Welcome to the regular meeting of the Allington School Committee on Thursday, December 12th. We're going to open the meeting with some new artwork from our Bracket School. I'm going to start with Board A. We'll go in order. This is Grade 1, Using Line Constructively, Tree Line Drawings. For the first lesson of the year, first graders revisited the elements of line and discussed how lines could be found everywhere in our world and that artists can use different kinds of lines to express their ideas more fully. Students examined and discussed several examples of line drawings by various artists, explaining how each artist used line. Next, students were shown several paintings of trees done by different artists and explored how each tree was represented differently. Using various and often unexpected types of lines, students were led to notice how using a particular type of line changes the way we expect a tree to look. Finally, students were instructed to create a line drawing of their own choice. That said, everything in the picture had to be constructed from a variety of appropriate lines and the subject had to include at least one tree. They were encouraged to think about how lines can be used to represent many parts of a tree in different species of trees. Students were given artworks created by Asian artists which depicted different species of trees during different seasons to help them think about the many ways line can be used. Over to Board B, which is Grade 4, Pinch Pots Revisited. Students in Grade 4 were shown an example of a ceramic pinch pot vessels created by a method of clay construction known as handbuilding, which differs from wheel throwing construction. Pinch pot pots are a fundamental method of construction created by using the thumbs and fingers simultaneously to squeeze and press the sides of the vessels into uniformity. Artist examples all depicted a variety of techniques, which were used to create interest in more complex designs. Techniques include relief building, scoring, textural impressions, and altered form that differs from the standard circular form of a traditional pinch pot. Students were then guided through the pinch pot construction process together and then were later encouraged to include some of the additional techniques discussed in the artist exemplars. Once the pots were fired, pieces were glazed with color and fired a second time. Moving over to Board C over here, Tiny Treasure Boxes. Third graders discussed the use and decoration of container design. They discussed how this wooden box created by a Japanese artist had the special purpose of storing incense, noting the planning and execution of design upon a three-dimensional cube. And as possible function and purpose allowed students to realize that everyday objects can be made beautiful by artistic skills. Students were given a template of a box, which they were instructed to decorate using pencils and or markers, giving special attention to how one side of the box could impact another side, as well as the top and bottom in a wrap-around design. The attention was brought to the fact that there are several ways to accomplish a wrap-around design, but the specific theme had to be chosen to successfully unify all the sides of the box. Over to D, we have Grade II paper pendants. Why do people wear jewelry? Students in Grade II learned that people everywhere have decorated themselves with jewelry since ancient times, often for many different reasons. Students examined and discussed several different artists and pendants, some of which incorporated neckline structure as well. The examples ranged in time and period materials, and students were asked to look for clues to help them determine how each pendant was created. They enjoyed seeing how different cultures have varying styles and how artists used the same materials differently and how styles have changed over time. Despite the differences, however, some jewelry making techniques have remained similar over the centuries. Students were instructed to design and create their own pendant from paper and aluminum foil. They are encouraged to include additional decorations with markers and pencils. And finally, all the way in the back, Board E, are observational drawings to Life Grade V. Each school year starts with drawing a still life arrangement for students in Grade II to V. In past years, each grade approaches the still life differently, using different skills or fresh approaches to their revisited subject. But after collecting student responses for their hopes and dreams of art class this year, every class contained a large number of responses stating hopes for learning how to draw better. I decided to address this by including a guiding discovery of eight different drawing materials ranging from pencils, pens, charcoal, and pastels. Students were led through a series of explorative techniques that can be done to each material to create more interest in drawing. These techniques include matching, blending, striped, stippling, and scrafito. The level of interest among students was considerable. Once the exploration was over, students in Grade III through V were then directed to draw the still life. But the choice of drawing in their sketchbooks of choice but with the choice of drawing in their sketchbooks or choice of drawing in the book were allowed to choose which of the eight drawing materials they would prefer. Many students chose to mix materials, including to draw some objects in ink and others in oil pastel for example. All students were required to include at least one of the drawing techniques they were taught in their guided discovery session. I was very pleased with this level of renewed interest for observational drawing as evidenced by the many comments from students. Those are actually examples from Grades III, IV, and V. Alright, congratulations. Thank you. Sure, yes, of course. And I would like to recognize David Ardido, our director of K-12 visual arts, and subplot him on the direction that he's taking our art department. Thank you. There's your name public comment this evening. Alright, so we'll move right ahead with our overview of the department. Dr. Vody, do you want to close? I'll introduce Deb Perry, who's the director of ELA K-12 and she's going to bring up the literacy coaches from the elementary. What? Oh, and Justin's coming too. Justin Baraza, who is a high school teacher. We need another... Shannon's going to state it's just going to provide music in the background. Thanks, Shannon. You could use that. Alright, we'll... Hi everybody, thank you. We're going to talk a little bit about the goals of the elementary and at the high school. Excuse me one second though. Could we introduce Mariette and Allie? We'll do this. We're going to talk about the goals at the elementary and at the high school. And I know we only have 15 minutes and the big question is who's got the hook? What happens if we go beyond? So you'll have to let us know. So we're going to start... Allie's going to talk about first grade and third grade Mariette is going to talk about. And then later Justin and I will talk about the high school. And we have everyone just introduce yourself as you start. Hi, I'm Allie Megahays. I'm one of the literacy coaches and I work mostly with first and second grade. So I'm going to talk to you tonight about our work in assessment and intervention in grades K to 2. Over the past two years the literacy team has played really close attention to the issue of early literacy screening and intervening. We sat in on sessions with Melissa Orkin who's a consultant with our district. We've attended EDCO workshops with other researchers in this area. We've compared notes with other EDCO districts and what they're doing. And we are learning about the new dyslexia legislation. We came away with the understanding that there were specific things we could do to improve our assessment system. We need to ensure that we're screening in the right areas, intervening in a targeted way and providing strong tier one instruction to ensure that students are getting the foundation they need to be proficient readers. We understood that we needed to pay special attention to the skills the research has shown to be strong predictors of future reading success. Especially rapid naming, the ability to quickly retrieve known symbols and timed assessments with reliable and valid test scores. Especially in the following two areas which have been found to be strong predictors for future reading success, phoneme segmentation and nonsense word reading. We reviewed our curriculum and assessments in the areas of phonemic awareness, phonics and fluency to ensure that we're addressing these areas. Through the review process we determined that grade one was the place to start this year. We've added additional universal screeners we selected the DIBLS because it's a standardized research based reliable and valid assessment. We're working with classroom teachers reading specialists and principals to use the information learned from assessments to implement targeted interventions. Next year we're going to roll this backwards to kindergarten and forward to grade two and we're laying the groundwork for that this year. I also want to describe a little bit of the work that we're doing with first grade teachers this year because they're the ones who are most impacted by these changes. Our focus this year is to help first grade teachers understand how to administer the assessment, interpret the data and how to support students with small group instruction based on their needs. Teachers were trained in the new assessment this past May. They were given a refresher in September at their first day back and coaches and reading teachers were available to support teachers during the assessment period this fall. In October the first grade teachers learned some small group lessons and routines to support phonemic awareness and phonics instruction. We looked at color coded data to form small groups based on which students would benefit from more direct instruction with segmenting and blending skills. They were also encouraged to progress monitor to follow select groups of students who might need more support. After the professional development I've been joining data team meetings and modeling small group lessons in classrooms.  Thank you. Hi, I'm Maria Mato. I work with Upper Elementary and I'm going to talk about the district literacy goals for both grades three and five. So our goal in grade three is to introduce the new Lucy Cawkins units of study. This year we're introducing the third and final unit readers workshop unit for grade three and that is a nonfiction unit. It's called Reading to Learn. This unit focuses on the foundational skills third graders need to learn how to read and write about nonfiction texts. The workshop model is newer to grade three. We're in our second year of implementing two units. One of them is called Building a Reading Life. That's the introductory unit to readers workshop in third grade. Another one that we did last year, it was the first year we did, it was called Character Studies. It's a book club unit where children meet in book clubs to discuss and learn about their books together. The new unit, because the teachers are newer to this as coaches, we're working on really getting them to understand the components of the readers workshop. So we're modeling many lessons for them. We're modeling how to confer and meet individually the students and we're also modeling small group work so they can differentiate their instruction within that independent reading time. One we've done that is through lab sites like Ali was talking about where teachers will come into a classroom, observe a lesson being taught coming with the teacher to see how small groups and conferring is run and then being able to debrief about it. For grade five, we have a new unit that was introduced this year. It's called Interpretation Book Club. It's the second reading workshop unit for grade five. In this unit, students are able to interpret the meaning of text through uncovering themes, the deeper meaning of text. They also learn to understand the use of author's craft and also understand character's motivations. Next year, Dick Ray will have their third and final Lucy Calkins unit. It's called Tackling Text Complexity. Two schools are actually implementing that this year. It's their second year piloting this particular unit. This unit is a nonfiction unit. It's designed for students to grapple with very difficult texts, understand also how to summarize key points of nonfiction, and also to analyze author's craft in informational writing. The high school goal for this year was narration. It had to do with narration and it was a logical extension of two previous goals which had to do with discourse and something we called ownership. I think those terms may seem a little vague to you, so I thought I'd talk for a minute about the connection among those and also what narration means in terms of the work that we do with high school students and also with middle school students. In a simplest form, narration is telling a story. When you're thinking about writing a story, one of the important things that has to happen is that as the writer you have to understand what you're writing about and be able to own it. What we had noticed in terms of both middle school and high school students over the past three or four years was the difficulty students were having figuring out how to put themselves into a story. The previous work or most of the work that we have done over the past many years in terms of writing has to do with claims and evidence. That's what the Common Core has asked us to do and that's what we've done pretty naturally. It's a very important part of writing instruction. You have to have an idea that you want to prove and then you have to have evidence to prove that. And sometimes that process doesn't allow the student or the student's ideas or at least students don't necessarily feel that it allows them to come into it. We've worked to try to figure out how to help students put themselves into the things that they're writing. At the middle school three or four years ago this began with a unit on speaking. Middle school, particularly the 8th grade teachers were interested in helping kids stand on their own both literally in front of a group but also stand on their own in terms of having an idea and supporting it and explaining it. And this was as much about writing as it was about developing a sense of confidence in the middle school students which is something that we were a little worried wasn't as evident as we wanted. The way it showed up in the high school was particularly in the junior and senior year when we were working with kids around writing the college essay. And the amount of support that students needed on the amount of time that they wanted to spend both with teachers individually after school and in classes was extraordinary. And it derived from a lack of confidence in terms of being able to tell a story. That's what the college essay is. It's telling a story and usually it needs to be a really small story that's well developed and we understood as this was over the period of three or four years as we were getting more frustrated that we didn't have time to do this work that we probably needed to think about narration in a more comprehensive way. So we're trying to, we're not trying to, we are actually integrating the narrative form more into the writing that we do at all levels to give kids practice and exercise. Before I turn over to Justin, just one other thing, the narrative form that it's commonly thought that if you, the person who tells the story owns the story and you know that if you've ever watched two children be involved in let's say the breaking of a lamp and they