Good evening. I'm calling to order the meeting of the regular meeting of the Arlington School Committee on Thursday, September 8th, 2022. I'm Liz Eckstin, the chair. Our first item on the agenda is a land acknowledgment. We acknowledge that the town of Arlington is located on the ancestral lands of the Massachusetts tribe, the tribe of indigenous peoples from whom the colony, province and commonwealth have taken their needs. We pay our respects to the ancestral bloodline of the Massachusetts tribe and their descendants who still inhabit historic Massachusetts territories today. All right. Welcome back everybody. Um to a new school year. I hope everybody had a good start to the year. Um our next item on the agenda is public participation for members of the public who wish to address the committee. There will be 20 minutes of public comment depending on the number of people who sign up. Time allotments may be reduced but will not exceed three minutes each. Dr. Allison Ampe, our vice chair, will be the timer and will give the speaker a signal when they have 30 seconds left. If the number of people who sign up exceeds what can be done in 20 minutes, the number of speakers may be capped and will be invited to speak based on the time stamp of their email to mistaken. The school committee respectfully requests participants of the public to utilize their camera if possible while speaking and to adhere to the public comment policy that requires participants to provide their name and address. Speakers may offer such objective criticisms of the school operations and programs as concern them but in public session, the committee will not hear personal complaints about school personnel nor against any member of the school community except for the school committee or the superintendent in their capacity as the operational leader of Arlington Public Schools. The public is reminded that the school committee does not hold jurisdiction over the performance of school personnel other than the superintendent. Additionally, the committee will not hear anything that might identify and or infringe upon a student's privacy by name or incident. If you would like to sign up to speak in person or via zoom, please email Edigan's at Arlington.k12.ma.us by 3pm on the date of the meeting. We have two public participation this evening. Our first is Ms. Perez. Welcome. So if you want to just move up to one of these chairs and speak into the microphone, please. So I didn't realize that you had three minutes. So I did not create three minutes worth of presentation. Is that that's the strict number? Yes. If you have it in writing, we'll take it and read it. And I think you did send us some documents, right? Yes. I sent you a supplement to which you can actually, yes, perhaps we can move it. Yeah. So we will, some of us, the public did it already and the rest of us will take a look at it as soon as possible. But just in the interest of keeping our meeting moving, we can give you three minutes, right? Okay. Well, I'll just do my best to condense. And practice my speed reading. Thank you so much for having me. My name is Eliza Perez and I grew up in the area. My husband and I are the parents of two APS students. My background includes teaching science as well as curriculum development. I'm also a member of Safer Air, Safer Schools, a group of parents and community members who are dedicated to helping our school community stay safe in this pandemic and beyond. We've sent various communications to stakeholders and decision makers such as yourself. However, those communications have been ignored. So therefore, I would like to take a bit of your time to discuss several important topics, including long COVID, how long COVID impacts equity here in town and what we need to do to fix this. So I'm just going to jump right ahead and give you the punchline. We need consistency in mitigations with oversight. We need to do more to put equity first and to do this by reducing transmission. And for the numbers folks here, we need to think about how all of this impacts the operations of the district. A lot has changed last year. We lost all of our mitigations except for the air filters and just like how our mitigations have changed, so did they are understanding by scientists about how COVID is transmitted and what it does to your body. We know that it's airborne. We know that masks help. We know that consistently open windows and consistent filtration help. We also know that long COVID is real and does leave lingering symptoms ranging from mild and temporary to long lasting and downright disabling. Both adults and children get long COVID. Public health tells us not to worry that COVID is long, COVID is rare, but a rare disease is considered rare if less than 200,000 people are affected. However, as of March 23 million Americans have been affected by long COVID, many of whom live in this town, including adults and our own children. So all of this long COVID and all of this chronic illness brings me next to our to discuss equity, which seems a little disjointed, but we know what equity is. It's a big thing that we all talk about, especially in our schools. But a big part of equity includes health access and health outcomes. Marginalized groups also include folks for whom their health conditions, which includes long COVID now, put them at a disadvantage to their peers. Now public health and schools have made tremendous progress to account for that wheelchair ramps and peanut allergy protocols and such and so forth. All designed to prevent ableism and to not exclude folks with medical conditions from being safe at school because when you are safe at school, you can access education and your world becomes brighter. But now there's a new barrier, which is long COVID, and it's not where 40 million Americans have long COVID is it is in or out of work at this time. So kids are at an disadvantage if they have long COVID. If someone has brain damage, they can't exactly perform at optimal levels needed to learn. If someone is fatigued nonstop, it's hard to pay attention. It's exhaustion on a cellular level and it's actually caused by neural inflammation. This presence time to finish up, please. Okay, so long COVID is bad. We want to reduce it. I included some supplement with proposals from our group safer air safer schools that we ask that you please consider in the name of equity and then and finally all of these tools that I gave you are available all within grasp and attainable. We know this because it's being done in different districts across the country and the world and we do not need the blessing of the CDC or DESI or anyone else but you to make this happen. The best time to throw what we've got at this problem was in the past. The next best time is now is today. We cannot allow policy to be guided by special interests or politics but rather science. In Virginia, the federal court of appeals just voted to uphold the rights of students at risk for severe COVID disease to have accommodations made so they can attend school. I need you to finish up. In Arlington, we can do for marginalized groups and vulnerable families what Virginia was unwilling. We do not and will not accept the prevent preventable illness and disability of children and their families in Arlington and children cannot individual responsibility their way through this pandemic. That is our job. We are the adults and you are the adults with the decision making power. So I thank you for your time and in advance for the thought and consideration that you will offer our solutions that we present to you. So thank you. Thank you. Our next speaker is Miss Leary and I believe she's on the Zoom. Miss, Miss Dickens, are you able to make her? Hi, I'm here. Hi. Don't start yet because we want to, can we make her the big the big screen? Yeah. Speaker view. Speaker view. I think when she starts talking she'll. Will it go? Okay. Miss Leary, can you just say something? Yeah, there we go. Okay. Thank you. Am I supposed to start? Yeah, good. Okay. Hi, my name is Kate Leary. I'm a 39 Milton Street. My son is a freshman at Arlington High School. So that's, this was his third day of school at Arlington High School. I'm here to speak in favor of option two for the high school building project decision that you're going to be discussing tonight. I think that 11 days of half days for students is a lot. It's a lot of lost time on learning. I think it would be a very rough start to the school year, particularly for freshmen. I'm watching my son try to adjust right now and it's everyone is being really friendly and helpful, but it's no joke trying to get around that building. And it seems like it would also have a significant impact on lab students. So I think that I urge the committee to choose to spend the contingency money to keep Fusco online for longer so that students can go back to school for full days next September. I think, you know, I will support option two regardless, but I do have a bunch of questions that I'm hoping. I'm sure many of you have the same question. So I'm eager to hear the conversation. But I'm wondering what's the plan for students if Fusco is demolished in June and there are further delays. That's very common right now. I also think that I really hope that there are real price tags attached to option one before a vote happens in this committee. I think there's a hidden cost that with the half day plan we're paying for a lot of educator instructional time that doesn't get delivered to students and I'd like to see a dollar figure attached to that. There's a TVD for outfitting temporary lab classrooms and modulars for athletics and ACE. And the last time we looked into this as a town modulars were very costly. Another thing that I think is important to consider is that the plan that was presented by the building committee to voters was a phased plan that did not require modulars and didn't have significant learning interruptions for students. That was really important to me as a voter and as someone who worked with many of you on the yes campaign. I think that's kind of interruption would have been a problem for voters and as you know as we all know the town will be going back to voters soon for an operating override. I think that this 11 day plan if it really is 11 days for sure is a significant interruption. You know and I think that maybe not a lot of people are paying attention to this issue now but they will be when they find out their kids are going to school for half days if option one is chosen. I really want to thank you for your work and your thoughtful consideration. I know many of you are on the building committee and that the school committee has been part of these conversations for a long time. I understand it's a very long and complex. Okay that's my own time. I still thought myself it's a long and complex project and that financial concerns and responsibility are very important. But I think it's important to be educationally responsible too. And I hope that if you if you can finish up please thank you. Yeah, I hope you choose option 2 because I think it's really the right decision for Ellington students. Thank you for listening. Just for the public commenters we don't respond to the public comment but it might come up later on in our discussion that might get referred to a subcommittee. So thank you. Thank you. Opening day and summer activities report Dr. Holman and Dr. McNeil. Give me one second I will drive slides but you're starting. Oh we're pleased to bring you a report on some of the things that we have been up to this summer. This is not a comprehensive report. We will have more to say about some of the professional development that happened this summer when we do the PD report but that doesn't happen until the very end of the school year. So we wanted to give you a little bit of information about some of the work that happened the curriculum work that happened during the summer. Dr. McNeil will do that and then he'll pass it off to me to do a report on some of our opening activities as we got the year started. It's been a great start to the year and it has been absolutely wonderful to see students and we're looking forward to sharing a little bit about what we've been up to over the summer. Go ahead. Thank you. So first before I begin. Oh I've been out of practice. So first before I begin I just would like to thank all of the teachers, coaches, curriculum leaders and directors who spent time and building administrators across the district who spent time over the summer just engaging in conversations about curriculum, attending special I mean professional learning sessions after this year. It was as we know that this past year even though we I say we were still in the pandemic it was still a very taxing time for our teachers and just for them to give up their time over the summers just very appreciative. So as we go to our first slide I just some of the themes that you'll see in all of the summer work that was completed just revolved around developing curriculum, updating curriculum, trying to make curriculum more inclusive of different groups of students and also attending professional development. So some of the things I'm going to highlight, some of the things I'm not going to mention but you'll see you can read about them on the different slides. So the first thing I want to highlight is we had 15 teachers take the ideas of one course which focuses on anti-racist school practices to support the success for all students. So that was something that we offer throughout the year for the last three or four years and so I'm really proud to say that I think we have over a hundred teachers or staff throughout our district have taken this course and so very attentive it's 25 hours and they can get to graduate credits through Framingham State University. The second thing I want to highlight is the work that our that Deb Perry our