Welcome, everyone. Today is Thursday, May 26, and this is the Arlington School Committee. Before we begin, I'd like to introduce a moment of silence for John Bean, who recently died. Mr. Bean retired from Arlington after serving for many years as the Director of Public Works in Arlington, and I've heard many people talk about stories about him, that he was a strong presence in town. He was a dedicated public servant who cared deeply by his work, and Arlington are condolences to his family. Moment of silence, please. Okay. So, first we're going to go talk about the artwork, and then we'll move on to participation. So, turn out out of water. So, starting from this side, and I have to tell you these are pictures. You don't see sort of the full beauty of the three-dimensional form. We have ceramic sculpture from grade five. Fifth grade students first discussed the concept of the enchanted forest, as the fictitious landscape often featured in old stories, particularly fairy tales. And houses' stories contain elements of magic and transformation. Students were then shown several examples of the work of contemporary glass artist Dale Chihuly, and discussed the abstracted botanical quality of his work. Chihuly creates pieces that are often derived inspiration from nature, while representing forms that are at once alien yet familiar. Students were instructed to plan and design a clay sculpture that could connote the idea of some form of plant life under an enchanted transformation. Sculptures were constructed from fired-cutter clay and later glazed. But students were also encouraged to plan for incorporating additional materials to include later, once all previous steps were completed. And in that section two, in a smaller subsection, is grade one paper sculptures. Students in grade one were shown several examples of contemporary sculpture inspired by nature. They discussed the artist's choice of materials as well as form, use of form and scale to create something that did not mimic nature, but rather suggested its influence and allowed the viewer to impart their own interpretation. Students discussed the contents of the enchanted forest as a fictitious landscape, often featuring old stories. They were instructed in basic principles of paper sculpture and manipulation of a variety of materials used to suggest the idea of an enchanted toadstool, a common resident of the damp forest. That is over there, so these are toadstools. Moving on to here, grade two fairy village. Students were guided through a discussion about the element of form and how it differs from the element of shape. They were then shown and asked to identify examples of three-dimensional geometric forms. And they discussed how these forms can be seen and recognized in examples of sculpture. They then discussed the contents of the enchanted forest as a fictitious landscape. And they were shown illustrations of several examples of different fairies such as the Pixie from the book Therries by Brian Fraund and Alan Lee. And they were led to notice how different in appearance each of these creatures were and asked to consider what kind of house such a fairy might live in. They then created their own houses from fire clay and were required to consider style of the house and to construct it from hollow geometric forms. They were then painted with watercolor paint and embellished with natural materials of the students choosing. Okay, moving on back, that's a three-dimensional paper sculpture. Students were introduced, this is a third grade, mythical menagerie. Students were introduced to this lesson with a discussion about the sculptures of famous hybrid animals, such as the great sinks of Giza in Giza, Egypt. People have heard legendary stories about magical combinations of animals since the ancient times and such mythical creatures continue to inspire writers and artists today. They then discussed the concept of the enchanted forest and they were instructed to create a hybrid animal of their own designed from construction paper using basic collage principles. In addition, students were instructed to include pop-up elements to create the illusion of background, middle ground and foreground more effectively. They were encouraged to consider what they felt would be an interesting or appropriate environment for their animal to live and whether it be a realistic or an enchanted habitat. Moving on to this large-scale thing, grade four, this is a fairytale silhouette, large-scale paper wall murals. Students began this lesson with a discussion of what the enchanted forest is. They then compared two very different artist interpretations of the enchanted forest, one pleasant and delightful, the other mysterious and verboding. They were then given a brief history of the art of silhouettes, which originated in 18th century papercraft and shown how artists of all eras have since adopted the art form in a variety of media. They were then assigned to groups and instructed to work as a team to construct a large-scale wall mural depicting a scene of the fairytale and or capturing the mood and essence of an enchanted forest. Each team member was required to contribute at least one element within the piece because the forest plays a key role. Each mural was required to include at least one tree. That was cool. And over here, kindergarten, bewitched butterflies, mixed media collage. Kindergarten students were first shown the work of found object sculptor Melissa Steitlein, whose large-scale butterfly sculptures defy expectations with their size and materials. Students were quick to notice the intricate butterfly bodies and wings that were comprised of found scrap metal, furniture, glass and plastic, while still maintaining the colorful uniqueness of real butterfly species. They were also shown the work of Paul Velinski, who creates delicate butterflies cut from scrap aluminum and soda cans and arranges them into larger whimsical installations. While being encouraged to consider that all butterflies come in a variety of sizes, shapes, colors and markings, students were instructed to create their own butterfly and to plan and allow for deviations as their butterflies were to be enchanted and transformed. Okay, thank you very much. Is there public participation? Great. Timor, Yontar. Good evening. I'm Timor Yontar, Bates Road, Precinct 7 and Thompson parent. First, I wanted to offer my congratulations to you all for yesterday's terrific news that the MSBA has invited Arlington High School into the eligibility period for the rebuild, so great news, well done. Second, I wanted to express my excitement about all that's been happening on so many levels in recent weeks regarding our school's challenges. This includes the work done by this committee and the administration and at the forum that was held on Tuesday and also the work done by the Board of Selectmen, the task force, other committees and a town meeting. Clearly we still have a lot of work yet to be done and so my third point tonight is to offer some encouragement and I hope even some inspiration. I have a brief deck of slides which I will hold up and then I'll pass out copies afterward. So, slide number one. This is New York City in 1930 and excavated site at the corner of 34th Street and Fifth Avenue. Why should you care? Because of what happened to it, what it became in 1931. Slide two, the Empire State Building. 102 stories, tallest building in the world, built in 13 months, a head of schedule and under budget. Now, let's move forward to the present day. Slide three, this is the Gibbs School and pending funding, this will be renovated and will reopen as a public school in fall 2018. Now, let's see what the Gibbs School will look like when renovations start. Now, let's see what the Gibbs School will look like when renovations start. Slide four, this is the Gibbs in July 2017. Of course, this is an artist's rendition. And then, let's see what the Gibbs will look like when renovations are completed. Here's slide five, Gibbs, September 2018. So, what's my point? As Rosie the Riveter said, we can do it. And I hope that if any of you ever waver in your belief that the Gibbs Project can be completed on time, please remember that if a 102-story building can be constructed on a vacant lot in 13 months, surely we can convert a three-story school into a three-story school in 14 months. And as Nelson Mandela once said, it always seems impossible until it is done. So, good luck. Please let us know how we, the parents, can help and thank you. Awesome. I have copies. Okay, great. So now I would like to actually, I'd like to introduce our AHS student representative who attended Day in the Hill, which is a thing we go to Beacon Hill to talk to our legislators, to advocate for school funding, for other issues. And please introduce yourself and tell us about your experience. Oh, actually we need to speak into the microphone. Thank you. I'm Danny Hallis. I'm a senior here at Arlington High School. And I went to Day on the Hill a few weeks ago. And it was definitely very informative. I think a lot of the stuff was very, like, complex. A lot about budgets and the Common Core charter schools. But I definitely learned a lot of new things, very interesting things. And Representative Garbley definitely helped us out a lot. Through that, he explains a lot to myself and the other members of the student council that went along with us. Yeah, it was a very fun day. Okay, great. Any particular issues that you want to bring to our attention or to legislators' attention? No, I don't believe so. Okay. Thank you. Okay, well, great. Thanks. I just want to say how well you represented Arlington and Arlington High School. They asked great questions. They were so interested in what was going on. And I want to let you know how impressed Representative Garbley was with the questions and just your interest. And it was. It was a lot to take in one day. But you did a wonderful job. Thank you. And I hope you continue to think about ways that you can be involved in politics and issues as we go forward. And that was one of those things that was his message as well. He told them how young he was when he got elected and encouraged them to think about it themselves. Thank you. Future school can be a member. Future legislature. Great. I just want to recognize Liz Higgins, who is our AEA rep today. Thank you. Okay. So the next on the agenda is Matt Coleman, who's going to talk to us about give us sort of an overview of what's been happening in the math department and where we're going to from here. You should do this on March 14th. So as the slides are coming down, I just wanted to thank you for having me.  So pretty much the goal, and I know you guys have seen the slides, and I'm going to talk through some of the, I would say final details. The goal pretty much is kind of giving an overview of what has happened in the last four years. It's hard to believe that it has been four years. And some of the things that I'd hope to work on, and hopefully we can talk about some of the, I guess different aspects and different things I'll be asking of Dr. Chesson, Dr. Bodie, all of you guys and of the department as well. Although this is a presentation and it's in a presentation format, I encourage you to ask questions throughout. If something kind of strikes you, feel free to ask. That's fine. I know the last slide refers to questions. I'll take some then as well. But if something does strike you, feel free to ask. So I'll talk about replacement lamp. Replacement lamp? Oh. You just have to hit it. The eternal problem. You need to hit okay. Okay. What's that? You need to hit okay. On the computer, probably. On the computer? No, I think it's on. There we go. There we go. We're all set. Of course. As soon as everybody runs out of here, they get scared. We're good. All right. So, just to give you a little history. It's not like I've been here forever. It's really only been four years. But I started in June 2012. Lucky enough to be offered the job. I started pretty much right away. You know, it was one of those things where at that time, I want to say the sixth grade team may have been attending some workshops at EDCO and I joined them. And there were all these other little things happening during the summer of that year. There was also some elementary PD. I had a chance to do that. I spent a lot of the summer cleaning, organizing, trying to wrap my head around what the job would be. Meeting with a lot of you guys, meeting with a lot of community members. It was awesome. It was really, really good. September, when that started, I spent as much time as I could in classrooms. I, you know, fully admitted beginning, it was more time in the middle schools and high schools because of the fact that I think there was a lot of work to be done there. And I think there's been a lot of good stuff that's happened. And at that time, I was pretty much analyzing as much data as I could. You know, my goal at that point was really just trying to get a sense of what I can accomplish in the short term and then what would be done over the next couple of years. So, some of the big things. And I don't know if you guys remember back that first year, but these were some of the big things that I would say drove my thought as to where we are right now. It really struck me as being really interesting that my first year here, there was only 76% of the seniors taking a math class. That really stuck with me. I thought that was kind of interesting in this town. There was only one math science specialist in all of K-5. You know, my predecessor was part-time and there was that one person working with that. In this school, and this kind of refers back to, I think, point number one, we only had two sections of AP Calc AB, which I don't want to say one is better than the other, but that's the AP Calc that's basically one semester. And that was the only AP course we offered at the high school level, which was kind of interesting. We had no computer science at the high school. The middle school teachers were using curriculum from 2011, 2000, which didn't take into account that there was a standard shift in 2004 and in 2011. So, this was a little antiquated. And at the elementary level, I would say it was inconsistent. It was one of those things where at the time, I think we had just different resources allocated to different places. In spite of all these things, these are big things I noticed. Things were going well. They were going good, but it really kind of gave me a little bit of a focus of what was going to happen. So, the past four years, this is pretty much what I focused on. And in my mind, I always chunked it as K-5 initiatives, six to eight initiatives, and high school initiatives. At the elementary level, really kind of my big focus was trying to get an infrastructure in that could really start to focus on curriculum and instruction at the elementary level. In terms of getting a lot more resources, that was going to be a tough sell at the beginning. I don't know if you guys remember, at 2012, new standards came in at 2011. A lot of the textbook distributors at that time rearranged what their concept was. They slapped on the common core sticker and then they resold it as something that was brand new. It really didn't meet what we needed. So, at that time, my decision and what we kind of went for was let's attack more of the curriculum instruction aspect of it. Let's try to support the teachers. Let's try to get something a little bit more in there and kind of wait out until we felt as though the better curriculum content or something that was more in line with what we wanted, both in practice and content was there. And in the meantime, we also had some digital, I would take technological improvements throughout the district. So, incorporating something that was a little bit more tech-savvy was something