Seeing a presence of the quorum, I'm going to call the meeting of the Amherst School Committee to order at 7.57 p.m. For those of you who have been watching, we actually had called to order a while ago and then adjourned for a short time for executive session and now are back. So welcome everyone. So the first order of business tonight is to approve minutes. We have quite a few minutes to approve actually. So we have minutes from December 18th, January 7th, and January 17th. That I will do one at a time and if we can observe our usual protocol, which is to get a motion to approve minutes first and then we can discuss each one of them separately. That would be great. I move to approve the minutes of December 18th, 2018. Second. Thank you. Any questions or comments? I'll give the committee a couple of minutes to review these as needed. Seeing no questions or comments on this, all those in favor of the minutes for December 18th as presented, signify by raising your hands. Thank you very much. It's unanimous. Okay. I will take a motion for the next set. I move to approve the Amherst School Committee minutes for January 7th, 2019. Thank you. Do I have a second? Second. Thank you, Mr. Dumlin. A moment for the committee. Okay. Any questions or comments from the committee? Can you please raise your hands, signify aye? Thank you. And do we have abstention? Okay. So we have four ayes and one abstention. Mr. Nakajima. I move to approve the Amherst School Committee minutes for January 17th, 2019. Thank you. Do I have a second? Second. Thank you. Committee, a moment to read this as well. Any questions or comments from the committee? All those in favor, signify by raising your hands. Thank you. It's unanimous. Thank you very much. I just want to take a moment to acknowledge the very hard work of Ms. Westmoreland for preparing such excellent minutes for all of our meetings. When you see them presented all together like this, you really get a sense of how much work is involved in all of this, so thank you so much. Okay. Next order of business is committee announcements. Are there any announcements? Mr. Dumbling. I just want to quickly take a moment to acknowledge a couple of updates in the front of the privatization war that is in full swing across the country, one positive, one negative update, positive. Late news is to be believed the teachers union of Los Angeles has nearing ending their strikes, growing a major victory for public schools. If you haven't been following this news, it's been very key, shows the power of organized labor and the power of people fighting not really for their own benefits or money, but really for conditions for their students, class sizes, nurses in schools, that kind of thing and a really huge pushback against those privatization forces. So kudos to them. It's important to acknowledge those victories. On the other end of the spectrum, at the Desi Department of Education meeting this morning, in our state, they finalized the agreement to expand a charter school in New Bedford. It's being hailed as a compromise, but it's absolutely nothing like that. To power phrase the vice president of the MTA, it's not a compromise if somebody puts a gun to your head and asks for your wallet. This is a charter school that's getting a free building in a neighborhood where students won't have a choice but to go to the charter school and the funding still comes out of the New Bedford public schools raking that budget over it. And so I mentioned this not because it has a direct effect on Amherst, but because we have our own fights against privatization locally and in our region. And I really feel like our best shot at resistance is whenever there is a front that opens up in this grand issue that we really stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters is how we look at it across the country, across the state, whether it's teachers, parents, community fighting for the future of public schools. So onwards we go. Thank you, Mr. Demling. Very well put. Okay, there are no further announcements from the committee. Moving on to public comment. We are a few minutes past the time that was stated on the agenda, but if anyone has any public comment they would like to make, it's obviously a little different here in the town hall than it is in our school where we usually do this. But please come forward, and you can have a seat and just state your name. And you have three minutes. The opportunity. I just wanted to thank you for all of your work in pulling together a compromise proposal to kind of get into the buildings with windows and classrooms with walls. You know, I feel like as a community we're still absorbing the proposal that came out on Thursday. And I think, you know, I personally am feeling grief at the loss of expanded preschool and the potential of having all of our kids in one school together and ending, you know, kind of fussing based on socioeconomic factors, you know, in a systemic way. But at the same time, I also totally understand the spirit of compromise and that, you know, there were two kind of camps and there shall they meet. And I feel like what you have proposed requires both sides to give up something that is of value. And, you know, I'm just saying that I really appreciate the work that you've done, that I see a path forward and I'm really hopeful and optimistic about the listening sessions and the process that you have so we can get something to MSBA in a unified way in April. So thank you. Thank you very much. Any other comments from the public? Seeing none, I will close public comment. Thank you. Next item on the agenda is superintendent's updates. So Dr. Morris, we'll turn it over to you. To make some time back on the agenda, I'm just going to share one item since so many of the other updates are in the agenda that we have in front of us, which is that on Friday afternoon I shared with the committee that there was some advocacy done by this committee as well as others around the proposed expansion of PVCICS, which is a charter school in Hadley, and the commissioner is not recommending the expansion. So thank you for your advocacy on that front. Whether the school chooses to appeal that expansion is unknown right now, but the desi will let me know if they do appeal that and when the date of the appeal will be heard and I'll communicate that whenever, if I receive it back with members of the committee. So thank you, Dr. Morris. I just want to add one little note to that. I think we've talked about this at previous meetings, but there was quite a bit of advocacy from many different districts in the area around that specific proposed expansion, including from the collaborative for educational services, and we had various other school committees in neighboring towns who wrote letters to the commissioner. So I think all of that actually has made a huge difference hopefully in the commissioner's decision to not endorse this proposed expansion. But thank you, Mr. Nakajima. Yeah, thank you very much, Superintendent. Thank you for all the work you've done in the subject. I hazard to say that the way in which the Piner Valley Chinese Immersion School pursued their expansion, I'm hoping in some ways rationality prevailed that as you can see from the work that we had done to advocate, their assertion that they were a model for the drive integration was so it variance with the previous decisions from the commissioner and the previous boards of education and the existing data that it's something that even though I recognize what Mr. Dublin said earlier as being very true that there's a broader challenge that we're under around policy, the idea that you can open up a front based on, then in some ways, reality-based and advocate on that position and find that you at least are finding some positive audience at the state, very positive in this case, is we should take heart in that, and particularly in a country right now in which it seems sometimes reality-based advocacy isn't always welcome or even finds a toehold to the land, but we'll need to keep at it. There's no question. Thank you, Mr. Nakajima, Mr. Dublin. Yeah, I also wanted to just take a brief moment to thank the advocacy from our local select board prior to our changing government, from our town meeting prior to the changing government, both advocated for a moratorium on expansion of charter schools until the funding formula is fixed. I also want to acknowledge the leadership of our recently elected state representative, Mindy Dome, and Senator Joe Comerford, who have been both outspoken leaders on this issue as well. So thank you. Thank you. OK, so the next item on the agenda is budget guidance discussion, and this actually stems from previous conversations that we've had at the school committee level regarding issue areas or areas of the district that we wanted to learn more about. And I see quite a few faces in the audience, some of whom I recognize, and a few that are new. So welcome, everyone, and I will turn it over to Dr. Morris to introduce folks as needed. So if I can do just one minute of orientation on budget guidance and then I can move forward. So for those who weren't here, perhaps in our November meeting or your November meeting, the idea is that we do budget guidance by the committee identifies a couple areas they'd like to hear some themes about what's happening in those areas to inform kind of that budget process. Prior to that, we had really overarching large thematic statements about budget guidance, and the concern was that it didn't really inform the committee or the community about kind of the budget process. And so there were four areas selected by the Amherst School Committee. Three of them we'll talk through tonight, which is English Language Learners Library Technology. The fourth one is food service, and we'll come back to that in February based on the agenda, and also based on Ms. Palmer wanting a little more time as she's trying to spearhead a particular program as it relates to elementary food service. The extra month was well, or almost month, was well appreciated by Ms. Palmer. So I just want to acknowledge that there was a request for food services to be looked at at the elementary level, and that will happen, it's just not going to happen tonight. So because of our significant agenda and the hour, we asked each of the three areas, English Learners Library Technology, to prepare a five minute presentation. I know that a couple of the areas presented many more slides than for five minutes because they wanted to provide a more background information for the committee that could be done in a five minute presentation. So I want to thank everybody for being here, and thanks for the significant work that went into this. And I apologize in advance for truncating the amount of time that any of you could speak about all of your areas. I think I've spoken to everyone here at much greater length than five minutes about what they do and their world. And that's not really what tonight's about, it's really to give the school committee and the community a snapshot of the programs that you all work so beautifully in. So tonight we'll start with ELL, actually Ms. Richardson, who you've spent a lot of time with in the fall, and she'll be back for a later agenda item as well. To describe a bit, she'll share a lot of data about English Language Learners. And I'm not sure if, I think, oh, you have a flash drive. We'll see if that works. And just a reminder for speakers who are going to be coming up, it looks like that one microphone is already on next to Ms. Richardson, but the other one might not be. So whoever comes to the microphones, please just press push. Hello, thanks for having me. So as Dr. Mara said, I prepared a very short overview and hopefully can just give a snapshot and answer any questions. It's, yeah, there's a whole lot to say in a really short time. I'm also not feeling great, so my brain's a little slower, but I'm gonna give you what I can. So this is kind of an overview of students. So we continue to see the student population of English learners growing. And that's both in terms of numbers, but also in terms of the complexity of needs. And we just see a really wide range of students from our well-schooled newcomers, who come and maybe are here a shorter time, to our students who have had limited former schooling, may come to us in fifth grade, not yet being readers in their first language. They're just a wide range of different backgrounds and experiences. So we're really lucky to have this amazing, diverse population, and also the needs are really quite intense for our staff and for our schools. So we are seeing our language groups are listed there. Spanish and Chinese are the largest. And then the following are listed, but there's, of course, many more languages getting close to 40, if we list all of them. And we do see more students, as I said, that are termed SLIFE students, or students with limited or interrupted formal education. And that designation comes from if students are English learners and they are two years below grade level in both native language literacy and math or numeracy. So those students come in and we know already that they have kind of a higher level of need that we need to address. We do see a lot of students that have dual needs, where they are identified with a disability and have an English learning profile. And we do have a lot of students coming and going too. So that transient number is shifting every year, but often that's families of either visiting professors or graduate students or folks like that who are coming into our community for a shorter time. So that breaks down kind of some of those numbers. And then this shows by grade level on the left what our numbers are looking like right now. So it makes sense that we would tend to have fewer English learners by sixth grade overall because many students who entered in the beginning of schooling with us may have exited by that time, but of course we have students coming and throughout. The reds are students that are being monitored. So they're former English learners. And that number is gonna continue to grow for us because we now are monitoring students for four years after they exit the ELL program instead of two. So that group is really on our radar for longer to support and make sure that we're providing what they need to continue to be successful. And then the levels breakdown is there as well just to give a sense. So I think if you kind of look at the spread, when we think about student needs our beginners, our level ones, our level twos, those are students that are really at the beginning of the process of learning English. And so they require the bulk of our support right up front to get going. But then they really need that level three, you'll see is the biggest because that part takes longer in the trajectory. So usually we see a pretty quick increase in English with the beginning stages where there's a lot of social language and we quickly kind of get functional. And then that transition into academic language takes a lot longer. So the level three is that place where we need to get them more at like content, grade level content and help support to push them through. So that's the overall there. Our instructional programs overall, our beginner and low intermediate students generally receive some pullout groups or self-contained classes. And many of them also receive interpreter support in math and unit study as needed. So we aim for about two hours of support a day if we have the staff, if the schedules work. So that's a whole nother challenge to arrange. And the DESI guidance is a minimum of 90 minutes of services daily for students in that group. So that's our levels one, two and three. And then for levels three to five, students are more often receiving their English instruction through co-teaching in the classroom. However, there's again a range. So we may identify a particular need with a certain group and they may get a 20 minute pullout that's a focused skill group.  