work? And I'd like Dr. Jinger to be aware of that. I'll stand corrected by any other members of the committee on it. Another question you mentioned. Has there been a contractual change between the teachers and. The school department with regard because my memory was. That we had agreed with the teachers not to do simulcast and remote at the same time. What you've suggested here is that I'm not opposed to it. Don't misunderstand. I just want to understand if we've changed the contract. So. And Kathy, Dr. Bode can speak to this more than I can. In the memorandum of agreement, it says that teachers can volunteer to do so there. Enjoying from doing it, but we can't expect them to do so. And so the, the, the letter of agreement. It's not a contractual modification. Is the teachers agreeing. To do this as a whole. So for teaching. You've already contacted. Speak to that. All the teachers have agreed to, to go forward volunteer. Am I correct? Well, yes. This, the question was put to the teachers earlier this week. And 80% of the teachers. Agree that this, you know, given the two options, they agree to this option. And so, yes, we are. The volunteering piece of it is going forward with the, with the teachers, as Dr. Jango said, the MLA that was agreed to back in September with the spoken made did not. Enjoying teachers from doing it. It just made it was not required. And so people, they just were choosing and that's, we wanted them to make sure that they were. On board with this choice. Because we have to choose one or the other. There's, you know, there's can't be anything in between. Of the two options. I'm sorry. I'm not clear on that. I thought. We weren't having two options. We were having. One. The classroom was going to be a blending of the two. So. Am I correct? Well, it's actually Jango was saying. The other option would be to change all the classes. Okay. But. You just said that 80% have agreed to do it voluntarily that. Simple mouth says 20% of it have not agreed to do it. So. Well, that's correct. But the high school has to go one way or the other. We either going to go with. You know, the blended or we're going to have to change everybody's schedule. And so it was really deciding which way. The high school was going to go and, you know. Laying that out for teachers to decide. I don't want to believe in this, but. What I'm hearing is that. It was the choice was made. Therefore. 20% I'm not going to have the choice that was in the memorandum agreement. Am I correct? Yeah, that's essentially correct. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Anybody else. Mr. Cardin and then Mr. Thank you. And thank you, Dr. Janger for all your hard work and. Doing this. I'm thrilled that we are at this point where. I didn't think we would be where we might actually get people back in the building. Just a couple of things because. Because of the. The challenging logistics, I would actually, you know, as you're still planning, encourage you to think about additional senior days and that, that week leading up to the change. I think just one day with the seniors and one day with the freshmen, you know, may not be sufficient to test to make sure everything's working well. And of course the more time the seniors have. The better experience they'll have because they're leaving early. In June. So I just ask to consider that as you're continuing to plan. I actually disagree with Mr. Heyner. I mean, I, I think. It's an extreme year. We're going to have to trust our students to be responsible. Coming in and out of the building. And so I'm glad to see that you're giving them that flexibility. And then. I guess. I don't want to put you on the spot, Ms. Fernandez, because I don't know how involved you were with this, this agreement, but I guess, you know, the concern that we've heard from it from possibly indirectly from a teacher is that they're, they're not thrilled with this, you know, agreement. And I guess what is, what is sort of the, you know, obviously we have to make a choice. We have to go one way or the other. We have to go one way or the other. We have to go one way or the other. We have to go one way or the other. Are, you know, Are the teachers collectively okay? Or are we going to find out that there's going to be a couple of recalcitrant teachers who, you know, contractually, they're not obligated to do this. So that would, that would put us in a difficult situation. Do you want to take this one? Yeah, I can, I can give it a go. Right. So I mean, this is a year of not ideal situations and. This is a year of not really being okay. So to say that we're okay, I don't, I don't know that we go that far. But kind of the official position here is that. 80% agreed to accept the change of language. And so just because that's a majority, the union has agreed to sign it. So. I wouldn't say okay, but I don't think there's a, a large concern on our end in terms of. The agreement we reached. Okay, great. And I do appreciate the flexibility of the teachers. You know, this has been a very challenging year. They have to pivot once again. This, this dual teaching is extremely challenging. And, you know, fortunately for. At least for Arlington, we won't, we're only going to do it for a couple of months as compared to the whole year. It's been in some other districts. So I do appreciate all your efforts. Thank you. Mr. Thank you, Ms. Morgan. And I want to echo. The words of other people on the, on the committee and how great we are for, for finally getting to a point where we can open up the school. I, I just want to make a few points. In response to concerns that about the, the students in the building project when the, when the building. When our building team, our design team and our construction team and the building committee were planning for the year. We were planning for students to come back to school. So safety protocols are in place to make sure that the students would be safe. Coming in out of the building and going out to the, to the field for activities. And so I, I have a great deal of faith in Dr. Janker, his staff, Mr. McCarthy, everybody in the team to make sure kids are safe when they go out for lunches or any other activity. And the construction team is very mindful of the fact that students are in the building and in fact, students have been in the building over the past year. There's a small number of students, but students have been in the building and, and the construction team has protocols in place that it is following carefully to be sure everyone is safe. So there's no evidence to the contrary. The second thing I want to say is an 80% vote by anybody is a good sign of confidence. And so I think we need to recognize that 80% voted in favor of this change. And that's a pretty substantial. Boom. So my question is, how we're going to treat any potential positive case is, is our protocol, what is the protocol going to look like? What is the decision going to look like if there's a positive case of a student in the high school in a class? Are you, is this going to lead to, obviously, obviously that student has to be quarantined. I don't know if we're going to get that, but for the fact that students are studying apart from each other, wearing masks, following safety protocols in rooms that are ventilated. What is our, what's our protocol going to be when, when, when that happens. So our current plan is, and these things change, right? We got, this is four weeks from now, and we will fine tune this in regard to whatever the current guidance is, but our current expectation has been within an abundance of caution to go beyond the within six feet for 15 minutes rule. And so it's pretty much been our practice. And at the moment, it's our expectation that if one student is in the school, the three classes that that student was in would be quarantined. All those teachers who are vaccinated, I believe don't need to be quarantined. The nice thing about this model is we're set up for remote instruction. So those students could then participate remotely during that time. And they would have to, because they would actually be in other classes because the kids cross cohorts and not staying with the same group of kids. If over time, you know, the district changes its larger view on that to say within six feet, then we would start doing mapping of who's within the circle of that student. But at the moment, the plan is that if a student is in place, the three classes that student passes through would be quarantined for the quarantine period. And that's one of the reasons why we are not planning on having homeroom because we don't want to create another 25, you know, kid group as people move through the day. I would just encourage you to study this. There are districts that have had, you know, at least that 50, 50 hybrid model and the high school. And I just look around and see if that's the protocol that everyone has followed. I'm not, I understand it's a, it's a very safe protocol. And, and it's ultimately the decision that's actually an administrative decision. The school of me really doesn't have a role here. I don't think. But I would just encourage you to maybe study what other districts are doing to see if that's the best. Yeah.  They go both ways. And one of the, you know, and some of why they split has to do with how disruptive it is, depending on, depending on the different model. There are districts that don't do, that do not quarantine a whole core. They, they, they do contact tracing and they make a decision based on their best judgment and. They've had good results. I would just, I would just caution, I would just ask you to look at other districts, give some thought to this because it could be very disruptive to. You know, quarantine three classes a kid 20, 75 kids. We're down. Okay. So you're trying to think about it. This is my growing punch list right here. I mean, if there's a month to think about it. And it could hear that that's a perspective coming from our school committee. Yep. Thank you. All right. I don't know if there was somebody after Mr. I see Mr. Shikman and then Dr. Allison ampy. Mr. Shikman. Go ahead. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Janger. Looks like this is a lot of work and. Thank you for every. The staff has had to do over the course of this year. A couple of questions. First of all, I want to say that I do favor the open campus. Anything that gets kids out of the building. When they don't need to be in the building is a good thing. And. And I. Encourage the use of outdoor space and, and open campus approach. Until we get through this, this pandemic. Or until we get our outdoor. Space open in the new building. My question is. Can I get a sense of the vaccine? Do we know the vaccination rate for teachers, both at the high school and the rest of the district? I don't know. I can say with some confidence. That any teacher who wanted a vaccination has, has had an appointment scheduled at the very least. And I know because we spent a weekend crunching that out and making sure everyone was signed up. Somebody else to have an answer for the rest of the district. Where we stand on teacher vaccination. Mr. Sorry. I'm sorry. I don't have an exact number, but I, I don't have an exact number. I don't have an exact number. But it's been similar in every school and Jenna, I can probably speak to the audits. And I know they were helping each other, the teachers in every school and the PTOs. Have helped teachers and staff. Who wanted to get a vaccination appointment, get a vaccination appointment. And I think by now most people. If not everyone who wanted to get a vaccination appointment has already had at least one. And many have had both. So if they had the two shots. We're not. I mean, I think one of the things we wanted to be, we've encouraged it. We've, and obviously the cooperation among our, our teachers and staff has been amazing. And most have really wanted it. But I mean, we haven't. We haven't gone that route to track it. And I don't think most districts are, but. You know, it's just not something we have done to date.  It's a medical piece of information. They're not obligated to reveal it. So I did survey my staff to say, you know, who's vaccinated. Who's got an appointment and who needs an appointment. And I got a very, you know, a chunk of folks who needed an appointment and we spent the weekend. Getting people vaccinated. I know. There were actually some extra vaccines. That following week so that people were able to do it as part of the school vaccinations. And then we've run through a few times. Is there anybody left out there? So I would say with some competence, I don't know how many people, there may be people in the building who have opted to not get vaccinated, although I don't think very many, but anyone who wants it has, I believe. Probably already got a first shot. Yeah, that's just my, I want to give a sense of where we're at. You know, we're actually pivoting at this point. I mean, my new mode thing. Is two thirds of the high school students will be eligible to get shots in a very short time. And so we're going to start ramping up trying to make that be our next goal, which is to get the high school students vaccinated. I've heard lots of stories about teachers covering for other teachers who are traveling during the day to get a shot. And PTOs and other people helping schedule appointments and a lot of cooperation. And a lot of support for the teachers. And I think that that's been really magnificent and very appreciative of the folks who've been helping each other through this part of the reopening. And I'm very grateful. And if there's anything we need to do to help out, both in terms of getting kids vaccinated, teachers through the vaccination, making this work and keeping everybody healthy. You know, we definitely want to do it. If anyone knows a way to get. Our local board of health. First shots again, so we can start running the clinics at the high school. We will. I would love to get that done. That they fold it back. Maybe we get a letter out to appropriate folks requesting that. We work with the board of health to vaccinate our high school students as soon as they become eligible. Thank you. If I could just say, I, if I could interject the board, our health department is looking into that possibility. I don't know if that will ever. We'll come to fruition because of. They, you know, they were limited a lot. The kind of vaccinations they could offer. Within the town. Well, yeah, I mean, the thing is, if there's any way we can support that, I want to know it because if, if we can get the vaccine, I mean, the thing is if there's any way we can support that, I want to know it because if we can put pressure on. Governor talk to our legislators, do whatever we can to make it happen. I think it'd be good. And given that the, the increase in vaccines supply. It is. Is in the pipeline and the president has said. That he expects. Everybody who wants a shot to be able to have had one. By June means that there's got to be a lot more supply in the pipeline. And if we can take advantage of that additional supply. To organize a clinic for high school students. Wow. That would be magnificent. I'd love to see that. Thank you. My question is more for our staff. I mean, more for Dr. I guess Ms. Sheridan. Karen isn't here, but it would have been for her. So I understand that under the current CDC guidelines. If you just look at Arlington, we fall under the, what's called substantial transmission. Category. And that three feet is felt to be adequate spacing for middle, for elementary and middle and high school. If our numbers go up. We aren't that far away from. The high transmission category. Right now we're at 57 per 100,000. For a week. And the high transmission is over 100. Per 100,000. For a week. I'm wondering first, who is monitoring. What are the numbers? And second. What I noticed if we go into high transmission. The recommendations are either using cohorting, which we aren't doing and can't do. Or if we can't, we're back to at least six feet distance between students and classrooms. And so. I just want to know. I understand right now that we're following the CDC guidelines, but I want to be sure that we're. You know, we're not doing this. Going forward. And when, you know, what are we going to do if that number. Hits that threshold. And. You know, how, how is that going to roll out? Um, well. Oh, we are monitoring it. So we're monitoring it. It's going to start right after we get to the school department. And. As well as, as one of our high school nurses as well. And we also have someone who is. Is also doing a lot of our stats for it. Who's. Who's a nurse in the district. So. That is being followed. I think you're asking an excellent question is. What do we do if we get to that level? Um, I think that it's a. Do we have it only be in the high school or is it the entire district? Do we have to go remote? You know, these are questions that we know how to do that and if we have to, we will. Right now we do have a cohort model for quarantine. So what I mean by that is if a student elementary is test positive, that entire class goes out because we cannot say that there hasn't been, you know, that all the kids haven't been affected. That may decrease as we get to the upper grades. And I think that's something that the health department are looking at is to whether that can be modified as we get, as the students get older because it's not like, you know, they may be wandering around the room. Once a high school student is probably in their desk, they're probably not wandering around the room. So I can't tell you right now how that's going to be potentially changed as we go forward. But I do wanna reassure you that that is being monitored. And in fact, there's a group of people that meet at least three times a week. One of them who are discussing that is the focus of conversation is the cases and what's going on with respect to COVID in town. I think as if that starts going up, we will be certainly developing a plan for how we're going to respond. Fortunately or unfortunately, we have plenty of experience and pivoting this year. Yeah, I'm hoping that it doesn't, but I'd note that the numbers for middle sex put us firmly in the substantial transmission category and have for, I mean, basically the last six, at least the last four months. And I think probably more than that. Yeah, definitely more than that. So it's not, I'm not asking this out of idle curiosity. It's, I'm still a little uncomfortable with the idea that we're essentially bubbling Arlington and saying, well, we're okay. Nevermind that everybody else right around us is having more problems, but we're okay. So we're going to do this. But I think that we need to be watching and figure out what we're going to do if it doesn't, you know, if things, if there's more transmission than we're expecting. So thank you. I'll just have one more comment. The transmission, the positive cases in Arlington still remains just slightly over 1%. And I think it's partly what towns and cities are making up the middle sex, which has a difference. And you're right, there's a range within the middle sex county and we're just watching it, but we're also monitoring what's going on in our community as well. Yeah, I'd say it's not when I say cases, I'm talking about the number of cases that were identified and then doing the math to figure out what it is per 100,000. And even if it's 1%, we're still in the substantial range. So yeah, we will. Anybody else? Oh, Dr. Janger, look at that hand. Go ahead, sorry. So just to point out after this conversation, the last bullet point on the memo does talk about when we would consider going remote. And I'm actually, I was just getting texts from our actual high school nurse, Sarah Lee, has been tasked to the Board of Health, has been working with them really closely on this.  