run to be the first person to explain what happened. And they know instinctively that if they get to tell the story first, they're going to turn out better for them. And so telling a story has a point of ownership to it, has a point of power to it. And that's an important thing for kids to understand. But as readers, it's also an important thing for kids to understand. So when you're looking at something that's being written and this happens in, this happens obviously in nonfiction but it happens in fiction all the time where the narrator tells the story and certain things are left out or certain voices are left out and we're working very hard to help students understand that there are other things going on in any story, it doesn't matter if it's a written story or something that you're watching, there are other interactions occurring and other voices that may or may not be heard that are important to know about. So that whole discussion of how storytelling actually is about power is something that we've been integrating extensively into the work that we've been doing at all levels. And Justin's going to talk a little bit about how it feels in the classroom. Hi, I'm Justin Barassa, I teach 10th and 12th grade English this year. And to kind of expand on what Deb was saying a little bit, we're really fortunate I think that we're able to focus on narration and it's popping up on things whether or not we're successful like MCAS because the sort of things in the past that might feel like a fun assignment in terms of hey let's think about like you know write a letter from this person's perspective we're really comfortable codifying now and we we're feeling more confident building rubrics and really asking what we're asking the students to do is demonstrate their literacy, their digital literacy where so many people are racing to either get the story first or get the story right whether it's from journalism or I saw this and I have a Twitter account. We're really teaching the students not only how to read the texts but to read the world around them as well as part of the four things that we're always constantly focusing on reading, writing, listening and speaking as well. So we're looking at things like voice like Deb mentioned, one assignment you know actually features following a separate piece and noting how the power changes and turning that into a visual which is not necessarily something that might you know you might think about in an English class right and people are coming in with graphs about how the power changes over time citing evidence while here this you know Jean said this and the passive voice was used here which do we know you know is he remembering correctly 15 years later after he's suffered through World War II and all of its horrors so that's one opportunity and we also are very fortunate because we are in the era now where we have classic literature and this foundational literature like the Odyssey for example and I know it's really easy to think about the Odyssey it's like oh come on really, we're still doing the Odyssey but you know we have Emily Wilson's female translation of the Odyssey, we have Cersei, we have the Penelopead, we have Barbara King solvers, the bean trees all of which are Odyssey but they're coming from very different angles and we're seeing different sorts of characters being represented and so we can compare those journeys, we can compare the tropes and the archetypes that pop up and really access this social capital that does come from a very old text but allows and encourages our students to recognize when we move into the world this sort of stuff is coming up and how as Deb mentioned how do we own this when we own our own storytelling it would be great if we could have the students remembering the tiny little details and what a dangling participle is but we really want them to be able to feel like they can advocate for themselves which involves eventually that personal statement or college essay in a very short surgical brief but brilliant piece of writing about themselves or are they able to own what's happening on the street, are they witnessing something that they need to be speaking up about are they able to record the things that are kind of happening in the world around them without politicizing it or anything like that we need to be able to control everything that we can and understand that we're going to write differently when we write a lab report than we write a formal piece of writing than we write a letter from Jean Tafini or a letter from McMurphy's point of view, I don't know who would want to read that in particular but we're really, we're feeling good about the fact that we can push these sort of fun things that kind of added on to those formal writing pieces in the last at least 11 years that I've been here and we can really start bringing them to the forefront because there's value in talking about who has the power in this story and why what's not being said, is there some hidden curriculum, is Jean purposely forgetting certain things or is it even Jean's story? We're right in the middle of a separate piece right now which is why I'm falling back on to that particular story but you'll see it at all levels, whether it's those foundational texts like the Odyssey or even Greek tragedy with the freshman things with Macbeth, we have a project that we do with the 10th graders where we ask what's the guy that's asking Lady Macbeth out to prom thinking? Let's get a look at his diary, scary thought again, sort of a high-stakes social event but we're kind of opening up because when we have these conversations with the students what's the difference between what you say and if Jean had a Twitter feed? He would be saying something very different than what he's actually talking about in the book and it's we can kind of play around in a very safe way with the uncomfortable sort of am I putting on a hat, am I putting on a face publicly to represent something and kind of get at the deeper common experience that everyone kind of goes through do I really want to send this tweet? Maybe not but I'm going to anyways, right? I guess that's one of the goals, we hope that they at least think about it before they send the tweet or whatever other social media like that so it's been a lot of, it's been very rewarding, the students they can describe it right away and it's really been very rewarding to turn it into something not necessarily four points but where we can use the language that we use to talk about formal writing and language and grammar we can use that language about language to say oh this is why that's effective, this is why I'm upset that my friend's leaving me on and this is why I'm upset that all of this stuff, you know, he didn't respond what's going on so that's the sort of thing that we're able to talk about like we talk about a piece of literature and the students are really handling it very well. Thank you. Questions from you guys? Alright, questions from the committee? Ms. Morgan. So I thought that this was great to hear. I happen to have a first grader and so I guess my question is, you know, the additional assessment and testing that you guys are either doing either it's a replacement of something that was done before or it's something new it's obviously really important. It's going to be one of the key actions we're going to approve later tonight as part of the superintendent's student achievement goal. I'm curious though, so it's, I've had my report card for my first grader and I've had my conference already and I haven't heard anything about like my kid, right? And so presumably he was evaluated in kindergarten and he was evaluated again in November and I'm just curious like what the plan is for communicating about this to families because I guess I mean I suspect the answer is well if you haven't heard anything he's doing fine, right? Which is like kind of great, right? But then also kind of like would be sort of helpful if we had more of a sense of that so I was just curious if that's something you guys have talked about or what you're thinking about that. I think that's a great question and I think you're right in thinking that if the teacher hasn't mentioned it to you then that means it's not a concern at that moment for your child but I think parents should be informed about the assessments and what's happening in the classroom so maybe by building base we could try to think of a way to better inform the parents about the assessments that are happening and what those assessments mean. Absolutely. However I do want to temper it to say that that's not the reason for the assessments is it to inform instruction in order to provide that overall picture of how you're a profile, a learning profile of your students so I don't want us to get hyper focused on how is my kid doing on his particular assessment and whether or not they're achieving more than their classmates so we just have to make sure that we're balancing it by providing the information and how it is integrated into the instructional plan for servicing your student. Because if we start talking about assessments, needless to say it's going to be okay we've given these assessments and I want to make sure that my child is performing at a certain level. I want to see the overall pictures like providing foundation for their learning on how to acquire the skills that they need in order to comprehend text and to decode text. So I just want to say that I'm excited that you both sort of started with a goal that you want to achieve, what you want to see in third grade, what you want to see at the end of junior year, beginning of senior year and then worked backwards and said what do we need to do in those earlier years and I think that's sort of the kind of thinking that we like to see and very heartening and I'm excited to hear that. Go ahead. I wish I had to teach it like you in high school I would have, no seriously I enjoyed the literature I did not like the writing and by mixing those two together and making it real I think that's really exciting and I appreciate that, thank you. Anyone else? Alright I have a question also on the Dibbles assessment we have gotten some feedback over the years including for myself whose kids were sort of missed because they were doing okay on the other assessment but at some point somebody realized that they can't decode nonsense words because it just wasn't caught before. So do we have a sense yet, are we catching more kids who need intervention is it a different set of kids or is it different from how we were getting to your RTI as a result of these interventions? It is giving us a lot more information about a student's ability to segment and blend sounds so even though your child might be a high reader if they are scoring low on these types of assessments it's giving us more information about how we could better support them to better understand what they're hearing in a word and how to build in those phonics and phonemic awareness skills for that child. We want more information about what their whole profile is as a reader not just what their reading level is or what their understanding about the story but how they're attacking words that they've never seen before. But are we going to need more intervention support or are we okay with what our focus is this year is to really supporting classroom teachers so that they can feel confident enough to support those students that are in their classroom so that's what our big goal is for this year. My comments actually kind of more on the student achievement goal that was referenced earlier but I'll bring it up now because it is involving the literacy. The goal talks about the different assessments that you're talking about. I was hoping that as that takes place that we could have some looping back to tell us afterwards how many students were identified, how many improved because of the intervention. You didn't just identify people, did it actually achieve the goal that you're really trying to do which is improve literacy? It's more of a comment that we're being told for example that the goal is all grade two students will be given a time for the student's non-sense word reading assessment in September literacy coaches will work with classroom teachers to support targeted differentiated instructions based on assessment results. My comment is it would be nice to know do the students then improve. Is it making a difference? That's really what we're looking for. Currently they're progress monitoring and then we have another round of assessments in January and then in the spring. My point is it would be nice to come for us to hear that result too. What we're looking to do is through all of these different actions and changes so that we have better window into what skill a student needs to support at the end of third grade they're going to be more and more of our students and not all of our students are benchmark. That is really the goal. What we'll see and which will be interesting to follow the data is that some kids are going to be different kind of trajectory for different students in part because what is happening now is there's a little bit more granulation and maybe more focus on some of these skills that students need to become the readers that we want them to become. I think this is a multi-year goal. This isn't something that's going to automatically shift everything because teachers have to learn more too in terms of the kind of strategies to support students as well as at the classroom level. My layman's take on it is that you're kind of going from having one ladder for all the kids to climb up to for the next level to saying we have this ladder over here that's maybe shorter and easier and another ladder over here for different kids and stuff. Different support. I understand that what you're trying to do is see if everyone gets up to the floor saying can't we find out in the meantime, are they advancing on their ladders, are they actually climbing or are they just standing at the bottom of another ladder? I think one of the things that's going to be interesting with this Dibbles testing that we're doing at the end of the year is just to see really what the progress has been over the year and how many of our first graders are at a benchmark for first grade. Now we have no comparative data. Over time we will and in these lab models that are being created more teachers are going to learn strategies to help students because I know math a lot better but I do know that at this age almost they have a math fingerprint if you do the right assessments to see what different kinds of skills that are essential to learn the next thing. But sometimes if you don't have the granulation of an assessment you don't know what those are and so you're not there supporting the student learning that. And we've come to learn, I'm coming to learn, they probably knew it a lot before I did. How important skills are to being a very expert reader later or maybe experts not the right word, proficient reader later. Thank you. I'm saying like also you know I think that the way that we want to look at it is this is a trajectory as it goes along. So even after first grade if you, the point of providing or getting gaining more information is that even if the student is not where we want them to be after the first grade that's the information that's going to be passed along to the second grade and then the second grade teacher so that student we can see how that student is evolving in their progress. So we wanted to make sure that we're getting the type of information and connecting it to the activities that can follow up to support that. So it's a trajectory so I don't want us to, again I want to kind of keep us from saying like here's where we're trying to get to and if we're not there that doesn't mean it's not working. I want