that was good as well. So, that took a little bit of patience. That's that bullet point number two. That's where we're kind of starting right now. You know, in the background, I always wanted to kind of refresh that K-5 curriculum because it was chunked. It was kind of a franken curriculum. Is that a good way to say it? So, it was one of those things where we definitely needed a refreshing, but we needed to wait a little bit. So, initially, it really was about that, just that support, like how do we actually get it so we could have consistent professional development in the summertime, consistent people to go to for questions, someone who could be in classes a little more frequently to see what's happening. You know, I have a lot of energy, and I try to pride myself on being in a lot of places. I don't think I could have been in nine places at once. So, it's been great to have those other resources to help me out. At the middle school, you know, this was one of those things where there were some pretty clear nears with restructuring our math sport program at that time. We had two teachers who were in charge of working with a lot of students who were struggling across all grades. At that time, they were structuring the way that it was tough to really meet the needs of everybody, so we restructured a little bit there, and we really try to foster a relationship with Special Ed that's continuing to be done right now. We had a lot of students at that time also who were looking for other opportunities for advancement. I would never say that I've actually solved all the problems that we have, but the bypassing option has been a pretty good solution for some of our students right now. Curriculum update. Luckily enough, the folks who wrote CMP, Connected Math, they were a little bit ahead of curve with the updating of their curriculum, so it was one of those things when we shifted over to CMP3, we were able to actually do that in year two and year three of my time. We're at full implementation right now. I think it's been a great sell for the teachers. They've really bought in. I think it was one of those things that at the time we needed a refresher, and it's done a good job for them. Also, and this was a big goal, a lot of times it's not rocket science, and this was definitely, I have to thank Lauren and Kathy for doing this. Getting release time, like full day release time with teachers, my first year and second year, just to sit down and look at the standards, plan, kind of reset calibration. It was one of those things where in the first two years we did a lot of that and it was awesome. The other thing is we really at that time I also saw a huge need for computer science in the middle school. There was this little class called DCL, Digital Citizenship and Literacy at that time, which covered some good stuff, but it was definitely a place where we can kind of change some stuff. At that time, I know there's some percentages throughout this, that class was mandatory, but it essentially covered 76% of the kids who were in sixth grade. AHS. I already kind of alluded to some of the things that were areas that I wanted to kind of work in there. That's all up here. Creating new cost offerings was big. That kind of lends itself to the fact that we only had 76% of the seniors. We had to figure out more pathways, more ways for our students to access with actually the content and different pathways. So I really focused on those higher level classes and the lower level classes. I kind of tackled and went after the extremes to see if we could make some inroads there. We built a CS program, that was a big thing. Another big part of the high school was that at that time there were 11 high school math teachers. Five had over 128 students. At that time, the math department in the high school there was a lot of teachers who had a lot of students. A lot of students. That was over. I want to say the high that year was 136 for one teacher. It was a lot. I needed to figure out ways to get a little more common planning time for those teachers. This is amazing and I still to this day can't imagine this. My first year here, my teacher in the high school had a common planning time with a teacher who taught the same level of the same course. I don't think he even tried to schedule that. That would happen. I was amazed by that. I thought that was one of the most amazing things I had seen. So it was really tough for us to get a lot of kind of conversation. So current state. That was a quick little overview. Any questions for all that stuff? Those are the big things that I saw. How is CMP going in the middle school? I think it's going well. They're at that point right now since we're in about year two, year three. Teachers are now starting to make their own adjustments because they feel more comfortable. Whenever you initially adopt it, when you make those changes, you may not understand the ripple effect until it's too late. So that first year, I asked for 100% fidelity. Year two, you make your minor adjustments. Now that we're in year three, there's some ownership. There's some more thoughtful changes. There are some other little aspects that are being modified. I think it's now becoming more Arlington curriculum territory, which is nice, but it takes time. What's also good is it's a form of PD for the teachers as well. They have to lend themselves to trying something a little different, trying something new. Because of the program, our eighth grade team chose collaboration and discourse as their goal to work on for this year because it really dovetailed in nicely with and how the content was actually delivered and it's been great. Some of the things that I've seen in the class, both in terms of the content and the conversations has been really good. We're also using that in Lexington and this is our second year of implementation. I'm trying to get together a couple of districts that might want to work together to make some of those modifications because I've seen some good ones and I feel like I want to share. We should talk because there's another local district that's going to make the change for next year too. We can definitely talk. This is great. We have six math coaches. Over three years, we've been able to build that up and it's been awesome. I can't tell you how invaluable they are to me. They're great. They really are great. I'm lucky to work with them. Still, there is this focus on curriculum instruction, professional development because we were waiting out the movement towards a new curriculum. The curriculum visions, this is the big one for us for the next couple of years. We are going to adopt the new investigations 3.0 and that's going to start next year. I'll touch on that in a little bit. We revised the progress reports. Finally, they actually match the current standards and match all the initial stuff. These all sound like simple little things but it takes time and takes work. It takes a lot of meeting with teachers and figuring out the best way to go about it. Right now, we're in the midst of restructuring what I would call our tier 2 and tier 3, our secondary supports for some of our struggling learners and some other students who might need a little bit of help. Our coaches satisfy what I would call tier 1 support which is that curriculum, that instruction part but we really need to start to focus on what happens for some of those groups of students who might be struggling or individual students who need a little bit more. We still haven't built that up as much as we can. The second line on the slide begs the question 6 equals 7. Are there any plans to have another one? To add even more math it's 5.0 FTE for 6 coaches for 7 schools. They're not even all full-time. I always have my grand plans but it would be one of those things where I would love it if we had a one-to-one correspondence. I was looking to the question up here less to you for the future. When we get to the slide about what I see for the future, we'll talk about that. Thanks. What's that? Please, yes. That's Kubernetes current state. Current state of LMS. We're fully implemented with CMP3. It's going well. We're definitely in live with movements what I think is good which is much more collaborative based classrooms, much more conversation, a little more ownership of the knowledge. Teachers are really starting to be thoughtful about the ways in which we're asking questions which is nice. The technology that we've had in 6th grade has also helped with that. It's shifted the way in which some of the kids can communicate. DCL, which I talked about before which was 76% of enrollment. Now we've renamed as DML, Digital Media and Literacy. Essentially that course is now we're supporting 88% of the kids which considering that the cohorts of kids are actually growing larger we're working with a lot more kids now with the same FTEs that we had before but now the city aspect is a secondary goal. We do a lot more, I would say, robust units that are all focusing on design, algorithm thinking, good project based things that kids are doing in scratch, HTML, at the 6th grade level which is awesome. It's hard to get that in the middle school and the fact that we found some real estate in 6th grade is awesome. Math support. We talked a little about the structure of the math support teacher per grade. One that's dedicated to 6, 1, 7, 1 to 8 which has been invaluable to me as well. It's increased our ability to actually almost read and react with some students a little bit more before we'd populate our classes and there wasn't a whole lot of room for movement. Now I could actually start with a lower student enrollment and actually grow throughout the year which is good. Another thing that the math support teacher does I gotta say this, if you guys ever go to the middle school and you see these, thank them. They have a hard, hard job. They do great work. They also co-teach our sub separate math classes with the special educator and all three of them also have other obligations. Julie McDaniel in 6th grade teaches the independent study in geometry. Shukti official does some work in kind of outreach with the LL and then Jeff Mountain because of the fact that there was a higher enrollment in 8th grade actually teaches a section of Math 8 to actually help balance out the sections. Those teachers, all three of them, they have three or four different preps. They're trying to communicate with multiple teachers. They're doing really great work. Really, really great work and really helping out in a lot of ways. Dr. Allison, have you had it? I know we're interested in taking an assessment of that but I'm wondering if you're seeing more interest and enthusiasm because I think that's really important to develop in the kids too. Yeah, you know I would say that also goes in conjunction and I put in the slides but I have to definitely tout the work that John McIntyre has done with the middle school math club. There's a lot more opportunities. There's a lot more things for kids to do and when I go through the classrooms, kids are happy. They're doing math. They're working. It's often times when you walk in kids will ask me questions. I don't see many dour faces. I don't see many kids jumping off the rafters having the greatest time in the world but there is enthusiasm. Definitely is. And then the bypassing. I kind of treaded lightly with the bypassing because if you don't have the full-fledged geometry class, often times it's a race to nowhere. So now we bypass sixth grade. We actually have a fully formed geometry class that actually matches the same geometry class that we have at the high school. One of the great things about Emily McDaniel is that she taught in high school. She has a good working relationship with the teachers here. They share content. They're at the same place. I feel pretty good about the fact that those students in those courses are receiving a pretty good education in terms of the math. Those students Sorry. There you go. You got the green light. Those students going inside there. There's seven kids inside that class. That's awesome. Those kids are so excited about the math they're doing. They've done some really, really good stuff. Really good stuff. Current state of the high school. If there is one thing I'm probably the most proud of, it's probably that first thing. Before 76% of seniors. I double-checked this again last week to make sure I was right. It's 97% of seniors now. We're virtually at 99% of all kids taking a math class across the board. The greatest stats also is that if you look at capacity of the math department right now in the high school against enrollment we're actually at 111%. Because we have kids that are doing two classes at the same time. They're taking computer science. They're doing a lot of other stuff. It's pretty ridiculous. It's pretty amazing. And I attribute that all to the work of the math teachers. I mean, they're not only putting these courses in. They're making these courses I think worthwhile and fun. I don't know if that answers a little bit about the enthusiasm as well. Kids are coming back to the math classes. Kids are coming back and they're saying. And that's really kind of, I would say helped out. We've definitely had an increase in staffing which we've needed to kind of take some of that on and it's been great. I know talked a little about computer science this morning. My first year, no computer science. We have 93 kids currently this year. Across five sections. And right now we have about 104 kids sign up for next year. We've had a lot of kids sign up. We've had a lot of jobs. Which is great. Kids are accessing that class. In terms of the increasing staffing, that's been a huge help. Right now, the staffing, the kind of the per pupil average that a teacher has, it's more in line with the rest of the school which I feel good about. And since I'm a numbers person, I pay a lot of attention to standard deviation of variance and make sure that things are balanced. 