curriculum director did with the ninth grade English teachers where they came together for five days and planned and participated in professional learning for our heterogeneous pilot at the ninth grade level ninth grade English. So you know that was a very successful and I heard nothing but good things from that and then we will come back to report on the progress of that at a later time at another school committee meeting. Now we can go to the next slide. Another thing I would like to highlight is the work completed by our history social studies team. First I would like to highlight that we have a new social studies director Caitlin Moran who has come right in and hit the ground running. She's done a fabulous job connecting with teachers other curriculum leaders and just learning the culture of Arlington. So you will meet her I will have her come in and you can meet her as we have at our at our future meetings. And so some of the work we did here is like updating curriculum again bringing in diverse perspectives looking at instructional materials and so I'm very proud of the work that we've done with our history of social studies and I want to emphasize that we have not adopted a canned curriculum. This is all cultivating curating different resources and so we're we're actually developing this curriculum K through 12 you know at the district level. So I'm very proud of that work. We can go to next slide. So I'm also want to highlight our K5 teachers who attended professional learning sessions focusing on instructional practice. Turk which is the curriculum that we have the the recent curriculum resource we use at the kindergarten through fifth grade level or actually first through fifth grade level. They attended these sessions and you can see the different topics that the workshops focused on and they were all online and they were asynchronous and synchronous. So I'm really happy and proud of that work that we've done and with our math teachers at that level looking at SEL. We had teachers and I want to highlight the work that Sarah Bird has done to apply for and receive grants and some of those grants you can see how we utilized it for professional learning. We had our K5 staff participate in a responsive classroom for the at the basic for the basic and advanced levels and then we had our middle school teachers also attend as well and you can also see that our K through 12 staff participated in grant funded training to get sort of to become certified youth mental health first aid instructions and then instructors and then we had some of our current instructors also participate to become recertified. So moving along and then I'm going to also ask Allison Elmer to also talk about this but we have 14 special education teachers and three reading teachers attended the Orton-Gillingham training and Allison can talk about the further training that's going to take place with those special education teachers. Sure so they completed the training portion and then there's a year-long practicum that is supervised by the Orton-Gillingham provider so they will be completing that this year so that they will have their um called Level 1 Practitioner Certification I believe is the official term but they'll they'll be doing that this year. Absolutely they'll be doing that this school year to get this practicum to get the certification. So they had the initial course in the summer and then they're going to proceed and become certified by going and going through the practicum taking the practicum throughout the year so that is something that I'm very proud of yes. Is this something they'll act as lead teachers for other people to support them? No. Orton-Gillingham is a specific um rule space reading curriculum so they're getting trained to deliver that curriculum. Thank you. Right. So moving along I'm going to jump to the next slide so that that concludes the work that we've done and like I said those are some of the things I wanted to highlight and then you can read about the other things and then I can also have a more comprehensive list that we have that can also share with you a whole spreadsheet that talks about all the other things that were not in the slide deck that was accomplished over the summer. So we had we did a we I feel like we had a healthy robust you know curriculum development and professional learning practice things that we wanted to accomplish over the summer and I feel like we accomplished most of what we set out to do. So moving on to the next slide talking about our new teacher orientation we had you see there during August 22nd through the 25th and the 29th we had approximately seven new staff participate in new staff orientation and training and I also want to highlight the work that Marie Janiac are outgoing mentor coordinator who pretty much organized this structured it. She did a fabulous job handing it off to our new mentor coordinators at the K5 level we have Dory Pazouk, how do you say her? Paluzzi and then we have at the secondary level we have Melissa Heath. So they came in and they worked with Maria I'm Marie excuse me Marie to understand you know the culture around this and understand that there are different things that they would have to accomplish and again they hit the ground running and so I feel like we had a successful week with our new staff. They also have new ideas how they want to transform this week and continue to have it evolve to be more effective and productive for our new staff as we unbored them on to into the Arlington culture and so I don't know if Mr. Speaker would like to say anything else about this week. I mean it was a busy week. It was moving from Arlington High School to Gibbs and thank the staff and custodial staff and IT staff at both at both schools for the help that they gave and food service for providing some of the snacks for the new teachers but it's a lot in a short amount of time and so as Dr. McNeil said Melissa and Dory are thinking of ways that maybe it can be structured a little differently in the future. It's a great Marie Janiex had a great baseline for how we do this and we've been recognizing Arlington for our orientation and mentoring program and we just want to continuously improve it. Yeah thank you for that and so you can click on the I included the link to the agenda for the week and you can see I know that they're overwhelmed about the amount of information that they received because it we had our curriculum leaders present on their different content areas we had they also met with their mentors and we also had a special education and miss Thomas are the director also present so you can see that and if you have any questions that ends my part of the presentation. So I'll talk a little bit about what leadership has been up to as we launched the year we had a successful August leadership workshop that was entitled learning and leading together in pursuit of growth, joy and equity for all of our students and the objectives are there I won't read them to you we did a little bit of pre-reading of a book by Dr. Jill Harrisonburg who does a lot of work on shared leadership and teacher leadership in schools and she actually planned the whole thing with me and then called me the night before and told me she had a family emergency and so we had to pivot quickly and Margaret was a great help and we facilitated a fantastic 3 days of leadership workshop time together. We had a lot more participants this year than we've had in fast years there were over 115 people at this which is over 10 percent of our organization and we really wanted to make sure that we had our teacher leaders at the table and it was absolutely wonderful having them there helping us plan how we were going to lead into the school year. I do want to make sure we acknowledge the Arlington Education Foundation because they supported in a somewhat last minute ask they were extremely supportive of providing some teacher leadership stipends to support the expanded participation in leadership workshop this year and to support the instructional leadership teamwork that we're going to be doing at the schools during the year so that was very much appreciated. Opening day themes were that we were really sort of focused on establishing sense of belonging for adult learners in APS that was what I focused my opening remarks on taking a look at a little bit of data that shows that we could work on this aspect of our diversity belonging equity and inclusion work and we really wanted to think about how we were setting the stage for individual and collective district and school actions for the 2023-24 school year. Some of those actions that we've been thinking about they're not listed there but the ones that I talked to the team about actually they're listed here. We're making sure that we establish and practice will be shared instructional leadership on our instructional leadership teams ensuring that we're establishing opportunities for all of our educators to engage in sustained choice-based professional learning. Dr. McNeil will have updates on what that's going to look like later but he's been collecting proposals and putting together menu of courses that teachers will be able to select what they want to learn about tied to the district's themes and the actions that we're taking so we're really looking forward to trying that out and seeing how it goes. We'll be continuing our instructional rounds by administrative teams this year and really practicing having sustained engagement and conversations with our community about the equity work that we're doing in the system that will start this fall with conversations with the community with that myself and Ms. Thomas will facilitate focus on the strategic planning work that we're doing and asking for community input and engagement with our new district vision and mission statements and our four priorities so we're really looking forward to launching that and I believe that's my last slide. All right so we'll take any questions that anybody has about the launch of the year. Thank you very much it was I mean the amount of things that happen over the summer in a school system it's tremendous and that's important for for us and for the community to see what all the work that you all are doing in July and August so thank you for sharing that. All right our next item on the agenda is an update and discussion on school and district logos so as part of the new website there's been some logo and branding going on and so the ask tonight Dr. Homan's going to share some of the logos with us and she's looking for feedback on the logos and also feedback on the process for how we might want to solicit feedback from stakeholders other than the seven of us and the administrative team in making a decision about what these logos will look like and I think you're going to share this but these are logos that will go on the website on letterhead that's part of your yes share okay yeah all right thank you. So I'm also going to try to do some differentiation because I think we have we have a branding update to give you for Arlington High School that's linked to the building project and if there are any questions on that I know Dr. Janger can take them he's on zoom with us and then there's the feedback piece which is the APS branding that I'm looking for community input on the A8HS branding is determined because that went through the building committee process and I just wanted to make sure that that was in front of all of you and that you knew that that happened so we did logo development for the A8HS building project I want to distinguish between the logo that we're using on things like perhaps t-shirts letterheads and a mascot which is still an ongoing conversation there hasn't been a determination about what the high school mascot's going to be we're just talking about the logo tonight and I'm letting you know that the logo and seal that was decided on by the interior subcommittee of the building committee is going to be used on the phase 2 gym floor and scoreboards and then I want to talk about the logo and branding development for APS which is a separate process which is about what we put on district level walls in central office for example we're working on putting a logo emblem on one of the walls in the new central office building but also on district letterhead on the district website so these are the A8HS logos that were approved by the interior subcommittee of the building committee and shown to the building committee as well the one on the left goes on the Arlington High scoreboards and the one on the right goes on the Arlington High gym floor so the one on the right will be very large many feet across the one on the left will be on all the scoreboards on the fields as well as in the gym now I'll switch to district so before I do that maybe I'll pause and ask if there are any questions for Dr. Janger or myself about the APS logo development or A8HS no that was really just an update okay actually Morgan is it also going to go on Pierce Field or whatever we're going to call Pierce Field um Dr. Janger I believe the answer to that is no because Pierce Field isn't getting redone anytime soon so when Pierce Field is redone which is somewhere in the neighborhood of five years out at this point our expectation is that the um monotony hunter symbol will be retired what will go on the middle of the field at that time I think is still something yet to be determined assuming people like this logo and it's what we're using at that time I would recommend it but there may be more branding that's been done at that point right so for Arlington Public Schools the options that you have in your materials and that I'll show in a moment were developed by our website vendor they have a marketing arm and so we asked them to do some graphic design for us as part of our project for the website this was these were based on some answers