to get us away from thinking like that and thinking that this is something that's going to maybe pan out over, depending on the student this might take more time with different students but at the end we will have students where we want them to be. Right, well I mean at third grade you know they're all, you want them all up here right? Exactly, exactly. And that's, I'm saying it'd be nice to hear what's happening before we hit third grade. Right, and that's why they were here to tell you that and these are the things that they're doing in order to work towards that. Mr. Shibman. Okay, so the typical question for a governing board that has budget policy levers, what do you need from us? What do you want us to be thinking about going forward? I'll speak to the mic. This is sort of you're sitting with Santa Claus and he's asking you what you want, okay? No we're not Santa Claus. That's a definite maybe though. And no red rider beef. To stand that. Because you'll shoot your eye out. Amazing success with four coaches and we thank you for giving us the additional coaches last year. It was really, really helpful. I think having people who can work with teachers to bring the capacity of teachers up is probably the most beneficial thing you can do for us. So we in the budget this year we're at the elementary, we're asking for a little bit of money for reading teachers to sort of even that out among the seven schools. And probably if that gets funded another coach won't be. But in the future I think having coaches to work with teachers, I can't emphasize enough how important it is to have people accessible, warm, knowledgeable human beings to work with other human beings. To explain, be next to about in all those ways. It's invaluable actually. So that's where I feel money would be well spent. Particularly the elementary. And at the secondary level, particularly in English, the fewer students teachers have the more attention they can pay to the students, the more time they can spend on correcting the papers. Which is a killing enterprise I have to tell you. As much as we love to read. It takes a lot of time. Keeping class sizes at a reasonable level is the most helpful thing. I will also say we carve out time, particularly the secondary to talk together in grade groups, in course groups taking a day and getting a sub working together to hone curriculum. And so that professional development time has proved to help us make gains and to do thinking that we wouldn't ordinarily be able to do if we were just doing it by ourselves. So I guess in both cases I'm talking about professionals working with professionals to move our thinking ahead. That makes sense. Because first of all there's the Tom Brady rule. Tom Brady has coaches. Then every teacher deserves a coach too. And it's the same thing though. He's got coaching. So every teacher deserves a coach because it's a key to reflective practice. And I feel your pain for the English teachers at the high school. I don't mean to make it sound terrible but it's kind of awful. Hold on. Let me get this out. I was a math teacher. I was a high school math teacher and he goes to the faculty room and the English teachers looked at you with disdain because of what you were grading versus what they were grading even when you were running through proofs. But yeah, I understand the workload. If you're really doing this well, kids are doing a lot of writing and they're doing a lot of writing. Teachers are doing a lot of reading and we don't want it to get into a cycle where teachers are assigning less reading and being less interactive in that because the workload is too high. Exactly. And that's it. It's a real fine line before people begin to sort of say, why am I doing this work? So I mean we have to work very hard to make sure that we're keeping things as balanced as possible. When you're halfway through the stack, you're at number 26 and you're just... Anything after 20 is a killer. Thank you for asking. And Dr. Martelia, one thing. And also can you speak to the impact that the schedule has had on your ability to work with teachers because that is something that the school committee approved in our budget last year. So the new schedule has really afforded us a lot of contact with teachers that maybe we wouldn't have had otherwise. We're in buildings going to data team meetings very often working with those teachers looking at student work, being able to then go into classrooms and then use that data to inform instruction and help those teachers look at the data to be able to say, okay, I have these students in front of me. I need to get to know these students, get to know where they are in their work. And then with a coach's assistance go in and actually use that data to then inform how they're going to teach. How are they going to differentiate? How are they going to meet with groups? And to help students with their writing. So I feel like it's been a really valuable experience and in some schools maybe where we weren't there as often we're able to be in those schools because of that. Because that's carved out time. Whereas we might not have had that carved out time before. It's been a great experience. It's extremely valuable to be able to sit with all the teachers at one time, not just one or two of them, to actually be able to sit with them and even meet some of them because we're in all seven schools sometimes it's hard to even just know who they are. So just to have that time to sit and talk and to see what other needs we always ask them first. What would you like for us to bring to this meeting? How is this most beneficial for you as a team? And that's been really helping us to just get our foot in the door sometimes. Alright, thank you all very much for coming tonight. Great job everyone. Okay, next up we have the Washington High School and Middle Schools FY21 budget needs request presentation. I am taking up the least I want to on record I am taking up the least amount of time of the 15 minutes. Here I go. Thank you for having us this evening to talk about our needs at the secondary level. We're in the second year of our five year budget at Gibbs specifically we continue to enjoy being there. We're getting very positive feedback from both the parent community and the student community about their respective experience. We are focusing this year on building our tier one work around social emotional learning and content area instructional best practice and we're doing this by concentrating on building a robust responsive classroom philosophy developing a project block curriculum that builds various necessary sixth grade skills and supporting teachers instructional pedagogy through coaching and special education support. This work is also allowing us to define our tier two and tier three intervention. We are having discussions about what we do for all students identified as needing access to this kind of intervention and as a result they're developing more comprehensive interventions and are beginning to be able to define our gaps and needs around professional development. Before I get into thinking through that lens and talking about our direct requests I think this work has been very fortunate to have the school first of all so we're in year two now and we're really finding our way through how important it is to have a tier one solid tier one plan and I think that in being able to do that work we're now able to see what we have to do to get a tier two and a tier three intervention program up and really running so when I see we're able to identify gaps I feel lucky to be in that position because I think it's when you've actually been able to really identify where you need the help you can start to plan and put in place professional development that's going to give us the things and the strength and the confidence for teachers to be able to meet the needs of the kids in the classrooms. So before I asked for some specific things I wanted to really drive that point home it's that tier one work that we're fortunate enough to build from scratch right here at Gibbs that is really allowing us the opportunity to do that so to continue to sustain that work next year we will need to think about enrollment growth and professional development through that lens our requests related directly to staffing are as follows and there really aren't that many and we're pretty well staffed there at the moment but we would like a point two increase in math intervention bringing our point eight interventionist to full time and I can talk a little bit more about that if there's questions a point three increase in world language to mitigate a 250 plus student caseload in Spanish and I can talk a little bit more about that if there's questions as well and a point two increase in physical education to bring our total phys ed education staff to 2.0 and again I can also speak to that if necessary our non staffing priorities are as follows funding for Wilson training to support the number of students entering grade needing tier three reading intervention directly related to what you just heard about here with literacy coaches in the elementary school so I can draw some parallels there connect some dots following my asks funding to train new staff members in responsive classroom so we were fortunate enough to have almost all of our staff members at the beginning of last year funded to have the training but now we've added new staff members on so we need to think about getting them that training as well and in addition to that we want to be able to sustain the responsive classroom training for all staffs it's not one and done for sure we need to put things in place that help continue to have that good work all over our building funding to maintain and continue the growth of co-teaching training and I've been partnering with Allison Elmer with that and it's something that we've launched this year I can certainly talk more about if people have questions funding to maintain the efforts around project block advisory and co-teaching through our think tanks and our think tanks are teacher buy-in teacher led so those are the groups we've made within our school where teachers have had certain interest and entry points and they're the one presenting at faculty meetings and they're the ones doing research and getting themselves some PD so it's been a very effective more than I even could have imagined way to lift some of these new things teachers are doing off the ground so I'm very pleased with that work and that's it I thank you again for having us this evening I look forward to continuing this work at Gibbs as well as working to vertically align with elementary schools and the Audison in the high school we appreciate your support each year and we know that we couldn't have gotten this really great opportunity for sixth graders off the ground without the support from this committee so we're really enjoying that support and I think kids and parents are really happy which makes me really happy so thank you so I wanted to thank you for the opportunity to listen to the budget request from the Audison middle school I also wanted to thank the school committee and the voters of Arlington for passing the override last year that really made a difference I think this year with education and going forward so I just wanted to acknowledge people for the override there are 900 students currently at the middle school next year projections look like we'll be adding about 40 students so we'll be up to about 940 students at the Audison I have some needs that I think are very much enrollment based and I have some other things that as I take you know kind of the principles role the second year as I'm looking around and finding out things that we might need for certain students to do better here at the middle school level the first request is a .2 PE teacher currently right now we have 38 sections of physical education that's compared with 40 sections of art facts and technology I would like them to all be even there's one part it's a scheduling but also it would reduce the class sizes from 24.7 next year to 23.4 we do have a teacher right now who is .8 I think it would be very easy to hopefully make her full time a .2 Spanish teacher with the 40 new students coming in Spanish is by far largest language and we need to see one more section currently there are eight sections in the eighth grade that are for 205 students adding an extra section would reduce class sizes from 25.7 students to 22.8 students I would also like to have half a learning team be added it looks like right now at the Gibbs there's 485 students if we currently have the four schools for 121 students per learning community class sizes would be average of about 24.2 if we could have four and a half learning communities that would reduce the learning communities to 108 students one being 54 obviously for the half and that would reduce class sizes to 21.6 with the additional half of a learning community we would add a special educator who could work with that new learning community but also could help us with co-teaching and inclusion as our special education numbers are growing I'm looking for a 1.0 bridge teacher so we are working currently right now we are looking at other schools that have a bridge program a bridge program is for kids who are for school refusal unfortunately I'm seeing a greater need as more kids have trouble with stress and anxiety and depression I'm seeing more kids refusing to either come to school or coming back from partial or full program hospitalizations so I'm also looking to offer that services right now typically what happens for kids who are missing a lot of school either if they're hospitalized or if they're school refusal a lot of times they end up in special education and I find the next step is if they're really struggling might be out of district placement so I am hoping to stem the tide and hopefully give these kids what they need looking for a .1 administrative assistant as we get more people I think it's a greater stress on the secretarial staff that we have I'd like to increase the GTAs that we have we're having trouble maintaining and retaining good teaching assistants right now in the reach and the compass program they are paid at a regular teaching assistant rate I would like to bump them up to BSPs like they are in the high school it's about a $5,000 raise for three teachers to maintain them but I also think it's an equity issue with the high school other requests a .4 math teachers we're seeing more kids needing math support we're also seeing some kids who are ELL students who are far below grade level that we need to service and a .4 computer science teacher currently we have 2.6 computer science teachers at the middle school computer science is an elective we have over 207th graders who decided to take computer science it is mandatory in sixth grade we had a lot more seventh graders who wanted to take computer science then eighth grade and I think we will see a continued growth in the number of kids who opt into our computer science program so I'd be happy to take any other questions I did not go into but I definitely wanted to also plug that there are some supply issues notably in art and I think in facts that might need to be increased as well. So it's funny how the different structures of each organizations cause us to cut through the same sort of basic questions in different ways and I'm going to try to do a little of what both folks did because it's nice to hear it's nice to go third because you can get to play off of that a little bit so first I do absolutely want to thank the voters I'd like to thank the school committee I'd like to thank as well our teachers for the amazing progress we've made in Arlington high school and in the district as a whole any good result we've gotten in Arlington high school is a