ief aside, I'm a lifelong Arlington resident born at Sims, so now you know how old I am, and have seen these schools grow and change through the years. And I hope that we can continue to work to provide the high-quality education we're known for. Thank you very much. Thank you. Lynn Cardin. Thank you. Thanks for, I think Dr. Bode for adding the positions. I did want to address the budget issues around this because that's what I do. I look at the budget. It's relevant not just to these positions but possibly to any other unmet needs that have arisen. I urged you in the spring when I spoke to you to take a fresh look at the budget either at your end of June meeting or over the summer. And you haven't done that yet, but I hope you will do that soon. There have been changes. There always are changes. The changes this year have been mostly on the good side. The special education circuit breaker, which was in the budget for $1.4 million. That was because the governor had cut some funds during the year, but he was able to put those funds back. So we actually received $1.5 million instead, 90,000 more. We received homeless transportation funding reimbursement for the first time. That was $68,000, which we received on July 3. There have been some teacher retirements. I'm aware of three. I'm sorry, five teacher retirements. Typically, the teachers leave at a high salary level and were replaced by entering teachers at the lower salary level. So if you do a conservative assumption of $15,000 savings for position, that's $75,000 just for the teachers. There are other retirements as well. And then the grant picture. Overall, the grant picture is very stable. The final augments may not have been made yet, but all of the state grant programs, the MECCO program, the kindergarten program, have been funded at the same levels or higher than last year. And the federal pass-through programs, those allocations, most of them have been made, and those are also stable, whereas the budget expected them all to decline. It appears to me to be about $100,000 of additional revenue from that. So that's $300,000. Now, things move around in the budget. I'm sure some of those dollars have already been accounted for. Maybe they were spent last year and just are being carried over. I don't know. But I do hope that the administration and it will come to you at a future meeting with a fresh look at the budget so that you can see if there are any other unmet needs that you might need to allocate some funds to. I do think that since running the deficit a few years back, we have been very conservative in our operating budget. Typically, that's a good thing. But I think perhaps we've gone too far over. And there are some unmet needs, like these three teachers, that we really do need to fund. And I'm glad that we are able to find the funds for that. And we're not being too cautious. We do have lots of reserves now. We've got the special education circuit breaker money coming in this year that we're not going to spend until next year that we can always rely on. We have a special $500,000 special education reserve fund. And we've got close to a million dollars last time I checked in various revolving funds, which again can be used in the event of other overruns. So I'm glad that we do seem to be able to find the funds for these positions. And I do hope that we will be a little bit more assertive and aggressive in meeting unmet needs as they come up, given the relatively favorable picture that we're finally in. Thank you. Thank you. Robert Simcoe. Hi, thanks very much. I didn't really come prepared to give remarks, but after speaking with some of the fellow parents, I had a couple of things to say. As somebody who works in the field of science, technology, engineering, and math education, I work on this at the collegiate level. My wife is a researcher on STEM education at the K through 12 level, and much of what I want to say reflects her thoughts on this. I first want to say that when we moved to Arlington, it must have been about seven years ago. It was because we had this sense that this is a place that actually had excellent schools without really having the pressure cooker environment that some places that have excellent schools have. And that was really important to us. And I think that all of you here are to be commended for creating this kind of wonderful atmosphere. And as a result of this, I think actually we've been sort of a victim of our own success in the sense that we start to see some of these issues of overcrowding, like several parents have been discussing here. I've seen it at the Dolan School because my son is in the second grade as well. And I would just echo the comments that Lauren Boyle had made just a little bit earlier, that because people are starting to realize that there's this confluence of excellent educational opportunity with a nice community, this is leading to demographic changes that I think are gonna be longstanding. And it's something that we're gonna have to think about moving forward. So, for better or for worse, that's what we may be heading towards. Now, coming back to the issue that I was discussing having to do with my wife's research in education, one of the things that I get to see is that there's different trends that come and go in the fields of education research. Something that she and I talk about fairly often is sort of the new math, which we've thought was taught quite well in my son's first grade classroom. People have different ideas about these and sometimes it comes and goes. There's one thing that everybody agrees on. And the one thing that everybody agrees on in educational research is that small class sizes benefit students. So to the extent that the budget allows it, this is always the right thing to do. And in fact, something that I found interesting is that 23 states actually have laws on the books that require maximum size, or they require more teachers to be hired if the classroom sizes exceed a certain amount. And what was surprising to me is that Massachusetts, given its reputation, is probably the best state in the union, or at least in the top few, for educational opportunities. It's not one of these states. So, we're not required by law to do this. However, there's been interest in passing laws like this in Massachusetts. And in fact, one of the champions of this legislation is our own representative, Representative Gabali, who I understand anecdotally may have served on one of the committees here in the past, although I don't know that firsthand. And he's been advancing legislation that was brought