So I think that gives, yeah, a real quick picture of that. Here's our staff. And I think it's really important to point out that we have amazing teachers. They're working really hard to meet the needs of students, they're creative, they're flexible. They're really going above and beyond all the time. But to have 20 students, depending on what those student needs are is a lot for them. And some of the tasks that in addition to all the things that you regularly associate with teaching, some of the things that they're doing in addition for their English learner programming are listed on the side. So we've really taken on trying to do more upfront family interviews to gain more information so we can be proactive to meet student needs. As I mentioned, we're monitoring former English learners for four years. We also need to monitor students whose parents decide they do not wish to have direct ESL instruction, but they are still considered English learners. When we have SLIFE students, we need to develop individual education plans for them. And the look bill, which recently passed is also gonna require us to have individual education plans for students who are not meeting benchmarks on the access, which the goal is to reach proficiency in six years so that they would exit within six years. So I think there's just a lot of pieces there that come with the role, a lot of advocacy, a lot of collaboration, a lot of places where we look to those folks to really be the voice of, hey, how do we meet the needs of language learners throughout? And I think co-teaching is a really good example of ways that we're doing that, that we started, this is our second year where we said sort of officially that we're supporting co-teachers for all, English learner teachers at the elementary level. And though they were skeptical at first, everyone has had a really positive experience with it. They've all, you know, there's challenges of course, right, like any co-teaching situation, but they've seen really positive things happening for kids. And that's not just for the English learners, right, because now you have a language expert in the classroom who's supporting all kids with learning academic language. And then let's see, so we have a few paraeducators supporting our students and our interpreter team who are also fabulous. And they, again, go way above and beyond to meet the needs of our students. They're technically interpreters, meaning they're just translating the instruction. The reality is that they're tutors and supports in all kinds of ways and helping us connect with families as well. So I'll stop there and see what else you wanna know. Thank you very much. I'm gonna turn it over to the committee for questions or comments for either the superintendent or Ms. Richardson. Ms. Pitzer, Mr. Nakashima. Thank you for this presentation. Sure. Just one quick question. Just in the beginning, you mentioned that there are almost 40 languages being spoken in our classrooms. So when I look at the staff and the responsibilities and I see, you know, there are probably languages that are spoken by students that aren't spoken necessarily by the staff here. And I'm just wondering, do we ever contract out for interpreters, for example, or how do we deal with it if there is a kind of language spoken by a student which isn't included in the language profile of the staff that we have currently? Right. So we do our best to find them is the first answer. So the 40 languages, all of those students are in our district, but they may not require an interpreter, right? So we tend to have the most beginners who need an interpreter in those eight language groups, I think is what we have identified right now. But what happens if we have a new student that speaks a different language is I get a request and I do my best to outreach to the community and see who I can find. So it's really, yeah, it's pretty on the ground. And that's in terms of direct student support. In terms of translation services, we do have relationships with UMass and a couple of business providers in the area that can do translation work for the parent piece where we need official letters and things like that. Mr. Nakajima. Thanks so much. And I'm excited that you have a chance to present this and that we have a chance to go in deeper on the subject because we've been, I think the last couple of years we've been talking about RAL programs and I just, we never seem to have the time to dig in as deep as it'd be great to do. And I guess one question I'll throw at the, it's sort of the back end of this thing is since this is a budget guidance item is if there are any resources or stress points that you have that could be ameliorated or just substantially improved in terms of outcomes with budget, and I know that feels unfair, I guess. I don't know if it could feel unfair, but I mean, it's sort of what we're here for. So if there's something that would be really helpful, it'd be great to know it. And then what I'd love to hear more about are the students with limited or interrupted formal education and how that population has grown if it's grown and the kind of, sort of generally speaking, the kind of challenges that you're seeing and how that relates to our resources, and I know, because I know it can't be specific as a general matter for the, I guess it's called the tier two IEPs that you're developing, talk a little bit about that and how that's going, because to me that's, I'm sure for any number of families and for students who are entering into our district and our schools, it could be a challenging process to continue to improve their native language and also adopt a new language. But if you had other life experiences that are interrupting your schooling or your transitioning schooling, if you come in to the district for some reason, that's just got to present significant additional challenges, I imagine, and I'd just love to hear about what we're doing a little bit more about that. That's okay. Sure. Let's see. So there's a bunch of questions in there. In terms of needs, just big picture things, I think some of the pieces budget-wise are just looking at overtime building our staff so that caseloads can be a little smaller and we can have more flexibility to meet the needs. So when we get a new student who has a lot of needs, all of a sudden everyone's reworking their schedule because it's not like we just have somewhere to put them in. So that's where our teachers are going above and beyond and going, okay, I'll split my prep and I'll go here for this 10 minutes less and I'll make this kind of shuffling, right? Because they're really looking at how can we do this best. Another piece that I've recommended for next year is to have an ELL building-based teacher leader position that could help manage some of the, all of that extra stuff that has to happen. So just to stipend a little bit to acknowledge that that work is happening and to help manage between Central Office and the schools. There are a lot of the ELL budget lines to be blunt are not really existent and Dr. Morris and Mr. Sheehan have been really good about supporting us in a variety of ways when we need materials and when we need professional development and things like that from other places. So over time, I think having a more robust budget that just supports English learners in that way would be great, but we have, you know, we've been flexible with meeting needs and collaborating with different departments. So that's the first question. So I wanna just clarify that it, just so we're clear between special education that the SLIFE students are getting what I should have put as individual learning plan. We don't wanna confuse it with an IEP because it really is a different need. And that's something that we have to be cautious of in our service delivery, right? Because it's really easy to jump to the conclusion that, well, they're way below grade level and so maybe there's a disability and we have to watch for that. So this is really an individual learning plan to say, well, if the student hasn't yet been taught to read, how are we gonna teach them to read even if they're at a grade level where we don't traditionally teach that way, right? Mr. Sheehan, can I just interrupt you for one second? I think Dr. Nakajima might have had a follow up. No, I was just gonna say I deeply thank you for doing that because I'm very familiar with the term of an IEP for special needs services and because I could imagine a subset, not all, but a subset of students who are significantly behind grade level might also have potentially a need for some additional services. I'm glad you clarified that. But actually, I hate to say this, but that actually reinforces my question around what are the broader issues that students who have had interrupted learning are confronting and how are we support. So in other words, that's cool, thank you. And now I'm also gonna be really curious to find out if there are, in fact, other sort of wraparound needs that we find that some of those kids have and if they do, how are we helping them? I mean, if it's not true, then you're correct about assumptions. It's absolutely true. Yeah, so you can generally, you can say that if a student wasn't getting regular schooling, then there was probably something going on, right? Whether that was coming from a place where there was violence and families didn't wanna send their kids to school, right? And how does that impact the child and their family? Whether it's in some places, there's, you know, if there's an environmental disaster and students aren't able to go as regularly or funding is cut. And there's a lot of reasons that we see these things happening. And like I said, if we're coming in with the assumption that there are two grade levels below what we would expect in numeracy and literacy, we just have a big job to figure out, you know, we don't want to kind of pull them through our grade level curriculum without filling the gaps, right? So this is because this isn't a newer population, this is really a challenge that we're working on right now. Again, doing our best with creative solutions here and there. So there's not a standard approach and I don't think there can be to some degree because it depends what each student needs, but we're really looking to our math and reading specialists to help identify needs, to help be creative with what the solutions are. Of course there's kind of a wraparound, like family center support and all the other things that our schools do to support families too. Mr. Dr. Morris. So I think I agree with what Mr. Richardson said and I think adding to it, the context matters and also the grade level matters. So when students are coming to us with interrupted schooling and second grade, it's a markedly different thing when they're coming in sixth grade with interrupted schooling. And not just on the academic level, but on a whole host of other less quote unquote academic levels as well. And this is something the state has seen a huge increase as well as we have locally and they're trying to develop resources, but I think they're struggling for the same reason that we're struggling, which is every situation somewhat unique and there's no rhyme or reason as to no way to predict what grade levels, what students and what resources would be most beneficial. So it is something that Ms. Richardson talks about with Mr. Sheen and myself frequently and she's not the only one who talks about this. And I think we need to develop a more comprehensive approach to the term as life that I think the state actually is using as well. Students, and some of that's about resources as well in terms of books, as Mr. Richardson said, just to put a finer point on it. So if a student coming in fifth grade to use her example who has not learned how to read, so it's not just right around language learning of English, it's actually around how do you have books that a fifth grader would want to read that's at a reading level that's appropriate for a fifth grade student. So it goes beyond kind of more traditional English language learner challenges to a much broader set of issues that our librarians who will speak in a little bit have been central players in actually on their resource delivery side as well. Right, yeah, so that like finding high low books or figuring out, you know, it's like how do I read, but then it's also how do I just do school? Right, like we have students who come in who haven't been in school for a full day, for a full week, for a full year, right? And so they're just kind of like looking at the clock, what is this, you know? So to get them available to learn, right, in the way that we expect, because they do have all this rich life experience, we have to figure out how to tap into that rather than always expecting them to do it the way that we want to do it, so. Any other questions from the committee or, okay. I actually have a couple of questions myself. Thank you again for putting together this presentation. I want to get through these quickly, because I know that there's a lot of other items on this agenda, and it's a long one. But this is also an important one, and as Dr. Morris said, and Mr. Nakajima also referenced, we've been talking about, you know, English language learners for a couple of years now in various contexts, and so it's really great to hear a little bit more detail. So looking at the second to last slide that you had about staff and responsibilities, I was wondering, you know, you've got 9.7 full-time teachers, each with an average case of about 20 students. Kind of, if you have any sense, either you or Dr. Morris about what best practices would be for ELL learning in particular, especially given the challenges that you've identified already. So this is a tricky one because that what's appropriate really depends on the student. So this same kind of conversation was just happening within my colleagues in the region, different folks saying, you know, people are thinking about budgets and what are different caseloads, and if you look at the data, there's a wildly huge range of, you know, anywhere from about 15 to 70, right? I mean, it's just like there's some places that are way under resourced, but also for someone to have, you know, 30 students who are level fours or fives and who really just need a little bit of a push in the academic language piece to access content, it's really different than having a beginner, you know, 10 beginners, right, who need two to three hours a day, lots of co-teaching, lots of collaboration, modification, et cetera. So that's maybe not helpful, but that's kind of true. Dr. Morris. Yeah, so I'll add to Katie's not helpfulness, which is that I think also, if you could go back a slide or two, Katie, actually. One more, actually, there we go. So I think the other challenge is that if you look at the right side of this slide, you could see the different numbers of level one, two, three, four, and five students. What's not in this slide is that our staff are generally working in one of three buildings. So it is a challenge. There are moments or there are years where, you know, for whatever reason, a couple students move to a different community and there's a little more flexibility in one school, whereas another school has the opposite thing happen, that the way our schools are sort of currently organized as wonderful as they are doesn't help for flexibility of ELL staff to go where the needs are. And right, it doesn't always work out like, oh yeah, well, we've got a bump in third grade or second grade, these are district numbers, they're not actually at the school level, which is where the staff are, they're at the school level offering those services. So I think, you know, I agree with Ms. Richardson's point, our caseload is not atypical. I think it's a little better than some districts, obviously not as good as some others. I think in the overall scan of Western Massachusetts, we do pretty well with those numbers. At the same time, kind of the needs fluctuate so frequently, not just at the beginning of the year, but throughout the year that we sometimes struggle to have the right staff in the right place to meet the kids that we have and the needs they have. So I think that's what's hard when you look at the math of it, doesn't really describe kind of the whole picture on the ground level. Sorry, if that's not helpful, but that's how. No, it's fine. I guess I was looking for more of like a best practices, you know, if there's a, you know, any thinking or writing on the subject if, you know, there's a recommendation. But I hear what you're saying about the challenge given the difference, you know, need. My other question was really also about, you mentioned there's 21 interpreters in eight languages. And I was just wondering what the, sort of the work statuses are these full-time employees, are these part-time, you said they're doing tutoring, what's their. So these are hourly paid non-contractual employees. So this is not ideal, but it is how we've managed for a long time. It's not ideal because it doesn't support them, right? In being long-term stable employees. And it doesn't, you know, retention, right? When we have fabulous interpreters, we don't often get to keep them at long because they're gonna look for a better deal.  