result of the folks that go before that make us look good and so it really is an entire district that does that and every time I get in front of a microphone I think it's important in the world where we often talk about our failures in fact we'll be talking about some of our failures in the later presentation today because every disciplinary incident is something that we feel as a failure but in a world where we talk about our failures it's important to remember that Arlington high school which is currently at 1,415 students and is slated to be at 1,500 plus next year is part of a district in which we are regularly recognized as one of the top schools in the state and the state is recognized as one of the top states in the country and if this state I say this over and over again but I think it's important to emphasize we talk a lot about international comparisons but if Massachusetts were a country it would be at the top of many of the international comparisons and so it's important to understand that as we're thinking about the really excellent district we have and then the very important work we need to do to make sure that we serve all of our students and that we serve all of the students as a whole person not just as a test score or as a small outcome because there's always more we can do for our kids I organized my little presentation which I shared with all of you around extending the five year plan that we talked about last year forward and if you look you'll see that the trend lines the basic categories in terms of what things we're looking at remain the same the main things that are driving Arlington high schools budgetary costs are enrollment, the new building project and those really kind of structure everything within that budget our major initiatives have been for the last three years social emotional learning, equity and diversity and rigorous education and I think we've made progress in all of those areas but there's still a lot of work to be done so doing this sort of within also the high school is a funny thing because we ask for money now emphasizing sort of a number of staffing increases on areas we're going to put resources but we have a much higher component of choice and so the students then tell us what classes they're going to take in January and in February we figure out how to staff those and begin off and posting them so the good news is that a lot of the time we're able to push certain things forward and shift things around in terms of trying to be really efficient in how we use the money while keeping the ratio of staffing the same so if you look at this year I have a whole discussion in here about what I call multipliers and the simple sort of simple math of a high school staffing is that there are seven periods during the day and if you put 20 kids in every class and you want to put a teacher in front of them for every 20 new kids you need 1.4 teachers and if you decide you're going to put 25 kids in front of them then for every 25 kids you need 1.4 teachers the MSBA has called us for ratios of 20 that in terms of fairness and sort of equity across our district is not what we end up looking for or targeting but it's an important thing to think about so the multiplier that we look at in terms of looking at keeping things constant is at the moment 25 if you then go back and look at a building which is designed to have one dean for every 500 students and standards which cause us to have one counselor for every 250 students and our rate of special education which ranges between 11 and 14 percent within the school over various different periods of time you'd be looking at additional staffing along with that as you have those enrollment increases if you calculate that out based on those recommended ratios I get a multiplier of 1.83 going back to what I said before about 25 kids we're working from a multiplier of 1.7 so then what I can do is look out over the next five years because I can't hire teachers in I have a spreadsheet of this in 0.23, 0.6 the speech and language pathologist we're going to squeeze out until we get over enrollment and then we're going to add half of a person a year and then we're going to be a little ahead here and a little behind here and add half of a person there but that's the logic of the spreadsheet that we have here and so the simple math and I'll leave it to you because you guys are smart folks you've read this in advance and I only get three minutes because I got to be shorter than Ms. Delford and Kristen is that the simple math is that within the four content areas of classroom teachers we anticipate needing an additional five teachers that's for math, English, science, social studies, world language ELL and the elective classes. Last year we were really fortunate that you folks were able to give us staffing growth that kept track with our enrollment growth and not in our experience at the high school because there was so much growth in the elementary schools prior to that. You were not able to give us staffing that kept up with what we call historic understaffing and you'll notice I've just left that zero at this point because I don't imagine there's going to be a time when we're going to be sort of getting ahead in that. We put the enrollment, the staffing last year towards getting our, those core content areas math, English, science, social studies and world language up to reasonable ratios and so for this next year our staffing and those will all be just to keep track with enrollment so we'll be adding between a 0.8 for four more sections or 1.0 to hire an entire person and then the rest of that staffing goes to where we've consistently understaffed which has been what we call electives but is actually the arts and electives because arts is a requirement and PE and so we will add a few sections where we can. We won't add as many sections as we might need and an example of that would be in family and consumer science where we could fill, we could have filled last year five more sections with one more teacher, they would have all been full. Even if I had the money to hire 1.0 facts teacher, family and consumer science teacher, I won't have a lab for the next three years consistently in which to be able to run those programs so we'll be putting it more into arts and other areas. So those are the major areas there. In terms of nonstaffing there is a digital technology plan and I just talk a little bit about technology here. I don't put numbers in because that's something that David Good will be putting into there and then I go back to the building. It's important to remember that we're going to be in this tired old building at least parts of it for another five years and so we are already over full. Our classroom usage right now is well over 90% and it's a hard thing to sort of understand. It's a hard thing to understand that 85% 80 to 85% classroom usage is full because when you get over 90 or 95% the only way to make that work is if teachers are running from classroom to classroom over every corner of the building and you can't possibly do that nor do all the classrooms accommodate all the different things people do. Right now we are beyond full. Last year we needed three new classrooms, we squeezed one because the lab program shrank their space. Next year because of the building project and the move to the Parmenter by the preschool we get seven new classrooms, which is awesome but that's going to cost about $80,000 to furnish and supply. We won't be building the walls or the paint, that's all part of the building project but that's a corner of the building that's going to have a physics lab in it that they're going to need another Chromebook cart. That's a big chunk of change that I wanted to mention in here. Last but not least things I just want to make sure that we take count of. There are small asks in the larger spreadsheet that I know Dr. Bodie will be sharing with you but one as we grow a family and consumer science section requires more food to be eaten when an art section requires more stuff gets painted. So for those consumable programs there will be an ask connected to supplies and then last but not least we have decided to move to start time, we've all been here for 30 minutes back. There will be costs associated with that in terms of the preschool, in terms of coverage and in terms of dealing with students who are coming in from Boston, it might be earlier or later. Those moving pieces are still there but that's something that will be part of the various lists. So thank you very much for your time. I forgot to mention the special education line. I was like what am I forgetting? 1.0 here if you look for special education. I wasn't sure which category to put it in but half of it is listed, I'm sorry where is it? Point 6 is listed as special education and point 4 is listed as a related service provider. That's actually covering a bunch of different names. One we're expecting to have 20 additional special education students so that would be a 1.0 case load. We also have a shortage in terms of speech and language pathology. There's a lot of need between that and reading and so we're looking to expand the services there and we're expanding the co-teaching. So the co-teaching program is something you can look at there. I'd love to come back and talk about that as well. That we've now expanded to really be serious about inclusion around the entire school. So students that would have been in a small group English class, a small group math class, a not being taught the content by a content area teacher and b not with peers who are achieving at a college and career ready level. We've worked to get one of the curriculum up to where all of those students were receiving a curriculum a curriculum and then to move them into an inclusion setting. We still need to add sections in science because we didn't have staff that program yet and we need an additional section in math in order to spread the students out to have an inclusion model. Thank you. I want to preface this first by saying over the past few months I have been hearing a lot of people come to me and tell me what a wonderful job you guys and your staff are doing. The feedback I'm getting from the Gibbs is marvelous. The relationships that the three of you were building with parents and kids are very positive. I'm hearing a lot of great feedback. And Dr. Jango, I also appreciate the way you're thinking and outlining your budget. I've scheduled high school and I see how the component parts fit in. Basically the only thing I'd ask you, I'm impressed by the three of you. The requests are relatively modest in my opinion. I opened the Novus document and was calmed by how reasonable everything seems. I have another list. Dr. Jango, how much duct tape do you need? My curiosities are in a couple of places and it's just me being trying to think this out because everything is well thought out. At the Gibbs, .3 Spanish? How do you get to .3 in a traditional schedule? We're also hoping we'll find a way to combine it with another ask at one of the other schools and maybe do some combination. When I look at a schedule, I'm usually thinking each class period for teachers is .2. How many Spanish teachers do you have and why .3? Why is it a .2 or a .4? I have one. And I think if I'm being honest, when Dawn and I spoke about it, she said let's split the difference. Would I take a .4? Sure. I'd take a .4. I think that .3 would cover our numbers. If we're looking at our numbers, that would cover our numbers. Is it realistic that we're necessarily going to find one person to do .3? We've got someone doing Mandarin .25 right now. That was a really good find. All of the negotiations. Addison, .1 administrative assistant? My idea is that we're growing by 40, so right now we have 2.6 right now. The .6 comes in Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Her chief responsibility right now does a lot of the guidance schedule, private school applications, fills in for the other teacher, as well as the students around MCAS and projects. And as you have 40 more students, that's more applications, more meeting, more parents calling, but not necessarily. So I'm trying to figure out, there used to be, as I understand it, 3 administrative assistants when they were about 1,200 kids at the Odyssey. And so I almost see it incrementally growing as we get 150 kids, 1,200. Can you logistically do a .1 on this? Because it seems like a relatively small Yeah. I know for hours, but you know. Yeah, and the person that I've talked to would be doing then an extra morning on one day. So it would be three and a half days I'd probably come back to if we had another 40, 50 kids asking another .1, 4 to 5 and eventually getting up hopefully 2, 3 full-time administrative assistants. So I'm just kind of going back where there used to be 3 for about 1,200 kids. Right now we have, we're going to have 950 just trying to figure out what I think makes sense. Community learning teachers, I guess that's The old cluster teachers? Yeah. We just renamed it. We just renamed it. So we thought it was easier. So they call them learning communities at the Gibbs. So we thought we would follow suit. I also just kind of maybe general thing. When I used the word cluster a lot of time it doesn't have a positive connotation. So I thought learning communities would be a little bit better. It would be a little bit easier. So we've switched to learning communities, but if this was two years ago I'd say 2.0 cluster teachers. Yeah. Adding a half cluster. Yes. Yeah, okay fine. Yeah. Yeah. And the facts supply, the facts and art supplies. I can't imagine teaching art without the requisite supplies and are we thin now? I think we're thin right now when I talked to David Ardido who I think is in the back and I talked to my two art teachers right now. They're constantly scrambling for supplies. You know I get a lot of emails of please bring in cardboard boxes. We've decided to do something else. If anyone's still getting their papers in the morning we're constantly getting things and as we get more students I think we're going to need more supplies and it also gives leeway to do more creative projects. Just doubling down on that. Yeah. We've done the math. We go at about 50 to 80 cents per kid per day. Right. Like when you think about how much money they're spending. My son said I don't know how they do it. I'm never hungry at the end of facts class. Okay yeah and because both of you put the same request in. Yes. Yeah okay I'm seeing your issue too. Thanks to the thoughtful presentation and looking at bonuses. It looks reasonable and realistic in something that allows us. Thank you. Mrs. So yeah so I spent an evening for fun looking at enrollment numbers and compared to the Kibben report and it was really interesting. So we're seeing a trend that I think is going to continue probably until we get the new high school. Which is and especially after opening Gips which is that we are having 100 or even more retention from 5th grade to 6th grade. So last year was 101 but we're seeing a falling off now at the high school. So we get so last year was 88% retention. Now I suspect that as we're doing the construction and things are really difficult that we won't get. I mean I know your numbers are based on 100% retention from 8th grade to 9th grade that we just won't get that number. So just in terms of as we're thinking about what our enrollment pressures look like to realize what the current trends have been, what they're likely to be in the future and of course everything's going to change dramatically as we get to the high school. Now I do have to say, so I don't quite think we're going to get 105 people. I do have to say though that I do think it's true that in the last few years we sort of shorted the high school a little bit because there was so much pressure