And so what I talk about at the end is that I think particularly at the high school because the guidance from the CDC at the high school is different. At the high school level, they say if there are high levels of community transmission, you should consider returning to six feet, which would occasion us needing to go remote. And in addition, I think that we are gonna look at trying to figure out a metric or an indicator for what is a high level of presence in the high school if we're getting a high case positive. And then obviously if there's any evidence that we're getting it in clusters and it's being transmitted in the high school, if we can't modify our practices to make that safe, we'd have to deal with that. So those three things are things that we're gonna sort of develop more guidelines on so that we are prepared when we come back to not get a bunch of information that not have thought through how we're gonna react to it. Great, thank you. All right, anybody else? Mr. Cardin. Sorry, I lost my cursor. So just following up on Dr. Allison Ampe's point, we as a committee has never adopted the CDC guidelines as a standard that we are required or requiring our district to follow. This memo says when to consider going remote. I don't support following the very conservative CDC guidelines. If Dr. Allison Ampe wants to make a motion to require that then I think that's something we can consider but I don't think the message should be from the committee that as soon as we go into the red as a town, and that's a complicated calculation because I don't know what population figure you're using, Dr. Allison Ampe, but it's not a figure that I think our health department is monitoring, Dr. Vody. So it's not something that you're monitoring the transmission, which is great, but I don't think you're monitoring the specific calculation that Dr. Allison Ampe is monitoring. And I don't support using that as a requirement to go remote again, thanks. Dr. Allison Ampe. I am not prepared to make a motion off the cuff, but I will consider it for our next meeting. I was assuming that because we're agreeing to do the things that the CDC, basically I was seeing it coming down from the state that the state has said, okay, we're following CDC guidelines now. And that's what we want you to be doing, that sort of implied that that's where we were going, but if it's not, that's fine. In terms of the calculation, it's not a difficult calculation to do. You just look at the number of cases that we have in this town and then look a week earlier in how many cases and the difference is the new cases in the week. And you figure out how many cases that is per 100,000 for the population. I can go through the math, but it's also on the CDC website on how to do it. But Dr. Bodie, yes, this is a number, I think Mr. Cardin picked up something that I hadn't realized. This is a number I think we should be following. And Dr. Jinger, I didn't see the bottom of your memo, so maybe it's in there. But if not, this is something I think we should be looking at. And I can go into it offline. It's not rocket science, so thank you. All right, anybody else, Ms. Exton? Do we need to pass a motion for May 5th to be a PD day? We do. That was on my list. I was just not sure. I'm sorry. Because no, no, not at all. No, don't be sorry. It wasn't on the agenda. So, but I think we can do it as part of this. There. The item, what do you think? Go ahead, Dr. Bodie. What do you got? We did not put it on the agenda intentionally because it was something we needed to present tonight. So actually, I think there's really two motions. Does everyone agree where we are going with the high school plan? Because that's a vote, I think it was taken for the middle schools and as well for the elementary. That's one. And then two, no, we didn't take vote. We just heard it and said, okay, okay, good. All right. But then you do need to vote on the planning day, which would be the proposed day is Wednesday, May 5th. Yeah, we have lots of votes on planning days. Something this committee takes very, our responsibilities around that very seriously. So I think, Ms. Exton, since you brought it up, would you like to make a motion around the planning day and then we can discuss it? I move that the school committee adopts Wednesday, May 5th as a planning day for the high school teachers. And right, okay. Second. Great discussion. Mr. Schlickman. Yeah, I support this. I would like to offer a friendly amendment to say that this will be a no school planning day. And in the motion, just to make sure we're dotting our eyes and crossing our T's. Are you good with that, Ms. Exton? Yeah, thank you. Great. And this will push out the last day of school for our high school students in line with where we are at for our elementary and middle school students. Can someone remind me what day that means? Oh, come on. These are the hard questions. I think we're at Thursday. I actually get this wrong, but I think we're on Thursday of that week in June. June 24th. Okay. Yeah, we're at Thursday, June 24th, 11.30 a.m. release. It was confusion. I thought I'd go right to the versus map. I'll change it on the high school calendar right now. All right. So any more discussion on the planning day? Seeing none, I've lost my list. Ms. Exton. Yes, Mr. Cardin. Yes. Dr. Allison Ampey. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Mr. Shikman. Yes. Mr. Hainer. Yes. And I am also yes. And we'll get a communication out to the community about that as soon as possible. Correct. Because it's getting, I guess our elementary PDAA has happened, but it's getting confusing with all these days. So we wanna make sure that people know what's happening. Okay, great. Anything else on the high school? Dr. Allison Ampey and then Mr. Shikman. Sorry, I forgot to ask one of my questions. Dr. Danger, going back to the open campus, I agree that it sounds like a good thing. I also agree with Mr. Thielman that we plan to have students in the building, attending school when we were building the high school, but we did not plan for open campus. And so I just want to think, is there anything that means there may be more kids going back and forth, not in groups like classes or something, like in the back of the, to the fields and stuff? Is there anything that will make that better or safer? And I'm specifically wondering if you need like a field monitor or some, I'm thinking playground monitor for high school students, anything eyes in the back there to make this work better and more safe for our students. So first, I mean, one thing to realize is that since we've been doing the departmental shift, there's been at least 100 students every hour coming and going out of the building, which is sort of more than would be usual because they're not usually all coming and going. So at any given period under this model, there would probably be 200 or so that would be unassigned. Most of those are probably gonna stay in their, in study halls or in the courtyards or other places because they're comfortable places to be. So I don't know that there's gonna be a ton more foot traffic. We are trying to sort of end two points. The building, as you know, is not well designed for stopping leakage. It has never been well designed for stopping leakage. There's 55 doors. And the new building is actually designed to limit it to two main points of entry, which a lot of that design was intended to enable an open campus if the community wanted it at that point because it's pretty easy to monitor kids going in and out. So what we are looking to do when we do this, and we're gonna have to deal with the realities of the building is to funnel entrance and exit through the courtyard and then the column entrance. And we will have an adult there supervising. And we have talked about whether we would use QR codes as students signed in and out of the building. So it helps us a little bit with contact tracing and knowing where kids are. We're already using scanners and doing that for signing into study halls. Another set of eyes would always be welcome. We are right now posted for one bare professional to help us just with the general monitoring of the very large space in lots of kids. So I will be honest, I am more concerned with kids congregating in unsupervised spaces in the building than I am with kids getting run over by construction equipment. The, as Mr. Thielman pointed out the construction, the plan has been to have kids in the building in an occupied building. The construction folks are very responsive. We will sit down with them before we return to in-person to say, you know, you've been great around the smaller numbers but we're going back to what we expected to be doing, which is a lot more kids around. So I think, you know, more paraprofessionals would always be great but I don't know that we're limited right now by more than at this point, it's the ability to find folks that are well able to do it. So that we do have plans to work in that direction. Okay, thank you. Let us know if you need more hands there. Mr. Schlichman. Pass. Anybody else? I don't remember. Got it. All right, we're ready. Go ahead. Do we need a motion for the return dates? We didn't for K-8. So. Well, okay. I just want to make sure we, so parents will be notified of all the changes in the PD day. Thanks. Anybody at Mr. Thielman? I would just say by the vote we took, we basically took that vote to set the PD day with the assumption that school starts for seniors the next day. So we, I mean, we've kind of endorsed the plan in a sense. Great. Anybody else? Okay. Super. Dr. Jager, thank you so much for giving us such a solid presentation. We're getting, we're getting, I do think we're actually getting better at this as a committee. Like we started with elementary and then we had middle school. And I feel like we were, we were cruising along tonight and I really appreciate your willingness to work with what we had questions about. So that's fantastic. There are many, many, many questions. And, you know, it's helpful to get them because it helps us to clarify the process. I take a bunch of notes. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. And we'll let you, we'll wave to you and say good night because it seems like there's a lot to do. And thank you so much for coming. Thank you very much. The next item on the agenda is the extended school year programming. So this was an agenda item that we did sort of, so a brief presentation about what ESY looks like. This was really helpful for me when Ms. Elmer did it last. I think I looked back, Ms. Elmer, I think it was actually my first meeting as chair in June. So this is like a nice full circle moment. And it's incredibly important programming for our students and for our families. And I think that it's really helpful for the committee to hear about it and to give the community the opportunity to hear any updates with how we're thinking about ESY for this summer. So I'll turn it over to you. Thank you for doing this. That's why you were able to recall it so quickly and pinpoint the presentation. I'm just gonna share my screen. It takes a second. And can I get a thumbs up if you can see it? Thumbs up, okay, great. All right, so as we mentioned last week, or last meeting, which is what prompted the request is that the DESE had updated their guidance when they announced the return to full in person and they've been rolling out additional information. So the week of March 15th, they clarified the expectation that extended school year, which is an extension of this school year, would need to offer both a remote and an in-person option to families. Whereas other new programming, the Acceleration Academies and other some traditional summer school do not have that requirement. So that in order to allow the students who have been remote for this year due to health and safety reasons to remain remote through the summer. And so we send out, begin sending out surveys of this past week or the week before and this week to families to find out what their intention is if they would prefer to remain remote for the ESY program if they're eligible or to come in person. We have so far about 100 responses. I checked this afternoon. The majority and 100 makes it easy to say this 90% wanted in-person. So we will likely the survey stays open until next week. So I'm assuming we will be having a very small remote program this summer and the majority of students will be coming in person. As I mentioned, just to give people general outline, as I've said before, this is an individual consideration for each student. So there is no set program like there is for our Title I reading or for some of the acceleration programs you've heard Dr. McNeil speak about. But in general, the program runs July 12th through August 19th, Monday through Thursday, 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. And then we have programs for the preschool students. They remain at a par mentor unless they're rising to kindergarten and they'll go over to the Pierce School where they'll be with the other elementary-aged students, rising sixth graders and the current seventh graders will be at Gibbs and then rising ninth graders and 12th graders, up through 12th graders will be at the high school. And that's generally where we've been holding the programs for the last few years. Anyway, last year being the exception that we just ran one program at Pierce. You'd asked about the timeline. So we really start planning for ESY in the fall. It's a year-round consideration and we will usually hire the extended school year coordinator or coordinators. This year, Joyce Schlinger will be the ESY coordinator for the preschool. She's the monotomy preschool director and has been the coordinator for several years. Annalise Abdeldnor at the high school is going to be the coordinator for the elementary and secondary program. She coordinated the secondary program last year. And then in the winter is when we start to post for the staff. So Mr. Spiegel will put out posting both internally and externally to begin hiring and we're really doing that. We're continuing to do that now with the addition of the requirement for remote. We reposted because there were folks who initially didn't want to be in person maybe interested now in doing it remote. And also we just have to make sure that we have enough staff and we're continuing with that process. I would say that we are, I think it's no surprise for the folks who are working in the buildings to say, I think folks are kind of deciding if they wanna break this summer or if they wanna continue working through the summer. But we are hiring up until right before the program starts usually with TAs in that, but we are in that process right now. The other thing we are doing is we have the staff or the special ed liaisons inputting the information about which students are eligible for ESY and what their programming is. So we can also start to build those schedules. And then as I mentioned, the program begins July 12th. And so just wanna start briefly cause I think this is what I did last year as well just to explain the criteria for ESY cause I know there's been questions about that particularly during this pandemic year. We have all talked a lot about learning loss and that all students are experiencing some regression they've had both a break in instruction last year and this year in many cases has been somewhat abbreviated and not being in school full-time. However, the criteria for ESY, which has not changed and it's very specific is to prevent substantial regression and to assist in recruitment of skills that are being addressed in the IEP. So the understanding is that like I said, all students will regress but is a student likely to substantially regress in the absence of services over a break of time? That's really the standard that we're looking at. And ESY is not a replication of the school year. So if you've got reading four times a week ESY is not intended to just keep continuing like the school year it's to prevent that backslide in skills significantly. So you may get two sessions through the recommendation me for two sessions. So you're maintaining the skills that you have and not falling back substantially behind your peers or it would take you a long time to recoup in the fall. Everyone comes back. We know the first four to six weeks of school is a lot of review and recovery for all students. Is a student likely to take twice as long to regain the skills they had the previous spring. So those are really the standards that we're looking at. And I've just linked where you can find that both on our website as well as the regulations. So that's kind of the big piece of it. I know you have some questions. One thing I didn't put a slide on here. I know that Ms. Exton had a question around transportation. So transportation is something that again is individual to a student and as it's in their IEP. So if they are a student who requires transportation to access their education, then they get transportation to the summer program or the ESY program. We do run a bus in the summer that's open to anybody in ESY that'll stop at each of the elementary schools in the morning so parents can drive to their neighborhood school to get picked up there. But that's not a requirement. That's just something we do. And with all of our bus runs, those are because that bus list, they're making routes up to 48 hours to the start of the program is when they're gonna be finalizing those lists. So I know sometimes parents aren't sure what time they're getting picked up but that's because our director of transportation is working with his drivers to make sure that that list is up to date. It's the most efficient route going through town. Any addition that's added to that change the route up. So folks wouldn't hear about that until 48 hours before the program were to start. Great, thank you Ms. Elmer. Questions from the committee about Ms. Elmer's presentation. Mr. Cardin and then Ms. Exton. Thank you. So yes, the other comment we get repeatedly year after year is not just the bus but also confusion about which school they're supposed to go to or who the teacher is going to be. And I realized that a lot of those details fall into place. Unfortunately at the last minute but it's great that we have the coordinators in place this early cause sometimes we don't even have a coordinator but if we could make sure we're doing the best we can to make sure that families have a week notice in advance of where they're supposed to be and who their teacher will be, that would be fantastic. Thank you. Sure, thank you. I will just add that the location is usually set. So I'm surprised by that feedback unless it's unclear about arising students but we do send letters out. So we'll make sure that we do that in most timely fashion. As you said, we can have meetings up to the last day of school, an IAP meeting. So it could be decided that they that that student is eligible. So it is definitely up to the last minute but that's important feedback. Thank you. Ms. Exton. Thank you. Thank you for this presentation. I think it's really helpful for me as a new member and just the community to get an overview of this. One of my questions, comments was the same as Mr. Cardens and I think just adding to that and hearing while some students might get ESY and their IAP on the last day of school, that's not true for most of the students. And so for as much as students who already know they're going to be eligible for ESY, the sooner that they can find out who their teacher is gonna be, who their service providers are going to be, I know you know very well that students receiving special education at ESY are particularly transitions are gonna be hard, new situations are gonna be hard for them, new adults are gonna be challenging. And so as much as the staffing is hard, I think it's really important that this is best as you can to give them as much notice as possible. And then I just, I had a suggestion and I shared it with you before but I also wanna share it here. I think this information is important for families to understand and the staffing is really hard and things like that. So I just wanted to suggest potentially having some kind of either at a CPAP meeting or some other time sharing this presentation and making sure or modified when whatever you wanna do to make sure that families have an understanding of this process and want to expect to hear about services and transportation and things like that. And then my question is I understand that you, there's a survey at the end of ESY sent out to families every year. And I'm just curious how that information is used to improve or change or modify things the subsequent year. Thank you. Sure, so our coordinators and we're lucky that they actually have been