126 was it, 128 students. Now the highest that anybody has is 124. And that's the highest. Which is good. It's a lot more manageable. The teachers are appreciative of the fact that they're not overwhelmed. Everyone is taking ownership over the education which is great. It's really good. Goals moving forward. So I just kind of chuck this in three things. I'll have a couple slides up here to kind of reinforce what it is. It's kind of weird, but year one, year two, I was reading and reacting to what was here before. Year three and year four, I really feel like this is my department now. This is one of those things where I want to set the tone. I have a better handle of all the stats. I have a better handle of what we're doing moving forward. So these would be the big things going forward for me. We've done a good development, still work to do of that coaching team. We have a three-year plan for the infusion program. So I feel the next, over that seven years we have a good plan for curriculum instruction with a little bit enhancement in the assessment. What we have to start to do is actually build more of a robust program that is that tier two, tier three part. We need to be able to now start to find that time within a school day. We have to find possibly those assessments that are going to inform us of these individual things that we can do with students. And then we actually have to start to hire some staff. And right now it's not where I'd want it to be. But the way I envision it, I think before you were talking about what I'd like to see, I do want to see a coach at every school. And I do want to see a student adventurous in a school. What I'd like to see is that team, that cooperation of someone who's going to be working with teachers, with instruction, with the content, and then someone who's going to be working together with the principal who will be focused on individual students if they need to be pulled or small groups. And I think that's going to be a special education as well. To me, that seems to make sense. It seems to be that we can actually accomplish a lot. I have an illusion that I'll be able to get 14 staff members over the next couple of years. So I'm fine with treading slowly. So one of the things you'll see is, how do we start to actually work with those students? So when I see these high-need students, I see it starting in kindergarten going all the way up. And I want to make sure we have a good team. I said before about all the good things that are happening in Mathsport, I still think we can fine-tune it and do it a little bit better. Right now, we're echoing the main curriculum that we do. But the reality is I like to start to work with students on more of an individual basis if we can and find a secondary curriculum that can actually help supplement some of what we're doing. In terms of OMS and AHS, this kind of goes together. We also have to kind of figure out a lot of our students. You know, we're working with social-emotional, sometimes we're working with cognitive, we're working with behavioral. So how do we actually take those Mathsport resources to create a more diverse support system we're offering for all of these students? And in AHS, the restructure and the Maths Special, I just alluded to, we're pretty much, Dan Sheldon and I, the computer science teacher, we talk pretty regularly about what we want to see happen. And this one, I want to start to increase some more Math offerings. And I want to do it in a way we can offer some half-year electives because of the fact that I like to start to see more kids take the chance to try out some of these classes. Right now, with all of our classes, we're at 111 percent and it's amazing but kids are committing themselves to full-year classes. So I could see us in the CS department start to consider half-year electives. I could see us putting in courses such as linear algebra that can be accessed after an Algebra II background, for the most part, and it could be a half-year course for some students to take. Something like a number theory. All this has to be done in conjunction with staff and that's one of the things I always work on is bringing in good people who can teach these classes. But really what I want to start to do is to round out the department to not just have these core Algebra I geometry, Algebra II pathways with the standard capstone courses, but to offer something that's a little bit more, you know, when you get to college and realize Math is a lot more than just Calc, I want to offer some glimpse into that and I'd like to start to make some connections with other stuff. But for the most part, that's kind of what we're looking for. Little things was at the end. That's it. Oh, there we go. Okay. Yeah. Any questions? Great. Thank you. Matt, can I just emphasize that there was something you skipped over and that is the need to build CS courses. Oh, yes. Sorry, thank you. Yes. Middle school. I really, really would love to get seventh and eighth grade computer science. That's going to take a little bit of work with both staffing and also kind of massaging the schedule and figuring out how to actually make that work. It's not as easy as it sounds. There are a lot of obstacles, but that's one of those things where I'll be pushing for the next couple of years. How do I actually get it to be a 6 through 12 good cohesive pathway? So thank you, Matt. Good presentation. As always, my question is if, you know, we might not be able to do all of this, but it's a goal, right? It's a goal, yeah. That's right. So as a goal, what would be your priorities? You know, if you were to go to Dr. Bode and say, this is what I want to do in FY 18, what would you you don't have to commit to it right now, but in this, what are your kind of top priorities here? It's tough for me to answer because like I said before, I think about it as K through 5, 6 to 8, and if I say any one, it might diminish the others. I would say probably that the top part right now would be really working with K through 5, getting the coaches, getting the interventionists, getting the curriculum solidly in there would probably be priority number 1 because I think that would pay dividends for all grades eventually at some point. So that would probably be, yeah, item number 1. You know, I could always, I always try to be creative with staffing and enrollment at the other grades. Yeah, so I'd probably say the elementary stuff. Thank you. Yes, Mr. Hinner. Thank you again for a phenomenal presentation. My only concern with all these extra courses and 111 percent is the emotional issue and the pressure on the kids.  I know, like overall with everything? Well, the idea, I mean, you mentioned that some students are taking more than one math course at a time. Yeah. And AP, other AP courses and things of that nature, they may be taking that aren't math related. I'm just concerned that departments are isolated, that there's not this coordination to all of a sudden realize that you got a student taking like three or four AP courses at once. So I'll say this, Guyantz has done a pretty good job of monitoring that. They often look at that. They often are advising kids, I think, in a pretty thoughtful way. I don't think we can grow much past 111 percent because after a while it's, there's almost a cannibalization. You know, the reality is our CS numbers jumped up, but our CAD numbers went down.  What I kind of view it as is I want to give kids some opportunity to take some classes. I by no means believe that we'll go to 120 percent. What I believe is that the courses would just be distributed differently. You know, it's great for me to see that a lot of our kids didn't choose Calc as their, you know, their through thread. They're choosing the AP stats course because a lot of times that's more transferable to what they might do in the future. So I don't think there's going to be, I hope, I don't mean this to intend that there's going to be kids taking four or five math classes. I just want to give them the opportunity to take a course if they want and then, you know, for me to staff it appropriately, fully knowing that enrollment for another course would go down. I want to make it clear. I am excited about all the offerings that you're offering and the more that you go, I think it's an exciting thing to give students the multiple choices. And just the idea of calculus, I don't know how many people that aren't math majors or very, very science majors. The stats course is something all of us can use. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, they're good courses. They're good courses. And they they speak well to each other. Computer science and stats. I mean that's an avenue where I'd like to see a little more integration because at this point they are so interrelated. Great. Thank you. Miss Starks. I'm really excited about the computer science. At my daughter's graduation this year the keynote speaker was the woman who founded Girls Who Code. Yeah. And she was unbelievable. And she got up there and said that the number one job, we are about to have a shortage of programmers. And not only, her goal is not only to make the United States the number one supplier but she is going to do it by getting girls to code. And it's, it was fascinating and she was unbelievable. And then yesterday I attended a summit and the keynote speaker was Kathy Fosnit. And she was talking about how the number one important thing that they have found that kids need going into kindergarten and starting early is early numeracy. The most important thing. Even more important than reading and literacy because if they have the math the reading comes easier. And that is the number one indicator. And I was just like, this makes me so excited to be a teacher right now. Like look at us, we've got to get to these. I agree with everything you just said. Kathy Fosnit was fantastic. No it is. I mean it's, yeah it's great. It really is. Any type of early intervention and doing things well at the early grades really, really does pay dividends long term. That definitely is one of my hopes. Yeah. So congratulations, thank you so much. Yeah, I want to, yeah saying this also everything we talked about, everything that's happened was money and resources. Like for me it's thank you to you guys. You know this is one of those things where I do appreciate the trust that you guys had in terms of the teachers myself and building all of this because you know it's an investment and I think we're getting stuff out of our investment right now. We are seeing some improvements. It's what we do now. I actually think, I was talking to my wife about this a couple of nights ago, I actually think my job for the next couple of years is going to be harder than the first couple of years because now we're talking about fine tuning. We're talking about trying to be much more creative. Like these are big broad stroke, you know, changes that you can do with some investment, some personnel. It's about to get a lot harder. Thank you. Yes, Dr. Allison Abbey. I'm trying to remember the name of the program. I think it's Play-Doh that we have done for enrichment for students who are having achievement problems or something in math and I'm wondering, I don't even know if this comes under your department per se. Especially I do use that a lot. Right. Do you work with them at all? I'm wondering if it's helpful or not for me. Yeah, there are so many computer programs out there right now that different teachers are using. You know, at different levels. One of the hard parts for me is corraling at all and understanding what exactly we want to use. So, Special Ed has used Play-Doh. I think there are pros and cons to it. It's a little bit more superficial. It's good as the resource it's used for. I would say it's kind of a tier two, tier three resource as long as there's a staff member who's also working with a student as well. It's good practice. You know, there are other things throughout. It will be a long conversation. I can tell you different things that are happening at different levels. But yeah, for the most part I would say that's primarily used by Special Ed. Mr. Cardin. Thank you. A great presentation. So, as we talk about adding more math support, we've added over the probably last five or ten years we've added reading support, we've added social workers, we've added these math coaches, literacy coaches, we've added a lot of out of classroom staff. So, one way we can do that though is by sort of balancing that against class size. And so I think we have to have a conversation and also educate the parents that yes, class sizes may creep up a little bit, but because we've got all this other support it may not be the end of the world. So I think if we want to push in that direction, then that's a conversation we have to start having. Yeah, I mean I have a lot more control over the class size than the middle school and high school. And I do put a lot of work. Actually before this I was in my office crunching numbers and trying to figure out the best way to balance everything at the middle school. And I think that's been done pretty well so far. I think it's getting better. But yeah, everything a lot of times it's a zero game. And you just have to figure out what it is that you value, what your goals are, what you want to see as a typical class size. I think a lot of the things you alluded to at the elementary level what you're okay with and then how do we actually build the structures around that as well. Yeah, it's never easy. I have one more question I just remembered. So tonight we vote. Gibbs, sixth grade? Or Gibbs, six, seven, eight? No. We're on the spot. No problem. My personal feeling, everything that I've talked to for the teachers, I would say Gibbs, sixth grade. That's where I would be leaning towards right now if those were the two choices. Does that make the intervention easier, more possible in sixth grade? Because now we can play with the schedules, we can find that time. Yeah, it's hard to say what the infrastructure will be because it also comes with the restructuring I would imagine of staffing. I'd imagine before I could answer that I'd have to see what the restructuring of the staffing would be and what I'd have for resources and then try to make a plan off of that. I don't know if it would be easier or harder. I can tell you this, I'll do the best I can to figure it out. Great, thank you. No problem. And I'll just say just a couple things, which is I'm particularly excited about the interaction potentially of linear algebra and the statistics courses because from personal experience I know there's a lot of really fun math that is not calculus. There is, there is. There's a lot of other fun math out there. And it's all related.  But you could pull off a linear algebra class without it and, you know, relate it, transfer it to what's happening in some of your science classes and computer science classes, which is good. Guys, thank you very much. Thanks so much. Thank you. So next up is Larry Weathers. He's going to talk to us about science. And I just want to tell you what we're doing, which is that we are this spring but also in the fall trying to get sort of information from each of the departments to sort of get an overview sense of where we've been, where we're going, what our hopes are. And so we've started with history I think was our first. Yes. And we will not be finishing up this spring but we hope to finish in the fall. Mm-hmm. 2016. Oh, it's a new. Cool. Science always has lab equipment and materials and I wanted to share some of it with you. So I just want to say we are a couple minutes ahead, which is great, so we have extra time. Sorry. We're a couple minutes ahead of our schedule, which is great, so we have extra time. But just a worry I know that usually takes about two minutes per slide, so I know that we'll probably have to rush through some of the slides but that they are available for the public to look at as well. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you for allowing me to share with you some of the struggles and accomplishments we're going through in our science department. The sorry, is this a click? Yeah, you have to. Oh, it's over. These are the mission statements of the science department. Now it ends up that the new science standards just came out last month, the formal printing of them, and they almost totally mirror these, and I'm sort of proud to say that we have these before the science standards came out, so we're interested in lifelong learning about being literate science citizens, and so that's where we're really trying to head. So I'm calling from the math department on the left, so that's why I inserted this slide here. I wanted you to see, although it's not entirely obvious where is science, it's at the core. If you look at the upper left picture, and you can barely see the word science on the left, it's just a little closer to the heavens than math. Math is down there a little further down on the right. When we demolish this building, and we build it, we can make consideration. Don't take it for granted. I'm describing the current state of affairs. And then in the vertical view, science is right there in the center. It's connected to every one of those disciplines. It uses math. Science goes on in all the countries of the globe. It uses language, and the history of it is very rich. I, of course, use these pictures tongue in cheek. The question is, if we're at the core, which I was positing before, why weren't we at the table? And as we have gone through a progression of regulatory documents from NCLB to ESSA, science, technology, and engineering frameworks, which were just adopted, we have started to move from that back burner to the front burner. We're not all the way there yet, but we've started. Our scores count, not to focus totally on test taking. We really want the lifelong learning. But our scores count now. They're part of what matters in terms of our annual reports and how the state views us. So we have our new standards that just came out and what do they look like? Here's an example. The standards are too complicated to look at in a short presentation, but they're composed of two major sections, one called disciplinary core ideas, which are you know, the areas of each topical discipline of life science, physical science, and earth science. And here's an example from grade 3 physical science. Provide evidence to explain the effect of multiple forces, including friction, etc. And these are all worded as what should the student be able to do at the end of a unit that's addressing the standards, their performance standards. And so this is a very important part of the new science standards as well as the practices that were added. A long ago the inquiry strands were in our early standards back in the early 1990s and then they slowly got pulled out more and more because of the difficulty of testing them. And so they're back in and they are claiming that they're going to test them and we'll see how that all works. But I've seen some very creative questions being developed and so if you look at these science and engineering practices which really are the inquiry skills that kids that we're hoping that kids experience these are the ways scientists work. And I think if you pick through those you can see that they really totally overlap the ELA and the math practices. The Common Core is in there two-thirds of the way and the math standards and practices are in there. They're really overlapping and so the writers of the new science standards were well aware of that and that is one of the advantages in the sense of going last in terms of the development of the ELA and math Common Core standards and then the next generation science standards came along but they had the wisdom to know how to incorporate that and overlap with the Common Core. Massachusetts of course always has its own way of doing some educational things and it didn't strictly adopt the NGSS. It pushed a few parts aside a few parts stronger which included the engineering practices. So it's an expectation that engineering is embedded in all of the science courses. We're not there yet but we're looking for the ways to do that so that every course will have opportunities for kids to look at problems and try to solve those problems and make iterative changes to reach a solution in an engineering kind of process. So embedded within that new framework is this little table on the left it's called the assumed minutes per day to reach the standards that are expected and that will be tested in about it's still being debated when it will be tested in probably about 2 years maybe 3. So you can see in K through 2 they're assuming that we're spending 2 hours per week 3 through 5, 3 hours per week, 6 through 8 4.5 and in high school 5.5 and you can see in the middle column there that we are very shy of that and this is our anticipated time for next year and the challenges were developed and before we were on the table in terms of the regulatory things it was even less than this and so that's one of our challenges is how do we work with these time deficits and again I just cut and pasted that table right out of the standards so one of the things we're doing is we have adopted a new program the program itself is not new but the iteration called the next gen edition is new they were so on top of it they came out right after the next gen was adopted and it's really the best program on the market these are the topical areas in columns of physical science earth and space science and life science through the elementary school we have been in our roll out this current year we have introduced these kits to grades one, two and three and in the coming fall we will be introducing them to grades four and five the program is research based it was developed at the Lawrence Hall of Science and University of California Berkeley it is centered on those two statements they are sciences inherently interesting to kids and they love to play around and muck around in boats and to explore things so there is a quote from one of our more experienced elementary school teachers we're loving the new science kits very teacher and kid friendly she's a veteran teacher and the new teachers are still having trouble with that as they would with any new curriculum so we're finding where we have gaps where we need support and we're trying to plug those holes but by and large it's a really rich curriculum so an example the motion and matter unit from grade three students explore it's called motion and matter and they do it through a variety of experiments they first of all build tops spin them imagine kids in third grade loving this and then they create new interactions they create an axle with a wheel on each side but the wheels are not the same size so it does some strange things and then they start exploring that and eventually have to build cars that are part of an engineering design challenge where the cars have to do certain tricks they have to turn left and right and end up under ramps and things like that so it's hard to notice where where science and engineering learning ends and where play begins and that's the great thing about this is that the kids really really love doing it some strong points about the FOSS system is that it's got really high quality supports it is very language based and I've shown you that the I just passed around these examples of folios and student resources the hardcover book is a reader and so one of the strategies that we're talking about in terms of how do we get that time to deal with the science that we need these informational reading passages are directly part of the science experiments they're doing and so what we're trying to do is see if there are ways that we can use these as part of an overlap in our ELA informational reading time and thereby gain some time back it's really you know as I said the common core overlap is striking it has a very strong notebook and component one of the other folios I passed out is all about the philosophy and the strategies of notebook taking that get kids to read and write and articulate and it has built in ELL strategies it's really a 21st century program very rich formative assessment and technology resources for the teachers and teacher prep videos a teacher can go and look at a five minute video of what the lesson is that they have to do a day or two from now and see what it looks like and you know we try to give them the professional development ahead of time but review that at home on the computer or wherever is a real great thing uses a lot of language for inquiry they're consistently involved in writing in the notebook and all the other things that it says here they are asked to engage in argumentation based on evidence and the research really shows that when kids learn either from just pure reading or even just from pure experimenting the learning is nowhere near as deep as when they're asked to reflect on it write about it and read about it it's really an integrated approach and you can imagine that if a student were to read and write about something what better than something that's right in front of them or that they saw that day or the day before a bunch of growing plants watching why some die and some don't and articulating that it's concrete and it's right there so it really aids in the writing so with that with the pressure from the congested curriculum and the lack of enough time for science science notebooking is a way of helping with that I think you probably notice where that notebook page on the upper left came from that's a page out of Leonardo da Vinci's book his lab notebook okay and so our kids are starting to do this you can see a progression there of second third and fourth grade even though this fourth grade example is not from our students because they haven't had this yet but kids start to articulate in the bottom right from a fourth grade student although you can't read it from here the student was observing plants growing the teacher posted a sticky and said where's your evidence and the kid answers back my evidence is and gives a hypothesis it may or may not be correct but it's the start of our argumentation from evidence and so we hope that notebooking is going to be a very strong part of this program this cartoon was obviously meant for a different kind of sandwiching but I think the middle school was sandwiched for a while because when the Common Core came out the NGSS got delayed we were waiting for the NGS the next generation science standards to be developed because we knew that the Massachusetts science standards wouldn't get developed until the NGSS came out and at the same time so we were reluctant to make whole big purchases for grade levels of science materials not knowing what those standards how they were changing and at the same time we didn't want to get old books you know we go from the good to the bad and the ugly you know this is pre 2000 and that's what that's what we're using in a sense right now so we wanted to go to digital resources it's definitely the way to go but then we also had to be cognizant of when the digital access was going to be there and you know it came up through the elementary school and is now finally there so we're ready to roll we have some money in the budget for next year to explore those digital resources and start recommending so we're moving in that direction this is our current curriculum and this is already partly revised to the new standards we've moved a few things around already astronomy used to be in the eighth grade now it's in the sixth grade and we're just kind of finding what we need to move into to align ourselves with the new standards so we have old texts but creative authors who have been developing their own materials along the way and we have that budget to help that process along they keep it lab oriented and we've had a great writing program a CER program claims evidence reasoning and that's through sixth through eighth the students are asked to really defend what they do in their lab experiments and collecting data explain it and how it works that will defend it so at the middle school we also have some state and nationally acclaimed technology teachers from the mass tech and NSTA and the international technology educators association we've had some awards claiming our program and our teachers as top notch and technology is in it is an equal part to all the sciences so we're proud to sponsor that and to have a robust program there and it has engaging and pertinent after school activities this year we had to double the amount of staff that would manage the robotics people because there were so many kids that wanted to be part of it we have had a growing science fair effort at the middle school moving quickly on to the high school we have solid core courses and we try to maintain a heavy lab emphasis although size and scheduling has started to become a limitation and we at the same time are increasing our use of digital access and we thank the AEF some AEF members who were instrumental in bringing us new digital access devices walk through our school today and I think they found they enjoyed what they saw we thank the capital committee for all their contributions to that and you the Arlington public schools and the people who make those decisions we're moving along we're on a moving train now and we're going to try to keep it going that way so we have our core courses introductory biology chemistry and physics and our electives we're proud of these capstone courses astronomy archaeology oceanography anatomy and physiology engineering environmental science is a lot there to interest kids and they and they show that to us I'll show you the statistics in a minute our AP is growing so you can see the years here and next year we're anticipating all of the new sections and our enrollment is going from 136 to 183 part of that is our Enviro AP which was recently enough added and we are still struggling with that a little bit which I think you see in the next slide you know we needed to we brought in a teacher had never taught that before was a new curriculum so we had some alignment to do so our students are strong in the bio and chem and physics these are scores 3, 4, and 5 in the AP as I said we we needed some alignment and calibration I think we're there I think this last year we were there but we will see in July when the new scores come out so this is sort of like the issue that Matt Coleman brought up we had a requirement of 3 courses but I just took a poll through our data specialists over the average number of science courses taken by senior over their 4 years here and it's 4.28 so not only did most students surpass the requirement of 3 and take 4 but about 28% took a 5th course so that brings up the same question that you asked Bill are we pushing the kids too much well I think we counsel the kids carefully to not look at this as an isolated choice in fact just today I had a student say as a sophomore can I take AP environmental and chemistry and I said I don't think so AP environmental is a capstone course so first of all you'd be going into it without biology and chemistry and you wouldn't get as much out of it so we do counsel our kids when to and when not to take these courses and of course that social emotional piece is very strong there because if students want to take 3 honors and 3 APs of course they're going to be stressed out and only some kids can do that so our MCAS is strong and growing these are just 2 snippets all students on the top left you know in going from 14 to 15 the colors don't show it here but on the left is advanced second left is proficient third left is needs improvement and the right side is failure and so we've increased going from 14 to 15 our proficiency are advanced I mean quite significantly and we've decreased needs improvement a bit we still have a lot of work to do we're interested in those kids that are in that gap and even though we make some you know you can see that our proficient group went up we still have more people in those later bars there than we want and we're looking at strategies to solve that so we have many adjunct activities we have a high school robotics, Olympiad we have a lot of speakers come in all the way from astronauts to many different scientists and science writers and the future directions so we really see increasing our digital access we're moving into a BYOD there'll be hurdles and hiccups along the way and we'll work our way through them and as that occurs we're looking at more digital resources and increased lab space we really need that now the new building project should solve that over time and it's hard to just make space up here and we realize that so that's why we're trying to juggle things and we try to keep those lab populations within safe limits this is a graph out of a report from the state of Texas data from about a thousand schools of class size at the bottom and the rate of accidents on the upper left and as you get past 20 to 24 in labs you can see that that rate starts to go up exponentially we want to try to watch that so that's why we try to be careful about our lab populations, our sizes and of course we're here for the globe and we want our kids to go out of Arlington High prepared and understanding the issues and having some tools to feel empowered about dealing with those issues rather than feeling doom and gloom so you saw again that in the assumption of time for the standards we probably need to have more time somewhere we're trying to figure out how to do