to some basic questionnaires that we want to we completed as a cabinet team the questions were very basic like what kind of style do you want do you want it to be simple do you want it to be um traditional what are you you know what's your district vision statement we can base it on that what's your district tagline we didn't have a tagline so they suggested some taglines to us um we did we did give them our new vision mission and strategic priorities and asked them to incorporate that into whatever they designed they attempted to incorporate some references to sustainability to spypond to Minuteman bikeway and some references like I said to our strategic planning pieces in their tagline and in the imagery they provided us we've done one round of revisions already and we have one round remaining based on feedback that we get from all of you or from the community so we can go back to them and say we like these pieces but not these pieces we like that one but incorporate this element of the other one into that one um we have the opportunity to go back and get other options we don't have to pick one of these options um we have the like I said ability to integrate feedback and um I would like to hear how folks would like us to proceed with getting any additional feedback from other members of the community um we can send a survey out and get some input or we can take input from this committee and just go back to them with revisions and let everybody know what the final plan is and we would be fine with either version of that process so branding option one for all of these the tagline is interchangeable so I'm going to show you the branding options and the taglines but we could swap out the taglines for any of the visual branding options um so this is option one the original before we did the first round of revisions is down below one of the things that we thought about and talked about was that this little guy looked a little lonely and so he needed a friend um and so they gave us a friend and we also asked for a little bit of um directionality to where they were walking so they added a path and a little bit sharper reference to the pond behind them so this is supposed to be water behind them and then this is sort of a path that they're walking on these are the two uh taglines creating leaders of tomorrow and education that empowers this is option two the original option down below is was this one um the the graduation hat came out not necessarily based on any feedback from us so that's something they could probably reincorporate uh some of the feedback on this from cabinet team um was around uh the lowercase letters a few people had a sort of a reaction to the lowercase letters they didn't really love that um a little bit of a reaction to sort of the puddle drop and you know could that water have a good direction to it and so with that feedback they gave us this version and this is the third version um the first one was down here the feedback we gave them on this one was that it was a bit uh clip art looking and we were hoping that it wouldn't look like it was taken from clip art and so we gave them a picture of spy pond and they actually used that to create this seal and i'm withholding my own opinions because i'd love to hear everybody else's on these which is sometimes challenging to do so the tagline option questions we have are education that empowers are creating leaders of tomorrow or some combination of those two in the imagery we're wanting to know what elements are compelling what elements should be eliminated is there one that you just flat out don't like that we can easily eliminate for for folks and then do we want to gather input from the committee the committee in the community and how would you all prefer we go about making a final decision and thinking through what we want to integrate into the website and into our district communications so as people have comments or questions so we're looking for both feedback on the logos and feedback on the process i wasn't going to separate the two um so you can share your thoughts in both on both of those topics mr. heiner i'm just kind of initially react to the the logos as presented uh i like the branding the aps uh on the set in option two uh but i also like the the two people walking so i guess my feeling is bring the people down the number two and creating leaders of tomorrow i think that belong in my mind with the logo piece not under the title of island bubble schools i don't know how to be incorporated but oh i the over with the logo is opposed to yes okay thank you uh i i have no feeling whatsoever for number three i'll say it and any any feedback on collecting feedback from others than i might meet personally the more people you get the more people you're gonna uh have negative feelings when you don't accept their piece so i mean it's tough it's hard to do um just letting people the amount of people you would involve let them know the final decision belongs to the whomever if they know that up front i think that'll soften things later along sir cardin sure um so on the tagline um you know creating leaders of tomorrow isn't in the vision statement so i think it would be unusual to pull that out as our tagline it wasn't an earlier draft maybe they read the wrong draft i don't know but one of the feedback from our here at the table was that that may not be the best for our vision so i wouldn't put it in the in the logo if it's not in our vision um as far as which one i don't have strong feelings i think maybe when you narrow it down to two or or something you could shop it around a little broader than just the um admin team just to if there's a sort of visceral reaction of a larger group of people that's not good then you would know i like the two people under the tree i think um definitely with the cabinet team on the lowercase aps it actually looks like an owl to me um i've gotten such varied reactions to that lowercase one it looks like an owl i didn't get owl yet though owl um so like not on don't love that um but i mean whatever uh that i just doesn't like scream spypond to me it actually looks like winger chic beach kind of i mean i totally believe that you gave them a picture of spypond i'm sure you didn't give them the wrong picture but like it doesn't there's nothing to me and i like the idea of that kind of iconography actually um the circle the circle like i i like circles i like i like this but like the problem is is that like i don't know where that is in the picture so i don't know um yeah so yeah the other one is very cliparty and i definitely don't see the pond an option one but i i believe it if that's what people say is there but that's cool i mean yeah anyway uh for feedback i yeah i mean i i think i like the idea that people you know are gonna see them i like the idea that like students will see them and teachers will see them and you know even if it's even if we don't do like a whole like survey like get them out to like faculty meetings and stuff and put them in front of people and then have somebody report back and and there's somebody out there who thinks that this one's an owl so i really think that you're gonna find somebody who sees an owl in that and and that's will be worth the whole exercise that's all that's all i i think it's great that we're doing this though i'm excited owls well that ends well okay when i first saw number one with the two tag lines the creating leaders of tomorrow sort of resonated a little more but then i thought about it and thought back to the message it was coming from our students during the during the strategic planning process and they want to be empowered they want us to help them go where they want to go so the more i think about it's more like education and empowers which really does draw from the strategic plan yeah i i agree that the one person was kind of lonely and the second one is i wish there was some way to get a waterfowl in there you know duck you know a duck you know spy pond is filled with geese um that would certainly send the messages to pond two leaves me cold i'd rather have the album as a little wavy aps thing just leaves me cold and three is really very gray it looks like a puddle um and i can't imagine that being a logo uh so bring me to the two people the tree maybe a duck you put a little duck over the schools on the other side you know i don't know but that would get that would give us the feel of i like the waterfowl aspect uh but nobody else seems to so sounds like the pond might be a little lost i i like education and empowers i i don't know the tree with the two people under it is nice and so is the aps with this sort of it looks like a path like the kind of a path to the future so that's kind of nice so but i wouldn't use creating leaders of tomorrow i i like education and empowers do you have any thoughts on collecting feedback well um i i don't know how necessary it is i think i think the superintendent get feedback from her staff and us and that's probably enough um i don't love any of them um i'm sorry i'm just gonna be the okay so the pond one the last one is just crazy you can't have no idea what you're looking at um the circle idea is nice i'm trying to decide if i would like this the tree one with more you know if it was like in a circle like the town seal is uh i don't it means that it won't match you know go together with the early to public schools and stuff as well but the specific tree that's drawn is just kind of weird um and the pond that the illusion that there's a pond back there also is kind of weird because it it's going in a hill which ponds can't do so i'm a little confused um anyway it i don't feel any of them really give a really strong sense of place but if this is what we've got i'd say the tree one um the other thing is if you look for feedback i think you need to figure out what you're going to do first if everyone says like they have with the high school logo on multiple occasions we don't like any of these and so you know depending on how you solicit feedback either you need to be willing to go back to the drawing board or know that you may be putting a logo out there that your feedback says we don't like it or whatever so um i don't the second one doesn't it just feels very generic so oh and i like the empowering leaders of tomorrow i mean empowering whatever the education that um i think that's all so i i like one and two i personally prefer the first one um with the tree i'm intrigued by your suggestion um about the circle i i think that that could could work um i like education that empowers um and and i i think some kind of feedback from teachers and students um you know as we've talked about um sort of the creating the vision vision admission statements and getting feedback from students and talking about this sense of belonging is sort of something that that you presented to the to the school community on opening day um i think the students and teachers have voiced um around some of that which is great i have to ask julie and julie so my first question is do we pay somebody for this because we have this amazing department of all these art students who i think would love to do a competition design the new logo it was included in our process okay because it makes me sad that this isn't like student submitted because i think that we could get some really interesting stuff i love education that empowers i think the other tagline implies that you don't have value if you're not a leader and i don't like that um there's a lot of people in the world who make really important contributions but wouldn't get be called leader um the third one take it from somebody who has a circle logo that i have to work with you can't shrink it down so like if you leave and just look at like that's if you tried to take that circle and shrink it up into the corner of like a background you lose the words you can't read them so as in terms of something that's like flexible to adapt to different things circles are hard um you're a tour fine so it's been really fun first week of school um we we have a little bit of a circle logo happening at oddison right now we have bulldogs trying to bring back bulldogs and that's been really fun um i'm not a big fan of any of these logos um i i'm so sorry i hope nobody takes that personally um i did like the the original one that people said looked like an owl but as soon as as soon as you said it looked like an owl i was like oh that's why i like it because it looks like the tootsie roll owl i don't even like the tootsie roll owl um it's going to be great year so but i'm not sure like are are there any other options it's just like do we go back to the drawing board or is it these are the options and let's pick this has been a fantastic conversation i'm enjoying it a lot actually every post whatever one has said um we are without paying more for the project that we've been working on then no we don't have a lot more back and forth um did have the thought of soliciting graphic design from within the community so that would be our drawing board plan if we were to say we didn't like any of them um that's uh you know something to undertake and have some logistical challenges to it and i think we need to think about what we want to prioritize whether it's the kids doing a competition for the new bulldog logo which i think what it would get into or for the district so um i so i i have thought about but some of those things um i'm hopeful we can come to some kind of conclusion with what we have but if these are flat out rejected by the staff when we ask them for their opinions then off to the drawing board we go our painter how soon does this have to be decided we are we launched the website without this because we wanted to give this the time that it deserved so we are not on a tight timeline look at this we are well i will qualify that if we want it on the wall of the new