So it's just not, you know, people do it because they love it and because they care and because they have the skill, but not because it's a good position in that sense. Okay, thank you. Okay, I see no further questions or comments from the committee. So I guess, thank you very much. I really appreciate this. And Dr. Morse, I don't know if you wanna introduce the next agenda item. Great, thank you so much. Ms. McDonald? Yeah, it's a little. I was, yeah. Can we tilt it back maybe? Yeah, if we could tilt it back, maybe that might work. Yeah, there you go, because that actually provides a little more. Thank you, I was actually thinking that before too. It's just, it's really hard to make contact, yeah. So while they're setting up, I'll introduce Lanie and Susan, who are the librarians at Fort River Wild. Would I know where Leska from Cracker Farm was not able to be present tonight? But they've got their slides ready to go and I know they've got lots to say in a short amount of time, so I'll let them go. Thank you and welcome. So I am Lanie Blackman from Fort River. And I'm Susan Wells from Wildwood. Thanks for having us. And well, Leska Santiago-Santeno from Cracker Farm can be here. We're gonna attempt to, well, we attempted to explain our programs in five areas, community space, teaching, integrated learning, resources and reading, and we're gonna attempt to hit on those in five minutes. So the first thing is that we are community spaces within our schools and so that means that it doesn't just mean physical space, which the physical space is important, but we're creating these spaces where all kinds of different activities, learning activities and things inside, outside, in between the classrooms after school, during lunch, all these things are happening. And so that space includes facilitating the needs of people and being flexible, but also we do house books. And we have a need for that that continues and actually grows, for instance, at Fort River where we're looking at adding, we're excited about adding the dual language program and looking at the space needs of books there. So this is such a great opportunity because I think a lot of people in the public sphere don't realize that we are librarians, but we are teacher librarians. So we teach classes every week and currently I'm teaching 24 classes, which only leaves like six sections, six 40 minute sections open a week, which would mean that if I were teaching and there were no one supporting me in the library, such as our fantastic paraeducators, then the library would be closed to other students. And if you look further in the slides, we're circulating over 58,000 books a year. And a lot of that happens while we're indisposed with a classroom of kids teaching research. This is kind of a snapshot of in that week in all those minutes that we're teaching and all the kids that we see, we have the K through six gamut and we teach a lot of different things, right? So I'll start the day by teaching fake news with fifth and sixth graders, which is so very important right now. And usually in the media, whether you believe it or not, right? But giving them the tools to evaluate material that they're looking at online and being good digital citizens, right? But then we'll go to fourth grade and we'll look at tall tales and how that connects to their study of American regions and the theme of progress versus nature. And then we'll be working with a second grade, teaching them how to orient themselves in the library and find a book that they would like to read that's at their just right reading level. So it's all different teaching objectives throughout a day. And then some days we could cover every single one of these boxes, which brings us to how we have really worked hard to integrate the library as a standalone class but also with the curriculum. So that we are doing pieces of co-teaching. So that we're looking at a kid from kindergarten and saying, you have an inquiry need, you have a question you want answered, where are the places you can go? You can come to the library, you can get a physical book, you can go online and how are you gonna do that in a safe way and get your question answered? So this is the research cycle and we start at a very simple, here's your question about the solar system all the way to animal adaptations in third grade which is a team taught that we built together as a third grade team library and the art teacher. It's kind of a 4D experience that this year they're adding a physical technology. That they're adding in physical piece with dance and interpretive dance about their animal. So this is an experience that a third grader has across the curriculum. At Wildwood to give you a snapshot of what we're doing, numbers are great and looking at minutes and books and things like that, but what are we doing in each of our spaces at Wildwood I've worked hard to make the MCBA program which is a reading list for kids from fourth to sixth grade come alive for them with the makerspace. So what they do is they pick from one of 25 books, one of 25 books, they take that book and they make it into a game or an activity in the makerspace which makes it active learning. It's usually collaborative, many students opt to work in partner pairs or groups of three and then the public comes and plays their game. So there's so much problem solving, building, engineering, just so many social skills. And it's multifaceted in a lot of ways and this year we added the 3D printer to the makerspace which is really phenomenal to have that. So another connection I would like to make is the students as leaders and teachers, right? We, since we see kids from K to sixth, we get to develop this relationship with them and we also have the opportunity to do cross grade experiences. So on Thursday I'll be taking a group of fifth graders who have been studying the Coretta Scott King Illustrator exhibit that is currently at the Eric Crawl Museum and they'll be the docents to second graders as they take them around this exhibit. We won't use the docents in the Eric Crawl because the fifth graders will be teaching the second graders. Because I have that class time with second graders, the surprise is the second graders are also gonna teach the fifth graders because they've been doing their homework too. This is a really great opportunity for them to work together but also see themselves as leaders and teachers. So some examples of integrated learning at Court River. I sort of focused on how in all of our programs the library skills happen in library class and everywhere else. And so one example here, many languages read aloud at Amherst College. I got together students in the fourth, fifth and sixth grades to read our books in our library. They were in their first languages and to read them together and to explore that collection and then I brought students to Amherst College to do read-alouds and their family members or community members from our school and beyond to listen to these read-alouds. Another example of library skills going places and all the in-betweens is we recently started a saga chapter at Fort River which there's one modeling after the high school a sexuality and gender acceptance group. And this came out of student leadership last year which led to an assembly around how all genders are welcome in our school and now is a lunch club. And so these are some of the ways that we're not only integrating with the curriculum and tapping into student inquiry and making them leaders but beyond the curriculum. And in that, we're also building relationships with students for their entire trajectory in our elementary schools. So actually last week, this third grader who I mentor turned to me and said, Lanny, all the specials teachers, you're the only ones in the school who know all of us. And I was like, we do, we know all of you. And that's true and that is not just, you know, 340 or 420 names but what are your interests and how can we support you academically and socially? And so here is a slide that's an example from Crocker Farm really focusing on how integrated learning means connecting to families and community and culture and that's happening in all of our libraries too. I'm sorry, Bleska, I'm here to throw this at you. So we're gonna move on to digital resources which this is an area I'm very proud of. I think it's a place for families, our community to be a part of what we've made for online resources which are digitally out there for people to access all the time. And they're free and they also support students, special education students, English learners because most of our are sweet of things that I would really urge you to click and explore because you can at your home or any other time. They are resources that read in a natural voice to the student and highlight as they read which shows that every emerging reader needs and supports emerging readers. So when I started in 2015 we had access to 24 eBooks and now Sora Alone which is our newest E and audiobook platform gives us access to over 7,000 titles and we continue to grow. So those are connected to the curriculum. They're in audio form, they're also in eBook form and then there's a read-along feature for our youngest readers which is a very like almost like you remember putting the record player on and you know turn the page and but it's highlighting as they go and they can do it on any kind of tablet, a phone and it's free to our families. So families have really responded to that but there's also many other things to look at there with a lot of non-fiction research that supports our curriculum and then helps kids to go above and beyond. And beyond just telling people in our schools that they can access these things. These resources are dependent in some cases on our state teacher licenses having access for our students. They require management and our collaboration with excellent departments like the IS department. Who made that possible for us to be able to fund these resources? So we do do reading still in case you were wondering. Last year we had almost 59,000 books circulate across our three schools which if you wanna average it out it's about 54 students, books per student last year. And the frame that we use to really promote reading and I hope you've seen throughout our presentation everything that we do is mirrors, windows and doors. Diversity is important to us and we see that it's important to our students, to our teachers for learning. So we want everyone to see themselves, to be able to see others and to know how they can get involved. So we're talking about race and gender and social class and ability and language and to pick not so arbitrary year. But in 2001 this is what books looked like and the book world is catching up. It's very white based. 2018 this is more what the book world looks like. We have access to more of our students seeing themselves represented, not just for instance in historical fiction but in folklore and fantasy and getting your hair cut in regular things. So we picked these years to illustrate because as you can see here from 2001 to 2018 the cost of books has increased but our funding has stayed level in our libraries. But I mean it is an exciting world where in 2001 Heather has two mommies was this iconic work which was like the only diverse book about families and now we have all kinds of books. So the spread from real sisters pretend is a book about a family with adopted sisters and understanding that they belong and are real sisters and it's also about families with people of color and families with two moms and all these things wrapped up together. So we bring this windows, mirrors and doors and this focus on diversity to things like our MCBA mashup list where we make sure that students of different abilities students of different races, gender identities are seen and we don't just do this because it's important but because our students want it. So these are three examples of books that represent various students and you can see this first one here. At Fort River I didn't promote this book at all. It's about a prince who's trying to marry a princess and happens to love wearing dresses and in just three months without me ever mentioning this book but having it on display, well now I mentioned it, having it on display it was checked out 47 times or ghost in two years, 105 times. So I think in closing I just wanted to say that you're always invited to any of our libraries. Please come visit us. Yes, we welcome you to join us anytime. Thank you so much. Any questions or comments from the committee, Mr. Demling? Yeah, thank you so much for coming and excuse me, I'm a little under the weather. I'm so happy this is recorded that we can like point people to I feel like, I know how you guys feel. I feel like part of my school committee life I live in just constant amazement of the end dimensions of our schools. Like I feel like after two years I should be able to give a fairly comprehensive presentation of everything that we offer and then something like this happens and I'm like the depth, I mean I knew some of the things you were talking about but it just makes me so happy to know that we have this kind of excitement and engagement. I loved what you talk about with being a library teacher and there's so many highlighted possibilities here of the things you, the fake news. I wanna take that fake news class with you. I mean I've thought about proposing that in a curriculum and so the fact that you've taken it upon yourselves and you're doing it at the elementary level, which is exactly when it should happen, is so fantastic of the fact that we have an all genders welcome Fort River Saga Club at the elementary level that's led to a lunch club and it's such a thing to be proud of in our community. You know it's like, it was just a sidebar comment to Dr. Morris, you know when we think about all the amazing things we offer in our schools and that are sort of like these hidden secrets that if you dig deep enough you understand it's, these should really be like front and center in terms of like what do we wanna celebrate that we are doing so over the top well? You know it's, I mean you guys are rock stars for making this possible and I