that that's all so questions Mr. Damon I just want to ask three questions first of all years ago I recall a struggle to find science teachers there was turnover in the science positions and could you just give us an update on how we're doing on turnover? how we're doing on retaining teachers and vacancies? it's a struggle when we have an opening because somebody leaves in physics or chemistry and sometimes physics and chemistry we have some choices to make that involve do we need a physics teacher and a chemistry teacher and do we need to hire two or do we need to hire who will fit that one bill and maybe that person is a little more expensive and we have to do that these are critical areas and they're not as easy to come by statistically in the last round of advanced science of course hiring I probably had five or six appropriate candidates that's not a lot that's not a lot considering after you interview them some drive dropped by the way so how are we doing that? we try to attract them to listen to their needs they're here for the most part I could say that the science teachers are here because they're passionate about teaching science they're not here because they have an extra month during the summer they're not here because they have because they're making more money than they would make in industry they're not here for a variety of reasons they're here because they love to teach kids science and so we have to listen to their needs so that they can do that well and when they succeed our kids will succeed so I think our turnover has been pretty slow lately in fact we've been expanding trying to take care of some of that lab size issue and so we've been growing and the people that are here for the most part are here and I should preface my questions by saying this is a great presentation this was a great presentation and I should have begun that way the next question I had is could you talk a little bit about the MCAS scores for the high needs students are not where we want them to be I guess the MCAS I'll talk louder the MCAS scores for the high needs are not as loud not as high as we'd like them to be so I just would like someone either you or Dr. Bode or Dr. Cheson to talk about what's the strategy to help those high needs students what we're doing part of what we're doing is using the Edwin analytics the analysis branch of all the data that the state collects we can disaggregate that data we can't just disaggregate it by high needs and all students and so we look at the data and what we do is we analyze strands and questions so we can look at themes and say let's see our high needs students are having trouble with these kinds of questions let's see what we can do to bolster that part of our teaching curriculum because we know we have the data we do our DDMs and our common assessments we have the data and we disaggregate it so we're trying to get some insights into what areas they need more support in that's one thing we're also in our AP courses AP produces a report every year called AP I forget the term AP access and they help us to analyze kids that have potential to go further in science of all kids and so we specifically we've had a grant that just ended this last year to try to increase high needs kids participation in AP courses and we tried to bring those in by analyzing that data from the college board sensitivity training and awareness we're doing that we're working with the rest of the administration to try to say what do these kids need and why are there more difficulties and how do we bridge those gaps so we're trying to look at that and make people aware of it what are the issues make teachers aware of them so that they can offer more supports I think those are probably the general things some of the challenges also that students have is the reading of the material on the test and so we're really working as a curriculum team to identify those transferable skills so that the methods that claims evidence that process we're looking at well what do we call that in other subject areas how do we help kids with close reading how do we help them with informational reading and use the same techniques across all subject areas in order to bolster those skills we're really emphasizing that in fact a comment from is an AP teacher here and the AP tests were just a week or so ago and so I said so how do the kids do how do you think how do they comment that they did and the kids comments are oh there's so much writing on that test you know it's not A, B, C, D and the writing isn't you know describe this experiment it's student A says this and student B says this who's right and why you know and so it's claims evidence reasoning and we're preparing the kids for that and that's the way the new MCAS2 will probably come out and that's one of the ways they're going to get at inquiry is to have kids explain what they have experienced through inquiry by dialogue so I'm good Dr. Allison Ampe I wanted to follow up on Mr. Thielman's question about the MCAS2 I can't absolutely so I agree that we certainly have room to improve but I just wanted to point out that there was a significant improvement from 2014 to 2015 I mentioned that the proficient went up significantly enough and the advance didn't go down and we pulled from that needs improvement that's we're making progress we've got work to do I'd like that bottom right graph to be the top left graph at some point no I agree but I just thought that even that for one year is really impressive and then if you can go back to your class size graph the second to last slide second to last slide I'm wondering what's the average class size in our intent for science classes looking at to answer that I'd have to have a magic wand because in some sense it's a strategy game and so when we start the scheduling process we know that students will change a bit some students and rightfully so want to challenge themselves part of what you were talking about Bill sometimes over challenge themselves and decide you know I'll be better off if I'm in a different section and those numbers change throughout the year and so we start out with a really strong imbalance in our higher level courses very very large class sizes 25, 26, 27, 28 in a lab and then we expect that over the course of the year as kids make different choices that those will level out to the 24 range and that the other classes would start out very small if you look that in the beginning you might say how come we're offering classes that small but it's because they're going to fill up so we adjust that and ideally I would love to have our lab classes at 20 or so 22 sometimes we don't make it because when we have sections of an honors level class the scheduling doesn't always go so that they're averaged out sometimes one class will be 28 and another one will be 17 so we do our best to try to keep them to the mid 20's but it doesn't always work. Thank you and then the last question is kind of for either you or the administration which is I was glad that you brought up about sort of dual counting can do both ELA and science at the same time when what? When you can do both ELA and science at the same time and I'm just wondering how do we count that time I mean do we actually double count it when we're trying to figure out how much time there's been? We're working through that a bit we're not there yet and so those are all good questions in a sense they're integrated time they're they're both Larry's talking about the elementary level I'm sort of talking about the elementary level just so we're clear we're talking about when we do that we do that at the elementary level and we'll be planning this summer in both social studies and science as they're doing their professional development this informational topic could be I was at a professional development experience this week on Tuesday grade 5 does something called clean water if that match that was that's the reading unit that's not their science unit however it could tie into their science unit or we might say well that's not 5th grade science that might be 4th grade science and so then we move it down to 4th grade so there's gonna be a lot of work done on that integration this summer but when we count things do we actually count it's counts the minutes for both science and for ELA or I'm not trying to suggest we can go we haven't gotten that far yet we haven't gotten that far right so that's the issue and I think other people around the state are experiencing the same thing because there's just so much to do so much on the plates of these teachers that we have to figure out smarter ways to let them do really good things and not be frustrated about it and not give up on some of it Mr. Hiner thank you for this and all the work that you do the elementary teacher and me your sixth slide the grade 3 physical science pieces I can remember having students science lens itself to a lot of projects hands on and assessing some of my students that I figured I had a future and Ricky Fermi or great sciences coming but when they had to take a written test and to show these skills made by the state and stuff like this and it becomes very abstract for them and very very difficult I'm hoping through you and other teachers when they come up with the tests on these standards there's some way of getting a kinesthetic or hands-on way for these children to evaluate because in the classroom at the elementary level and even at the high school level in chemistry and stuff they learn these things yes they're writing down responses and stuff but asking the detail questions to show evidence and stuff often the child can do it by showing you and having the tools that they were using initially yes they transferred it to their notebook and writing and stuff but it's more real in the real world so I guess what I'm asking you I appreciate that and I assure you too that we are doing that in our own classes the struggle comes with the standardized state testing in our own classes it would be very easy for an elementary teacher to come up and say you know tell me about these five plants here how come one's wilted and in a sense that's both a performance assessment and maybe a summative assessment as well and so we're doing that in our classes again my concern is and hopefully you as a director will have some influence on the state to let them know we're trying thank you great thank you very much awesome if you would like these are very rich resources you know if you want to look at them take them home just bring them back we're not going to use them anymore this year so you can just leave them somewhere in the I'm afraid to look at it could be your bedside reading for the next week okay thank you thank you very much yeah great great thank you thanks Larry okay we are now ten minutes behind but not bad not bad okay so the next item in the agenda are the Gibbs Decisions and what I want to do for both of these votes is before we propose a motion and discuss a motion I want to get a sense of the committee about whether we are ready to take these votes or not so I've quickly get that sense thumbs up thumbs down this is about the Gibbs configuration question okay it sounds like this is that's a good way to do it so we are ready to take this thing so let's we need a motion on the table uh Mr. Thielman move that the Arlington school committee endorses Dr. Vody's recommendation to configure the Gibbs facility as a sixth grade school second motion by Mr. Thielman seconded by Mr. Schlickman question is endorse the word or to go forward with a sixth Dr. Vody's recommendation review I thought we had already endorsed this a month or so ago no this is specifically about the configuration we didn't say anything about the configuration yet the Gibbs we haven't said anything yet yeah I just recommend change the word endorse to go forward with the superintendent's recommendation for sixth grade move forward with friendly amendment to move forward rather than endorse move forward discussion of the motion Mr. Cardin thanks so I just want to emphasize that we're choosing between two good options um and my vote on this motion should not be interpreted as any concern with the sixth grade option being potentially being a very good thing and a very successful thing for our students while I greatly respect the preferences of the school administration and the Audison teachers about the sixth grade option I also respect the preferences of the parents who responded to the survey who attended the forum in January and who I spoke to while I was running for this seat who do prefer the two middle school option I'm not voting against this motion because I think the two middle school option is necessarily better than the sixth grade only option I don't think we can make that determination with any certainty but between two good options I'm choosing to join with many parents who prefer the two middle school option okay Mr. Slickman um I think the the evidence overwhelmingly supports the Gibb sixth grade option um one reason certainly is equity and it wouldn't be intentional we talked about this last night did we go look at towns with two middle schools and my esteemed colleague who works in Lexington described the accidental inequity in two schools that are identically sized we would be setting up a small middle school and a large middle school and that would breed inequity in that there are programs that we would not be able to offer in the smaller school and there are climate issues that we would have in the smaller the climate would be different in a smaller school and a larger school and I don't want one end of the town to have one kind of school and the other end of the town to have a completely different kind of school as we set up our elementary programs we were very careful to bring equity to all of our seven schools so that there isn't a substantive difference in the education offered and I don't think that we could provide that equity by having two six seven eight schools number two certainly the cost factor the evidence shows that it would cost more to run a two six seven eight schools and that in discussions with the finance committee who said we really can't afford to add to the cost we came back and said if we feel strongly enough that we prefer this that we would make reductions in other programs in order to support a six seven eight over there I see nothing that's educationally sound to support redirecting resources from other programs to turn the Gibbs into a six seven eight one of the issues was transportation and walk to now I live a half a mile from the Bishop's school and my neighbor certainly walkable and I've walked to the Bishop's school often because it's a very pleasant little walk over there but every day when I'm leaving for work my neighbor would be driving her child to the Bishop so that having a walk to in theory having a walkable school doesn't mean people are going to walk and by virtue of the congestion that we have around elementary schools that are all walkable I don't think that we're going to achieve some sort of nirvana by having a more walkable configuration east to west there's going to be traffic issues the traffic issues will indeed be less at the odyssey because we'll be reducing the number of students going there there will be more traffic in the Gibbs neighborhood of course because we're going from a tendency situation to a full blown school with 500 kids and we will have two years to get a traffic plan out we have successful traffic plans to get the tack to solve our traffic issues and if you live on the east side of town you'll have one year of close school and two years of schlepping across town and if you live in the heights you'll have one year of schlepping across town and two years of being close and it's not that big a town it's five square miles and I know that traffic in the center