central office building which i would like um we are on a little tighter of a timeline we should decide this fall because they have to make the graphics for the uh for the wall in phase two we could wait to put the graphic up on the wall if we had to wouldn't be the end of the world so yeah i mean i can offer bulldogs i mean what about the cat lovers you know i'm i'm kidding i think you've long enough to know the history of the two middle schools and the mascots and all the different colors and all that stuff i know we yeah i'd offer my cat up as a volunteer for a while ago she's well okay but uh no i yeah i i i really think that if we're talking about a palm we should have a duck yeah i wrote the duck down okay all right moving on from the enjoyable discussion so now we are going to discuss um the start of the 2023 2024 school year specifically in ahs um so this is for for people who are watching um they're and dr homen will explain this a little bit in a lot more detail they just want so um they're three weeks at the beginning of september 2023 um where the phase two will not be finished where students should be would be moving into their classrooms um and the current plan is that uh basco would be taken down in the summer and so there are some um there's a discussion we need to have about what to do with the high school students during that time um we had a subcommittee meeting a few weeks ago where many but not all the members were there and then it was discussed at a building committee meeting where some members were there but not everyone so this is the first time that this full committee is hearing all this information at the same time um so after dr homen shares um her report and dr janger as well um we can ask questions and have a discussion um and certainly people can share their position um this evening but we're going to hold off until the next school committee meeting and to make a decision on which option we're going to to to give everybody an opportunity to give feedback hear the hear the options um and to get sound like some more information okay all right so i'm gonna start with sort of an overview of exactly what the challenge is that we're facing and that we need to address and then i'll talk through two options for um the fall 2023 start of school walk through for each of the two options what the impact is on both phase two and phase three move in and what the implications are for space schedule and finances um at at the time of both phases um and then i'll show some timelines for option one and two in a calendar format that might be a little bit easier for folks to read so based on the current project timeline in fall of 2023 arlington high school is not going to have enough space to host the entire student body during the first three weeks of school before we are able according to the current contracted timeline to move into the completed phase two buildings on september 25th of 2023 resolving this challenge has implications for the future of the project in phases three two three and four um it has some potential implications for student learning depending on which options we choose and also on the overall project budget so i'm going to talk through our options for addressing the challenge both in phase two and phase three dr jangers also here to answer any logistical questions you might have about the implications of phase of option one or option two and the purpose of our discussion today is to consider those implications of both options answer as many questions as we can this is a very complicated challenge that we've been thinking about for several weeks now and the two options i'm showing you have come from lots of discussion with the owner's project manager with our construction company consigli it is based in options they have given us and cost outs they have given us on what it might cost to do either one of these options and it's not it is not feasible to move the pace of the project up that is not a possibility it's not possible for us to put students at another site in town and run the high school schedule the way the high school schedule is designed and the way that we provide the most supportive start to our high school students we don't have another building in town that can house 1500 kids and we can't split the kids into two groups across other buildings and we will have school going on in all of our other school buildings which means we can't accommodate kids in the other school buildings so i just wanted that to be stated before we dive into the options so here's a quick overview of our contracted construction timeline the phase two transition includes ahs phase two being completed by the 19th of september of 2023 so that's the humanities wing in the central spine so that would be available to us after the first few weeks of school about 11 days in to move into and then we would be able to start classes after the move fusco house and blue gym demolition begins before that in summer of 2023 so there are about three months there where the fusco is offline and not available to us and that's why there's not enough space to hold the entire high school student body from the time school starts to the 25th of september of 2023 notably the central office offices are also located in fusco house so that group of people would be need to be relocated during the summer of that year as well as for the first three weeks of school of 2023 phase three transition as currently contracted includes arlington high school phase three which includes athletics offices lab program which is our special education collaborative program that's housed in arlington high school the administrative offices for the high school and arlington community education being completed in september of 2024 the downtown demolition is currently slated to begin three months before that in summer of 2024 so again those programs athletics lab the high school administration and ace would be need to be relocated for those three months there wouldn't be enough space to host all of those programs and offices between june and september 2024 and we have to find an alternative solution for housing those programs so we have two options i'm going to walk through option one first which is to follow the contracted construction timeline with the challenges that i just described so in terms of space what this would mean is that demolition of fusco would start in june of 2023 and we would have to use the current new building the steam wing that has been constructed phase one and downs and we'd have to build the connector in between the new wing and downs because there's fusco is the connection between that area and down so we would have to build a connector between those two buildings that would facilitate half day classes for the first 11 days of the school year the implications of that are that we would need additional classroom spaces in order to accommodate the full schedule so we would need to build those classroom spaces we would need to build the connector connector in terms of space and we would only be able to accommodate half the student body at a time so that means in terms of the schedule that we're creating a half-day schedule for students for the first 11 days the students would attend three classes a day and morning and having lunch and then a shift coming in for lunch and then having classes in the afternoon because of how the schedule works and because some classes are mixed so we would try to prioritize ninth and tenth grade classes for example this isn't hard and vast yet but we would accommodate maybe ninth and tenth in the morning and eleventh and twelfth in the afternoon but some students have classes that mix grade levels so there would be students who would have to stay and maybe have a gap in between their classes in order to attend their afternoon classes because it's a mixed class with upperclassmen for example and we would also have students who would need to stay for the whole day even if they didn't have afternoon classes due to transportation for example some of our Boston resident students there would be approximately 30 fewer hours time on learning in 2023-24 and a disrupted student schedule for the first three weeks we would probably we would seek to eliminate some of that loss of learning time by absorbing some early release professional development time which would mean loss of that professional development time and we would in both of these options need to accommodate the move which we have some options for but in this case we probably need to cancel school and make up some days if we were to choose option one because I'm not sure if we could accommodate the half-day schedule for the teachers and also accommodate some elements of the move but we would have to work out the details of that if we were to choose option one this will cost at least $125,000 but as we have worked on this proposal we've identified a lot of additional costs that are associated with this proposal that aren't reflected in that 125 that 125 is what our owner's project manager has told us it's going to cost in order to build a connector if we also build additional classrooms that is cost on top of this the cost of running our buildings but only at half capacity is an additional cost to this the cost of those 30 fewer hours time on learning that's the you know we spend money on our time that we spend with kids and so there's a cost to that as well and so this is definitely a minimum spend and there are costs in phase three which I will walk through next so if we do option one this impacts not only phase two move in but also the phase three move in so we would need to do a demolition of downs in June of 2024 which means that down to us wouldn't be available for for lab program which means you would need to use the space that's currently slated for monotomy pre-k to host the lab program which would delay the move in of monotomy pre-k to their new space for about a year they wouldn't be able to move in when phase two is finished because we would need that space in the summer of 2024 in order to house the lab program um we would also not have a solution in this scenario for the lab program for the first three weeks of school in 2024 and we would need to relocate them well they they may stay in the monotomy space if we did this option but they also may need to be relocated again if we were to use this option depending upon how the monotomy pre-k space was being used so we have a delayed move in per monotomy we'd have two moves at least for lab we would have a swing space required for athletics and ace just in terms of space for option for phase three option one there's no impact on the student schedule for this one with the exception of PE classes which would probably need to be held outside we would have some implications for like locker rooms that wouldn't be available we wouldn't necessarily have access to all of our athletics spaces in the scenario um and the administrative spaces wouldn't be available until late september 2024 but those are offices and that's probably something we could work out we would need to possibly rent modulars for athletics we would need to find a new location for earrington community education which may include a rental um and the cost of some of those things is to be determined as well as um temporarily outfitting any of the monotomy classrooms to be lab classrooms so that was option one at the building meeting i took questions on each option after should i just go through okay all right i'll keep going so for fate for option two phase two transition this would essentially shift the construction timeline on the project so if we used option two we would keep fosco online for the first three weeks of the school year in 2023-24 and not begin demolition until after the move into phase two so we would have fosco open for the first three weeks of school year run a regular schedule and accommodate the full student body and then move into phase two with either an adjusted schedule for our high school students using some half days to do the move like we did when we moved into phase one or with a few full school days of move and then make up those days in later parts of the schedule so we would have full school days to start school year in this scenario we would maintain time on learning maintain early release times later on in the year for teacher professional development um this would shift the project timeline back and the cost of that shift back in the project timeline because it requires us to keep all of our staff from our construction company and our owner's project management group on line and also our architects because they have to continue to be paid and they're still on the project it costs us the building project 1.2 million dollars at least in phase three this would also keep down's house online for the first three months of the school year in 24-25 and demolition of downs would begin in january of 2025 this would allow if we can adjust a timeline on a playground project this would allow monotomy pre-k to move in sooner it would allow lab to maintain its space in downs and only move once it wouldn't have a significant schedule impact on the main student body we would still have uh gymnasium locker rooms lab program and some administrative space available but not until january of 2025 so that means that the opening of phase three gets shifted back three months as opposed to the opening of phase three happening in september of 2024 it would have to happen in january of 2025 and that's because the demolition delay on fosco then delays also the demolition of downs um and then the financial impacts of this is the same as previous slide the whole shift of the project schedule uh has that cost of 1.2 million dollars to the project so i have a couple of calendars here that sort of demonstrate visually the differences between option one and option