love how you framed the maker space and all those examples. I mean sometimes people think of maker space as this like dry engineering STEM thing and you know the way you inject that in the humanities is just so great so I really don't have a question other than keep doing what you're doing and if you have you know resource constraints there are ways that you think are like a smaller or medium kind of investment would be a huge thing for you. You know let us know and let us know what the students are telling you because it sounds like the way that you approach your job is to really connect with the students and then respond to what they're doing so thank you so much. Currently our PGOs sponsor all our author visits so the author visit piece is a huge piece. Last year Lisa Bunker she was just inaugurated in New Hampshire as one of the first transgender state senators. She's an author and she came and visited our sixth grade so for them to see her then go on to be elected was super powerful and that was funded by our PGO so the author visit piece is a real piece that I think we could expand to get more diverse authors into the schools so kids can see wow I can do that. It's really great to just to jump in very quickly the remark about how the community actually supports this kind of learning and I think the libraries in particular I've heard from many community members just singing your praises but also just singing the praises of the program and the work that goes on there so I definitely appreciate hearing that as well. Mr. Nakajima did you have a. Yeah I'm always happy to hear about libraries and I think what you're doing. I echo everything Mr. Demlich said and particularly I think some of the most exciting things are doing the notion of mirrors, windows and doors and also building in both knowing how to navigate and understand media of different sorts, learning to appreciate it and the diversity of that literature including things like if people's first language are different than English that they're able to celebrate and share literature that's of first quality with a broader community because when we talk about the dual language program we always talk about the cultural and social dimension of broadening out what is your community and changing perhaps people's or broadening people's perceptions of that it's wonderful and then the third dimension around maker spaces the idea that every student, every child, every person really should understand that they can not only consume some of the world's greatest art of different sorts but that they're also active participants in reflecting on it and then also adding to that body and so to me the most exciting libraries are places where students can do all those things and as communities where people can do all those things so I just think it's wonderful to hear and I'm glad they have an opportunity to highlight this. I'm curious about one thing you said though so you made the comment that your media budget was level funded since 2001 and so like there are different ways of presenting what that means but in real terms when you're showing the books costing $3 and then $7 for paperbacks my question would be if this is for you or if this is Ernest Mangano or the superintendent is that like level funded but adjusted for inflation? Is that level funded meaning in real dollars like not real dollars? Like what is in real or nominal dollars how is it level funded because the way you describe that you'd think you'd after 17 or 18 years you might need an increase. So I don't have those numbers up at my disposal and John can just certainly work on it but our supply budgets generally aren't adjusted for inflation so if you went at any of and it's not to take the attention away from librarians if you look at any of our supply budgets across this or any district I'll just speak to the Amherst public school district when it's level funded it means level funded so that was an accurate statement. I think the only thing and I'd have to go back and look I think there may have been a reduction for a while it hasn't been I think and I don't have again my disposal at the moment that it's actually fluctuated some that we added some money back to the elementary library budgets in 2000 I'm looking at Mr. Mangano. Yeah I think it was four or five years ago. Yeah so there was a decline and then it was up so I think it's probably accurate that it's the same amount but it had declined and then was brought back up to that level so it wasn't like stagnant many of our supply budgets frankly are stagnant for a length of time this one actually had dips and then rises and I'm not suggesting that their good work couldn't be done with more but I want to answer your question more specifically. Mr. Nagy. So I'm glad you phrased it that way because the last thing I want to do is to get like an inline at it more between one under category and another under category and I'm sure you don't want to do that either because you're talking about your colleagues and everyone's working as hard so I'm actually like I'm grateful that you like threw a bath of cold water on me and said look we're generally underfunded. Not that that's a real, I guess that's a really cold bath of water right? We're just generally chronically underfunded but sort of on the back end of a really inspiring presentation in which you can really see the difference you're making and also you know that everyone, you know better than we do but I think everyone has the experience that the book you never encounter or the material you never encounter is a lost opportunity for new worlds, for new friends, for new experiences and so this is one of those areas in which you can feel very acutely that and also I guess because I'd seen the revenue numbers and overall probably like per capita whatever spending over the last 17 years but I'd never actually heard in the last two years or two and a half years that there was line items that had literally have been cut and in real terms actually been cut substantially because the nominal dollars are the same that means the effect of cut is pretty substantial and I'm not sure there's anything to say about it but I just think this is something we talk a lot and we talked earlier this evening about underfunding of educational line items at the state level, we talk about money being draining out of our district, we talk about what a challenger is but in the end and oftentimes we talk about you know this is gonna hurt kids, this is gonna hurt teachers, this is gonna strain teachers but I hate to put it this way, it all sounds like really abstract, it sounds sort of like we're talking in general terms about like some awful thing that's gonna happen you know highlighted 11 and no, you're talking about real books, real resources, real things that you could do to expand the capability of you and your colleagues to teach and for children to experience worlds you know beyond what they can do now and it matters enormously so I'm not sure that helps because I'm not do what you want, I mean about with the line items because I can't, I don't wanna sort of line item war but we need more money, we need more money in their line items for that. I would say I think that the you know what was stark for me hearing that sort of phrase that way about the books is and then the slides that you also had about the different kinds of books that are available to students now highlights the point about you know how materials can make a difference right and the fact that getting the right materials at the right time is really a benefit to education of kids of course right but it's you know when you see those things kind of drawn out in that way it really does make a difference and for me anyway I think just Dr. Morris' comment about how we're underfunded across the board and the district in terms of materials that that is something that we tend to not pay attention to we tend to pay attention more to staffing or to you know programs and things like that materials are always sort of a second you know thought kind of thing in particular with books you see how integral they are to learning and whole education of students and so it really does make a difference to hear about it in that way and I appreciate your putting it that way it does make me think more now about our budget price process in general you know we were never in a position where we have a ton of extra money but in thinking about where we can actually maybe make some increases or improvements to the budget you know for all the different program areas that we have is there a way to look at these things you know sort of a little more holistically right and you know can we make some increases or adjustments in places where there's you know a lack of funding or level funding that has gone on for too long with the recognition you know sort of eyes wide open that they make such a huge difference to the everyday lives of our students so I want to thank you for that I also want to say I appreciate your comments about the library Paris I know that that's also been a point where the community has come out full force for you know a number of years now thankfully and you know I think they continue to be definitely an important part of this library program that we have across our schools so thank you for highlighting that I also don't have very many other questions or comments beyond that except to say thank you so much for the work that you do really appreciate it Dr. Morris I think at the end I think in terms of resources you know there are occasional odd years we haven't had them super recently where at the end of the year we do have some resources to expend and I will tell you that the librarians they're wonderful expenders and I don't mean that to me that they spend unwisely is actually quite the opposite that they are ready they know what they would spend the funds on if funds were available and we have went and shared when we do have some in relatively small size I mean to be very blunt but they've got PO's ready like within 48 hours they are ready to go because they really know what the students need to the point that was raised earlier so I appreciate that about them and we do try to find ways even if not through the formal budget process if we do have some flexibility in the spring sorry we get too busy and we don't give you a lot of time but the staff really do a fantastic job of utilizing resources if there are additional resources and that's one of our go-to places can I say one thing about that yes just recently we bought a binding machine which many of the graphic novels that we get are there so consumed so readily they just fall apart so then do we purchase the same book over and over again or do we repair it for $2,100 at that time that you gave us that money we bought a binding machine that we share among the three schools and we're able to do our repairs ourselves which increase the life of a book which means more kids can read it that's great thank you any other questions or comments from the committee okay thank you again thank you Dr. Morris last but not least we'll call up not for the meeting but for budget guidance we'll call up Ms. Breen, Mr. Takayama and Ms. Runyon who are the technology teachers at Cracker Farm Fort River and Wildwood respectively and thank you for coming tonight welcome it's a test for technology educators we have to look at it anyway we really wanted to see if you'd be able to handle this portion of the show thank you I'm Katherine Runyon I'm a Wildwood technology teacher Dr. Takayama Fort River technology teacher and I'm Liz Breen I'm at Cracker Farm we're going to tell you a little bit about some of the different things that we do it's we're a combination of technology educators and school-based instructional services so we information services so we try and take care of a little bit of everything so between teaching teaching kids teaching teachers taking care of anything that has a wire basically anything that can be plugged in yes is our responsibility yes seems to happen so our main role is technology educator as Katherine said we're part of the specialist rotation we teach every student once a week for 40 minutes and we base our curriculum off the Massachusetts Department of Education's Digital Literacy and Computer Science Standards and ISD's Standards for our students and we put that in the packet so for kindergarten and second graders we focus on keyboarding educational games and creative problem-solving educational tools third and sixth graders we focus on research project-based learning and productivity tools because each of the students has a Google Apps for Education account and uses Google Classroom Docs, Slides, and Sheets often for example we post assignments with links and templates in Google Classroom and students create Google Slides presentations Google Doc posters, videos or other technology projects Katherine's going to talk about digital citizenship coding and the robotics part of our curriculum and so one of the things is digital access and we are kind of like the behind the scenes people in that a lot of what happens in the classroom and in other places does have something to do with the kids having access to technology whether it's in the library we work a lot together in the library figuring out we do the fake news together and we figure out how to get kids really get access to this information and so we have we've bought subscriptions for lots of different things like BrainPop and BrainPop Junior for different groups so that's used all over the school and we want to make sure that kids have access whether it's in school we know some kids do not have access out of school and so we try and work with the IS department seeing how they can get access or figuring out when they can get access during the day we also think about digital etiquette like making sure that kids can one more thing with the digital access if they need to be able to read or write digitally they can use the read write extensions for Google apps so that they can hear things or they can like speak into the computer so that they can get their information in there and it's not necessary for everybody but we try and teach it to as many kids as possible so that they've got it available so it's kind of a universal design we also try and talk about digital access making sure people know how to react to each other can they reply to each other like in sixth grade we start teaching them about email can they reply to each other without replying all that's a problem for a lot of adults as well as children but it's one of those things that if it's not directly taught they never quite get it and that's why a lot of adults have the problem can they respond responsibly can they know how to relate to other people online we've all seen lots of issues with online things with social media lately so we try and prepare them for social media even though we know some second graders have gotten social media accounts supposed to be 13 year olds but like most of our fifth and sixth graders have some sort of social media accounts so we're trying to make sure that they become responsible with that and then we're also trying to protect their digital rights and responsibilities and their safety and security making sure that they know about copyright laws so that they're responsible about things making sure they know about their own online presence making sure that they know about how to be respectful of other people and be cautious about strangers online because we know that kids and some adults friend anybody who requests so we do have unfortunate frequent experiences working with our counselors and administrators about kids either sexting or cyberbullying or other things and so we're frequently in on those conversations and trying to figure out how to make them be even