at the elementary school level. And so we saw classroom numbers increase more than we're happy with but just sort of to keep all that stuff in mind. Go ahead Mr. Jinger. So you're right. I mean traditionally when you open a new building you get a bump, so Minuteman's getting a bump up and when you start to construct a new building you get a bump down. So our range, full disclosure because I've done it both ways the 105 is based on the 5-year historical average which is about 94.5%. What's the number here? I think the number is exactly the number. The difference is 100%. Not in my spreadsheet. So I mean the 105 I'm doing is based on the service spreadsheet, the actual enrollment and like as of when we started the budget process and this. But if you went with the retention last year we'd only get 58 students. And so we're going to be in that range. I think as we develop the budget we need to have some common assumptions of what we think the likely enrollment at the high school is going to be. The budgets of committee can look at that as part of the since you're basing it off of a formula that would other questions? Go ahead Dr. Dr. Jinger you have a couple items in your list and this question is not just so much for you but also for Dr. Bodie. One is the changes in the space as the preschool moves to the parminter. So I understand the construction, the new construction is covered by building committee but is the furnishings and stuff it cannot be? I mean because it's swing space. We're creating swing space. It could be. We were waiting to see what happens with the building piece in terms of the construction cost, the swing space costs. I think it's starting to get more definite as we go along but we're trying we've had some discussions about whether we get the new furniture now but we haven't gone to the process of deciding what and so maybe the easiest thing to do would be to forage in our own district first and then see where we can get furniture that is being shifted out of another school. We're going to look into that but I think that's a pretty decent estimate of what we're going to have to do because the furniture that's there now, a preschool furniture that's going over there but we have to have for open classrooms, we don't really have extra rooms of furniture here. It's not really swing space. It's expansion space. We're not closing any space and moving over there. I guess that's true. Go ahead. Sorry. We've opened classrooms in the past. We've estimated the cost at $15,000 but because the building project is going to be absorbing a lot of the cost of fixing up the space, electrical, that kind of stuff, I took that out of there and we are going to forage furniture because there's no reason to buy that. This is really furniture unless we went and bought what we're going to buy going forward and that doesn't seem reasonable. This is going to be furniture we're going to use for three or four years and then sell to somebody else or we'll repurpose it in the building. I would not expect that the projectors, the Chromebooks, the physics supplies are going to be covered by the MSBA so that's what I was estimating about. And then the second question is about the security guard position that you're asking for. It says with construction on the front lawn and the building being made both more hazardous and porous by the presence of construction activities, we've requested a 1.0 FTE security guard position to supervise the high school site after hours. And again, I'm just wondering is that a building project related cost? I don't think so. Plus we're going to have two entrances next year which is another issue but we're in transition meetings now as you know and I think the security is one of the things that's definitely on our discussion. And so we're identifying that this may be very necessary and it probably would have to come from the operating budget. Has security been part of the contract with the builder? On our other construction areas and stuff, they did security at Hardy, they did security up at all the other schools. They'll be security. But what I'm saying is the security for the site was built into the contracts and not carried by the school themselves. The security of the site is part of the contract. What Dr. Jeng is talking about is another person. That's not usually in the contract. We didn't have that in the contract to straighten. We did not have a security person. We had security cameras. Didn't we have it at Hardy? Not Hardy, I'm sorry, Thompson and they redid the whole school over there? I don't think it should be part of our budget. I think it should be part of the contract with the builder. That's all I'm saying. Ms. Morgan, do you want to go next? So I really appreciated how, so I didn't expect to come here tonight and say let's take the FY21 column from the 5-year plan and like we'll be out of here in like 10 seconds because it's like, oh we just want those things. But what I really like is how you tailored your presentation to sort of like bring us back to that so that we're all speaking with this common language, which was really great. So I have really quick questions for Mr. Merringer whether your budget asks are in order of priority or not. Are they prioritized or no? They are not. Okay. And then for Ms. DiFrancisco, have you, well I know you haven't because I have two 5th graders and I assume they haven't been surveyed about their language needs so I'm just curious why, so I can see why at the Audison or at Arlington High School you would have a pretty good sense of like well we've got this whole, these kids want to take Spanish or all these kids want to take French because by and large they sort of progress. So it's easier for Brian to probably prognosticate on his foreign language than for you because we don't really know. So I guess I'm curious why, what if all these 5th graders want to take French? Historically, if we're going on the data historically, if year after year Spanish is always the most. So if we're basing it on that historically that's what we see. In addition to that it's currently she currently has very large classes and she's teaching 5 instead of 4 so she's not teaching a project block, she's not teaching advisory we had to take those, we couldn't have done it on 4 classes so that's the other reason for, and because posters fall, no. That's the other reason for the ask, I think not only are we anticipating that it's going to stay at 250, it currently, I mean it's there now, was there last year so we had to do the same thing this year so this is based on those 2 years of data plus the historical data before the 6th grade existed. And then the point 2 for the math, so we added so correct me if I'm wrong, last year we did the point 8 so that we could take the math resource teachers and actually have math projects. Correct. Which seems like a win, like seems like a really good idea. So then we added the point 8 and then this is just to fill that out because we expect we have more kids. And is there reason to expect that we have more kids who need math intervention coming? So Matt Coleman who isn't here tonight but is the data man, I mean he does a lot of good predicting about what we're going to need. That ask is from both he and I and we, as he's looking at the numbers of kids coming up that are currently taking math intervention, there's an increase there. In addition to that, the kids that are currently at Gibbs, those classes are a little bit bigger than we would like to see them but are working. So that was the other pieces that they're noticing growth there for kids and better access to classroom to the time in the classroom. So having that point 2 will do 2 things. Number 1, it will service the larger number that's coming in and number 2 it will also make it a little bit more manageable of a size. Perfect. Thank you. You're welcome. Mr. Thielman. Thank you. So my question is when you add up all of the positions, are they within the confines of the FY21 plan of the FY21 budget of the 5-year plan? You're asking all of us to guess? Yeah, I'm asking. I checked, yeah. So in the request list, yes. Yes. So yes. Okay, so we don't have funds to fulfill the entire 5-year request, remember? Right. So in the request but not in the actual past. Correct. We never went back and cut down the plan to match our budget. Right. That's what I was curious about. So the conversation about priorities I presume is going to be between you and the team. Right. They come back to us because you're not asking us to make a decision about whether we... Not yet. You certainly once get the superintendent's budget, you have every year spoken about requests that you have that may then change some of our requests. But we've already talked about this as we know that the sum total just even right now from secondary level exceeds what we think might be the budget. We're trying to get really clear on this and it's a very tedious process because what it means, it's not a simple roll over personnel because each person may have, you might kick in longevity for one person, a new step, and so each one has to be done individually. And so Mr. Mason's in that process. But we already know just now we've exceeded what we think we're going to probably be. And you have the elementary. Yeah. Right. So we know and we've done this every year. It's important I think for you to hear and for the community to hear what the situation is in each school. But then we will as a team work on what are the priorities and that will then become the ask in the new budget. So I'm not going to ask you to, we had this analogy last night. But this building committee meeting, we're not going to ask you which of your children to pick, but so I don't want, actually you can answer the question I think right now what your priorities are going to be. But just kind of like what could you just kind of tell us in the public maybe kind of as you're going to this kind of this dialogue between you guys and the superintendent and the rest of the staff. Are you going to be thinking about enrollment? I mean what's going to drive your decisions I guess about deciding what you're going to recommend to us ultimately. I think this particular year at least if I speak for Gibbs and I think I can safely speak for Brian. We're also looking where it's a five year plan. We're also looking at the numbers below in all of these grades. When third grade comes to Gibbs there are 540 kids in third grade right now. Yeah. If we maintain that number my enrollment asks are going to have to be larger. So for me I'm not asking for a lot of FTE and I purposefully looked at that very carefully. Maybe that's why I asked for the 0.3 because as I said as we identify these gaps I want to really train the teachers that I have. I really want them to be able to have the professional development they need to launch all of these things that we say are going to be integral for their launch into 6 to 12. So I think my priority while I want to be able to run these sections at a smaller size and I want to be able to mitigate that Spanish there's not a lot to ask as far as Gibbs is concerned for FTE's because I really feel like that professional development which you'll start to see when you hear about special education. I think Allison will probably talk about co-teaching a little bit and when Dr. Bodie presents you her budget and what we have in there for PD that's where I guess I would be drawing from. So for me I think I'm looking down the road more for my enrollment growth because it's going to happen. Your third grade when they come up that we're going to need to have some bigger asks for enrollment. Right now we're maintaining pretty consistently. Does that make sense? I would also say that as one of the other things we're doing right now is we're presenting what we would really like to have right now and we understand there's budget constraints and I think there's multiple people that we need to collaborate as well when we talk about the budget. So one of the things that happens is I look from a lens of the building but I know that there are curriculum directors who look through kind of vertically and think of what they need to do and where they can fit certain goals. So what I like to do is be able to talk to the curriculum directors because they also have a different view of things that we think that we need and sometimes that's a blind spot for me and I think we also try to collaborate a little bit together so that we can come up with gee I can understand why this is important for you. I'm willing to you know maybe it's a little bit more important that you have this FTE maybe it you know and maybe we kind of go back and forth and hopefully we can work together. So I don't know if there's any other things that I think are important for the curriculum that I think are important for the curriculum directors and I think we've tried to give you our best guess of the things that we would love to have but we also know that as Dr. Bodie said we're asking for more than we will probably have available and so I think that's one of the things that I think is important for the curriculum directors and I think we've tried to give you really have available and so we need to go through and have decisions and talk about what's important for us to pair down the list a little bit unfortunately and we also need to talk to the curriculum directors because they need to have say in their departments and what they need as well. You made me just think about when Brian and I were talking to as well I know that I know the cohort that's coming up currently I know those kids I know what they're doing what they're used to I know the sizes and so when I hear you're asking for an additional half cluster I want him to get that half cluster because we just at Gibbs worked to get them to a place where they're going to really be able to access I want them to be able to access so you know while I do need these people I tried to be as conservative as I could because I also know the money's only going to go so far and so I really I think that through line is important so it's my responsibility to listen to Brian too and say I have kids coming to you and I think we do that collectively with Matt too so I guess that would be what we would want the community to know did you have another ad? I do want to echo I mean one of the things that's really nice about the structure of Arlington and the strong curriculum directors is that they really are looking particularly at the secondary level and they're looking at that through line and so when we are doing our waiting of sort of what things we're going to have you know somebody will say you know well it's great but they're going to need X, Y, or Z at the middle school too because you know they're having these same issues and the same things I think we're asked to prioritize we're going to do what we've always done at the high school level which is we have to prioritize the required classes what that means at the high school level is that we're losing enrichment, losing programs so the options that are available for kids outside of the core content areas become significantly less kids have a harder time getting interesting things in their schedule, stand alone classes suffer as a result of that alright I'm up next I think so Mr. Francisco at some point it would be great I'd love to hear more about what a social and emotional learning intervention model looks like what a tears are not really related to this maybe with Sarah Bird you can come back at some point but it would be a great thing for us to hear about Mr. Merringer so if you add a half cluster to 7th grade this year next year the following year you're going to want to add a half cluster to 8th grade I presume as those kids move up correct right does it to find for one year to find teachers that can