can be a little unnerving at times but it's not that big of an environment the evidence is so strong for doing the sixth grade school and the and no matter which configuration we go to we will have challenges that we will need to meet but we will be able to move forward we will be able to meet the special needs issues we will be able to meet the traffic needs and we just have to do this and we will be able to move forward with the Gibbs 6 you hear other thoughts Dr. Ellis-Mapy I didn't think of preparing a speech I'll be voting for the Gibbs 6 but in doing so I'm not trying to I know that we've heard from many parents who would also prefer a second 6-8 school there like Mr. Schlickman I feel that the educational benefits the cost benefits and the equity actually I didn't put them in the right order for me it's the equity is first education is second and then financial is unnecessary but is definitely a distant third all of these are why I feel it's important to choose to go with the Gibbs 6 option but I very much want to hear over the coming year as we plan and begin to renovate how we're going to address the concerns that are raised especially the special education population and how we're going to make this the best possible experience for them second any other students who will have issues with the additional transition which we're going to then be creating and then finally the impact on the parents people who the local community in terms of traffic and the other issues and I think that there's a lot of things that we can do towards all of these I did some research over the last few days found a government website which lists schools that you can search by sizes there's almost 120 in the US or sixth grade only of those almost 70 of them or over 300 students or more and so I think they're fairly comparable to what we're setting up and I think that we can start reaching out to some of these other schools and find out how did they achieve not necessarily the traffic we're going to have to deal with that's site specific but the things like special education and dealing with transitions other people have grasped with these problems how they've done it and if we can get any ideas so that's how I'm going to vote and why I hope that community members who have concerns about this choice will continue to reach out to us and tell us why so that we can address their concerns and solve the problems especially before we open the school so I'll be voting for the sixth grade option I think there are pluses and minuses to both the sixth grade option and the sixth or eight option the one thing I'll say with the sixth grade option is that this is a this will be a new experience for the town of Arlington we're creating a new school and a new model and it's something this district hasn't done since we reconfigured the middle school 25 years ago whenever that took place so it's a new moment for the town it takes a maybe a different set of skills than we've used in the past to solve problems and challenges so I hope that we do what Kersi suggested look at a lot of different schools help we think creatively I hope we look at I know we're looking at Needham and everything that Needham's doing and I hope we use the talent of the people in the building and that we think very critically and that there's a lot of good creative tension in the process between teachers, administrators parents, staff because that will lead to the creation of something wonderful which I think we want to do but this is a new experience for the town of Arlington and part of the reason why I'm voting for it because I think it's good for us as a district to embark on something new but it has to be understood that it's brand new and it's something people haven't done before most of us haven't done before so I'm voting yes and I think it's an exciting moment and there's a lot of work ahead of us who knows I'm just going to say a couple things which is that I think if we had unlimited money and limited space we'd create eight equally sized elementary schools and two equally sized middle schools and they'd feed into the high school that my decision is partly because of the constraint of our buildings but that I think with that constraint comes some opportunity to really create a unique transitional space between the relative protected environment of elementary school and the more difficult environment of a seventh and eighth middle school experience and I look forward to the kinds of opportunity that this presents I also have to say that I've been in several rooms of parents who were initially opposed to this idea and who after discussion especially with educators sort of came around to supporting it but the initial thought was no and then through discussion sort of changed their mind and that was very very influential in my decision I'll be voting yes for this yes Mr. Themen this is a side point you know one thing that well when we get too far ahead of things but one thing to think about actually is to be hiring a principal a year in advance of the opening of the school so there's somebody who's driving the process a year in advance I didn't mean to throw that in the budget discussion right now but that's really how you would start a new school you'd have the academic leader on board a year in advance of opening Mr. Hayner just to go along with what Mr. Thelman said it is a new school to some degree it will be a new principal to some degree but we have teachers already in place so I would and I'm sure you've thought of it I've seen other schools do it to start that new person off with a very positive thing it is new and it's pieces of what we've got so it is very unique as you said thank you great okay so should we take a roll call vote roll no just take a so all those in favor please signify by saying yes or yes and yes for myself all those opposed Mr. Cardin and that is it okay actually I'd like to introduce a motion a second motion to direct the town GIS department and the transportation advisory committee to study what I think is a very serious issue of traffic especially because we're talking about eastbound traffic during rush hour and to come back to us and to the school department with some ideas so discussion on the motion or comments yes well I mean I think we also have to look at it as to what we can provide as far as busing I mean if we can provide particularly for the sixth grade there are a lot more sixth graders I think there's not a lot more but there the sixth graders from almost all of Dallas Pierce some of Stratton some of Brackett are out of the two-mile zone so I think if we take our first look at the bus where they're coming from then we can provide some additional data to that right I think that's already gone Mr. Hanner correctly if I'm wrong don't we have to doesn't the state require us to budget for any for the number of children that qualify whether we beyond the two miles yeah Dr. Lee I've already started in fact done quite a bit of work on it because we've looking at our current third grade and where they are distributed in town and you're correct that we're going to have many more students that are beyond the two mile in this situation it's hard to say yet because one of the things we're looking at too is how close students are to Mass Ave in terms of how many students would probably choose that over and being reimbursed over being on a bus because what our experience is presently and has been for a number of years is that more students choose reimbursement than they choose going on the school bus part of it is not wanting to get up so early be honest it's true because they get up have to be at the bus stop early and they get to school earlier and then they have to participate they usually participate in AMPM so we are looking at this when we have been Adam Karoski and I have been looking at maps walking maps our director of transportation has been looking at bus routes we have time to plan and I certainly want input and as we did before once we get some a place where we're ready to have some feedback we want to get feedback on the plan and we'll probably want to do a survey at some point just to get a sense of how many parents would prefer to carpool or go on a bus or go on the school bus and look at that so just to clarify the school department is responsible for anybody who lives over two miles but if someone lives 1.9 miles they're unlikely to walk and what we want to make sure is that those kids don't get driven individually in cars that's why I'm putting forward the motion to sort of direct the town to GIS department and the transportation advisory committee to sort of look at those kinds of issues yep first I'm not sure we had a second on the motion oh we did sorry I will put discussion okay thanks I will make the motion for the purposes of you're requesting a motion out there madam chair the chair requested a motion I can't put a motion out can you ask for it what's put in here Karen is that clear to you yeah that's what I was are you going to say Paul sure fine Paul and a second my second point is I'm not sure we can direct the town to do anything we can ask yes right oh I'm sorry yes you're right we can ask we can ask that's what we'll do yes anyway I mean frankly this was actually something that mr. chaplain said we should maybe ask him officially ask him I think the other thing we should ask at this point is for the transportation advisory committee to look at things like one-way patterns and things we can do to enhance traffic flow and safety around the school I mean ideally you've got streets in one way those are one way they're all one way both one way both one way so if you're bringing a school bus down the street because the bus is on the the door is on the wrong side and the kids would have to cross in front of the bus right so that to flip one of those would possibly in here safely for kids traveling on the bus or at least you need or at least you need a driveway around the school or something they should look into it there's a lot of issues to involve ready to vote all those in favor aye opposed okay so our next item I also want to get a sense from the committee whether we are ready to vote to take the Gibbs at a surplus or not yes okay so actually so Mr. Schickman I'd like to make a motion before the motion I actually want to get a sense from the committee about whether we're ready to do this absolutely yeah I thought we already did to take the Gibbs at a surplus we have not yet done we haven't done the official vote yet and I'd like to make the motion which we can then discuss so but we're ready okay okay great I move that the Arlington school committee declares that we require the use of the Gibbs school for educational purposes no later than July 1 2017 and that the Arlington school committee request that the town of Arlington notify all tenants of the Gibbs school that their leases will not be renewed after their termination on June 30th 2017 okay second Mr. Hain our second okay discussion on the motion yes Dr. I had asked in previous meetings whether there was any necessary legal language that we needed to use is this it or we were told that we were told that we don't need anything specific state is basically okay yeah if council receives this and quest needs something in addition I'm sure we could revote it but based on the conversations we had earlier in this in the process that's all we need to do which directs yeah that's as far as I understand that we don't need to be very complicated it may be even more detailed than we need to but I just wanted to cover the basis okay it's important we do this the tenants already you're now finding alternate places to be so it on one level it's going to happen naturally but I think that the sooner we say that we're moving forward we're going to do this we need this facility you know what why delay well let's let's just move this forward Mr. Hainer if we have a building we're no longer using it we declare it surplus then the town has control over it up till then they don't this we did that with Gibbs X amount of years ago right now we're asking with this vote for the town to take it back give it back to us for our use so that's what we're doing in this motion is making a request to the town once the town does that we will then have legal ownership or our control of the building so we're basically requesting it I just want to say I was not in favor taking this vote at this time just because I thought it made sense to hear from the voters I mean in terms of just the timing seemed odd to me but but it seems to be the committee so that is what I defer to yeah okay any more comments yes you have this language right I just need me to okay and we don't need Doug Hyam said this is not okay yeah okay all those in favor aye all opposed and I'm going to stain yes can I ask through the chair Dr. Chesson was it you who was telling me about Concord changing to a 6, 7, 8 model oh you were could you just I didn't want to bring this up because I didn't want to suggest we were making our decision because of it but I thought it was an interesting side light on our decision making just what's going on in Concord they have two middle schools one's a little bit bigger than the other and they have decided my understanding is they're going to have to defer a year because of the size of the class that would be entering but they're going to go to a 6 and a 7, 8 and it's not about enrollment they just think that would be a better model for Concord. trying to keep up with Arlington we're so ahead of them with everything except the budget just trying to keep up with us it may change they're looking for a new superintendent I don't know where that will stand I thought it was interesting that it came up at this point yeah lots of opportunity to talk to each other we do okay now we're early great so the next item the agenda is to vote to renew the human rights committee members and we are fortunate that the current members have all elected to continue their appointment so if it is if we are in agreement we can go forward with that if you remember last time we voted I wasn't here but for Christine so who do we vote for, for Sharon to continue and at that time I actually didn't realize how many other people's appointments were up at the very same time so these are the remainder of the people I move reappointment second second by Ms. Starks discussion do you want to say they're awesome yeah I'll say their names great okay I was just unaware that we get to select we appoint all the members of this committee no we do not but when I understand we're second to appoint some people and the town manager and all our appointees are moderate then my next surprise is that our appointees are all at the exact same time they usually stagger that's fine thank you they actually are staggered by a couple of months but it's all around and I think that was probably the reappointment time you know one was February and one which is delayed and one was April but they're all around at the same time okay so let me read them out they're Christine Carney Gonda D. Figlia Nick Menton and Marissa Brighert Brigitte is it Brigitte? yeah okay great thanks Brigitte we're lucky to have dedicated volunteers like many things in Arlington these are volunteers who are giving up their time to work on this important issue and I think we're we're lucky to have such dedicated volunteers so all those in favor of repointing those four members please signify by saying aye opposed okay it's unanimous vote okay so then there's the calendar update Mr. Slipman first I'd like to move the calendar okay and then we want to move approval move approval okay so moved approval by Mr. Slipman second by Mr. Hayner I think we should have this is for first this is first read and I'd like to move an amendment okay so we don't move first read is that