more responsible and be more aware of what is out there so those are some of the things about digital citizenship having access and then being able to use that access in a really good way another thing that we do is a lot of coding and steam and I know I heard something about stem and steam being kind of dry earlier but it is really a problem-solving experience whether we're doing the international hour of code and using different languages like Scratch Blockly, Logo, Python, Tinker and creating either artistic or animations or games whether kids can create stuff Scratch just came out with Scratch 3.0 Liz and I were supposed to be at a workshop today on Thursday but they cancelled it unfortunately but we did go to a mini workshop a few weeks ago but I've been using Scratch 3.0 and Scratch 2.0 for many years and it's a great experience for kids to be really creative and I've got some kids making like stories that are going back and forth or working together on games together it's very cool we've done robotics whether we do like Lego or WeDo or in Mindstorms or we're using ProBots and Bebots which use kind of a logo programming I have a couple of maps of the Amherst of Amherst on my floor that I've made out with tape it doesn't have every street and all the kids are like where's my street it's kind of a simplified map but then I have kids use the ProBots and Logo to figure out how to get from one place to another so it's kind of a fun problem solving thing and we use our 3D printers in our rooms and either print out parts of projects or I recently worked with the fourth graders to create maps of the United States that created puzzles puzzle pieces with the 3D printers and so they can use these different things to show their knowledge in different topics so these are all 21st century skills just trying to figure out different things in different ways I know I've used Steam for having kids explore solar projects and different kinds of inventions and trying to figure out problem solving how to make cars move in different ways or is like what can you do with a solar panel and how can you use that to make the world better and that's kind of been how I think of using Steam and Steam as an engineering to try and figure out okay how can we make things even more exciting more better yeah your Lego club yeah I've done the Lego clubs and things like that so it's a lot of fun so we were talking about our technology classes but outside of those classes we do a lot of extracurricular activities for example we integrate with teachers by helping out in classroom projects for example I help out third graders create an animal slideshow they spend almost two months on and they present it in April we also collaborate with classroom teachers by teaching technology tools they'll use in the classroom we each individually help out in different ways around our schools Wildwood has a lot of integration projects Crocker Farm has Film Festival and Empty Bulls Night Fort River has a student newsletter and a yearbook and additionally we run and Wildwood has first Lego League teams in the past few years do you want to say something about it? we've had a number of Lego League teams that we haven't done them in the last few years but hope to get those happening again in the future and additionally we run coding, robotics, keyboarding, 3D printing and 3D building clubs throughout the year now we're just going to talk about another important role we play at our school I know there's another whole piece to our job just like in the library they're also running a bookstore as well but we'd like to make you aware of some of the extra things that we actually do we're the first ones to field all the phone calls and the drop-ins on any technical question as we said anything with the plug today I had four jammed printers and there were no students in school so students Chromebooks that don't work forgotten passwords any type of Google question we're just the go-to person that comes they come to our door holding a little Chromebook and then if we can't troubleshoot an issue we're the go-to person to put in the work orders and then we send them up to Jerry down at IS and those guys are great they're usually there within one day it's usually about 150 per work orders per year for each building so that's quite a bit that we have to do there we're also responsible what I call for bringing the buildings online at the start of school so for like the first week before school starts with all the Chromebooks and you can see this is just a list of the equipment, a general list how much we have now compared to what we've had over the past years but all the Chromebook carts because students move from classroom to classroom we have to reorganize all those back up, we put them reorganized and then username and passwords for every classroom so the teachers need that whole list so there's a whole organization piece that's coming on the back end that needs to start up for that very first day of school so we're doing that for the whole school as well as getting our classroom set up you know so sometimes that gets to anything but you know that's in addition to what we have to do as well because there's and then buttoning up the equipment in June just everything organized at the end so there's a lot of things that we feel personal responsible for I know where every cart is I know where every laptop is I know every teacher has a laptop as well that we're responsible for and when Chromebooks go missing you don't want to have to talk to them we were also told to bring to this meeting maybe some improvements that we would like to see or you know some wish list kinds of things so the ones that we found that came to our top of our priority list was we would really like to do more classroom integration and really work with teachers a little bit more especially as they've had Chromebooks and as the teachers responsibility for teaching different things our role has turned more to STEM and STEAM but we would like to really work with the teachers on how can we integrate that with more of their curriculum that's going in there so there's always ongoing talks about that and then continued the last one that continued tech instruction at middle school and high school sometimes we're the last instructional technology teachers that the kids will see unless they choose for some of the electives in high school but there's nothing really in middle school and they really have to seek it out in high school it's not an automatic kind of thing if they want it so lots of kids are like oh I want to keep doing this I want to learn more about this programming language we're like okay well here are a lot of resources where you can do it on your own because come back and see us otherwise you may not have that opportunity so without organized stuff some kids will just fall off the wagon and not really not stick with it some of our spaces but we are limited by the size of the rooms and the organization of things so looking at those so those are some pie in the sky things but as well as things that we can actually talk with teachers and principals and actually get to do in our classroom especially the classroom integration if you have any questions for us thank you very much we're like I know because you're like way far beyond on your agenda we know that at this point any questions or comments from the committee thank you thank you very much for sticking with by the time but also just preparing everything and I think it's a similar comment I think that was made earlier by a colleague about the libraries that when you start seeing all the work that you do and the many different ways in which you're able to integrate with your colleagues an understanding a sophistication and then also an engagement with technology in different ways I think it's great and so I just really appreciate you're bringing this to us I sat at the joint capital lending committee last year I feel like I've had lots of conversations as well as our budget side about buying new Chromebooks like do we need desktop computers like weirdly enough I've been in another venue where I've had lots of conversations around technology so it's the educational piece and how you're the classroom work you're doing for me and it's probably not an appropriate topic for this venue but the last bullet that they had on their improvement suggestion is like super meaningful to me because to me when you look through the state guidelines or guidance on the subject and then you think about just how students are engaging and then utilizing technology over time and all the challenges that come from that some of which are super practical like how do you set up like a home network or something and then others that are more sort of esoteric like there's some new piece of fake news out there or technology how do I come to understand what I'm hearing in the news and then just other levels of computational thinking and things like that that are super important but I'm going to leave that there because you said you're doing a wonderful job on the topic for a different committee. Thank you. I remember many years ago in a school committee meeting one of the former school committee members said well kids already know how to use tech so why do they need tech teachers and I hope we've proved them wrong him wrong. Well I want to say thank you also for coming tonight I really appreciate it and Mr. T is one of my kids favorite teachers over at Fort River they're constantly talking about Mr. T and hanging out with him but I really appreciate it and I actually really appreciate hearing a lot about the nuance in your work so it's not just about getting in front of a screen but it's also thinking about things like digital etiquette and online security and safety which are becoming such critically important things now for young people who are spending an incredible amount of time in front of screens and that's as a school committee member just as a parent I think about quite a bit about how to make sure the time that kids do spend in front of screens is productive and that they're not just kind of sitting mindlessly doing stuff but that they're engaged and learning and hopefully furthering their education in some way and so I'm always aware of a lot of the different programs that are made to offer even I think next door there's quite a popular summer camp program for kids who are interested in tech and there's a lot of promises made and it's very expensive and so it's great to hear what's happening in our schools because I think that that actually serves as a more thoughtful in some ways in a lot of ways actually programming around this issue we do have to make sure our kids are tech savvy and this is a 21st century and there's a lot of things that will be happening online and happening with computers and tech generally so it's really great to have our schools actually aware of that and pushing the boundaries as much as they can I think that in just thinking about our budget process or budget guidance process it's really helpful to have these suggested improvements I also would want to echo one of the things that I've been thinking a lot about is about classroom integration and how you actually sort of cross learning tech with health for example like how is additional screen time impacting mental health for students and even physical decline in physical activity as a result of so much screen time so how do we bring in those aspects into what's going on in our tech classroom but then also just I love hearing about the combination of work happening with your team and library team and bringing in those different ways that also represents just extra work for you so I think I want us to think about ways that we can both share the burden and then provide also the resources that you need to do your jobs well and to make sure that this is happening the way that we expect it to happen and the community expects it to happen but thank you again very much for this presentation tonight and Dr. Morris did you want to add anything to that? Very briefly so two things that they breezed through it because of the time constraints but it wasn't that long ago that we were in a Google district and you know I had a teacher tell me the other day because they were working on report cards like there's no way I could do my job working with colleagues and co-teaching relationships if we didn't have Google like just and that's not an ad for Google that's just the way that there's file sharing and the way that lesson plans can be co-authored and co-edited and that wouldn't have happened without the three folks who are here you know we did all the PD the mass like lots of people in auditory like that kind of PD excuse me but the critical pieces were that yeah I did that PD but Liz can you show me how to do this because right that's my learning profile is going to be that I need someone on one tutoring and so it wasn't that long ago that we had no file sharing in the same way that we have now acknowledged that work because now it's like sort of routinized that we have that but that was not it would not have gone smoothly without the support of folks and so one thing that didn't talk they touched on the three of you but I know you would have if you had more time is around the professional development end of things which is not just the kind of some of the pieces you talked about but it is really critical that we have kind of professional developers and technology supporting all of our staff and the second is actually what I would say which is that technology in our schools is really about critical thinking it's about analysis it's not about the keypads and the screens you know those are vehicles to a much larger end that we all I think can agree we want for our students so I think you exhibited that by what you said but I want to put a finer point by stating that very clearly at the end of the presentation so thank you all. Thank you. Thank you so much and all the other presentations talked about staff and I'm believing that it's just the three of you but if you could just confirm that there's what is your staffing situation and technology in each building? Yeah we used to have paraprofessionals in Fort River and Wildwood which were the two larger schools at that time Mark Smedow and Crocker Farm did not have that and the paraprofessionals were helpful in when we would get kids or teachers who were having issues we didn't have Chromebooks or even the third as many laptops at that time but if we had technical issues sometimes either they would deal with it or they would take over a class after we'd given the main lesson and then we would deal with something while they kind of supervised and so it was kind of an extra extra hand for all the equipment we have probably tripled the amount of equipment and lost those paraprofessionals probably about 10 10 to 12 years ago but at this point it's one per building and then I know that the IS department has shrunken in those 10 years and they are dealing with many many many times the amount of pieces of equipment that they used to between the Chromebooks from the third grade through high school all of the projectors which are now in starting they're everywhere and they're starting to fall apart unfortunately they're starting to fail because they're all there from about 8 or 9 years ago but they're being replaced but they're being replaced but it's a process and it's kind of consuming for them and they've been helping us with all of our extra equipment their 3D printers are dot cams weren't there 10 years ago we didn't have dot cams so these are they are working at a smaller staff with much more equipment so we are always thankful when they're with their response time and how really helpful they are to us so we try to we try to take off their bullet burden by doing