teach both two subjects and then next year you don't really need them to teach two subjects because they could teach two grades instead of two subjects is that going to work is that doable or does it I think when we've had and I think Jason Levy was a half cluster teacher back in the day I think we have been able to find those people so last year we had before we were granted another half cluster half learning community we had one in grade so I think at the middle school level you can still find that history slash English teacher that science slash math teacher right now so if I look at the in 8th grade Nikki Hockter and Susan Stewart were both had a half cluster I think they did a wonderful job and then they were able to go back to the you know the subjects of their choice but I think they did an excellent job so I actually think there's a great likelihood that we'll find great candidates for that great and then Dr. Jinger we weren't able to get you all of your request last year but I just want to make sure you did get the 6 FTE because that was more than more than the enrollment increase but not the full extra right you were pretty generous last year I mean I really appreciate it we were able to do a lot of interesting things with programming a lot of things with programming you know for the co-teaching was helpful in terms of being able to staff to get sections in some really important areas to smaller class sizes the English math class sizes like right now in the core content area the class sizes are pretty good so we're really we're running to two funny problems with staffing one is we're just expecting a bunch of kids and so if you get a hundred new kids you still need four more sections of English the other thing is that we were very creative about using everything to get everything so we had split teachers and all those things and so we don't have a lot of stubs of teachers where we can add a couple of sections so one of the things that will happen for example which he is able to do is we would if we had fewer than what we're looking at have to do things like hiring high school teachers who are English social studies or one English teacher versus one social studies teacher and in the high school level particularly in the math and the sciences there's nobody out there I mean we social studies must be the best job in the world because we get this many applications English is second guidance is pretty good but math and science we get great people and I got to give a shout out to Matt Coleman also known as Billy Bean I don't know where he finds them but he's already found them before we even post I mean he just knows where people are he's reaching out to people he draws people from a lot of really great places if everybody else could figure out how to do that we'd have a lot of advantages but it's a lot to do in order to staff that but yeah it was helpful. Great, alright anything else? Great, thank you all for it, go ahead. I'd like to acknowledge the curriculum directors who are here to support the presentation we have Bill Papascesis for performing arts we have David Ardido for visual arts we have Denny Conklin for social studies and we have Cindy Bouvier for health. Great, thank you all for being here. Thank you. Alright next up is the AEA budget needs request for high school and middle school. Miss Keyes welcome back to the guest table today. And I have so much space compared to everybody else We can get a few other people to sit with you I'm good I'll be fast. Thank you all for giving the Arlington Education Association the opportunity to share our budget request with you for the 2020 to 2021 school year. My name is Julie Anakies I'm the second vice president of the AEA and I'm a teacher at the Odyssey Middle School. Most of our requests stem from our growing enrollment and the need to add staff to teach students. I'd like to highlight some of those requests with you that you'll find in the document that we submitted. I'm also going to cover a few requests that are sort of district wide not specifically elementary or secondary. And most of those center around curriculum and professional development. In terms of curriculum as we shift to more and more digital based curriculum instead of buying one set of textbooks that last 15 years you buy licenses to online books and curriculum materials and those need to be renewed every few years or every year in the case of some of our curriculum. It also means that for example we would love it if all of our special educators had teacher licenses to access all of those online textbooks but you have to pay by the license. So we're asking that you continue to increase money for curriculum for online subscriptions for curriculum materials for our small group classes. We have a lot of small group special education classes both for students who need a smaller more supportive environment but can do grade level material but need a little more teacher intervention that they would get in a mainstream classroom and for students who aren't working at grade level and they all need all of the same curricular materials that are being provided to the mainstream classes including teacher textbooks, manipulatives and such. And then finally increase funding for science materials and consumables. That's the elementary school FOSS kits all the way up to our new iScience curriculum in the middle school and high middle schools. We'd like increase funding for professional development. One of the great perks of working at Arlington is that there is some course reimbursement for teachers but we've been burning through the budget item for that in the past few years. So we'd like that to continue to be a perk of teaching at Arlington rather than having teachers who are working on master's programs or something being told sorry the money's all been spent this year. We'd also like more specific targeted training for our BSPs, our behavior support people. They are on the front lines with some of our most challenging students and it would be great if they had some more training. And then we would really be like if we could get more additional district psychologists and additional physical therapists and that's simply because these people are work to the bone their case loads are more than one person can do at this point. I'd like to echo our principles. We need more money for art supplies. That's something we heard from all of our art teachers from kindergarten all the way up through grade 12. And finally continue to work on providing equitable technology throughout all of our classrooms. We do recognize that great strides have been made in the past year but continuing to make sure every kid has access to technology continuing to update staff devices when they break or wear out or just are too slow to work anymore. And please, please, please take photo copiers and printers in all buildings and including any network upgrades that are necessary to do that. Wasting an entire period trying to find one working printer in a building with seemingly 18 floors is frustrating. So in terms of the high school we want to echo what Dr. Janger said. One thing that I think you'll hear from all our grade levels is increased EL. That's ELL, ESL. The acronym keeps updating. But English language learners, if we had more teachers they could even push into classrooms with kids, which would be great. The high school needs just more core subject teachers, math, PE, science, social studies, ELA, world language, facts, and performing arts just due to numbers. At the oddison the biggest ask from the teachers was more college educators with the idea that every cluster learning community should have their own. Right now we have almost there, but not quite. So it would be great to have an additional seventh and eighth grade inclusion co-taught teacher as well as another learning community. I'm going to be bold. I want a full one. Our numbers are going up. Our kids need more support. It would be great to just start us off with a full community. We need another .4 math teacher to do more intervention, but also as Mr. Merringer said, because we have some ELL students who are coming in who just lack schooling and just need to be caught up. So they need much more specialized instruction than they can get in a regular classroom. Additional PE, Spanish, and administrative assistance. At Gibbs our teachers definitely supported the need for more math support teachers and additional Spanish. They also said we just need more support people and I don't care what that is whether it's special ed or social worker or school counselors or TAs but when one student has having a bad day and needs a full time attention even if everyone else in that classroom is losing their support. So they just need more people who can step in and help. Leaving that up to you find people to decide how that money should be allocated. That was the big request from our Gibbs teachers as well as technology for special education classrooms. When Gibbs was started, it was the idea that every kid was going to get a Chromebook and carry it around with them and that model changed last year to having Chromebooks stored in all the classrooms that the kids could access. But when kids go to their special education classrooms they don't have those Chromebooks. So adding a few Chromebooks for the special education classrooms at Gibbs. So this is what our teachers asked for. Our building reps went out and surveyed and gathered all this data for us and that's what we're looking for. So any help you can give would be appreciated. Any questions? Mr. Shikman. Okay. Can you explain to me how the course reimbursement works and what's the impact of the funding not keeping up with the pace? So when teachers are taking classes at universities, graduate level classes, if they get them approved by the district ahead of time, the district reimburses teachers at the average state university per credit rate. Which works out to be, it's only a couple hundred dollars per credit but it helps. We just had so many people accessing that in the past few years that the line item budget for that money has been spent. Okay. So our policy is to go to the average state rate so as the state tuition costs go up the amount that you're eligible for goes up. Because I know where I work it's a fixed amount and that fixed amount hasn't gone. It is. It's not, it doesn't include all the fees and all of that. It's just the flat tuition rate. And when we run out of money we just stop. You just stop approving reimbursement. Cody? Yeah. I feel strongly like Ms. Keith, this is really important. And yes we do go over the budget line but we do it. Because it's really important. And I really appreciate the teachers that want to do this. I mean they have a long day and there are, you know, a lot of teachers are doing these in the evening or Saturdays. So I do everything we can to make sure it happens. The rate has gone, it jumped up a lot which was a little bit of a surprise to us. Because the state started shifting. They used to have, they kept the, the tuition's low and had it in fees. And we're not, our formula was based on tuition. But they switched it about a year or so ago. And that was a little bit of a shock to our, but we did it. We got it covered. But I don't try to discourage. The only thing that we do look for is to make sure that the course is being taken. One is graduate level. And two is something that would be helpful in what they, what they're teaching content areas or the specialist area. And they, I can't think of a course really that hasn't been that way in a number of years. Okay. Thank you. Other questions? I'll just, I'll just make a quick comment. So, so professional development, art supplies, things like curriculum materials, those are things that sometimes sort of get slipped under, you know, under the headlines of the classroom teachers and things like that. So I think, you know, we've tried to increase those budgets in the past year that I think we need to We're, we're planning to do that. And in fact, we're going to probably do some increases this year. The other thing that we're changing this structure because it used to be that performing arts and art were part of the principal's budgets. And we want to differentiate it into unique departments. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Now we have the principals back up for the discipline suspension report. Two of them at least. Thank you. So I wanted to go over the Audison suspension data from last year. So there were 42 incidents last year that resulted in either in-school suspension or out-of-school suspension. Out of that, there were 18 students that were out-of-school suspended. 24 of the incidents were in-school suspensions. In total, there were 34 students who were suspended. Obviously, 42 incidents, 34 students, there were some students who were suspended multiple times. I think the some of the key takeaways that as you look at the data is the difference in gender. So out of the 34 students that were suspended, 30 were males and four females. Half of the 34 students who were suspended were on IEPs. If you look at the racial breakdown of the 34 students that were suspended, 23 students identified as white, which would mean about 68% of the students who were suspended were white. Last year, our white population was 74%. Four students who identified as African American are 12% of the students who were suspended. Last year, our African American population was a little bit over 3%. Three students who were suspended identified as Asian or 9% of the students who were suspended. Last year, our Asian population was 11%. Three students identified as multi-race non-Hispanic. So 9% of the students that we suspended fell in that category. Last year, our multi-race non-Hispanic population was 6%. We didn't have any Hispanic or people who identified as Hispanic who were suspended. Last year, our Hispanic population, according to Desi, was 6%. The biggest reason for suspension was an in-school suspension. So we suspended eight students who were caught vaping last year. Seven of those students were only suspended for vaping. There was one student who was also caught vaping and was also suspended for something else. I am hoping that the number of people who are vaping are going down in the middle school, just from kind of evidence from kids reporting and parents. I think it has gone down. I'm hopeful with some of the new spotlight that has been seen both from the governor's office, but also unfortunately through some of the headlines, I think parents are a lot more vigilant with their kids if they are trying to vape and they catch it. I think two or three years ago, we were in the process of educating a lot of our parents of what is a vape, what's a jewel, the pods, and I think parents are a lot more savvy. I also think unfortunately because of some of the things that have happened, it's no longer kind of categorized as teen rebellion, but I think people are really scared now because of some of the things that are happening, so I'm hoping those numbers go down. We haven't had anyone this year who we have caught with any tobacco or vaping, so I'm crossing my fingers for that. The other thing was just a grade. If you look, we had 13 students last year who were suspended from seventh grade. 