one we start fosco demolition as slate as currently scheduled in june 2023 we have a three week half day schedule um and a regular start of the school year in september of 2023 and september of 2024 uh we open phase two in uh september of 2024 in both options but we delay the opening of phase three um until later in option two but here phase three would open in september of 2024 and then in option two all of that gets pushed back and you can see that the completion of the project gets pushed back about five months um in option two and that is because of the timing of work on the fields and some of the implications of the seasons of doing outside work on the fields um there's about a three month delay to the demolition schedule in option two and then there's another couple months delay because of the field work that's happening outdoors over the course of winter they can't do some of that work so the completion of the project would be um september october of 2025 in option two and you can see that this moved some of those timelines to the start of school or the start of demolition back so i'm happy to answer any questions dr jenger is also on and he can answer any questions as well if it's okay i just want to give sort of a process update on the building committee so the building committee met on tuesday night in case you can uh add to this and correct things um and we uh had some meetings with sandy pooler our interim town manager um so the way this has to work is the building committee the school committee takes a vote endorsing one of the options one or two and then the school committee and the vote makes a request to the building committee to withdraw the fund to to take appropriate steps to support either option one or option two and then the building so the building committee is scheduled to meet while we're trying to be scheduled the uh october meeting because of the uh jewish holidays so that's kind of how the process would work the the the funds would come out of contingency so we're not spending we're not going above the budget we're not spending money we don't have there's contingency funds in the budget there's 7.7 million of contingency funds in the uh high school building project left and um so uh so there's different levels of comfort with using that money on the building committee some people um are are comfortable some feel that it's premature because we have a couple of big things ahead of us which is the abatement and demolition of fuss go house the abatement and demolition of downs house and there could always be surprises in the in that process and if we get to the end of the project and we are out of funds we would cut certain things at the end of the project that people might want to have so um i'm going to be clear we're not going above the budget it's a request by the school committee to the building committee to take funds out of contingency to support um one of the options so that's it and uh ms exton dr ellison ampey ms morgan we're all on the call and can and listen to me and thirsty participating mr hannah i don't mean all the simplifiers but in the first part that you said you're looking for 11 days right yes any thought of starting this program 11 days later i'm talking heresy but taking February and April vacation that would be that would be an option available to us if we were to not open school at the start of school at the high school um i'm not sure that that would be a popular option and i think that one of the challenges associated with that is that it would require a separate school calendar i i understand i'm just but the the major part is looking for 11 days am i correct and the if you fight if you had a if you did not have the deadline of June 30 as a school year and have you option to start a later time would that solve the problem or is it more complex i would say it's complex in so far as the um that you know running a school when we are currently when we're slated not to be running a school has additional costs to it as well so we have to have the custodians on staff and we have to have it so and and there's more efficiency realized when all of our schools are in session at the same time so yeah could it solve the time challenge sure not without additional cost in addition to what my second question is the 1.2 million in the second option that you talked about is that include the additional time of four or five months with the contract and stuff of that nature yeah okay thank you i'd also like to note that some of the implications of other things that you were suggesting would have also have bargaining implications we would need to bargain that with our units who would need to be working during that time thank i i didn't think it was that simple thank you mr slickman yeah killing the two vacations only buys you eight days because you legally cannot operate on the two holidays on those weeks um if we were to go with option one are we guaranteed that we'd be able to move in on that date or uh could something happen that would delay us a week or two which would make it a totally untenable it is a complicated construction project and that is a full year out and our society has been experiencing significant delays when it comes to the supply chain so i would say no there's not a guarantee that if we were to go to up with option one that we would have a backup plan if the project were to be further delayed and in that scenario while we do have the available hours in our high school schedule right now to meet regular regulatory requirements such as the 990 hours that are required for instruction we could be in a situation if the project were to be delayed where we would not be able to meet those regulatory requirements and we need to go to the commissioner for a waiver yeah um i i hate i i really hate to spend money to delay the project and that was my initial reaction we can camp out on the football field or do something just to get us over the first 11 days but the thing that really is worrying me is is what you just mentioned is that there are supply chain issues right now going on if we don't get the steel on time if we don't get the bricks on time uh if forces out are out of our control that are going on everywhere get in the way to be a week or two and that's 10 days of instruction and that really puts us in a hole so the more i think about it the more i'm looking favorably at option two as much as i don't like delaying it and i would hope that if we go to option two uh as soon as the building is ready we're moving across and we can start the demolition as soon as possible so we so we're not extending the delay by delaying the demolition i just wanted to ask the question which i know if i already asked you which is did you consider doing something like a tent city where we create completely temporary school i mean a temporary classrooms um on the parking lot or something and can you just review what you told me sure i can speak to that a little bit and i'll also talk to us dr jenger if he wants to weigh in here because that was one of our earlier earliest conversations related to this uh possibility but yes we have looked into that there are some pretty there are big costs associated with that because of how many tents you would need um there are costs also that i thought of after we had our conversation about um associated with some of the realities of bringing that many kids outside and then back inside because if it's a rainy day for example you're going to have a lot of masks associated with some of that um and then also if the weather is particularly bad needing to heat cool or otherwise manage some of those tents for extended period blocks of time during the day but dr jenger can you speak to some of the other things we thought about when we looked into the tent city on pierce field the tent city was one of my favorites so i'm glad some of that um so so the bottom line is to replace fosco house we need 25 classrooms and in looking at all of the places that we could get classrooms we could get 12 if we use the auditorium the red gym the areas of the field that we would be able to use um because if we were to put tents on the field we would damage the fields and so it would be prohibitive to put dance floors across the whole space wire electronic and everything like that so we were only able to get up to about 13 um additional spaces um which isn't enough to allow us to keep running a full schedule and then as dr homen pointed out that the logistics of that would have kids all the way out on pierce field coming around into downs house and then running through the tunnel that was going to go up through downs house um to the other side so that just wasn't enough to be able to do that i well since i've got the microphone i do want to just say one thing for parents who are concerned like there's a plus and a minus this is unfortunate right it means that instead of a nice smooth start to the year whether we're doing shifts or whether we're doing um the fusco plan there's going to be a little bit more moving and disruption than we would like for the beginning of the school year but i also want to assure people that you know we're going to sort of plan around the schedule to try to make a virtue out of necessity and really use that time to focus on giving kids a good supportive start to the year so i'm we're really interested here with folks think is the priority there but we will make it work for the kids either way just as we've been doing all year long thank you i understand that the 1.2 million for option two is coming out of the contingency fund from what um i'm concerned about it you know it says 125 thousand there but then for option one but you know that's just this connector so the funds for additional space or dividers or what all the other things that would need to be involved in option one is that funding also coming from the building committee is that something that we would yes so one of the things that i think we need that i know we need to go back to the building committee with um at our next meeting is a little bit more detail and come back to all of you with at the next meeting in two weeks is a little bit more detail about what some of those things that we weren't able to cost out before we had this conversation would actually be um i think one of the things that um has stood out to me is the fact that we are you know for every hour of instruction we are paying a significant dollar amount and the there is a cost that is coming out of the school's general fund um and all the other funds that we use to educate the kids of losing of losing some of those hours of instructional time and that would be an added cost to option two that's not going to come from the building committee's contingency but is going to come it's essentially not going to go back to the students and and that's something that i've been thinking about a lot over the past couple of weeks the you know as we estimate things like modulars temporary space it's also hard to get an exact number on that we'll have to come up with some estimates because it's hard to know what rental cost of an additional space for say our administrative offices is going to be in a year or two and we haven't worked out where exactly we would actually put our administrative offices in 2023 if we had that um span of time where we didn't have access to fosco and our offices they are and this the option i don't know if i was mentioned the option one includes this like serverry tent thing in the front right that's yes so that's those are costs that are not on this those those costs as i understand it the 125 is for the connector no that list it's it's not sorry it's not it's 125 is fair five classrooms the connector and the server and the server that's the whole thing five classrooms where dr jenger the auditorium the auditorium no i recognize that there are a lot a lot of costs that are not there i just wanted to be there i'm what they were and where they were coming from um so something else that i've been thinking about and we've talked about this but um with monotony is um if monotony gets in option two moves sooner than um then was on the schedule or when the schedules um will they have a playground or outside space we wouldn't move them without a outside space a play space for them um but we and we have looked into whether or not there would be a cost associated with moving the playground part of that project up right now it's actually slated for very late in the project as part of phase four some of that seemed to be because there was a feeling that we might need to use the monotony space for the lab program for a temporary period of time while downs was being demolished and because there was concern about having our preschoolers on site during construction i think we've learned through living through construction on site that it's actually really not as disruptive to those who are in the new wings as we might have previously imagined that it would be and i don't have any qualms about having our pre-cares with all the safety precautions that we have in place on our construction zones right now um in their new space once it's available and there is a cost to the town of um you know not having access to farm enter which they could easily rent out if monotony were not in that space no i i i want them the kid the pre-k to be in their new space i just want to make sure they have outside yes they will okay i think those were my questions that didn't get answered um the piece hi um i'm just trying to get caught up because i haven't seen this before uh so would the two the half day schedule for those 11 days or maybe a few more in like length in the length of the work day for any staff not right now no okay um i i'm just gonna put in a plug for our high school teachers right now some of them are working in really deplorable conditions um their windows i don't