right okay so we're not moving it okay I'd like to offer an amendment to the calendar okay so actually do we want to I want to actually have Dr. Bodie just give a couple words is there something that you want to say before and then we'll get to that okay first of all let me just review some of the key things I don't think it it hurts to reiterate this is that there's a couple of big changes next year and the first of that is our kindergarten we are going to begin our first day for kindergarten just as we do for all of the students except it's only going to be for an open house and then half the kindergarten class will come one day and the other half on Wednesday the other half on Thursday and then the full group on Friday and the reason for this change is that we've decided to do the screening in June before when we had a delayed opening to the next week that was because we used to do screening but the concerted opinion of teachers and administrators is that they would it would be much better in terms of classes to be able to have that information earlier our preschool however does start the following Monday on the 12th so this calendar is very similar to previous years but I will say that both the middle school and the high school will have an extra early release day and the high school in particular needs an extra day in there because of all of the work facing it and we'll talk more about that when we get to the MSBA decision yesterday but there's a significant amount of work that they're doing both in that area and some work that they've been committing to over the last year and a half on diversity issues in the school so however Dr. Cheson has looked at the minutes and hours and we're fine so that's not going to be an issue the other thing I would say about the high school is that I have a schedule here that is very similar to last year but Dr. Janger has indicated that we might need to tweak the dates for the conferences they may actually move them up and be in concert with the middle school but I will have that for you during the course of the week and let you know that the middle school has decided to move conferences earlier in the year before they used to have the conferences in December but now they're going to be in November and I think the reason for that is that they would like to talk with parents before the end of the term rather than after the term this may be influenced maybe influenced they think that earlier in the year makes more sense in this and because we're finding that every block is taken for a middle school teacher they're just completely scheduled that we're adding a little bit more time in one of the afternoons so there's going to be two afternoons in two evenings for the middle school and those are in early November as you can see there and I have to give Mr. Fitzgerald a lot of credit we worked on the codes on this and finally we decided probably the easiest thing rather than coding this whole calendar up which would make everybody a little crazy is to actually list out the days of early releases by level and so it's just really clear what's going to happen and the other thing we try to do with the difference early release it's 11.15 if we're going to have just a regular professional development day it's one o'clock the difference being that 11.15 is going to have no lunch and one o'clock will have lunch so in terms of changes those were the major changes we also decided again this year not to go into late April, May and June we decided to go into professional development once we hit those months we're into testing and we want to give as much flexibility as possible next year's window for MCAS 2.0 will actually begin in earlier April I think it's April 6th isn't it and it will go through May so and it makes sense in terms of pedagogy educational goals professional development earlier in the year the one that we have scheduled and I'm not sure which one will do it whether we'll do it in March or April we need to have some early release time all levels to do any kind of training that might be necessary for the new 2.0 so that's part of it another reason is that we wanted to make sure we had that time so those are the main highlights of the year otherwise it's very similar to what we've had in previous years now I know you have some discussions you need to make about the meeting time for a school committee so actually can I just ask one question Clarification you said that the high school is going to move to the similar time as the middle school well we don't know that but I think it's not the same day if we're looking it's similar timing is that thinking right now what they did last year and it seemed to work really well in October they had 11.15 dismissal for afternoon conferences they stayed through and had evening conferences the same night and I understood that that went pretty well and then they had one more evening conference and so that is how it's scheduled right now for the high school so the conferences for the high school are late October the conferences for the middle school is early November and elementary is staying the same in December because they wanted to have conferences after the first progress report that's where we are questions and I know you have an amendment any questions I have something I want to question Saturday when we had our retreat we talked about potentially two retreats coming up is that something you'd want on the calendar I'm asking the group we just announced them ahead of time once we've decided that's fine changing how we did our meetings okay Mr. Slick okay I didn't catch this when I had my initial conversation with the chair about the calendar she was very gracious to ask me what I thought and if there were any conflicts on the calendar and I didn't spot it then but I did spot it when I saw the calendar in Novus in that this iteration doesn't have a second February meeting which results in the fact that we'd have 19 scheduled meetings in our policy dictates 20 there's another potential conflict in here and that March 23 will be the League of Women Voters debate and we were looking to move our meeting off of that date this year so that our candidate for reelection wouldn't need to make a decision between hanging out with us here and hanging out with League of Women Voters and I know that when we run for reelection it's always good to have friends in the room so that in order to rectify both that we'd get to the third meeting and we'd avoid the get our 20th meeting and avoid the issue of conflicting with the League of Women Voters that we delete the scheduled meetings for March 9 and March 23 and instead add the meetings for March 2 March 16 and March 30 January and March but that think of the March 2nd as being February 30 I actually have a similar kind of discuss and vote in this similar kind of suggestive change we do all together which is that I know I won't be available on December 22nd and if you look at the calendar it looks like we can easily shift that a week earlier and have a December 1st and a December 15th meeting the first has a lot of conflicts for us with a conference maybe we can do 8th and 15th and the other possibility we've done that in the past that's fine, I'm just not there we've done two weeks in a row in December in the past so the 8th and the 15th there are always these conflicts towards the end it could also mean that I it's always good I will tell you that the 15th is the elementary evening conference night but I don't know anybody have that afternoons as well so then you'll get priority picking that now yeah, if only that's a perfectly plausible option if that just makes more sense that's a tough day because everybody's off on holiday it's right almost before the holidays that's why it's a tough day I'd say that's a great idea to do the 8th and the 15th okay, elementary conferences just looking at the calendar and remembering what was going on then the problem is that that's kind of hitting peak budget season and so I remember we were having to schedule people in and there was concern that things were going too early so I'm just a little concerned if you're moving, if you're shifting both meetings forward that it may mess up budgeting but I don't mean schedule now and then adjust as we get closer we can also keep it as is adjust when we get there it's not a problem no, I think it's better to schedule this all seven of us have it on the calendar right away so everybody does but I'm just saying we'll put that on the calendar and if we need to we'll shift it because of budget because of budget issues then we shift them and do a budget presentation on a 22nd let's put it this way our employees will not be better but another option might be the 20 we can always do things on a Tuesday or something it was another possibility okay just to speak to Mr. Schlickman's comments I've brought up that there weren't 20 meetings scheduled before and what I was told was we'll have meetings over the summer and that those will count and I'm just saying that this is what has been said before got it we're only obliged to schedule 20 we don't have to have 20 if we don't need it we don't currently schedule a meeting necessarily in the summer though it has happened if we stick with our current calendar we'll have 21 this year because last Saturday was a school committee meeting right and if we add extra that's true we're talking about potentially doing one or two more does that take some pressure off of not needing to add another one in March well it's just a busy time for us because we're finishing up the budget and doing a lot of work so it's worth it keeping it okay so why don't we keep it maybe we could also again adjust it so you're saying we're going to keep the 2nd, the 16th and the 30th in March so let's do this all as one motion I guess right to the March 2nd, 16th and 30th and then December 5th and 19th December 5th I'm looking at the wrong thing December 1st 8th and 15th sorry I was looking at the wrong one 8th and 15th any more discussion on those okay all those in favor opposed and I want to sort of request to the superintendent that when the middle school and high school and elementary school sort of schedule significant events that we ideally try to find a way for them not to schedule these big significant events during school committee meetings if it's possible that we sort of get a sense from them um well guess what conflict over I'll have to have a conversation I just got this information from the middle school they wanted to have their curriculum night on the 8th of September let me go back to them and see if we can get a different night we just need to disseminate this early and widely this raised parents have I think it's germane to the calendar some parents have said over the years there's sometimes there's events going on in multiple schools in the same night do you ever monitor that do you guys try to control that people submit events to you in the central office no they don't really we have a central calendar now I think it's going to be easier than it ever has been before because we look on the website we now have a central calendar where all the major events and how we've defined it for everybody is that if you have an event that would potentially involve people beyond your school as soon as we define it this way I'm not sure I think we would still put a major event like curriculum night at the middle school on that central calendar on the website because then what we'll do is we'll see that that hits a school committee night we just didn't really have that tool before but we do now have it or that that hits another night that some other schools have Audison has the curriculum night and the high school has their big concert I think we'll hit those but we have to really be conscious of but the thing is if bishop had a chorus night and it's bishop community and it's not going to affect anybody else it won't hit that central calendar it'll hit the bishop calendar so it's something that we'll have to work at and think about how we're going to it's challenging that parent has a child at the high school that's the problem obviously a bishop event is not going to conflict with the Thompson event but if you vertical articulation once an elementary stakes something out of major any other elementary can pile on that vertical articulation that was what I was looking for that's incumbent upon the middle and the high school to get their oar in the water that's right I think it would be nice to collect this information if we don't necessarily ask people to shift but just to sort of collect it let me go back to the middle school get all these dates at the beginning of the year and say let's get your big ones on there and take a look at them it also might be helpful for the community to know what's going on there's all these great exciting things going on it could be PR too we've talked about that the potential calendar would become because the good news is a lot is going on and then that's the good news but then when you try to organize it in one visual thing that became problematic and so we went the other direction maybe we shouldn't maybe we should just have everything that's going on in each slot at the very bottom of the calendar there's a statement on mine it's two thirds printed it says approved back in January so no I understand but it may give people the impression that this is the final if they read it off Novus today it's been approved since January well some parts have been I understand but it doesn't qualify I'm just suggesting pull that off until we get until we finally do it just a thought if we're commenting on other aspects I started it I'm concerned about the parent the kindergarten parents especially those who are working and who aren't necessarily expecting half days or no school day for their kindergarten students during that first week and I'm wondering first are we making sure that they all know what's coming and second are we to arrange any help for them like with the after school programs or anything for those that time when the kids are not in school because it sounds like they've got multiple hours when otherwise you would think that they were there well the answer about notification yes and one of the nice things that is happening with our new registration process and software that we have we have the emails for every kindergarten parent sometimes multiple emails and so we have a list servant I've actually gone out just with information to kindergarten parents a couple times already so that is happening we have the first introductory meeting on the same day for all elementary schools it was discussed then we're having meetings at each school for visits and now we're going to have screening and it's discussed then they're really being saturated with this I will say that we haven't looked at the after school programming because this is the first time we actually have had school in the first week this they it could be considered a positive for parents because they will have two of those days that week with their child in school which in previous years they would have had no days that week they would not know that I mean you know they if they didn't have a kindergarten student before they may have just thought the kids just coming that's true that's true so it's something I can ask the after school programs if they could the only issue is that the after school programs are after school programs they don't run simultaneously to our school day just on the other note in terms of major events happening if we have say college night and the community and the school committee all in this building on the same day it's just traffic hell and you can't park within ten blocks of the school so another reason even if it's something that we don't care about I don't have a college aged kid but boy if there's