21 students were in eighth grade. This year, the eighth grade students who were last year's seventh grade students are still getting suspended at a lower rate than their seventh grade counterparts who have moved in. So so far we have suspended 15 students this year. Five have been in the eighth grade and ten have been in the seventh grade, so I'm finding it's a little less of we suspend a certain grade more. I'm thinking it's just luck of the draw in many respects. We are this year out of the 15 kids we have suspended, only two of them have been out of school suspended. We're really trying to keep kids in if they do make a poor decision. We are trying to keep them in. We are trying to educate them within the school day. The only times that we're really having to use out of school suspension is when we feel that that person's presence would be a disruption at our school. So we're trying our best to hopefully have kids learn through consequences but keep them educated so they don't fall further behind. So this year's or last year's discipline data in today's report is some good news and some bad news. And the sort of the analysis is we've put a lot of effort over the last six years in reducing number of suspensions and addressing students with challenging behavior. And this year we're now in our third year of rolling out an approach called collaborative problem solving which I'm not going to talk a ton about today. I'd love to come back and talk to you about it some other time. That's the poster that fell down was just sort of a little visual aid so I could just try it at some point during this talk. But we've also done work around cultural competency with students and staff around social-emotional learning. We've had a focus on wellness with events and activities, focus on inclusion. We've had programming for students like Voices United. We've done a lot of great work in terms of developing student leadership. We now have very active Black Student Union Gender and Sexuality Alliance, a young feminist organization of the Student Council. The mission is around inclusion and positive focus. And obviously we have a lot of work around having appropriate programming for academic support because when kids are succeeding in school they have a lot less challenging behavior. So that's kind of where we are. We've seen over the last three years which I focus on a lot which has been the period of the implementation of collaborative problem solving three trends which really have seemed to impact the disciplinary behavior that we see. One of them and it's pretty major is the legalization of marijuana and the advent of vaping. I have some positive sense of what Brian is saying but I also have some real concerns still. The political situation in the country which I think has led to a lot more provocative behavior and increase in mental health challenges also nationally and in the school. And honestly one of the things that in the past I think was leading to a brief period of higher levels of suspension and disciplinary consequences is what I would call better policing which is just a lot more supervision in the school in an effort to keep the environment safe. You also catch more kids doing things. I think that's turned out now to a pretty positive effort. So if you look over the Arlington High School suspension trends in terms of the number of out-of-school suspensions over the last six years and this year. The pattern has been the year before I came there were 96 suspensions out of school. We then really started an effort on not using discipline in that way unless we absolutely had to in terms of what behavior students were suspended for school for. And they really are again only really disruptive behavior. Drugs, theft, fighting vandalism threats, bullying. Things that in large ways are sort of illegal behaviors if you're not in school. And the pattern after that was 56, 53, 76, 47 and this year 34. So over the last year. So over the last over this past three year period during the implementation of collaborative problem solving we've had a 55% decrease in disciplinary incidents. And that's really good news. If you look at the pattern of that behavior just looking over this year and last year there's some even better news as far as I'm concerned and some bad news. So last year those 34 suspensions were 31 students total. So we're just talking about the students experiencing challenge behavior at that level. We had 18 that were substance. Almost all of those were marijuana or THC, vape to THC. Nine that were what I would refer to as conflict. One of which was with a staff member. Six which were disruption, things like theft or not sort of student on student just somebody doing something out there. And one what I would call chronic which is kind of a rare case of someone who just kept doing low level things and we finally decided we had to do what we call plan A which is you had to bring the hammer down. If you go back to the year before that where we had 42 total students you'd see that 12 of those were substance incidents and so the substance incidents continues to be high and has risen in the last two years. It continues to rise this year. 16 were for conflict and three of those were with staff. 16 were for disruption. One was for a chronic incident and one was for a student who committed a felony outside of school. And so the really good news to me if you think about what collaborative problem solving about and collaborative problem solving is about having a philosophy that kids succeed if they can. And so the approach in terms of dealing with challenging behaviors is to understand that what you're largely dealing with is a lagging skills in these cognitive skills for dealing with challenging behaviors. And so you want to focus on skill not will. Discipline like putting kids out of school is to keep the building safe to make it clear to everybody else that that behavior is not acceptable in the building and we also try to use it to encourage the parents and the students to sort of seek outside support beyond what it is we can provide. But it doesn't teach a kid how to behave if they can't manage their behavior. It doesn't teach them how to behave. In fact as we know the other outcome of discipline through suspension is it harms the relationship with the kid and puts them further behind in school. So we really try very hard not to use it. So if you look again at that focus we went from 32 suspensions two years ago around issues which would be conflict based disruptions and conflict misbehavior that's directed at other people to only 15 last year. We cut that by more than half. And if you dig down underneath that when you look at conflict with staff which is something we really want to worry about right if we talk about implicit bias and issues around how we deal with students for equity one of the sort of surmises is that it's about the relationship with a staff member. There were only three of those two years ago there was only one last year. All three of those two years ago with students of color. And all three of those involved escalations from an initial behavior. And so that's the sort of thing we really don't want to happen right because that's something within our control. A student may be misbehaved. We know that they're going to get the same consequences of misbehavior. But when we interact with a student if we have the training and the relationship more often than not we're going to do a better job of deescalating that. The one incident with a staff member last year was not escalated by a staff member and did not involve a student of color. And so although that's a very small snapshot because the numbers are small that in terms of data that we're looking at is something that is very positive to me. So jumping ahead I shared with you all the table of racial disparities for 2018-19. And it's a little hard to read because these categories are more fluid than we often talk about. So the good news is if you look at the racial disparities for this year for African American students one the number overall is just lower only 2.3% of students were suspended outside of school. For African American students there were only 3 incidents. But the population is small. In order for there not to be a disparity there would have had to be only one African American student suspended outside of school. If you look at other groups that are traditionally over, I don't know what the word is but have disproportionate disciplinary consequences the other would be Hispanic students. And last year there were no Hispanic students suspended out of school. But that's a statistic. Because if you then go to the next category which is other mixed which is a little bit hard to break out most of many of the students in that category that were disciplined identify as in part Hispanic. So if you to try to be fair the question is then how do I add those all together. If you go then to grouping together sort of the groups of students that would be traditionally have inequitable results. So you would see around students Hispanic mixed race and African American and this is not 100% true. You would see you had 12 students suspended out of 202 students which is 2.5, 2.5 times the general average which is the same ratio as you saw for African American students. So we still have that disparity. It's significantly lower. If you went back 3, 4, 5 years ago it was 5 times, 4 times and what's happened is the numbers overall have gotten smaller, the ratio has gotten smaller which is a positive thing and that's what we continue to focus on. You'll also see that one of the patterns which I didn't calculate out for numbers is that we have a disproportionate number of male students which is a pattern we see nationally. It's 15 students suspended or male and 18, I have that right now, it's 20 to 12. So 20 male students and 12 female students. So that's basically it. Alright, who wants to go first? Ms. Seuss, go ahead. So thank you for this. I'm really glad that we're getting regular reports. I think that's really valuable to look at sort of the whole health of our system. I'm glad the numbers are going down. I continue to worry about a couple things because there's so many different documents, it's hard to sort of figure out where things are. So one thing I worry about that isn't you guys are numbers that I see at the elementary schools and I assume those look like they're out of district. I mean they're they are not out of district, whatever it's called. There are suspensions out of school suspensions at the elementary school. So it looks like there are, let's go back. I wasn't looking at that one. It's one of the documents. Incident count by school. Incident count by school. There's one at Dalin, three at Hardy, one at Stratton. And so you know we know from lots and lots of research how absolutely devastating out of school suspensions are for students, especially when they're young, especially when they're our most vulnerable populations because this is often because those are the kids who are acting out the most. And so I'm just concerned about numbers when I see them at the elementary school. So I don't know if you talked about the particular incidents but I'm just, I would love for that number to be zero. I mean at the elementary school how devastating that is early on in your... They have been zero. I really don't want to... I knew you shouldn't have it. People take that very seriously and agree with you. So these are not taken lightly. Yeah. I think the question you always have to ask is to what purpose? Why are we suspending some? What are we trying to accomplish here? I think too often the answer is well we have to create, we have to show to the other students that this behavior is unacceptable and not realizing how devastating it is for that individual student to be out of school at that time. And then the other thing, and I don't know where this is coming from, but when you look at the death report you get sort of these funny things like one person was suspended out of school suspension for skipping class, which also feels like that's not quite, you know, that person is disassociated from school and then we throw them out and they're more disassociated from school, right? And then the numbers for disorderly conduct, you know, which is pretty high, is at 14. And so I just, I worry about those numbers and I just sort of, you know, I'm I'm glad you're paying attention on it but I'm just, this is a worry. So first I agree, right? I mean that's the bottom line. Suspending kids, I mean one of the whole points of collaborative problem solving, and you're just going to get me on my rant here because I have my notes, like if you think about the philosophy, right, which is the kids succeed if they can versus what traditional discipline is used to do, right, which is to say let's make them want to, right? And the problem with that is that when you make them want to, the result is externalized motivation breaking that relationship. It doesn't actually teach them the skills, right? And so the, you know, incentives and consequences as a motivator, right, they teach basic lessons and they provide external motivation. They don't teach complex thinking skills. And so like one thing I think to be clear is when you see those things they're not being used as a motivator, right? We're not trying to make you not do that because, you know, you're going to get in trouble because for the most part that's not the point of the behavior.  So just for example because drugs is the big issue. We've already had 16 suspensions this year. When I come back next year the news, if that trend continues, it's not going to be as good as it was this year. Almost all of those are drug related. We hold a 37H in expulsion hearing for every single incident of drug possession in the school. Not for being high in school because the law doesn't do that but for drug possession. We'll cover this so the kids don't know but if you, it's a single drug possession if it's not dealing, if it's not something more substantial than that. The purpose of that is to engage the student in the family and conversation to bring them back on conditions to make sure that they're getting into treatment and to have, to sort of put them into a structure which is really our own version of diversion. We don't hold the expulsion hearing in order to put kids into disciplinary situations. And so I mean, you know, it is really important how we do it and one of the hard things about the desi stuff, part of why I actually my numbers that I give you that I report back are from me pulling the stuff up and going through those cases and coding them myself because you just get weird things in the desi data. You know, we've had incidents where I know two, you know, we're just like there are two kids in a category. There's one in there where it said there were 11 kids who had an incident, 13 of them were suspended. Right, because they pull from different lines and they add them up in weird ways and I want to know what the numbers really mean. Yeah, so.  So skipping school, nobody gets suspended from the high school for skipping school? Well, one person did last year. Yes. And so remember when I said chronic? Right. So what ends up happening is that's the code that went in for the incident that happened to be the last straw of a very long period of intervention. Right. And then just, and I know you know this, but like things like disorderly conduct, I know you know this, but you know, African-American students with the same behavior as a white student are perceived by teachers often more disorderly. And so you always have to sort of be careful about that and think about what's really going on. So again, one of the things that we look really hard to make sure, and we actually have a chart, we track this during the year, is to make sure that students are having consequences for the same behavior. Right. And that we're not over-policing. And it's a real conversation. Like we just recently were having a conversation where some teachers were complaining about kids that were being loud, you know, and it turned out the, you know, Dean went down, they were arguing about Star Trek. You know, and so it was like, probably not behavior I'm super worried about, but it was perceived because of the nature of who the kids were and where their kids were that that was disruptive behavior. And for me, and this is the issue with collaborative problem solving, like what we're really trying to train everybody to do is that when a kid walks in laden says, go teach I don't know who that kid is, I don't know what color that kid is, but that kid walks in and does it. If the response to that is, John, why are you so respectful, disrespectful every time you come in? And if your perception is that's disrespectful differently depending on who the kid is, you're gonna have a pattern of behavior where you don't really get good support. And if instead the conversation is, you know, hey Eric, you're late sometimes and like the beginning of class, can we talk about that? And then you listen to the kid and have the conversation. That's the way you interrupt those sort of cycles of bias and build the relationships. I also don't know if the disorderly conduct, so you have a menu of things that you can choose from. So I don't know if that's high school or middle school thing. But a lot of times that's the, when you're trying to decide between a couple categories, that sometimes is the default that you would put in there as well.  