relatively consistent over the last few years. Ms. Nolan worked with Ms. Abdelnor. So they're what, you know, last year. So there was a transition between that and she was the previous coordinator. So they review that information, look at what that means for class sizes, you know, whether we also try to coordinate with some of the other programming that is going on in the district. So I know that one year, you know, we were able to coordinate with Mr. Coleman and his math program so that we could schedule math at the end of the day so that students who were gonna stay to go to his math program who were already coming in at that time. So we use that information really in the fall as I mentioned when we're starting to, when we hire the coordinators to really start looking in that and planning for that. Thank you. Dr. Allison, happy. Thank you. So I missed anything that was discussed last meeting. So I'm sorry, I may be repeating something, but to me it seems so first I agree that it's helpful to get information out as quickly as possible. But also whenever you have something like this where it is having to go later then perhaps the families would like and maybe coming out in pieces, you know, they know the program but they don't know the best schedule and stuff. If there's a clear point person that can be contacted and maybe that the role of that person is just to say you're right, we're working on the buses but we've got a couple new people and we're having to rearrange the stops or something just so that they know they haven't missed anything and they have someone to talk to. So I'm thinking that that can make it at least more tolerable even if they don't have the information. So thank you. Sure. And that individual would be the ESY coordinator. They're listed as the contact person for all this stuff but, you know, we certainly get calls to our office as well and Mary Camione or Mary Morocco now will also field questions and direct them to the ESY coordinators. Great. Anybody else? Mr. Schlickman. Admittedly, it may be off topic but I'd like to know what plans we have for second language learners over the summer. That is the agenda item after the survey. Okay, thank you. Anybody else? Great. Thank you very much, Ms. Elmer. The next item is the survey results for students and staff. This is something that Dr. McNeil presented at a CIA meeting. I don't know, weeks ago. I don't think months ago. And the direction from the subcommittee was that it would be helpful if he provided a condensed version for the full committee. So I'm glad that we're able to do this tonight. I'm working off all the last bits on my list. So this was certainly one of them that was pending. So Dr. McNeil, thank you for putting this together and we're ready. Thank you, Ms. Morgan. So I'm not going to go through the slide decks because I sent it out to school committee members and it's a wealth of information. And so I'm just going to focus on some highlights from all three surveys. The students in grades three through five, students in grades six to 12, and then the staff survey. And then I'll open it up for questions or comments after. And if you have questions about the data that you receive, I'll be happy to respond to them. So the overview for the... I want to start by going through the response rates for each one of the surveys. And let me pull up my notes right now. So the response rate for the elementary schools, which is grades three through five, all seven of the elementary schools to average was 89%. The response rate for the middle schools, which would include Gibbs and Otteson was 76.1%. And the high school response rate was 12.5%. So as you can see from those rates, the older the students are, the less of a response rate you were able to get. So when I give the different results, I mean, you look at the results in the slide deck that I gave you, you can kind of conceptualize what the bulk of the response is where they came from, especially at the secondary level. So just looking at some of the highlights, I'll give you the highlights. The way that I organize the slide decks is there was like six components of the survey in which students receive questions. And I'll just highlight some of those sections, those components, and I'll give the highlights under those, those different section headers. So for the student survey results, which I will use both the three through five and six through 12, looking at student relationship, some of the highlights were that 90% of the students in grades three through five reported that they can access an adult if they needed help at that moment. And then for students in grades six to 12, it was 87% of the students reported that they can access an adult if they needed help right at that moment. Under positive feelings, which was another component of both surveys, student surveys, students in grades through five, 85% of them reported that they felt safe, which really goes to our primary goal for the year was to keep our students feeling safe, especially during the pandemic and healthy. And I think we were able to accomplish that. And that's the way that the students were feeling. 59% of the students in grades three through five felt that they reported that they felt loved and 69% of the students in grades two through five reported that they felt happy, which goes to what we're trying to do with SEL and provide a safe and welcoming environment, even though we're in a pandemic and even though that we're looking at different learning models. And then for students in grades six to 12, 87% of the students, I'm sorry, 87% of students in grades six to 12 reported that they felt safe and 67% of the students in grades six to 12 reported that they felt loved. So, that definitely goes to our parents who are working in partnership with us and with the teachers and the amount of attention that they were able to provide to students, despite the fact that we're in a pandemic and we're dealing with different learning models. For the component of student engagement, 82% of our students in grades three through five report that they are putting in quite a bit of effort or a great deal of effort into their classes. So that was very great to see how that students are trying very hard. And 79% of students in grades six through 12 are reporting that they're putting quite a bit of effort or a great deal of effort into their classes. So again, looking at that student engagement, making sure that we have students that are motivated to learn and it looks like based upon those results that we're able to accomplish that goal. Looking at the cultural awareness and action, which was another component of all three surveys, but for the students, we had 63% of our students in grades three through five report that their school helps students speak out against racism and 56% of our students in grades six through 12 report that their school helps students speak out against racism. So that was good to see because that we're definitely focusing on creating an anti-racist learning environment for all students and staff and we've made that a priority this year and there's lots of different things that are going on within the district to address racism and prejudice. And we put a great deal of effort and also with our curriculum audit in order to make sure that we're providing the resources that students need in order to learn about people from different cultures. So that's kind of like the highlights of the student surveys. And that's not to say that we understand, looking at the student survey results on a whole and from a comprehensive perspective that we know that there was a lot of things that we needed to focus on as we move forward and hopefully as we give the next administration of the Panorama Student Survey that we'll see those improvements in various areas. Moving on to the staff surveys, some of the highlights. I would like to start with the component of well-being which is one of the components of the survey. 71% of staff report that they felt safe at work. Again, going back to our primary goal for this year during a pandemic to make sure our students and staff felt safe. And I think we were able to do that. So it was very pleasing to see that staff felt safe. 96% of staff report that their work matters to them quite a bit or a tremendous amount. And so we definitely know that we have very dedicated staff and that they're very passionate about what they do. And they're very concerned about the health and the well-being of our students. And they put forth a lot of effort in order to make sure that we're meeting the needs of all of our students. 93% of staff report that they felt like the work that they were doing was quite meaningful or extremely meaningful. So again, going to their passion for what they're doing. And I think that's something that you can't teach that. You can't provide professional development to promote that. That it has to do with our administrators and our staff working together to make sure that we're doing the best we can to make it through this pandemic and provide the highest level of quality of education to our students.  