college night on a school committee night you know some may please pay special attention to the high school headmaster on his use of the calendar and facility use on school committee we do have to alert them more because they live in their world of high school they're not looking to see when you're meeting but on a note that was the attendance the participation was even more than the previous year was a lot of people came if we have a hot topic on the agenda where we have people want to come we're going to be talking about important stuff we're going to be closing out citizens from participating in our meeting as well good point we're not voting on anything first read on the amendments we need to vote on the amendments okay so all those in favor of the amendments did we vote on it? what? I thought we had I thought we had okay so we're not voting on the calendar though yet because it's first read so we're going back June 9th is going to be our second read and that will be it that will be our calendar and I know there might be some discussion about school committee meeting structures as well okay superintendents report too big of course I got the press release out today so I think it saturated the town with media and parents and staff so everyone knows that yesterday the Massachusetts school building authority board of directors voted unanimously to invite Arlington high school into the eligibility period that's the formal part of the vote what's happening is that we're being invited to commence the eligibility period we've been in the eligibility but sort of in a limbo for the last few months and the reason they did that just so people understand they accepted more people to program and they have more schools 26 they've never gone they've never invited that many at the same time well as you can see from the documentation that's required during this period of time they have to stagger it themselves so they're not going to be able to deal with the volume of work and the feedback that has to go on during this process but it's very exciting this is doesn't mean that there's not other steps along the way and there are just because you get into the eligibility period doesn't mean you get to go to the next stage though I will say that they're retention rate their retention rate is really high because they work with you they want you to be successful as well and usually there's some reason beyond anybody's control of it could be funding where a town would have to stop but that is really actually more rare so this is a process we're going to go through with MSBA the first so during this first period of time there's a lot of documentation that needs to be given to MSBA and we have to adhere to the schedule the dates I put in here a novice what the deliverables are during this period of time these number of days these commence on June 8th so right now we're invited but we can do some we're doing some work already but you can't go beyond those dates you can submit them earlier you can even submit some of these earlier in quickly but you can't go beyond those dates and so that's it's very well laid out the compliance certification that one's not a particularly time-consuming one there's going to be a lot of thought given to a building committee but having said that there are prescribed positions that MSBA requires in fact the form that I have to fill out has the names of those positions you have to somebody who's here months I'm just figuring out nine months from now where the local vote has to take place I'm sorry the votes taking place in June June 14th this is about for the feasibility it wasn't for the big money it's not for the big money it's taking place six days in Dr. Buddy when you say June 8th it commences do you mean that's the day that the clock starts ticking and we count 30 days from then yes that's the day the clock starts ticking exactly so we will be having some discussions and we probably should have some discussions at an upcoming meeting on the building committee it's not a particularly large committee and it's very prescribed one of the things that we can add on a couple of positions and we did that with Thompson we added on a parent representative to that committee and we did not add on a teacher I don't think we added on a teacher no but we had everything that was prescribed and then we had a parent representative is there any prescription for committee members parents or teachers is that not part of the prescribed positions those are add-ons now it's possible that you can get two first that might be a parent who fulfills the engineering requirement so that could happen what we found with the Thompson building committee that a number of members of the permanent town building committee fit some of those descriptions and it worked out well to have working very closely with the committee now they may not be as eager to join this because talk about a lot on our plate we have stratton next year as we're working through this we potentially will have an addition on to Thompson we're going to have sort of simultaneously to the Thompson the renovation of Gibbs and meanwhile we're working on this huge project which is going to be significant so it's huge it's a big and the building committee for the Thompson and the Gibbs is the permanent town building committee yes so stratton, Thompson and Gibbs will all be overseen by permanent town building committee so they have a lot that they're going to be doing too that's different from this and that is different from this even though they recognize that yes Arlington and actually not all communities have these permanent building committees we're somewhat unique they have a very prescribed layout of what the committee needs to be for example I have to be on it or my designee the principal of the building a school committee member the town manager or his designee that kind of thing so it's very prescribed and but it is helpful to have people who fit the different descriptors and by the way I can give you a copy of what the form looks like so you know I'll send that over to you so that we will be working on then there's the educational profile questionnaire this isn't the part that's the vision of the school how you know you heard tonight from our director of mathematics and science and first of all I have to say that I think people who are listening understand what terrific leadership we have in these curricular areas and that is enormously important for movement of a school district and I think Mr. Card made an interesting point that you know sometimes you might have to balance off the kind of leadership and also coaching and maybe have class sizes creep up a bit but the benefit is so terrific and so at any rate they're going to be very much involved in this as well because science for example we need to know what a flexible science lab would be we need to know really how many labs we have and just really do we want our labs to be configured both for physics and chemistry but then now you heard about all the capstone classes so what will be the design will we use the model design and actually how many do we need we clearly do not have enough right now let alone size I think our science labs right now are at almost 100% utilization well that's not that's not even it's really hard to schedule and sometimes they have to hand schedule just to make sure it happens but at any rate those are things that we'll be looking at should science and math be adjacent despite what Mr. Wethers was saying about having science being the pinnacle and in the center of everything maybe that's not the best way how should we have our maker spaces where should our computer science be our CAD courses there's just a lot of adjacency and philosophy issues that are going to have to really be how many small group sizes do we have how do we want to deal with blended learning in the building let's go on on it's time to start visiting some schools oh yes yes yes we are we definitely will is there anything still in you buy one of their they already build schools or the cookie cutter the models the school districts that use the models have land okay thank you okay land without anything already on it land without anything on it and you build stars there are no vertical models maybe cows you know thank you Mr. Cardin the required positions there's 11 unless you get a two fur the committee has to be at least 11 people Belmont just announced their committee has 15 people so it can be a sizable committee especially for a project of this magnitude and you also have to 15 would be a good workable committee you get much bigger than that but even having said that sometimes people can't always attend and so that becomes an issue and given the length of time of this commitment I think that there's going to be transitions on the committee over time because most people aren't going to think that a five or six year commitment is huge and the the Thompson building committee actually met toward the very end even after Thompson been built because we had to close up the project too so it's really a six year commitment that's probably not going to happen so they'll have to be having a committee that's a little bit larger is an advantage because you might have something that's more staggered as you go forward you need some institutional history in terms of the discussions that go on because you do a lot of work for each one of the meetings so that's what we're going to do and then enrollment the part that's going to be one of the most important besides the vote in June probably the most important thing in this list of deliverables is enrollment that is where we we need to really I know this is going to be an issue but can we actually as a community have the evidence of Thompson the calculator that they used didn't really predict and I just got I'll actually give you a copy of it but I was just shaking my head we got nestex predictions for us and they're so far off and so low it's they're not even accurate for this year so I know this is going to be a big issue because first of all the size of the building the reimbursement you get is really related to that number yeah I think the two things we have to go by one I think the McKibbin report is really high quality report the state should look at seriously and I'm pretty comfortable the numbers going forward especially because at least in the near term we know who's in the system now and we know what we're projecting in the elementary and how it will flow so high schools are usually easier to predict in the elementary the second thing is when I think about planning this building out excuse me we're not just planning it out for our opening date in 2020 or 2021 or whenever we are able to finish this building is the heart and soul of our operation for the next 50 years and with the stem orientation going forward we're in a technological society in a high tech town so it would behoove us to get somebody who's really got a tech savvy and has got that crystal ball to be playing on this committee as well to figure out what are we going to need in 20 years to have a facility that will meet our needs in fact I have a recommendation on that I recently went to hear Barbara who was the person who founded high tech high school in California and it was a fascinating presentation and then I spoke with them after because that's one of my big concerns is that you know in elementary school this is a really different situation how do we get the building to match our vision and our curriculum with an eye to 10 years out 20 years out what should we be thinking about and an architect and the idea is how to create the space they first have to know what kind of space you want and so I think that in this project we're going to need to get some consultants along that line and so even though there's going to be this building committee I would like to have much more reach out in terms of getting ideas on this straighter. We as a committee have a problem with the town we have town offices in this building which are not either deciding are they going to stay if they do we own it 100% in this thing the whole 6th floor is another one of those places and a pre-school they probably will reimburse that's great to know but the other aspects of that with all the wonderful open space we have in this town if the decision is made does the town want to buy space in this building 100% if the answer is no where does everybody go I mean we have our committed spaces that we need but there's also town spaces down on the first floor so that's sitting on the outside of this consideration but when we decide what kind of building do we want we got it that's a parallel question there's lots of those questions lots of questions let's say that we look at the space we have when we move the 6th floor operation and the folks downstairs the town office is out and take the space that maybe ACA is going to take over the central school and flip that out because it would be better for them to be tied with us and we get a performing art center maybe the town wants to build a parking garage that we our kids would pay for and people who work for the town would use as well as a revenue basis lots of performing art center lots of things I'm dreaming so the question I have is in the educational profile questionnaire which is a 90-day period that commences on June 8 what is it we have to answer all the questions about what we're going to do this is more no but we have to have that during the feasibility this is a questionnaire about our programs it's more of a nuts and bolts this is what we're going to do with technology that's what I wanted to clarify I have a question I know that we're not allowed to do the feasibility until we get the go ahead from them we have to get a formal vote from the board to go ahead and I know that that formal vote you're from now did you get a sense if we could move it up if we did all the other things earlier they said if you finish this all in a month you could do it okay great awesome get to work realistically school is 13 months like the empire state well I clearly like to make it faster so that was my question a lot of this is going to hit over this summer so what is your plan to do all this and I did want to note that there were three schools that were approved in January that moved into feasibility study at this last meeting their elementary schools are much simpler but you can move along much quicker than the half a year absolutely and the sooner we there's no point in taking this part out longer than it needs to be because honestly I think the feasibility part is going to take longer than so 12 month employees will be around most of this stuff is administrative kind of Ruth Bennett who is the director facilities for the town went with us to MSBA because she wanted to hear what we needed to do so they have forums online that we're now going to be opening up that we couldn't before but she's known about this for a couple months and so they've already been starting to gather the information in some ways that's in terms of lengthy report that's the most lengthy on this one because you have to give a history of all of your maintenance for this school well Mark Miano fortunately is a walking encyclopedia of everything that's been done and who did it when it was done is amazing the channel has do a download and all of that he did the Thompson one too she's not going to do it by herself but it's a long report I would say the real important thing in this whole process is the enrollment this is number one in this we went through this with the Thompson and we had a good discussion with them and they predicted 3.30 we predicted only 4.20 we were lower so I think I just sort of keep the committee informed of all the dialogue with the MSBA on the enrollment especially because I think we we want to make sur