It also seems to be something that when you don't have something that accurately depicts on the menu, a lot of times you default to calling it disorderly conduct because you have to call it something. I don't know, there's 14 that were out of school suspensions last year for disorderly conduct according to the desi numbers. Dr. Allison Ampe? I also have a question about the desi numbers. It has bullying, it has one incident with one out of school suspension. And that just seems low given the other data that we have that people are experiencing bullying and stuff. And I don't know if that's because of what you say that, you know, it's the weirdness of this report or the coding or if it's because the bullying is treated in different ways and so it doesn't even show up. I mean, if someone's caught bullying as a student, it's treated in a different way and it doesn't show up here at all. It just stands out compared to all these other numbers that just one seems low. So at the high school we've logged one case of bullying as a suspension. So the law in practice right around bullying is, I mean, for one thing many incidences of bullying are incidents of conflict. I mean, the language of bullying is specific and legal. And it involves repeated behavior in hostile environment with a power differential. Whenever there's a complaint about bullying we do an investigation. We make a determination of whether it's bullying or something else. Often it's something else but if something else is still not okay and those students may end up on behavior plans, they may have interventions. But for the most part they do not escalate to the point of ending up as a suspension out of school. Because that would have to be pretty much you were told not to do this. We were really clear you did it. It was differential and you continued to do it. And most of the time it's resolved with more restorative justice, more behavior, more conversations and mediation. Yeah, I'd say that's accurate as well. We can't say that there was one bullying case 6 through 12 last year and I think a lot of times we're able to hopefully curb that before it does become an out of school suspension. So there's a process that we follow, procedures that we follow, including calling in parents, doing paperwork, if people are on an IEP, reconvening a team. There's a lot of things that we do. It hopefully doesn't escalate to where an incident happens that all of a sudden we're like we warned you, we've been through this, you're now out of school. A lot of times something might happen along the way and a kid might be, it might be the second offense that something happens and you might be dealing with that specific event and then you're meeting with the parties involved and saying like that is the second thing. We're considering that's bullying if you do something else then we're involving, you could involve the police, you could have another out of school suspension. But I think a lot of times, as Dr. Jang you said, there's not something usually that says we've met, your parents have been in, you've continued to do it now you're suspended. And so I think we're not claiming there's one bullying case, but we're saying that hopefully we've addressed the bullying earlier before it had to be coming out of school suspension. And that might be in-school suspension, that might be detentions, that might be some restorative justice piece that has happened before it's risen to that level. Thank you. Are there questions? Mr. Suklin. The vaping thing has me worry and I know that in law we're seeing a boatload of suspensions for vaping. Is there, I'm at a loss to figure out what we can do to look at this differently so that we're not tossing kids out of school and they're not vaping. What kind of interventions are we able to establish that might allow the kids to retain in school and why is it I guess this is a violation of policy to be in possession of vaping equipment within the building. But how do we also identify this as being an addiction issue that we're addressing? I think it looks, and I'm not sure if Matthew would agree with me or not, but I think it looks different in the middle school than it probably does in the high school. So I think in the middle school last year we caught eight kids who were vaping. More kids than that obviously were vaping that we didn't catch. I think a lot of it is experimenting, kind of first seventh grader or last year it was mostly all eighth graders that we caught. I think at the high school it's probably a little less tobacco that you might be worried about. It's both. None of the things that we caught were drug related with vaping last year. My senses and my hope is as I've said is that at the middle school level 13 and 14 year olds it's harder to come by right now and it's also we haven't got the reports from parents, we haven't got the reports from kids that it is as bad as it was last year. You know when we do have someone who vapes our first call is Cindy Curran who talks and kids have to do either go through a diversion program or they have to pay a fine we keep them in school so they're not out of school because we want to keep them there and keep them educated and part of what they're doing is the diversion program that is being set up. So if you're suspending it's probably a repeat? We didn't suspend anyone out of school for vaping we didn't have anyone that we caught as a second offense for vaping. It was the first time last year that we would catch someone vaping that we'd have an in school suspension we'd call Cindy Curran. Cindy Curran would get in contact with Darlington Health. They would come in there'd be a diversion program, things that they would have to do so that they wouldn't get fined but we don't you know I don't feel for them to go in vaping that we needed those kids outside of school we wanted to keep them there but also have a chance to talk to people and hopefully do their work. So first just to make a distinction we talk about vaping. There's Juuling vaping nicotine cartridges and then there's vaping THC and the little cartridges of THC that are about this big sell for about 25 bucks and they have 25 more joints in them. At 90 plus percent THC they are very powerful. You take one hit of that thing and it's like you just smoked a joint. So it's a very different thing in terms of people's understanding about THC. At the high school our response to vaping of nicotine is similar to that at the middle school. It's a tobacco violation. It's a drug paraphernalia violation. It's an MIA violation so students will miss athletics if they get caught and that's probably one of the strongest motivators The students will be searched and this is part of the issue there and then they get diversion, they get a motivational interview, they work with Cindy and they get a fine which actually goes to the parents if they don't participate in the program. The issue for us last year was out of control. Kids were coming to us complaining about kids in the bathrooms. You couldn't go to the bathroom because you were walking through kids. Teachers were just sort of opening the door of the bathroom saying all five of you come on down and they were bringing them on down. Many of those drug offenses were teachers with six kids in the bathroom bringing them all down and we searched them and then they'd end up with THC in their backs. So that was last year. It feels this year and I have no data on this other than sort of how people are reporting incidents with issues around vaping and lung disease Parents finally saying no, this isn't just a cute thing, it's a big deal. Fewer of the just kind of a group of kids going in to take a hit on somebody else's vape before they go off to class because it's funny and it's social and it's really sort of a more surreptitious or more involved group of kids. But the vaping of THC is seen by a lot of kids as normal, it's safer than smoking, it's safer than drinking. If you look on the YRBS, you saw our drinking down offset by an increase in THC. The number of kids who are sort of seriously using substances remain probably the same but a lot more of this was THC and what we're really finding concerning this fall and I've talked to a lot of public health folks about this is that if you think about the combination because this is what's happening of vape to nicotine and vape to THC vape to nicotine is way more addictive than cigarettes and cigarettes are way more addictive than marijuana. But vape to THC is much more habit forming. We have the experience now of kids who vape THC and they don't remember when we caught them because you can take so much THC in such a short period of time that they are really substantially affected. We have reports from people not in our school but elsewhere else nobody went to emergency rooms from smoking joints and it would take like a month to get it all into you but they are now going to emergency room from vaping to THC so it's really concerning behavior and we are seeing what appears to be just more aggressive more sort of drug seeking behavior and more kind of a group and it's not the nice thing about school is we say these things with fear because there are 16, 15 cases in a small period of time there's a group of kids we're worried about. It's a school of 1415 kids and the vast majority of kids aren't doing this and don't want to have anything to do with this. And the main inconvenience for them is that they can't find a bathroom they want to go to. And that's a real issue but it's the nature of the building. But the other issue is a big one so just today the main speaker of the event was about jeweling and about the effects on people's lungs and what's going on. The second one of the other presentations was about drug addiction and sort of the sequence of drug addiction. We're working on public information we have meetings with the kids we're going to be having class meetings coming up in January and I know Cindy is still here you know Cindy runs and with Arlington Youth Health and Safety Federation a lot of parent forums get the information out to parents. I actually think for us in the high school it's going to be about building relationships and getting the kids who are currently already in trouble for folks coming up for the middle school it's like trying to get cigarettes out of the all over again and it's going to be about changing the attitudes of parents to be able to realize that like it's much more worrying behavior it's much more destructive behavior than you know sort of an occasional this that's not really a big deal and that's something that's just going to have to change norms again All right this is something that I think we have a lot on our table right now as educators but this is a new thing this is a new scourge that's coming through it during the 50s and 60s and 70s we brought into education alcohol we brought into drugs in the 70s and the 80s and stuff we dealt with it this is a brand new thing we're going to have to add this to the curriculum and all aspects to it on through all history it's not going to happen overnight just want to share that All right I think you've gone on any last questions All right great thank you for coming in presenting this One of the things that's in my super intense report is about today's wellness I don't know if you'd like to have Dr. Janger just talk a little bit Dr. Janger one last thing He knows that I was going to ask him I had the wellness day from 9 to 11 and it was from all I've heard very successful it was so well organized you've seen the website that they created for each grade level and all the students had as you talked about this one assembly on tooling but I'll let you talk about it because it was really a very successful day So wellness day I think is really the 12th year of what we've called in the past mental health awareness day Andrea Rossi deserves huge credit for bringing that to the school many years ago and keeping it going and being a champion The model that we've been experimenting with the past few years has been a conference model and part of the idea behind having it be a conference model is we're able to bring in lots of different speakers we're able to have students do workshops, teachers do workshops and the reason for that is because one of the things we often say about these is that we act as if people don't say well yeah it's one day a week we care about one day of the year we care about wellness but the purpose of this is to get that information into the community and also to build capacity so all the folks that are running these workshops are also then running those other activities and it ends up spurring other activities through the year and so Andrea Rossi is the organizer the primary organizer and then Stacy Kitzis scheduling she's our librarian and with work from our computer science students and Dan Sheldon our computer science teacher they've actually created a whole scheduling program that ranks what kids want and shoots them all emails of what their schedule is and so students are doing workshops we had therapy dogs in the building we had a speaker about Juuling who was Dr. Hartman who was recommended to us by the middle sex partners for youth we had for half the school the students went to something called the improbable players which is a group that does work around wellness and drug addiction at stress and they had come last year and were very popular so we decided to put them in front of more people and then half the school did a whole bunch of wellness activities and so we experiment with that every year and then in the spring we'll be doing inclusion day at the second this is the third or fourth I can't the fourth inclusion day is the same basic structure but it's around diversity equity and inclusion with student teacher and expert run workshops it's really a fun day it's really great thanks for reminding me. Thank you. Alright now we are really moving on so next item is the school calendar first read I had actually intended this really to just be a discussion and a vote on the first day of school so it's helpful to have the calendar there because it shows what the impact of the first day of school is barring no other changes but there's still a calendar committee that is still looking at possibly making other changes so my intention is to next week just have a vote on what the first day of school for students will be unless anybody else wants to proceed differently. Does that make sense? I think that's accurate the thing that I think that we could also vote on because they're pretty much standard is when the vacations are it's always in February and April the third full week of the month and so that can vary every year as