know if you've seen the backside of the building anything facing construction has been completely taped there's no fresh air that comes in some of them got air conditioner some of them didn't they can't see out the windows at all so the kids are in like windowless boxes i think anything that's going to delay them and keep those in those rooms longer is going to be more detrimental than half days for a couple of weeks um because the truth is by Thanksgiving nobody remembers the first half of september anyways um you know you're in your rhythm and you're going so i i think the idea of delaying and keeping people in the old rooms and the old buildings for longer is going to be more detrimental in the long run i want to qualify two things one um the rooms and downs get fresh air through the univents and do have appropriate air exchange rates and we test that but you're right that the windows are closed off and they can't open the windows yes i just for community members watching wanted to ensure that we are i'm not worried about like we are ventilating i'm worried about you know when there is an odor and you can't just open the window and like blow the man out that is true um and that both option one and option two have us moving on september 25th of 2023 into the new wings and into the new classrooms the difference is that we would be either running a full schedule in fosco for those first three weeks or we would be running a half schedule for those first three weeks um it'd be a half schedule for the kids not for the staff and there are no implications on staff workday based on what we've currently sketched out and the next year as well the following year doesn't have implications for classroom teachers in that phase three doesn't include classroom spaces we would all be in the new wing in in um september of 2023 for most of the classroom spaces it's just some of those other programmatic spaces that wouldn't have access to their newer rooms so people wouldn't be in downs just because we're keeping downs online mr. salmon yeah so just one thing to make sure we're clear on the the impact is on the end of the project so the the field work wouldn't be done until august of 2025 rather than april of 2025 so that's that's and extending all those people working more time and all that stuff is a big part of the cost so i mean i think we i tried to get a straw poll the building committee but that people didn't want to do that so um so i'm not sure where they are going to land but i do think what i said i don't know if everyone agreed with this is that i really think the building committee should do whatever the school committee decides i think that's the right thing to do so the school committee makes the decision that's in the that it feels we feel collectively isn't the best interest of kids then hopefully the building committee will agree but i can't guarantee that so i think that's that's why we have to fill the case for whatever option we choose and that's why dr. homen was asked to do some more research on option one to get the full two costs to your point on this accident that's that's that's what that's the homework we have to do over the next week or so i will tell you just to put it out there that i am strongly leaning towards option two because i think that's in the best interest of our students it is a risk it may mean that we're not able to do something at the end of the project because we're using 1.2 million of contingency right now but to me that's a risk that we would have to take and we would have to confront together as a community and i mean i still want to hear from more people in the community but i i think given some of the disruption our teachers and our students have encountered over the past few years as well uh and encountered this it's um for everyone to start fresh in 23 full days of school normal school all nine graders all teachers feels like the right way to begin the school it's also a right way to begin uh life in a new building so but we're gonna get more information we're gonna discuss it one next week it's fine um i think you know i i'm i'm a little concerned about that i i appreciate the way that we're doing this um i'm a little bit concerned about the sort of reaction that we're gonna see from folks um sort of in the interim two week period between now and the next time that we meet um which is fine i just um i think you know we're gonna get some more information i've been really pretty unequivocal about this from the beginning i really think kids need to be in school and have their time with um their peers and with their teachers and that will never know uh what the cost might be of having a disrupted start to the school year um but it's you know it's potentially significant um and i was talking with uh one of my kids former teachers today on my way into a meeting here and we were talking about school starting and and i i said something the effect of you know the the whole like we're experiencing this period right now right that that we would be disrupting next year and students meeting their teachers seeing them almost every day that it really only works if kids build those relationships with the adults who are who are going to teach and lead and and who they're going to learn from and so i you know i i hope that we support option two um i hope that the building committee in turn is able and in a position to support option two um and so you know i um i just i i'm a little worried that people are gonna feel that we're yet again sort of dithering around are kids going to school are they not going to school um and so i guess for me all i can control is that i i think kids need to be in full days of school yes i think it's expensive um i think it's worth it um so you know i plan to support option two when um i guess we're planning on voting on this in two weeks so that's where i'm at yeah i was gonna say i mean i mean if if if it would be helpful to come to a joint decision then we have a joint meeting with the building committee but if if they if you think they're gonna defer to us then we don't need to do that but i i do think you know and there's two of you on the both committee so you can definitely communicate what we're saying but and the superintendent as well yeah um but but if i mean we're not hearing their concerns if the only concern is not being able to put the lights on the field for example we can find money for the lights on the fields somewhere else i mean i want to know what their concerns are that they're talking about yeah i mean the do you want to answer that yeah so i mean the concerns are is that we have seven point seven million dollars in contingency left and that um when you do an abatement and demolition of a building all sorts of things would come up that we didn't anticipate yeah so their concerns that we would use all the contingency too soon or get to a point where we'd have to take votes to not do things at the end of the project right right and so when we sign the project funding agreement with the msba we're actually not allowed just to go to other places to get money right right but the original plan was to not include the lights knowing that at some point correct we would add the lights in some well well well right yeah but let me let me finish so we we we could correct at the end of the project we can value engineer we can take out certain things we could say we're not going to do the lights on the on the facility on the fields yeah there are some people really want lights yeah um we could say we're not going to do the connection from the bike path to the school there are certain things we we have options at the end of the project to say we won't do certain things and so absolutely and we could take those votes and the committee not do certain things that's how it works but i i don't know if a joint meeting is that is what we i mean what we agreed to was committee would take its vote and we would i mean i can't speak for for christy or liz but we would go to the building committee and say look this the the the school committee strongly feels whatever we feel by vote and i'm going to urge you everybody on this committee to vote the way the committee has voted and they may ignore that or vote i don't know what they're going to do i really don't i can't predict that yeah yeah i mean to me again i think to spend the 1.2 million to avoid this disruption to me is worth it and i understand the concern about the contingency and what i'm trying to say is we're that 1.2 million has to come from somewhere i think coming from somewhere else if we end up with some other concern within the building project right well not technically but by moving things out of the project we can fund them separately later yes we we could we could say the building committee could say look we're going to value engineer we're not going to do certain things and we're going to ask we can lower furniture and fixtures for example and fund that somewhere else i don't think we can't because that's in the front no no so we would take no we can't do that no so that yeah there's there's there's there's things that we could we could we could look at yes but you're kind of constrained by a guaranteed maximum price and a project planning agreement signed with the msba yes and then at the as you get to the end of the project there are certain things you say we're not going to be able to do them right and they're deferred to whenever the town can get to it right by however the town can do it or they're not going to be done at all yeah that's the possibility we all understand that but there are some people committee represents different constituencies in the community and there are some people that are like all those things at the end of the project so that's it so Dr. Allison ampy thanks um i just want to speak to a couple things first we haven't talked that much about what the problems are if we were to have a further delay in the project and i think that's one of the main things that really pushes me towards option two but i personally was not in favor of taking a vote tonight or even this straw poll because we're basically weighing two not great options either we're putting our kids through a less than optimal start of the school year and keeping the project on track and keeping funding keeping our contingency well enough that we hope to get to the end of the project and be able to fund everything we expect to fund or we're going to be spending a big chunk of money possibly endangering some of the stuff at the end of the project and delaying the project itself so everyone won't have to be able to benefit from chunks of the new building until you know three five months later or three months later um it's i think it's a big enough decision that we shouldn't just hear about it and vote on it the same night so i am in favor as has been scheduled to wait a couple weeks and i don't think we're dithering i think we're giving it good consideration and building our case so that we have the information that we want um so i was going to say something else now i've forgotten um oh in terms of the contingency and stuff i do think we're in a good position that the bulk of the building is all going to be done by the end of well before the end of the project so the thing you know it'd be different if we had a wing of the building that was the last thing that we were building and i would feel different about the contingency in that case but in this case we're talking about fields lights like path which are things which are more easily severable from the project without actually necessarily meaning that they would never be done whereas if it was an actual building we'd be like changing the materials and you know there's all sorts of stuff that would have to happen so i think this is you know we're in a good situation in terms of the timing of the project and and what we're building when but it is a big decision so breathe a sigh of relief and contingency when when the demolition and abatement is done so and then when the demolition abatement of column house was done that was like good news all right good we're in good shape and when the sooner fosco house gets down the blue gym and there's no surprises there that's good news downs goes down no issues there that's good news so those are like the the three milestones for contingency so i was i was waiting for like a call over the summer with something at column but i never came i checked in frequently and everything was good all right so we'll come back in two weeks to vote on one of these and we'll get a further report on the cost of option one and where that funding would come from because it's not 1.25 million dollars with versus zero so it's going to be 1.25 versus 125 funding will come from more than 125 it'll be more than 125 it will be in very much an estimate whereas the 1.2 isn't as much of an estimate and it will all both in both scenarios it's coming from contingency yeah so so we're not making a 1.2 million decision we're making say a one million or an eight thousand dollar decision we'll work on getting more details on that yeah we'll get i mean no so just so if we're when dr homand does a research and comes back to the report on option one it'll be 125 thousand dollars without a contingency maybe a little bit more plus operational impact operational costs right that's you're doing an analysis of um yes we've done an analysis where we've taken a look at what the instructional time right cost is and and that's those are dollars that essentially we would spend anyway but would not go back to students and i can share that as well it's a little bit it's a little bit of more of a mental exercise than it is um anything else but i think it is worth considering because it's part of the cost of that option right it's town money it's right it's it's it would right there are certainly educational costs to