So I have nothing but kudos for all of the staff and administrators working together. Looking at cultural awareness and action, 82% of staff responded that they frequently are almost always think about students from different races, cultures and ethnicities, what they experience. And so I think that was great to see because there's definitely a will and a motivation from our staff to make sure that they are working towards developing those culturally responsive teaching practices and trying to make sure that they're thinking about their own bias and working towards, again, a primary goal of ours to create an anti-racist learning environment for all students. So those are some of the highlights from the survey, some of the highlights from all three surveys and I'll open it up to questions and comments at this time. Is this okay? Thank you. Yeah, it's fine. Thank you, Dr. McNeil. Questions from the committee? Hold on just seconds. Okay, seeing none. Thank you, Dr. McNeil. We did see this at CIA. So thank you so much for doing this for all of us. Okay, the next item on the agenda is summer school and ELL summer programming. Dr. McNeil. Yeah, so I just wanna start off by saying that again, this is something that we have put a lot of time and effort into thinking about about how we're going to provide students who have a need access to academic support over the summer. And we're gonna, you know, our primary goal is to replicate what we did last year. And that means that we are utilizing our Title I funds to definitely target those students that are receiving Title I services throughout the year. We're using different sources of data in order to identify who those students are. And we're, you know, definitely conferring with our math interventionist, our reading specialist, our principals and teachers in order to identify those students and make sure that we have a comprehensive list. But I also wanna say that we're going to also go beyond just offering support for our students who are currently receiving Title I services and any of those students who are not necessarily receiving Title I services in those buildings that have been identified, but also expanding into other buildings who are not necessarily receiving Title I funding. So we're trying to have a very inclusive program that's going to, you know, that's going to, you know, take in all the students that we feel that need support. So our primary focus is to definitely make sure we're offering that program into those students. With that said, looking at some of the details of the type of program that we're going to, you know, provide is, so we're looking at to replicate what we did last year. So it would be a five week program for literacy and math at the elementary level that will take in consideration those rising kindergarten through fifth graders. And it will be a half day program, primarily scheduled for Tuesday through Thursday. And the groups will be, you know, around four or five. And then, you know, looking at what we're trying to do right now is we're trying to identify staff in order to who are interested in teaching in that program. And we're also, we've sent out invitations to those students who have been identified to those families to see whether or not they would be interested in sitting their kids to the program. And so we're also trying to also take in consideration what we did last year by offering a remote part of this program, a version of it. So we want to make sure that we're taking out any types of barriers that may be there for our students and provide access. So we're looking at an in-person and remote version of it, trying to make sure that we're doing in-persons as much as possible, but understanding that there may be families who still might want to have the remote version. So again, it's a five week program, title one extended title one program, I would call it, replicating what we did last year at the elementary level would be K through five and it would focus on math and literacy. Looking at the middle school level, which we also offered a middle school program last year, again, a five week program. Right now we're talking to our middle school principals in order to identify staff and students that could take advantage of this program. And so we're really in the planning phases at the middle school level and the high school level. So that's where we are, but we're gonna definitely work to offer something very similar to what we did last year. And so I will be coming out with more information within the next couple of weeks in order as we solidify these plans. At the middle school level, we have meetings planned for next week. And then we also have to work with our high school principals for the credit recovery program, which will be primary be the way that we're gonna offer the support for students who need that credit recovery over the summer. So I'll open up for questions and comments right now. Thank you, Dr. McNeil. Questions for Dr. McNeil, Mr. Shipman. Yeah, I'm sorry, I forgot the ELL. I'm so sorry. ELL, we are trying to offer a program, a comprehensive program over the summer. We're working to identify a space. And I'm sorry, Mr. Shipman, I totally forgot. So I'm gonna, definitely. So I'm working with Ms. Busey, who's our director of ELL. And she's right now seeing what teachers are available in order to staff the program. But I will say it's very challenging after this year because as we ran into the same issue last year, we had teachers that were just, they just didn't have the bandwidth in order to work in a summer program. So we're kind of running into the same issue this year. Again, we're looking at trying to maybe definitely starting with prioritizing an in-person program. But if we think that the staff are more willing to do it in a remote version, we're definitely gonna keep that open. So we're reaching out to families right now to see who's interested and also trying to see what staff members we have interested. I just wanna say, to my mind, there's nothing more critical than providing summer services to English learners because they do not have the opportunity for high level English interactions at home because they're coming from a second language environment. It is essential. We cannot go this year and say, well, nobody wanted to do it. If we don't have the staff in Arlington, we have to go and recruit elsewhere. We've gotta make this program run because this is a critical, critical group of students. So I would urge the leadership here to not only identify space, identify space quickly, but make quick identification of which teachers are able to do it from within our staff. And if we don't have staff in Arlington that's able to do it, that we need to go out and hire and recruit because we must have this program. This is the most essential program, summer program in my mind. And I just don't wanna see it fall apart again this year. Well, I don't wanna say that it fell apart last year. We did have a version of it. It was not as comprehensive, but we did have staff work with students in small groups remotely and they did meet with them throughout the summer. I share your same concern, but I also wanna make sure that the individuals that we're putting in front of our students are also qualified and able to provide the level of support and the quality of education that we're looking for. So I understand what you're saying and we're doing the best that we can in order to recruit a staff to do so. And we will definitely think outside the box and try to, if we have to go outside the district, we will, but again, even if you go outside the district, I don't know how many people you're gonna get to work in the summer program at this point in time. So I just wanna make sure that I understand and I share your same concern and we're doing the best that we can in order to staff these programs. I mean, if you need to come back to us, if we need more money to run this thing, to attract teachers, if we need incentives, whatever we need to get this running, I wanna push for it. And I wanna make sure that we don't do anything as a school committee that's a barrier having a world-class second language learner program over the summer. No, the school committee has always been very supportive when we've asked for resources. And so that's not the barrier. And it's not a funding sort, it's not a funding. It literally is, this year has been very, very difficult. And I just wanna make sure that I'm saying that for our teachers and that, we want our teachers to come into the fall, refreshed and ready to go through, because next year it's gonna be just as challenging. So I understand what you're saying, but I also understand what teachers are going through because I hear them and we meet with them and I talk to them and I understand what they're going through. So this is not because, like I said in a survey, they wanna do it. It's the fact that whether or not they have the bandwidth to do it over the summer. No, I understand this. I really do understand this. I've taught, I've run summer programs, I've worked in summer programs, it's exhausting. And if the summer program goes too late into the year, you really don't have enough time to decompress between the time of the end of the summer program and coming back to school in September. I understand all of this, but if we don't have the capacity within the district, maybe we also need to make sure that we have more ELL staff so that we have greater capacity, less in the burden during the year, have people who are more refreshed and more able to go work the summer. Cause this is, to me, this is our biggest priority right now over the summer. Absolutely it is. It is. And with all due respect, I understand that you have experience, but I don't think any of us have experience working through a pandemic before. So I do wanna make sure that that is a variable that is different than any other given year because in any other given year, we haven't had a challenge of recruiting staff to work in the summertime. Yeah, I understand that, I really do. But I'm also looking at those kids and this is a cohort that need more intensive, more focused English instruction because that's what's gonna move them forward within our system. So Dr. Al-Shanbi, and then, but I have a question first. So for Dr. McNeil and maybe Mr. Spiegel, what is our ability or capacity to be flexible around salary for these summer positions? What are our obligations and how can we make it more potentially more desirable? Okay, can I just say that it's not a salary thing, it really isn't. I mean, I think that if Jenna can chime in here, I really would like to have her share some understanding as what we're taught, it's not a funding, it's not funding, it's not salary. We can offer all the money in the world, but if people are burned out, they're burned out. And I just want Jenna, could you please provide some insight to this? Yeah, what's going through my mind is when I also read your slide deck that you sent to the staff this afternoon, and there was a question about how often did you feel exhausted at work? And I think it was something like 89% felt, at least somewhat, or I don't remember exactly what the, but it was a huge