up in 2012, but didn't pass, but may come up again that would limit class sizes. Something that's been interesting is that this legislation is targeted more specifically towards, not necessarily towards towns like Arlington, in fact. Sir? We're just limited into three minutes and we have one speaker after you, so I'm just asking you to be mindful of the time. Okay, let me wrap it up. So the thing that was interesting was that, this was targeted towards schools that had a large fraction of their students on the school lunch assistance program. And I don't know that Arlington would qualify for that. My sense is that this was because these communities were deemed most at risk for having very large class sizes. Arlington's very lucky not to be necessarily in a position where there is a strong need for a large fraction of the students to be on assistance, but I'm glad that, in fact, it doesn't look like we're necessarily as at risk as we had thought for these large class sizes as well. If these recommendations will go forward, which is something that we very much appreciate, but I see this as something that will be a continuing issue going forward. So thanks very much for your time. Well, thank you very much. And I encourage everyone who hasn't spoken here tonight who would like to speak to us, to email us, to write us letters. We've received some emails over the summer on this issue and other issues. Please continue to do that. 20 minutes of public participation isn't enough for the entire community, so I invite, at least for me, and I'm sure my colleagues will look great, please contact us. Our emails, our phone numbers are on the district website. Thank you. Dr. Bodie, Dr. Cheson, I'd like to introduce you to those here. Most of you know each other. Would you like to, who would like to go first from the start of the discussion? Okay, thanks. What I wanted to do tonight, I wanna address the issue of enrollment and where the budget, how we're able to do this, but in terms of like an overview of what we want to do this evening, is just give you some updates. There's a number of reports at your desk. Some of them we can address in more depth later on, but just some snapshots around enrollment, where we are with hiring. This is still an ongoing process, and then Lord Cheson is going to give us a quick report on where we are with technology. So going to the enrollment issues, we are seeing this year a dramatic increase in our elementary enrollment. And so tonight I'm just really gonna limit my comments to what's going on with elementary. Compared to October one numbers last year, we're up about 140 students. Now, I don't want you to take that as a final number. There's going to be some decreases, there's gonna be some increases. In fact, one of our speakers tonight spoke to the 29, the 29 included two students that were in a transfer situation. So they were on one list and potentially on another list as well. So that was part of it. And there is still some of that that's going on in schools. We're in the process of reconciling withdrawals in the school. Sometimes the schools know more about who is withdrawing, moving out of state, moving districts and so forth. But let me come back that in a minute. Cause I want everyone to understand where we're able and why we're able to make this recommendation this evening. As you recall, when we set the budget for the year, we made an initial estimate of a reduction of 10%. And we changed that to 8% for our grants which represents sometimes as much as 17 or eight to 19% of our budget. We then changed that to 8% and with the hope that it would only be reduced 6%. And the reason for that was sequestration at the federal level and also the uncertainty what was going to happen at the state level. Fortunately, that did not come to pass. We have learned over the last, and some of them coming in as early as in July in terms of the homeless number, but special ed grants, title one, we're seeing that the grants are very close to what they were last year. So for whatever reason at the federal level, they're funding K-12 grants at last year's previous number. So what that does is allow us to have money available for as Mr. Cardin talked about and other people, the unmet needs. We've had some unmet needs that we've had to address in special education. So some of the money we had to sit down and really reconcile where we were at the budget to where we were retiring and some issues there. And we have done that. There have been some retirements, there's been turnover savings, but then there's other positions that have been expensive positions to fill just because of what the market is. So we have been, we're at an equilibrium at the moment on this. So what we have available is some additional money through the grants. Had this not happened, I will have to say we would be in a very difficult position to address some of these needs. And until we actually again looked at where we were with the budget and we did quite a bit of that discussion today, I couldn't go forward making this recommendation because we're not going to be in, we don't want to be before we start the school year looking at some difficult budget situation. So these are not the only class sizes in the district which are something that we have to have on a watch. What is happening for this year and it's actually quite a surprise is the increase in the number of elementary students. We have, as I said before, increased about 140 students since the October numbers came out. Now, to give you a perspective, when we looked at the last two years and we had a report on this this last year, we actually started to see the last two years, 10 and 11, and I actually had those numbers. As a total elementary population in 10, I were 25, 2520, then I went to 2583. And then it dropped again this last year to 2,569. Well, now up to 2,700, a little over 2,700. And we have more people making appointments to register. And anecdotally, I've learned even today of some people who haven't even, not even made appointments yet, but we know that they're going to make appointments. So this situation is not over yet and we're going to be having to see what happens over August. Right now, our kindergarten is up to 466. I think that one of the things that's very concerning and it's to the point that Boyle and Mr. Cardin alluded to and that is the issue of the size of our schools. We did a lot last year in terms of looking at buffer zones that could help us modify class sizes. And without this big influx, I think that it would have had, it was looking actually fairly good in