consider outside of it when i'm saying in the initial when you said that we constantly more than 125,000 is that limited structure would require a contingency or is there other costs that we have flexibility outside of the SPA there are not really costs that impact our operating budget you know there are there are the opportunity costs essentially associated with losing 30 hours so money we're talking about option one and option two right but dr homin's visit then asked to explain this to the building committee the opportunity right but i mean but there are also costs around outfitting lab temporarily that aren't in the 125 rental modulars for athletics and community ed that aren't in the 125 so it's i mean it's 125 and 1.2 and this one's going to come closer the question is how yeah and i think that's that's the number that we need to see that it's and i that i think we need to share with the building committee right right that it is closer to 1.2 million dollars than 125,000 and that that's the piece that we want okay i think you're right though we're gonna move on it'll all work out we're in attendance to report so i will start not with a graph displaying number of covid cases in the district but with a strategic planning update so i wanted to provide a little bit of an update on what where we're at with strategic planning we did provide a more comprehensive update to the curriculum instruction accountability subcommittee on in late august we have a smaller group of individuals most of whom came from the original larger group that did the mission and vision work and this group is made up of administrators teachers community members in four subcommittees one subcommittee per strategic priority and i'm going to be talking to dr jane gerson now that the kids are back in school about whether we can add a student member to perhaps priority one to work on that one with us as well and this group split into their subcommittees has the task of developing two to four strategic initiatives for each of our four priority areas so over the course of the next several months they're going to be working on this the goal is for them to have drafts of strategic priorities ready at some point in october that we can start workshopping with members of the community and getting feedback on and then redrafting and then in order to bring a draft of a strategic plan to the school committee and cia subcommittee for consideration later on in the school year around december our hope our current timeline is to have a strategic plan ready for approval by the school committee at some point in january of 2020 what year are we in three and they we are definitely like i said earlier tonight planning on having some forums throughout the fall to look at the vision and mission with members of the community that i'll be coordinating with miss thomas and other members of our team one of the things that we've said to the strategic planning committee is that these initiatives if they are strong will have a direct tie to the vision and mention they will directly address the priority area with concrete actions and long term changes that we can break into specific steps over multiple years they will connect directly to our students experience they'll be useful for guiding our operational decisions within the district including our budgeting decisions and have clear metrics for success it will look you know we will see this kind of improvement if we are successful in this area it will define important outcomes while leaving some room for adaptation we need to have some flexibility to adjust as we go and we'll also include a picture of the resources particularly the financial budgetary resources needed and a plan for implementation these groups have just gotten started they've some of some of the groups have had a sort of on their own subcommittee meeting over the last few weeks and other groups have sort of done some offline works trying to understand the work that's already going on in that in that area one important question that came up in one of our early meetings was wait are we creating 12 brand new initiatives for the school district and the answer to that is absolutely not we want to continue doing some of the work we're already doing because we don't just want to be piling on and adding to things we want to really make sure we're strategic so some things are already happening that we're that we've shared with them and said you know we expect to see this for example the redesign of professional development we expect to see that in priority two some of the work we've done around curriculum and are planning to do around elementary ELA curriculum we expect to see in priority one and so the community have the group has already gotten debriefed on that and we'll be incorporating that into the initiatives that they bring forward we had a very successful first day of school it has been absolutely wonderful to see everybody back in classes lots of smiling faces this week and I'm showing a few pictures from the first day of school that folks took as they were out and about a couple from Pierce and Thompson elementary and our fantastic met co and diversity equity and inclusion team were over where I guess they were down at the high school in front of the met co office we didn't have any real challenges on the first day of school that we heard about we had rain and we had elections and it all went very smoothly and we had a lot of little logistical things to figure out along the way but we had a really great first week so far and we only have one day of it left and I'm sure it will be a fantastic Friday a few quick additional updates we did receive a grant Dr. McNeill referenced this earlier to support social emotional learning behavioral mental health and wellness an SEL grant essentially in the amount of two hundred and twelve thousand five hundred dollars and that is supporting some additional staffing some more professional learning around youth mental health first date I'm sure they'll run more courses on that in responsive classroom and resources to support SEL instruction in the classroom as well as some additional SEL support for our staff we have launched our elementary before care program pilots there are five students currently enrolled at Thompson and 15 students at Pierce but we also have a drop in option and are hopeful that families will take advantage of that when they need it we are able to provide scholarships to eligible families so if you know families who are financially constrained by the program and but still need access to it we hope that they'll reach out to us and see if we can accommodate them and I also wanted to provide a quick transportation update we are looking into the feasibility of a bus that would act essentially as a shuttle from the east side of Arlington towards Otteson it would be fee based and families would need to sign up for it so we could establish some sort of stop plan because it can't stop in one place that would be too many kids in one place so it would need to go to some strategic areas around town in order to bus students over to the Otteson this is in response to challenges we know our students have had with the MBTA we are not yet prepared to launch it but we are seeing what it would involve making sure that we would have the appropriate staffing and resources in place in order to do that and mapping out what stops would look like so we may send an inquiry survey out to the community to see what the interest level would be and what some of the transportation challenges are for our families whether they're still encountering those or whether this has been resolved by additional routes added by the MBTA I haven't heard anything yet from families on this challenge but we certainly do throughout the year and have we also I also wanted to update everybody that the Gibbs bus has also been a bit of a challenge this year we filled up the spots for the Gibbs bus almost immediately based on our requirement to bus any students who are 2 miles or more away from Gibbs and didn't have any room for fee based spots or wait lists on the Gibbs buses this year so it's clear that that's being used and that became a capacity challenge and so one of the things we're thinking about when we think about Otteson is do we want to increase capacity for our sixth grade students who are using those buses is there a way to do that and if not then maybe we can use those resources to help out with the kids who are coming from East Arlington across town to the Otteson so I just wanted to provide a bit of an update on that because I knew that that had been some conversation and that some parents had had some challenges associated with transportation to start the year. A couple additional updates in athletics we had over 540 students try out for fall sports which is somewhere between 80 and 100 Mr. Bowler told me more than we've had in previous seasons we have some very competitive talented and excited teams starting games this week and they've all been out practicing and very enthusiastic about the start of the fall season they seem very happy to be back at athletics this fall. We have one active search currently for an administrator role as you all know our spectacular Mr. Mason has been offered to the role of deputy town manager and will be headed over to across the street. Offices before too long he is staying with us as we get ready to launch the budget process and we currently have the position posted that posting closes on September 16th we're planning on doing initial interviews the following week of September 19th and final interviews the week of September 27th and I will be putting together an interview committee. Very very soon and we'll keep you updated on the progress of that search. I updated your enrollments we're currently projecting about 150 more students compared to last year's October 1 numbers we have overall increasing enrollment at the secondary level. A slight increase in elementary overall though it looks as though our elementary enrollments are leveling off and are fairly consistent with the projections that we've received. We do have a new half learning community at grade 8 at autism that rolled up. We had accelerated that additional half learning community last year grade 7 and we're rolling that up now into grade 8. And those are my updates for today. I'm happy to take any questions. I think that athletics update is great one of the things that I as we as we talk about how our increasing enrollments at the secondary level. I worry about how many kids are cut from sports at the high school. So I guess I I think John probably has data on that I hope so if he's not I hope that he can be directed to track that because as these cohorts the big one the high watermark is the current fourth grade but these groups are just going to get bigger and bigger as we start marching those kids through and I I'm I'm happy that that we had more kids try out and I'm happy that they're not paying fees just to participate and if that helps more kids participate that's great but if they can't make the team. Then that's that's not great so I would like to know how many kids are being cut from fall sports winter sports spring sports. So that we can start to look at that because I I that's something I worry about a lot over the next 5, 6, 7 years. Just to tag on to what Ms. Morgan said. I think the question isn't just how many people are cut but also is there a way we can expand our offerings so that they have some place to play. Either you know there's all sorts of different things it could be but that's I think that's really what we're looking for is trying to make sure that you know what would be entailed to make sure that we have offerings for our students who want to play a sport and what do we need to do to see that happen. Thank you so now we have a possible vote to approve the unit C contract which is the administrative assistance throughout the district. We had the successful negotiations with a unit C and we reached a memorandum of agreement which my understanding is that the unit C has ratified and you previously discussed this in an executive session a few weeks ago. So I think you know it's a good fair contract and I want to credit again Mr. Mason for you know he's one of the things he's been very helpful at for all of the negotiations this year is really thinking creatively about how we can have salary structures that will both attract and retain staff and I think he's really driven us forward I think in several of our units to be able to do that. Would someone like to make a motion to approve the AEA unit C contract from July 1st 2022 to June 30th 2025. Mr. Thielman. So moved. Seconded by minister Hainor. Any discussion and to authorize the chair to sign on every hand. Any discussion? I have a signature. Oh you have it for me to sign. Okay. All in favor. I have a pose. Abstention. It's unanimous. So now we have a possible vote to approve a contract with our Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction Dr. McNeil. I know Dr. Holman would like to say a few things. You have in your materials proposed contract renewal and salary adjustment for Dr. McNeil right here who is currently in his 6th year as Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction. I'm pleased to bring you this contract renewal for your consideration and would like to say a few words about why I've brought it forward. During his time in the district, Dr. McNeil has been a tireless advocate for improvements to our educational system in Arlington that promote equity and inclusion under his leadership. Arlington has interrogated early literacy practices in curriculum and implemented curriculum and pedagogy consistent with the science of reading. We've expanded instructional coaching at the elementary level to support instructional improvement. We've supported and implemented practices