as much trouble shooting as we can but it's you know that takes away from our student planning or student work time as well it's a trade off okay thank you again thanks okay so Dr. Morris moving along to our next item on the agenda is a dual language registration lottery so in your packet you'll see that there's a page right after the end of the technology presentation that has kind of like a blue flow chart and Ms. Richardson is going to come back up and present this and this is for your feedback we'd be looking to come back in February with kind of more formalized perhaps I don't know I don't want to predict that but we're not looking for a vote or any formal statement tonight we're really just looking for your feedback so that we can come back in February with perhaps something a little more final for us to move forward which works on our timeline so I forgot I have to keep pressing this so I think I'll start facilitating it and Ms. Richardson you can jump in as you'd like so last time we spoke about this we talked about making sure oh yeah this is the same thing that's on the packet there's a small edition okay great thank you so the original version all the way back into the fall talked about having a process that would after our kindergarten screening would result in families being notified whether they were part of the language program or not one of the pieces of feedback we received from the community as well as from staff is that going through screening at one school most families fall in love with that school they meet the staff they make a connection with that school environment the students meet the teachers that they'll be working with the counselor that they'll be working with perhaps a principal or assistant principal and that it was in students best interest to actually have that resolved before that occurred we've also spoken about in the past wanting to make sure that we're trying to get as close to a 50-50 balance of students who come with some Spanish language background and students who did not so we really want to compliment Miss Richardson's work and trying to put together a flow chart that would explain a process to sort of serve both of those ends to have a process to enroll Spanish speakers in the front end because in our community we will not struggle to have 50% of the students be native English speakers with our demographics our kind of efforts have really been go have been and will continue to be to encourage families who have Spanish language background to take part in the program even if Fort River is not their home community or home school neighborhood school however you want to describe it so I think I'll just walk through the flow chart and Miss Richardson you can then I'll give you an opportunity to jump in and talk about the slight modification so our registration is actually set we're getting a nice banner for the town common kind of a new one which is March 22nd it starts we're actually having a registration event well ahead of that which is just we had it last year for the first time we spoke about it in the committee last time which is for families who are interested in students it's sort of like a celebration of our schools our principals go up and talk about each school families can make positive connections and then also we have post-meeting around dual language because we don't want to take any attention away from all three of our actually pellums invited so all four of our elementary schools they'll be there so we have kindergarten registration beginning on March 22nd we'll ask families if they're interested in the dual language program and their language background you can see on the Miss Richardson's handout something that you've seen in presentations earlier around how we might ask for that information that point next month we'll enroll Spanish speaking families there would likely be events for planning and I know Miss Richardson and Miss Chamberlain are planning events not just at our schools but in neighborhoods for families to share more information particularly Spanish speaking families that way and see how close we can get to that 50% threshold that's our aim after that complete we'll enroll English speakers again for river students as we've discussed well the first priority if there are spots we'll have the lottery be pulled for non-fort river primarily English speaking families and we'll notify families with the date of May 3rd all families with the exception of we trend reserve four seats for late enrollees of their status because screening doesn't start till about two weeks after that so it gives all families kind of advanced notice and it's not like the day before screening starts you get this information and try to give families because families may put in for the lottery and then decide up not to participate in it we want to give families that choice that's a general flow of kind of how we're currently thinking about this but I want to turn it to Miss Richardson if she wants to add a bit more before we open up for more feedback so the main thing that I added just after some feedback and looking at guidance I'll say that there's a lot of it was helpful to look at a lot of different district models and talk with Mabe and it's complicated right but one thing that I thought was helpful in clarifying is now in the second sentence of that first block on the bottom and that's right from desi guidance and that sort of gets at the issue that I think we talked about in the fall where they're thinking about two way as being 50-50 is sort of the easier or older way of thinking about it and it still makes sense for us to think about Spanish speakers and English speakers but the reality is it's more complicated and so the way that it was described there I think helped clarify that so if you want to take a minute to just read that I think that might help with that piece and just for the sake of the community who may be watching at some point I'm just going to read the sentence out loud because it's not something that was in the materials and the agenda so the sentence that's in question right now says two-way programs include approximately equal numbers of students who are monolingual or dominant in English at the time of enrollment and students who are monolingual or dominant in the partner language at the time of enrollment keep going sorry that whole quote section there may also there may also be students who have proficiency in both languages at the time of enrollment a general rule of thumb is that to be considered a two-way program no less than one-third and no more than two-thirds of the student population should be monolingual or dominant in either English or the partner language at the time of enrollment so the way that they describe that last sentence I think helps kind of say there's flexibility here but that's the range we're looking for Dr. Morris in the last couple things that I wanted to mention are in the kind of Q&A format but I want to again just highlight some of those particularly the ones on the back of that page which is that we want to build in a place that if a student who is in the dual language program moves to another area of town that they don't lose their seat in the program and that's really thinking through families move a whole range of reasons and if we're committing, we're asking families to commit to this program for multiple years we need to commit to families as long as they stay within Amherst you know the bounds of Amherst and I think that we have that was one thing and I think the other thing that we haven't talked explicitly about here is that there really is a team looking at the enrollment it won't be one person so you can see a list that it says the elementary registrar, ELL coordinator which is Ms. Richardson for her principal and representative for human resources that we're trying to think through these decisions aren't they're not as as binary as it seems like one bucket here, there and so having involved in a team making these decisions person seem to make a lot of sense and so I just want to highlight Ms. Richardson's thinking about that because I think it's spot on Any questions or comments from the committee? Mr. Dunling? Mr. McDonald? Just make sure you press the button for I keep doing the same thing but yeah It's after 9.30 so I first go around Is this first page meant to be like a public okay if that's the case then my piece of constructive criticism is that that first question and answer is a very helpful long description of why we consider language to be why we're taking into consideration but it doesn't directly answer the question okay how's the lottery going to work I think what might be helpful is to take that block and the content is very good as like the last explanation of why is language considered as a factor in the enrollment that sort of gives you the pedagogical background and then replace it at the forefront with just basically a two or three Q&A that essentially recreates the information that you've done in the top which is how is enrollment determined well first Spanish speakers in the Fort River District and then Spanish speakers outside of and then so it's like if you're just picking it up you're not reading a long does he quote you're saying oh that's how the lottery works oh why would you do it like that oh here's a longer explanation on the back page so just for public consumption I don't know if this is more of a question or just a thought but in answering the question about what if I move what if my family moves and we answer well if you stay in the district you stay in the program it's going to beg the question about what happens if my family moves to Hadley or outside of the district so we probably should prepare an answer for that and I don't know what the answer is so Dr. Morris if families don't live in Amherst unless they're unless they're there's school choice seats available and they there's a lottery system that goes with that that this cannot be a factor in legally they would have to go to the whatever district it is that they connected to the town they reside in right to say that we need to be explicit about that any other questions or comments Mr. Nakajima I guess I have one in a meeting I guess sometime before whenever it is March 22nd it would be great to I don't know how you get feedback on where you're going to do outreach particularly within neighborhoods or within Spanish speaking community but I would just love to hear how that's going and that we're on the right track it's kind of funny like I'm not trying to delve and pry into it but I just mean I'm interested in hearing more about how we're ensuring we're successfully reaching all the parents and as well as people's networks to engage them so I actually I think you know what you've laid out here so the kindergarten registration timeline and approach makes a lot of sense I would agree with the comments that have already been made I think this doesn't still quite tell us too much about the actual lottery per se and so I don't know if I'm if it's an extra step that we need to identify in this flowchart or if there's actually like a separate flowchart that we need to describe but again thinking about this as a public document you know it doesn't tell us exactly like for families that are coming in saying I want my kid enrolled in this you know what can I expect how can I put my name forth it doesn't really tell you that so I don't know if there's additional work that you're thinking about doing around that just to make it explicitly clear yeah can I ask what questions are you thinking of because I think the challenge is that we don't want to say too much because we don't have the ability to really look at who the students are and the complexity so we don't want to put a specific number so it says about 50% for Spanish speaking seats but you know is there wiggle room there yes so there's some things that we need to be really clear about and others that we don't want to say in that level so I guess I interpret your comment which may or may not be accurate is that this describes on the district level sort of like this kind of broad approach which I think for all the reasons Richardson said makes sense but it doesn't describe that so what do I do if I want to be a part of it like how do I describe it so I think it says registrations forms will ask families I think having a little more definition on what that looks like which this helps with but I think it's not explicit right we worked on this together it's not explicit about how that goes and it's also not explicit in terms of like what we've shared earlier like there's two lotteries I mean you could you can intuit it but it's not actually explicitly listing that there's a lottery for Spanish speakers that'll go first trying to fill to roughly 50% of the class with the caveat that you mentioned and then there's a lottery for English speakers I think it's lacking it's not that it's not there it's just not there like I think for this group we would all sort of oh I can see that but I think for a public facing document we need to be more explicit I think that's exactly right and I think to communicate to families they need the details they need the nuts and bolts so I think providing like I said maybe it's a separate chart or maybe it's worked into this one very explicitly detailing all the different elements there's us frankly as a school committee you know a way to communicate this also to constituents right into the community just to help them better understand what's involved I saw Mr. Nakajima and then I think Ms. Spitzer yeah I'm going to build off that point because actually I was just thinking about this that you know you have a team that's reviewing the the students who are applying families who are applying to admit this into the program and I think one of the things I can imagine that if you get in you're probably just really really excited and so if you get in you may not care what the mechanics of the lottery are because you're just super excited to be in I imagine if you don't get in for some reason then you really care if it mattered to you but it's something that really your family cared about enormously what the actual mechanics of the lottery are and how many of the factors in it are arbitrary and how many of them are non-arbitrary and I'm not trying to screw up sort of the art of doing this but just as an example if we're going to use the term lottery which we've been using in repeated meetings it'd be interesting to know whether if you get a pool of 30 applicants are you actually a lottery? Do you actually put like the names in a hat or whatever the mechanism would be some random number generator and then you you pop a name up and then you review and screen that candidate and say well can we accept this person because we want to they won the lottery but now we need to make sure if they fit or are we using the term lottery and I'm not going to be funny about this I'm literally asking are we using the term lottery but we don't actually mean it and then we're going to apply a screen to the students to figure out whether they can fit and then if that's the case if we if we're taking 15 kids in a given category and how do we differentiate the 15th from the 16th and 17th kids if there are otherwise have relatively similar characteristics I am having similar thoughts to Mr. Nakajima and one of the biggest things I think that if I were a parent and I wanted to get into this program knowing that my odds of being accepted if I'm in the Spanish lottery versus the English speaker lottery is different how do I know at what stage in the process am I going to be told you're an English speaker or you're a Spanish speaker when we're dealing with the spectrum so on I think a lot of us have had a little bit of exposure to Spanish maybe through preschool