number of staff feeling exhausted. And I'm looking at, I'm gonna do some summer fund stuff, but this year, I can't put into words how different this year is in terms of looking into the summer and kind of what we need to get ready for next year. So I appreciate Dr. McNeil bringing that up. And I absolutely share the concern for our ELL students. I know the district's doing the best they can. So we don't have, I mean, there are generally speaking, there are dollar amounts where people will make different decisions. Like that's just how people, like eventually that there comes that place. So I hope that if this is really a priority and certainly there's no obligation that any of our teachers choose to do this this summer, but we can continue to incentivize it if it is really a priority. And if we're going, gonna continue to spend money on it, there are ways to make it more appealing for people. And if we can do that, I think, I agree with Mr. Schlickman that it should be something that we try to do. So Dr. Allison Ampey and then Mr. Schlickman. Thank you. So a couple of things. One, I totally understand about burnout and can guess that that's how many, many people are, I mean, many, many of our teachers and staff are feeling right now. So I would wonder if there's any way that we can play with the schedule where like they're only teaching half of a program. You have people doing team teaching. One person teaches the first two and a half weeks. The second person teaches the second two and a half weeks. So then both not doing the full thing. And second, whether I don't know our numbers, but whether we could combine with another district and maybe both bring staffing in and be able, you know, maybe they're having problems too, but they can put together half a program. We can put together half a program. We bring all the students together and do that. Anyway, just trying to come up with some other ideas to help us achieve the goal. But the other question I have, and I'm gonna have to start driving, so I'm just gonna be listening. When I read the New Desi Guidance, to me it seemed to suggest that all students, not just these students who definitely are in high need, but that all students receive as much in-person learning during the summer. And I was wondering, is there somewhere else where they make it more clear that it's just referring to special education students, ELL, Title I, et cetera, or is it really everybody? It is everybody. And we're thinking outside the box and how to provide activities. And so we're thinking of like for enrichment. So what I hear you talking about is the enrichment. What can we offer to the students who aren't struggling, who are progressing typically and or above? So we're looking at for literacy coming up with like an activity calendar, activities calendar, definitely looking at our enrichment page and having very targeted specific activities that students can access over the summer. They'll have their Chromebook and then we have our online platforms that we have invested in that will be made available and our licenses go from August to August. But I think that, again, as I talked to you about us having problems staffing the program for students that are in high need of support over the summer, I don't want us to compete against ourselves and offering an enrichment program. And then you have staff that you would, so we have to have priorities. And so right now our priority is to provide staffing for our students who are in need. And then definitely considering our students who would like to have enrichment and then providing them with resources that they can access over the summer that doesn't necessarily rely upon having a staff member. We think outside the box again, we're saying maybe we can have a check in once a week with a staff member after they do some of the activities and they can summarize what the students have accomplished during the week. So we're trying to think outside the box in many different ways and also be very respectful of our teachers who have gone through a lot this year. And Jenna pointed out our staff survey has shown that. And so when I go into buildings, I think the one thing our teachers want us to be able to just amplify over and over again is how much we appreciate them. And knowing that they put it all on the, they left nothing on the field. I mean, everything they left it on the field this year, they really have. And so we definitely are trying to reach out to teachers and make sure that we have these programs available for our students. Okay, I wasn't necessarily just talking about enrichment and stuff. I think this year, a lot of students may not be at where they might have expected to be at the end. And, but not necessarily falling into the really need summer. I mean, that we would ordinarily have considered them for summer school. Anyway, I was trying to understand the DESI guidance and what it's trying to say and whether there was something else about it. But I'll let someone else ask questions now. Thank you. Dr. Bodie. We certainly want to have students supported this summer. That's a given. DESI guidance is asking districts to figure out how you can do that. One of the things that we have, we have a lot of assessments that we are able to determine where students are in terms of benchmarks in these two important areas of literacy and math. And one of the things that we're looking at with this summer programming is to look at the students first who have not, that maybe not a benchmark. We do know where kids could be, should be at this time of the year. So we, and I think your suggestion, Dr. Allison Appie, as a great one, because about the schedule, having the smaller, maybe less time, a week that would be committed. We've looked at that actually, and that's a possibility. We'll just have to see if that's workable. The issue is that we're actually trying to maybe do a little bit too much, to be honest. The Department of Education does not require for any program, except for ESY, that you offer remote and you offer in-person. Last year, we had a lot of success with the remote. But I think this year, if we were to lean toward either one of them, it would be go to in-person because I think we all understand that we've had a lot of screen time for our students, and particularly the students that may not be at benchmarks, they need more of the in-person. So that has been the priority. We're going to have a program similar to last year. We're going to identify those students. And if we have additional capacity, we certainly would open up a little wider. I think one of the things that we've talked about before, but the platforms we have bought for the district that we've made available, actually are excellent in helping students with review. A particular note is our math form, Dreambox. And we're going to make that available for all students this summer. Now, it requires some level of parents saying, you need to do your half hour or several times a week. It's different, obviously, than saying, okay, you've got to be at school from nine o'clock to 11, 30, 12 o'clock. It is different. And I realize it's putting more on parents to make sure the students do that. But I think the one thing we've learned this year is we have a very supportive and parents that will really take advantage of that this summer. So reducing for the in-person, I know Dr. McPhil would like to have remote. And it's just really a question whether we have the staffing to do both. But our first priority is in-person. And I think we can give you an update as we go along. And we actually do pay our teachers very well. I will also point out that Summer Fund is an early in public school program. And there are lots of programs that we offer in Summer Fund, which is of an enrichment nature. So I just wanna, I think we're gonna have, it's hard to say how many people we'll have. We've had very high numbers, thousands of registrations in the past. Doesn't mean that we have thousands of kids every day. It's just the number of students that have taken advantage of this. So we will look at whether a reduced schedule can work in attracting teachers, but the main thing is we wanna make sure we have the summer programming, both for our students who are not a benchmark, our ELL students, and of course we're gonna have ESY. So let me also say that there are teachers that are leaning towards the remote option as opposed to being in-person. So again, we're having, we're reaching out to teachers and trying to figure out what we can do in order to have them work on a consistent basis and work with the students. So like Dr. Bodie said, we're trying to consider in-person, but we know that we might have to offer that remote option, which I indicated earlier in my summary. So I just want to make sure that I put that in there. And I also want to add that myself, Matt Coleman and Deb Perry, we met with Jen Rothenberg, who runs the summer fund program in order to see what we could do in order to partner with summer fund in order to offer some of the classes for the enrichment part. And I'm only saying enrichment because I know that some students may not be where they normally would be, but for the learning loss that happened during the pandemic, and again, we're using all the different metrics we have in order to have a very comprehensive list. But that was also problematic because she has a program that she's trying to run. And we were all going to even say that we'll do something with the fees in order to lessen the burden on parents. But again, it was space and again, it's competing against each other for the students. And so we didn't want to take away from her program. She did say that we could utilize some of the internal structures that she has, as it relates to the administration, things that have to happen when you offer a summer program. But she suggested that we offer it outside the dates of summer funds. So we have tried to think about all different options and I'm still going to continue to try. I'm just giving you an overview of where we are right now and maybe in a couple of weeks that will change. So I just want to make sure that we're going to continue to