such as ace blocks to give teachers needed planning time to make adjustments to instructional practice based on formative assessment data under his leadership. And we have conducted audits of our curriculum and teaching which have supported the expansion of representation of diverse identities in our curricular materials and expansion of professional learning opportunities which you talked about earlier tonight that support culturally responsive teaching practices. During his tenure he selected successfully supported curriculum and instructional improvements through 2 challenging years of pandemic education alongside all of the challenges that came along with that and we're looking forward to sharing some good news about student growth as soon as our MCAS scores are released to the public and are no longer embargoed. Dr. McNeil is overseeing really exciting improvements to professional learning the school year as well as to continuing to build out our coaching models and our literacy work that will support strategic priority one ensuring equity and excellence as well as strategic priority to valuing all staff. These achievements for our system are significant and foundational to the work we're looking forward to over the next few years and very importantly only leaders who are thoughtful reflective and humble are able to facilitate the kinds of instructional improvements that he has accomplished for the Arlington public schools during his time here. In my 14 months of superintendent I've observed that Dr. McNeil models all of those qualities in his work with the leadership team. He's consistently willing to interrogate and improve upon his own leadership practice in order to better serve our schools, our leaders and most importantly our students and for these reasons I hope you will support the renewal of his contract this evening. I'm looking for a motion to a contract assistant superintendent curriculum instruction Dr. McNeil and to authorize the chair to sign it. Motion by Mr. Heiner second second by Mr. Schlickman any discussion. All in favor. All right. A post. An abstention. It's unanimous. Thank you Dr. Congratulations. Thank you very much for your confidence and faith in my leadership and I look forward to our what we can accomplish together as we move forward. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Good job now to come up with the perfect logo. Okay we have some policies to discuss and approve Mr. Schlickman. Okay on August 12th the policies and procedures subcommittee met to consider things were remaining on our plate after June. First one was the secure gun storage resolution brought to us by some Arlington parents. The you know first of all we as a practice will not go and adopt something is brought to us in a public comment period. Also the form of the resolution a resolution is designed to express an opinion it is not directive in the original form of the resolution presented to us had the committee directing the superintendent to do things which is not appropriate in resolution. So we had Chief Flaherty into the meeting and she discussed what is being done right now. There are a couple of notes about some of the things she said in the minutes of the subcommittee meeting. There is currently tremendous cooperation between police department public schools in terms of gun safety and that we are on track to do the things that are in the context of the resolution. So the bottom line was to change the directive to a statement of support for this work and so that because it was essentially before us before and we knew it was coming and it's not a policy it's a resolution I will move approval of the resolution as put forth in the report. Second. We have a motion by Mr. Schlickman second by Mr. Heiner any discussion? Those in favor? Opposed? Abstentions? It's unanimous. Thank you. Next up is first read for file a division mission and strategic priorities. Basically this is housekeeping. We are taking the new vision mission and strategic priorities that we adopted in June and codifying them in the policy manual. So when this is adopted be it through suspension of the rules tonight to go to second reading or by waiting two weeks to adopt it we will replace the old vision statements with the one that's current. So right now we're not current this just puts in the language that we essentially adopted in June. So I'll make a motion to first to suspend the rules to bring this to second reading and that would require two-thirds vote after which we would vote to approve the policy. Second. All right a motion by Mr. Schlickman seconded by Mr. Heiner to suspend the rules for a second reading. That was in favor. Discussion? I just want just a question so the urgency of doing this now it's just it's just administrative. Yeah okay yeah I mean the thing is the policy is in our manual right now doesn't match what we voted in June that's why we yeah. Okay yep. Any other discussion? Ms. Morgan sorry just can when when we approve this can we just make sure that the capitalization is consistent with the rest of our policy superintendent school and committee I think are generally capitalized I was just I'm literally doing this as is but those seem to be able to be made administratively after we vote this. So we're voting on the motion to suspend the rules of this. Those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Abstention? That's unanimous. Now a motion to. Okay move to adopt file AD. Motion by Mr. Schlickman seconded by Mr. Heiner to adopt file AD. Discussion? Those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Abstention? That's unanimous. Finally we have before us file ff-e procedures for naming AHS special spaces. This is a second read we did the first read in June and there were concerns from the committee so we did a rewrite of this to meet the concerns that were expressed so the things that we were looking at before was in terms of being very specific about the spaces that are being named and the tenure of the committee we we've addressed the questions that were put forth so I will move adoption of ff-e. Motion by Mr. Schlickman seconded by Mr. Heiner to adopt file ff-e. Any discussion? Okay those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Abstention? That's unanimous. Thank you Mr. Schlickman. Thank you. Okay so we the next agenda item we have a regular school committee meeting scheduled for June 8th 2023 which happens to also be the lab graduation and so Dr. Holman had asked if we could possibly move that so that any of us could attend that graduation so we looked at the calendar to the Thursdays before and after that date and felt that June 15th at our regular time of 6.30 made the most sense so unless people are opposed to that I'll entertain a motion to change the date of our June 8th 2023 school committee regular meeting to June 15th 2023. Motion by Dr. Allison seconded by Mr. Schlickman. Any discussion? Those in favor? Aye. Opposed? An abstention? That's unanimous. Mr. Heiner? I'm abstained. Okay sorry Mr. Heiner abstained so six in favor. So June 8th is now June 15th. Yes yes so Mr. Heiner can well you'll change that on the APS calendar also. Oh right we have a big consent agenda. All items listed with an asterisk are considered to be routine and will be enacted by one motion. There will be no separate discussion of these items unless a member of the committee so requests in which event the item will be considered in its normal sequence. Warrant number 22302 in the amount of $423,736.28 on July 12, 2022. Warrant number 23011 in the amount of $290,277.22 on July 26, 2022. Warrant number 23021 in the amount of $504,026. on August 9, 2022. Warrant number 23032 in the amount of $659,182.17 on August 23, 2022. Warrant number 23044 in the amount of $1,444,376.72 on September 6, 2022. Approval of meeting minutes from school committee meeting June 23, 2022. Approval of meeting minutes from school committee retreat July 26, 2022. Approval of meeting minutes from school committee retreat August 9, 2022. And approval of meeting minutes from school committee special meeting August 9, 2022. Motion by Mr. Heiner seconded by Dr. Allison Ampey. Those in favor? Opposed? Abstention? That's you know. Okay. Subcommittee leaves on reports and announcements. Budget Dr. Allison Ampey. Hi. So budget met earlier this afternoon. And we basically are trying to get our work going and discuss the FY22 budget, the FY23 budget, how we're going to plan for the FY24 budget. Any updates in program fees and ESR and then what we're anticipating coming for long-range planning and the CFO search. The last thing Dr. Holman asked if any of us would be willing to serve on the committee and we've actually got all three of us are willing to, so we're going to see who can make the meetings. And so we anticipate having someone on the CFO search committee. And that's basically it. We'll be meeting again probably soon I think. Community relations Mr. Heiner. The community relations subcommittee reports and recommends appointments and reappointments to town commissions and town committees to the full committee. The community relations subcommittee recommends the reappointment of Stuart Cater to the Allington commission on arts and culture, Stuart Deck to the poet laureate committee, Christine Carney and Sharon Grossman to the human rights commission. Therefore I move that the full committee approve these four reappointments. Second. We have a motion by Mr. Heiner and a second by Mr. Thielman. Any discussion? Mr. Schlickman? I'm happy to vote for this. These are really high quality people and I'm proud to say that they're representing us. In the reappointments as well. Yes. Anybody else? Those in favor? Aye. Aye. Yes. Opposed? Abstentions? That's unanimous. And hopefully on September 22nd, Kim Goldsmith will be coming seeking appointments. He's going to be available for us to talk to to the LBGT QIA plus rainbow commission. That's just for information. We'll be provided with the CV by me. We'll have a resume or CV. Yes. Yes. And she'll come. And she'll come. We're in the process of the she's being invited. We haven't had that confirmed. Right. Okay. It'll either be the next meeting on the following one for sure. Yeah. Thank you. The IAA and Mr. Morgan. The we met on a date in the 20s in August on a Friday afternoon and we talked about the strategic planning update. Dr. Homan and Dr. Anderson came and we also talked in a sort of preemptive conversation about the fall 2023 plans at HHS as well as planned out our meetings and schedule with the support of Dr. McNeil through the end of 2022 facilities. Mr. Simmons, the subcommittee meets next 15th at I think it's Wednesday. Yeah. Well, I'm sorry, the 14th at 5pm policies and procedures. Mr. Schlickman, in addition to the motions that we made under the policies agenda item, we had a brief discussion on file JC assignment of students to schools. Superintendent brought that up as a preliminary discussion of something that we should be thinking about going forward. She thinks it would be helpful to ask families who are attending school under open enrollment to indicate their desire to maintain the open enroll school on an annual basis so that it's just not where we're not looking to move people out to have some sort of a statement that says yes, I understand that I'm an open enrollment. I do want to stay in my out of district out of zone placement. The question that she had for us as well is that historically we haven't done a really good job of tracking this in power school and that once we have the buffer zone report and she'll also do some investigation into who's open enrolled and how many people are moving around under the program that will have data to have a conversation about this and to consider any tweaks to the current policy. But that's just sort of a heads up of something that sort of November, December, which we might be looking at. High School Building Committee, Minister Thielman. We had a good conversation about it right now. No further report. We're trying to reschedule our meeting because of a conflict with the Jewish holiday. And then a superintendent evaluations of committee which was created at our special meeting this summer. Put in a schedule meeting shortly. Thanks. Liaison Report. Announcement. Future agenda item. I had one question about the direction on public comment. So it was rewritten. So the expectation now that if people want to give public comment that they have to sign up by 4, 3 o'clock even if they come in person. Which is definitely different than our past. Yeah. So that it's posted on the agenda. It is posted in two places on our website. And I will read that at the beginning of each meeting. The meetings are hybrid now. So the piece of it being past practice is tricky because we have like they were fully in person that they were fully remote and now and now they're hybrid. So it's not consistent though with the way the select board does it either because they just they have people sign up. So yeah. I mean I think that the policy I think says that it's at the discretion of the chair. So that's fine. Maybe we can have a conversation with the next chair on how we do that. I don't know. Yeah. And if we don't like the policy we can change it. Okay. Executive session. Let's see. So I'm looking for a motion to go into executive session to discuss strategy with respect to collective bargaining or litigation if in an open meeting we have a detrimental effect on the bargaining or litigating position of the public body. And then chair so declared. Related to a unit demonotomy preschool TA treatment. So moved. Second. Okay. We have a motion by Mr. Slickman second by Mr. Hainer roll call vote Mr. Hainer. Yes. Mr. Cardin. Yes. Ms. Morgan. Yes. Mr. Slickman. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Dr. Allison And I vote yes. In executive session and we're not coming back into open.