early June that we were being able to manage it a little bit better than we have in past years. But if you look at, you know, Bracket and Dallon right now in terms of total school is up to 480 students. And that's a lot. And what's going to mean at Dallon in order to have this extra kindergarten is that it's a choice between the computer room and the music room. And that discussion Dr. Woods and I had today and as did Dr. Chesson, we've been looking at that. We don't know quite which way is going to go but that's the level that's there. At Bracket, we have a similar situation. We're going to have to find another place for our learning specialist because we're going to have to take that room. The computer room went last year. So we're in a very tight spot. There's fortunately for Stratton with Thompson moving back to their own school, there's a little bit more breeding space there for some extra classrooms, particularly for breakout rooms. So this is an issue. And you know, the last couple of years did not indicate that we were going to have this all of a sudden this spike. But, and it may be an aberration. It may be this year and then we'll level off again. It's just very hard to know. But it is something that we need to address and as we look to the budget next year, when you have schools that are much larger than other schools, I think we may need to start thinking about extra support for those schools in terms of administration. And we'll talk more about this this year but as many of you know we're moving in, in fact you all know, we're moving into a new evaluation system that's going to require our principals and our department chairs and all of our assistant principals to be in classrooms more doing observations. But when your school is almost twice as large, and in one case it is twice as large as another elementary school, this is an issue in terms that we have to look at. So, an issue of space. When we were looking at redistricting last year, we had the three schools pierced down and bracket and Bishop and it's very hard to move within that and really make any substantial changes when we have this kind of influx. So, this is something that I totally agree that we need to take a look at. It is a problem long term. And I don't know, I don't have a crystal ball. The only thing, we are the recipient of all the good work that we've been doing because people want to move here to town and we're seeing a lot of that, particularly this summer. This is really a summer phenomenon because in May we did not see this kind of shift, let alone at the budget time. So, that's where we are with respect to the enrollment and when we meet again at the next, we'll have a much clearer idea of exactly what happens over the next month. So, what we will be looking at is to look at the space issues and what makes the most sense in these schools, particularly down and bracket. And of course, we're gonna begin very soon the hiring process. I don't know if you want to ask any questions about this or... Does anyone have any questions on the enrollment? Mr. Hiner? Is a question about the grant money appropriate at this time to supporting the enrollment? Yeah, I guess that would fall under the discussion. In our budget and everything, and I want to make it clear, I'm very supportive of having the smaller class sizes and having the teachers with this question. By taking this money, are there any, with the anticipated cut in grants, were we anticipating reducing programs or whatever the grants were for? We'd already done that. So, we will continue with that, by using this grant money, this grant money to support the lower class sizes, we will continue it at the program that we were planning on going through. Yes, we've been able to... Yes, but we also have been able to enhance one program. A little bit by offsetting through some additional Title I. Title I is actually the grant that we got a little bit more. The others are pretty much level. But, Laura, I don't know if you want to mention a little bit how we're using some of that money. We had an extra about 15,000 there. Yeah, Title I will be using for some additional math support at Thompson and Pierce. So, we'll definitely have the programs that we planned on and we'll have a little bit of additional support in math at Thompson and Pierce. So, there's not in that area of math, yes. The other grant money that in anticipation of cuts in it, the programs that were planned for will not be put back. There were no programs. I understand what you're saying. I think what you're saying is because we had cuts in grants, we cut programs, or that we anticipated we were going to have... You anticipated the cuts? We just, there were no cuts in programs in order because of the cuts in grants. There were cuts in other areas. There was no programmatic... Then let me add to it. The cuts that were anticipated to support the potential cuts, they will be continued. Those cuts will stay there. The answer is yes and no. But for example, we anticipated being able to provide less professional development because our Title II grant was expected to be 8% less than it was and it's pretty much level funded now. So, professional development. So, that's $165,000 for three teachers. We use the $55,000 figure for a teacher, don't we? Yeah, we use $55,000. So, that's $165,000. I just want to be upfront. I'm supporting and I will vote for the three teachers. There's no question in that. And not because you folks are here. I mean, I'm a former educator and I appreciate everything with a smaller class size. I just want to be upfront with the public to understand that what we had planned on doing there has to be some give and take here unless we've found a magic $165,000. Well, the money for this is mainly out of the special education grant that we have. And then it becomes a, well, what we did have to increase our special education personnel, that was very clear. And so, we had to make sure that we were able to cover that. But one of the things was a particular gift that was alluded to is that we received, actually it was $80,000. About $80,000 more for Circuit Breaker from last year. And it's not next year. So we were able to cover a big chunk of that with that $80,000 and some of the transportation. My concern is that this money is not basically put on the base. And this is, I don't want to say a one time thing but it's going to be hard to continue to support the staffing that we have unless we get more money in the long run. I'm saying this to the parents, I'm saying this to the folks at home that the budget is going, we're now adding