and we're dealing with kindergartners and I just think that's going to be one of the biggest questions and it's not on here anywhere or forgive me if I'm missing the response and then I think having dealt with you know on a very peripheral level housing lotteries for example in New York City for affordable housing and some of these logistics that Eric's getting into are really important I mean we're not dealing with the same volume or anything but I think you know you had to meet certain requirements and it was very clearly laid out to earn between this many dollars and this many dollars you can't have this or that and I think we probably need to I know we want to have wiggle room but it's going to be controversial and if we don't at least think these through we're going to potentially have a lot of angry parents in our hands Dr Morrison do you want to respond? So because of the things the agenda like I don't want to belabor it but I think what you raised is a really good point but it's actually a really interesting point so what I hear is comparing it and I know you weren't using the totally analogous to a system where it literally is a formula right so that's really different than the way we've approached this task so I think it'd be really helpful to know if the committee's will is to make it more literally formulaic you know and and that's okay you know I have some thoughts I'd share about it but I don't want to come back in February with some of these other pieces done in terms of logistics but I still have it not meet that standard and then kind of play out a perhaps awkward conversation so I'm not suggesting that your comment is or isn't consistent with the committee but I think that's a big all the other comments I would say are sort of consistent I can understand it and so perhaps I'm overly dramatizing my understanding of your comment but when I think of New York City housing lottery thinking maybe you're not either but Miss Spitzer yeah so it's the only other lottery process I've been involved in so it's the one that I'm comparing this to but I do think where there's going to be a lot of gray areas so it's going to be really important to be transparent and document so I mean I think the thing is with the housing lottery you could always fall back on well you know your tax forms that you read between this and this with language you can't do that I understand that so I don't think we can do that but because there are going to be more I think there's going to be more demand among parents than there are seats and so if we're going to at the end of the day do this fairly we need to be very transparent and right now it sounds like we're going to be trusting the enrollment team to be deciding who gets categorized as an a Spanish speaker an English speaker if I'm wrong and then that kind of seems like the area where there's going to be the most subjective decision-making process going on and that could have the biggest impact on whether or not if I'm a parent whether or not my child gets into the program so yeah if you have a quick response and then Miss McDonald also has because we do have to move on so many items on the agenda still yeah so my quick response then I'm happy to follow up because I'd love to hear your thoughts I mean I think that's more consistent with the second comment maybe I heard the first comment differently was consistent with the way we're thinking about it I think we can be more explicit so we're not judging Spanish speaking skills as part of this it's right it's the family who is self-reporting it I think what we can be explicit about is that there's a distinction on this chart that may have an impact of where you where families self-report their children on this chart based on you know Spanish only know English versus speaks English understand some Spanish and then they have a differential impact I think we need to be explicit about that so I think I hear what you're saying much more clearly now and I may have misinterpreted your first comment which I apologize Miss McDonald I was just going to comment on the question about formulae because I think everything that you've been telling for the last few months is that we don't want it to be too rigid and formulae so I back that I would endorse that but I think I do agree that having more transparency and more explanation of the criteria that are going to be used as input in making that enrollment decision so being very clear that there is some amount of subjectivity and just being upfront about that but then being also very clear about here are the specific criteria and it's in here it's just not sort of like here's what we're going to look at and how we're going to do that and I think also to your point of you don't want to say okay if you pick box seven or eight you're going to be considered Spanish but sort of being clear that that you know that you're going to be using this to to decide the composition of each classroom that's exactly and I was going to mention too language survey is another piece that we would look at with this right and that has a lot of information about parents first language what languages are used most in the home and things like that so we can say that those two documents together will give us that picture of the language use Mr. Nakajima yeah I'm sorry to throw in one more thing but so I'm hung up on this lottery business even if this isn't true in year one I don't see how it's not possible that it would be that this wouldn't be true in year two three or four but you're going to have a situation in which you essentially first slots let's say 12 through 20 and let's say you only have 15 right but you've analyzed the kids you have 12 and 12 through 20 let's say of the applicants are all in one degree another equally viable students to be enrolled if I were told there is a lottery to get into this program I would want to know that there is some non-biased random way to select equally eligible within degrees of reasonable degrees of separation students because in every school system in America like every single one so this isn't about an amour story you have situations where somebody assumes that because you're the volunteer soccer coach and the soccer head coach happens to be married to the person who is on the enrollment team then we all know that's why Janie and Jimmy got into the program because they're friends it's not random it's because they know someone and everyone always feels like or whatever the story is every district in the entire country has some story where they feel like maybe they just moved to town maybe they're new they don't know anyone so they don't have any way to get an inside hook on the way things work in this town but they want to know that we're treated fairly and so I get the subjectivity of the range of criteria you deal with to try to figure out how you get a good pool together but I also think I mean in my view and I'm saying it's very strongly because I believe it's very strongly you've got to find a way to be able to explain to people and also adopt a practice that also allows for absolute fairness and equity for all the families in town who want to be a part of this program and there are going to be so many knows that we have to be able to explain to folks who are going to be able to legitimately come to you and say I have a case where I can tell you for a fact my kid is perfectly eligible for your program and to me what you're going to have to be able in position to do is say well actually you're right and here's how we treated the 40 applicants or the 40 applicants or whatever we got who were all equally eligible and I apologize we didn't have the slots I'm saying this very forcefully but I'm telling you and I strongly believe it is absolutely a mistake not to have something built in that you can explain to people that we're doing so yeah so yeah a lot of districts either live stream the lotteries or they do it live like a public meeting for exactly that reason we would do one of the two but again it's about being explicit so what I'm going to recommend is it sounds like the committee is more or less aligned just in terms of having this be a more transparent process have some more detail about the selection process initially that we could then share with the community is it possible to bring back some suggestions or recommendations for the committee to consider for our next meeting which is end of February at this point? yeah that was the plan to bring back another track great so thank you again Mr. Richardson for all the work you put into this it's really just coming together amazingly well so thank you just for planning purposes for our agenda because I see some members of the audience and it is getting late and we have a lot to get through so I just want to recheck in with people about what our estimated maximum end time is I don't know if we ever checked in initially so I was being slightly let me recheck I think it's a fair question I also think that there's probably something that we can do with the agenda just looking at this at the very least I'm wondering if it would make sense for us to move up the MSBA SOI process conversation because we have some members in the community here who I'm sure don't want to stick around until midnight to have this conversation I see some smiling faces in the audience that's your main suggestion so if the committee is okay with that let's move up that discussion Dr. Morris is that okay with you? absolutely okay so next item on the agenda is the MSBA SOI process Dr. Morris so I don't have a tremendous amount more to share from last Thursday two things that I wanted to share that we do have the staff session scheduled and the staff have been notified by email on Friday that there are three consecutive days last week in January and we let all staff know about all three dates so that if someone had a conflict on one of them they could attend Monday was at Wildwood and you have a conflict on Monday you can go to Crocker Farms on Tuesday so we let all staff know and formalize the other thing to note is that the chair, I don't know if you want me to comment or you Mr. Donas, but the chair and I were invited to talk at the town council or be president of the town council on Monday the 28th yes although that seems like it's still kind of gray area, not quite sure yeah I think my voice trailing at the end was trying to neither one of us are quite clear on that I think we are meeting with the town council president this week and town manager to better understand what that request might be again I think just to restate what we talked about last meeting town council is very eager to support our efforts to reach out to the community and get feedback which is great so we are hoping to have this meeting and then maybe you know I don't know if we necessarily have to be at the town council but at the very least come up with some sort of plan for engagement that then can be communicated back to the town council for decision making and carrying out is that sound fair those are my expectations anyway for the yeah I think I talked to you know the town manager just literally couple hours ago whenever we started I think there is some hope of kind of a very condensed version of what I presented last Thursday just so that they are in the loop because they certainly get a lot of communication from the public so that it gives them a bit more context than they might have Mr. Nakajima, Mr. Demling yeah so I think we saw an email a while ago about a potential invitation for the town council on this subject I guess the only thing I say which I think sounds good planning anyway is I'm hoping that the chair and the superintendent would both go because I think when we're talking through the process I don't know how we do that without the school committee being obviously represented to the council on what our approach is as well as what you're thinking was makes sense yes I was going to say that so plus one Mr. Nakajima's comment so it's been great to hear the town council's enthusiasm and wanting to be engaged it's also very appropriate because one of the technical requirements of this is that we want the town council not just to vote on the statement of interest which they would need to do anyway any statement of interest but we want their understanding and we want their feedback and ultimately we wish for their full approval of the consensus statement which is going to be a very important powerful piece of that community consensus so getting them involved and providing whatever information that they would want to hear I think is very important so I think yes in the interest of time giving them a condensed version but I would certainly forward them the full presentation that you gave you know if there's additional edits enhancements to that that you wanted to do was maybe more appropriate you know one because I think it is a long presentation but I think it's as short as it can be while covering a pretty lengthy topic there wasn't a ton in there about the the notion of the driver of fiscal responsibility to the town it was it was a bullet on the MSBA history slide but it sort of didn't get its own showcase and I think rightfully so for the introduction talking about the educational urgency that is the wheelhouse of the superintendent school committee but you know that being said even if there wasn't the educational urgency the fiscal responsibility and the fiscal urgency of the town is a huge huge driver as well so I don't know just think whether that's a comment or another slide you know because I think I think that the presentation that the superintendent gave is a pretty good document to be able to socialize to the broad public as a introduction to the topic so just you know to think about that yeah great sure snuck another question too is you mentioned you had scheduled the staff discussions and presentations and I don't know if the committee knows what those dates are but I was wondering whether you feel it's appropriate or welcome or you let members of the school committee come and just sort of sit and listen what's going on like not saying anything but just sit and observe what staff say I'm very open to that I think if we're going to have a quorum even if you even if the intent is not to say anything I think the safe approach would be to post so what I can do is ask Mr. Smorlin to just I can send those dates out and if we have a quorum just post it as a school committee because you may get asked a question directly and feel awkward for staff to ask a question of a committee member and not be able to respond I just maybe something that the committee itself wants to discuss or debate or something like that but in an earlier meeting I had expressed the opinion that given the importance of this topic and you know the depth of feeling that everyone's expressed about the subject that it would be ideal if a member of the school committee I don't care if it's all five of us but I'm just saying at least somebody goes to every single listening session so that we come back to debate what we're going to do in addition to taking the you know if we do a facilitator whatever their report is whatever summary you provide we can actually warrant that we've actually directly been hearing listening to people and taking that information into account I would totally agree with that and we did discuss this before although I think from that comment initially I had taken it was really the community sessions so perhaps I don't know if Dr. Morris is the same thing but I agree I think having committee members present for the listening sessions at least a large majority of them is critical for showing that so Dr. Morris you can send along those dates or Mrs. Morlin will thank you the other thing that I just wanted to mention was in your packets are is the proposal from