work. Mr. Schlittman, we're going to continue to try to make sure that we look at all different alternatives for all students because we definitely know how important it is. Anybody else for Dr. McNeil, Mr. Thielman and then the next item? Thank you. So for the ELL program, how many, I mean, how many teachers would you need to hire? Well, we normally, I think we're between four and five to run a comprehensive program. Okay, so, and for the summer enrichment program that we ran last year, how many teachers did we hire? You mean for the Title I extended program? Yeah, the Title I extended program. For the K-5, we're looking, we ran about, I have to look back, but we had four groups a day for ELA and I have to look back for math, but it ended up being around nine. We're looking to hire between math and ELA. So we're looking to hire somewhere around 20 teachers or 20 teachers or so for the summer. Is that about right? It's even more than that because we're looking at all for a middle school program. So, you know, we're trying to, I can't give you the, I can, I don't want to give you inaccurate numbers. I will, I can get that information to you. I can email it to you as to the number that we actually need to run like what we ran last year. And I didn't, I didn't, I didn't, I will, I can get the information that we, the number of staff that we had in our program from last year and I can send that to you. Okay. If we get to know the numbers, I mean, my thinking is between the American Recovery Act money that is supposedly designated a city to states and then to communities for summer programming plus any funding we may have that is not used in our budget, there may be enough money to, you know, offer some very competitive, highly competitive wages to the 25 or 30 teachers in from our district or outside of our district who might want to teach this summer. So I think this is a solvable problem given the funding that we have in our budget and the funding that is supposed to be available through the American Rescue Plan, I guess the Recovery Act Rescue Plan, whatever President Biden signed a few weeks ago with that an acronym. I mean, I think there's the funding available to solve the problem. I understand recruiting 25 or 30 teachers to do that over the summer is a challenge, you know, hiring talented personnel anytime to do anything is always, you know, recruiting and finding people is always a challenge in any organization at any time but we may have the money to provide an incentive to hire people. That's all I want to say. I just want to kind of point that out there. Maybe the resources here to solve this problem and I think we can do that if we use federal state, federal and our money. Absolutely, and I hope that you're right. And like I said, we're going to continue to offer those incentives to teachers in order to attract them into the program. And I know that Mr. Spiegel is probably thinking, well, we also have to make sure that we're being, you know, have an equitable what we offer that, you know, we have the ESY program and we have other programs. So we don't want to, you know, overcompensate in one program which will make it inequitable for other programs. So I just want to point that out but we do have a fee structure that we follow. And if we need to sweeten the pot, I'm sure that we can do so. And I'll have to work with Mr. Spiegel in order to make sure that, you know, we're doing it in line and not trying to again, you know, pull staff from another program because we are competing all for the same resources. Yeah, I get that, I get that. We don't, I mean, there has to be equity to turn all the programs, but I think you can use the funding, district funding plus American and money together to pay everybody the same and pay them more. I mean- Absolutely, which that type of funding allowed us to go beyond our normal title one programming from last year. And so that's why we were able to have an extended title one program last year because and have a very extensive offering from last year because we did take advantage of those funds. So I just want to point that out. Yeah, that's the point. Go ahead. Sorry, go ahead. And at some point in time, it would be good for us for the school committee to understand what we're eligible to get from the federal government with this new plan. Absolutely, I appreciate the suggestion. And like I said, we're going to continue to speak with teachers and try to make sure that we can find out what incentives and how can we structure the program so they will participate. Okay, thank you. Ms. Exton and then Mr. Schlickman. So I appreciate how much you're supporting the teachers and how tiring and exhausting this year has been. I also agree with my committee members that if there's a way to increase the pay to incentivize teachers or others to teach in this program in the summer, I would support that. I have, I just have some questions about the sort of the goals of the programming and some of this is to help the community understand and then some of this is to help sort of the parity between ESY and this Title I extension program. So as Ms. Elmer said, ESY is very clearly by law to prevent substantial regression. What are the goals or what are we looking at for this Title I programming in terms of our students? Is it to prevent more regression from where students are now or are we really trying to close a gap of where they are compared to a benchmark and we wanna move them toward that benchmark during the summer program? Absolutely, so we have to be very careful when we talk about the different goals or the different programs. So I appreciate your question. So the way I like to talk about it and the way we talk about it with the curriculum leaders and the administrators who are running the program is targeted instruction. So collecting the data, understanding, getting that profile of that student understanding where they need the support and being able to provide that support and identify those skills that they need in order to move them forward and get them prepared and too close to gap. Again, within that inherently is that you're gonna prevent regression but you're also wanna target those students and those small groups in order to identify the skills that they need in order to move forward with their understanding of the content. So it's definitely preventing regression at the same time of trying to move them forward. So I guess my follow-up question to that is and I don't know if this is to Ms. L.R. or to you, Dr. McNeil. This is a little nuanced but for a student who receives special education may or may not qualify for ESY but is not meeting their benchmark, for example, in reading and it may or may not be due to their disability. Are they being considered for the Title I program? Would they, just how does that come together? So that's a very good question. So we have reading specialists. We have math interventionists that provide general education support throughout the year and our reading specialists see students on an IEP and they also see students in the general education program in the general education program. So we are, like I said before, we're looking at those students who are already receiving Title I services and we have identified buildings that receive Title I funding. And then because of the funding that Mr. Dilman pointed out, we're able to go beyond our Title I schools and extend it. So we're also looking at those students who are receiving math interventionists and reading support throughout the year. And those, that may be the profile of student that you just described. A student who may be on an IEP or have a goals and objectives in a different area but they also may be struggling in reading. And so they're not receiving special education support for their reading, but they're seeing a reading specialist. And so we're trying to definitely, like I said before, offer what we provided last year with the same intensity because last year was very successful and we had a lot of students participate, probably because the camps were closed where people were feeling some anxiety about sending their students to a camp. There's lots of different variables, but we had a very high participation rate. And I do believe it was partly because we were offering it remotely as well. So with the combination of people not wanting to send their kids to camp and also the remote, we were able to get a high participation rate. Thank you. I hope you can staff this because I think it's an important program. Thank you. I do as well. And I want everybody to know that that's our goal is to staff this program and replicate what we did last year. Mr. Schifman? Yeah, I just want to put for the record for us to be thinking as we look at the AEA contract for next year, it sounds to me like we should be exploring adding some 11 month teaching positions into the contract and into the budget so that we have a secure source of highly qualified teachers who are committed to working a summer program in either special ed or particularly in the EL. Thank you. Mr. Cardin? Thanks and thank you, Dr. McNeil, for all the efforts. My main concern is that there's lots of talk about summer school. The president mentioned it. The governor has mentioned it. The DESI guidelines are pretty vague and I'm a little concerned that there's going to be another requirement coming down in another pivot required. And I don't know what the demand is in the community for summer school. But I do think that we should be building as big of a program as we possibly can. People will start hearing about it from this meeting and hopefully from their principals that people are being selected for this program. But what if my child has not been selected and I think they've fallen behind? What are my options? So I, you know, besides just doing Dreambox on their own, you know, again, I understand that our staff is exhausted but I do think we need to look as big as we possibly can. And I think you're hearing that message across the board. Thank you. Yes, and I agree with you. I want to make sure we offer something for all students. But I want to also point out we're not doing anything different as