Bill Logue from Logue Group for managing the listening sessions and facilitating the discussions and it's you know it was a fairly quick proposal that he put together understanding our timeline and wanting to make sure the committee had a chance to review you know what his how his team would work and sort of you know his initial ideas he is open to feedback and changes of course and I think you know upon reviewing this it actually feels like a pretty good plan pretty comprehensive plan you know it incorporates reviewing background materials and you know planning the process for listening sessions using both past experience but also you know this community's experience and then facilitating six listening sessions which is what we requested because the three sessions already that Dr. Morris mentioned for educators and staff are already handled so these would be six community sessions three for parents and caregivers in the district and three for community wide and then involves working with various organizations in a network basically of you know folks who do this kind of facilitation around tricky issues really in communities when I spoke to Mr. Loog you know he explained that he's had a lot of experience working on issues that have been divisive in communities and so likes to have a kind of working group type of feel around the sessions so that it's not just somebody presenting something and talking at people but that really they feel like they are a part of the process and providing feedback into the process and I think that that seems to fit pretty well just given the interest on this topic and then I think possibly most important I think you know the listening sessions it's important to do them well and to have a neutral party facilitating this is obviously somebody who's got a lot of experience with that but it's also the post session follow up so gathering the notes and the raw data from note takers which this committee has expressed an interest in before you know I think Ms. Spitzer you may have been the person who mentioned this at our last meeting about making sure there's some sort of feedback you know form that was being utilized so this is exactly what this proposal talks about and then preparing a draft in the final summary of you know what was heard during those sessions that can then be presented back both to the committee and the community so this is in essence what we had talked about before you know he's come at I think that there's two costs shown on this budget so one is the estimated cost and then one is not to exceed amount which is fairly standard for you know for proposals like this so he actually breaks down what the cost would be but it comes out to 11,740 for estimated cost and then not to exceed 9,990 dollars so I don't know if the committee has had a chance to take a look at this proposal any thoughts or questions Mr. Demling I'm always looking at the clock so considering how many more times will I do this so yeah I'm always looking at the clock and the schedule and the time is going to be against us throughout this whole process and so given that we were nowhere this before this I think is excellent as an approach Mr. Logan is also the public forms consultant for the school district planning board we found him so just to give you the origin story and the public the origin story the mass offices of public collaboration is the state organization that ran the last possible 7th and 8th grade to the middle to the high school study or was it 6th grade looking at Dr. Morris 7th and 8th grade anyway our board member Mary Lou I had a very reported positive experience with that we reached out to them they were unavailable but Mr. Logan is an affiliated member with MOPC so that was the origin there I'm really thinking about logistics in like our next meeting and so what is the to-do list that we need to check off before we leave and so I'm thinking about voting the contract scheduling the sessions advertising the sessions and I just I don't want us to leave here tonight feeling like we've made good progress and then realizing oh we're not meeting until the end of February so I'm sort of looking to Dr. Morris about the schedule well I think just to respond to that immediately I think we definitely want to vote this proposal in terms of scheduling the listening sessions that actually would happen with the facilitator because it's also his schedule and sort of what he can do he and his team can do so I think we can probably we can come back at a later time with that information just as a reminder to the committee had tasked Ms. McDonald, Dr. Morris and myself to actually come up with the format of the listening sessions and take care of it so the committee wouldn't have to and so we wouldn't hold things up so if that still works for the committee and for Ms. McDonald and Dr. Morris I would think that that's how we want to move forward because I agree we don't want to leave this sort of you know hanging out there we definitely have to get moving on this so that's what I would say Dr. Morris I don't know if there's anything else that's what you're going to say so I don't know if you know we had talked about this proposal coming at our last meeting if folks feel ready to vote on this if there's any other considerations or thoughts Mr. Nakajima yeah I just wonder I guess I'd go back to something Mr. Demlings said a moment ago it's your experience I don't know if we have any other review of prior work that would basically give a thumbs up in terms of experience with this firm Mr. Demling yeah so we're very deliberate about trying to select our public forums consultant limited budget on the regional school district planning board so he came and met with us he's from Connecticut so it's a drive from him and every member of our 6th member board had glowing glowing things to say about him and his response also mentioned you know that he was there with us at our last meeting in terms of planning forums and we've run into some potential snags that we'll get to hopefully at the end of the agenda with the regionalization that call into question whether or not and we just signed the contract with him and so he offered he's like look I understand that you might be running into a situation here if you just want to part his friends and call it quits that's fine and this is after he had signed the contract so I took that as a very goodwill gesture on the part of his willingness to work he's not looking to make a quick buck and he really wants to understand I really liked his approach of wanting to call each of the individual board members in terms of their point of view in addition to being at our open meeting so there's a line here about we call with several school committee members superintendent and two or three other stakeholders I would think so as Ms. McDonnell, the Oregonians and Dr. Morris are planning this the two or three that come to mind would maybe be a member of the town council and maybe one or two members from the public who have advocated strongly on different sides might be a one way forward on that but yeah, and generally thumbs up, it's sure answer your question Dr. Morris, can you just remind the committee about what your standard process is for reference checks because I think that that's what Mr. Nakajima was getting to speaking microphone I'm unclear if that was completed already for the project Mr. Demling spoke about and whether it's just something I'm not aware of so I think there's a couple of different ways that we could probably do this right I think that the reference checks definitely need to happen and I think that we can either vote to move forward with this proposal contingent on reference checks which have to be done or we had talked about possibly trying to schedule another meeting at some point very soon just because we have a couple of other issues that we're we're attending to so we could do the reference checks and then hold a vote until we come back Mr. Nakajima if there is a best practice that you or Mr. Mingano wish to share I would welcome hearing it I probably should shut up now and just listen to that before I say anything else I think I will I'll start by offering a slight preference that since we don't have another meeting scheduled then we don't know what schedules would be like a vote a contingent vote or vote contingent on reference checks would be probably preferable than the alternative you know with a report on the reference checks one by the other at the next meeting but I think because of the timeline issues that we have that would be my preference but I'll turn to Mr. Mingano yes so we typically try to do two or three reference checks I think we have one quasi because the mass office of public collaboration or communication recommended him as somebody they work with and we've had direct experience with them that was positive so I think we would reach out to at least one or two more to make sure that it's positive Mr. Nakajima yeah so I was going to say now I'll jump in thank you I mean the reason I was asking a question so the regional legislation board is that I am personally comfortable voting it now based upon the good word Mr. Demling and his colleagues knowing that you're also going to go through the due diligence of doing the reference checks and if you find anything that we should know about you won't go ahead and sign the contract like in other words our sort of hurry up we got to get going stuff will not unduly influence your due diligence will not Ms. Spitzer and then Ms. McDonald I guess the only piece of feedback I'd give them is proposal and I understood it's not the contract is that we don't have a timeline in it and I'm assuming that somebody communicated that timeline to him but given it is such a tight timeline I'd want to make sure that it's reflected in whatever final proposal or contract we end up executing and that we get the feedback as soon as he can possibly produce it so a general sense of timeline was communicated because we didn't have the actual listening session scheduled or anything like that you know I think some of that's going to be contingent on that but it is you know this is what we knew going in that it was going to be difficult to try to pull this together with you know a good report and all of that so I think it's you know it's a little bit of a risk definitely Ms. McDonald I was just going to add that this is this proposal only addresses the listening sessions, the sixth listening session so it doesn't mean that we're not doing any of the other outreach that we've been talking about in previous meetings. Good point. Mr. Demling did I see your hand up? Yeah just that in terms of technically so this is so we got a proposal of similar format for our public forums and technically what happens is that you know Mr. McGanna would use the district template to write up the contract and then it's really the scope of services that one page at the end that sort of translates what's in the so when we're voting we're voting to you know approve a contract based on this proposal contingent on. Excellent point yeah so just to reiterate I'm also comfortable with you know given the fact that we know that there was at least Mr. Demling but he's been working with had had an initial you know sort of recommendation about this this particular firm at the same time I also think that you know understanding Mr. Mangano and Dr. Morris is typical approach for this that we would be looking for reference checks in order to make sure this is okay but I'm also comfortable just voting on this proposal in order to move forward and then coming back to the committee with reference checks and you know a final contract at a later date Mr. Nakajima move that the Amherst school committee approve the development of a contract with the low group based upon the proposal submitted to the committee January 17th 2019 contingent upon successful review of references do I have a second second all those in favor signify by raising your hand okay it's unanimous thank you so I assumed Dr. Morris and Mr. Mangano will sort of take it from here I can certainly send Mr. Logan email just tonight to let him know that this was that were you know attempting to move forward but that you'll be in touch with him for references and all of that thank you so assuming there's no other issues or comments on this particular item we will move on so the next item on the agenda is the fiscal year 20 capital budget information so there's our presentation in your packets from Mr. Mangano again it's a little bit high level the first part of our meeting tonight I had a whole lot of food for thought this presentation is a placeholder that we have because we have not done the prioritization as we referenced earlier yet but Mr. Mangano logs in it's the presentation that says restoring our school's response to questions and while he's getting it in just to give him just to remind the committee of where we are so perhaps this can go not super fast but fast enough this was there was questions about how 20 costs were calculated and what book it was so what you see in the presentation is kind of very specific factors as to how the costs were calculated there was also a question about what would happen in a revised plan if both schools or two of the three elementary schools were placed in five years that one we didn't go to the same level of detail of how those costs were calculated it was much more what could we live without doing if we knew new schools or highly renovated schools were coming in five years those were the two key questions that committee members had that we wanted to come back with more information so I'll get right into it so TAG certification I won't spend a lot of time I spoke with Almolectric who is out of Westfield and they perform this type of certification and so they basically verify that the information we shared last time is how it works they'll come in they'll do like an audit they'll look at the major electrical systems they'll identify issues that they see up front that we would need to rectify and if we fix those then they would certify our equipment for some length of time and if anything breaks during that length of time they would come in and fix it so it's probably something we should do anyway at least the initial audit whether we do the certification depends on where that gets funded but the sort of that review seems to make sense given the age of our buildings and there's a link there so if you want to find out more information from them so the second question was how are the costs calculated so I wanted to more detail on these specific projects there was one more for FY20 that was sort of a specific project that we ended up pulling off based on what could we live without if we had new schools it was the new generator the generator project was really sort of a community project I think it was a wildwood site like a shelter if there was something town-wide so given the priorities of the other projects so for each of the projects there's sort of three major cost components and these all come from an industry resource called Building Construction Costs with RS Means Data so it's a thick book that has lots of indexes and pricing information and that's what populates each of these three components so the first is design and engineering so it's the architect engineering costs from bid specs to managing the project most of the projects have that so I think one project that doesn't really we don't require design and engineering so that's not part of it Construction Costs, so what is the raw cost for the labor the equipment, the cleanup demolition and then the last piece which can be larger than the actual cost depending on what we're looking at is the markup so this is based on a variety of factors that are outlined up there this is probably the most liq