three teachers. And we may have to add other staff during the year and stuff like this. If this is done by extra grant money and things of that nature, it can't be sustained in the future unless the budget itself is increased. And I'm asking you all out there to support that. Thank you. I think what the superintendent is trying to say is that there are things that we normally do which are grant funded eligible that in anticipation of reduction of federal funds that we budgeted for out of local money. And as the federal money came in, we're able to move our local money to higher elementary teachers which has to come out of local money. Yeah, come out of grant money. Exactly. Because I think that the way we budgeted this was proper because I know that in Lowell that we were expecting a hit on our federal titled money and it was twice as bad as we expected. So we weren't level funded, we were taking a hit up in Lowell. So it was very prudent to move some of the expenditures that we need to do into local money in anticipation of reduction of federal funds. That's exactly what happened. So we moved into operating and we can now move them back into the proper grant funding and therefore that opens operating money up for this. So we're not paying for these teachers directly from the grant. It's really shifting money that we had put into operating, moving that back into the grant. So they scrutinize what we do very carefully and we have to submit very detailed reports so we are squeaky clean about all of that. Yeah, I just want to make it very clear that we're not supplanting with grant funding something that we should be paying out of local revenue in that what we were doing was looking to cover an anticipated loss of grants with local revenue and with the additional grant money coming in, we're now free to go and do this. I agree that it is a concern. I mean, the one thing I want to say is the school committee has been very much aware of the enrollment issue. You're saying we have 2,700 kids in our elementary. 20 years ago, we had about 3,700, maybe even less 3,400 total in the district. So as Arlington became a more desirable community, the number of children who are being educated in the public schools has increased dramatically and we're obviously still seeing the gains of our success and we have spent a lot of time in school committee meetings trying to be strategic about what to do because this group of kids will eventually end up at the odyssey and we not only have to worry about class size, but we also have to worry about facility. Is this a one time deal or is this going to be a permanent increase in our six through eight population? We have to weigh facilities considerations of what to do about middle school, how to handle our elementary enrollment along with the needs of a high school that is in warning on accreditation because of the condition of the facility and we need the state to be a partner with us in terms of meeting the facility's needs. So the facility's issue is a very difficult one that's certainly in our radar. When you start budgeting process, this has started in January, we had to have a final budget prepared for town meeting by April. We're doing this with the best guess as things change and they do. You have to have some ability to go and make changes and I'm glad that with the federal money coming back a little stronger than we budgeted that we're able to go and do this. This is a concern of ours that we do have an increasing enrollment and we do have funding capped under the fiscal management plan based on the last overwrite. So these are continuing challenges and be aware of that and make sure that you town leaders, the people who normally sit in these seats are also aware of our needs. Ms. Hyde? I just wanted to point out though, first of all, this type of situation where we have increased enrollment that exceeds what we expected, we've been in the situation before. Thanks to grant money coming in higher, doing what Mr. Schlickman said, we can put it where it was supposed to go, we have the money available to expend our classrooms. These students are gonna count for October ones though. So we're not gonna see money from the state this year for these children, but we will see money for the state next year for these children. So while the town does contribute a significant amount to the education of all our students, we will get some reimbursement or a leavement from the state. These three positions are not completely on our budgets back rolling forward and that's something that the budget subcommittee has looked at. The piece though I wanted to add to this is it's fortuitous that this additional money got realized at a time we had this need. The budget subcommittee did though forward a list of recommendations on projects to accelerate that we saw as crucial to raising the level of education of our students that are being phased in, such as math program purchases, such as the technology piece. And I would just say that from this day forward I would expect that list to also be referred to where we are if there is any additional surplus that comes in that reduces what comes out of the town's coffers. So that's my bit about the budget piece. In terms of the kindergarten enrollment, this is the first year that we actually have had the buffers really in place for this. And I'm noticing that with the exception of the bracket which has just been solved, these are the most level sized classes I've ever seen in terms of coming in. And I'm wondering whether you feel that having that access to the buffering helped do that or whether you're collecting information so that if the plan does need revision at some point we have some concrete data to look at. Well, I think we need to, I'd like to reserve some comment on that so later I can sort of look at the whole piece of it. It has helped but it also, you have to understand, we had two reserve positions in the budget. They've already been expended on kindergarten, one to Dallin and one to Stratton. Totally unpredicted. Now I tried through the buffer zones to keep the Dallin moving so that we could stay with three but it became impossible. And in fact, I had to move some other students around after consulting with the families. So I still have to go back next week and look at the people now that we have these other kindergarten, what do I need to do with respect to the wait lists to make sure that we can maybe even them off a little bit more. So there's still more work to be done on this. We're keeping all the data, you're gonna be able to see all of it. We'll get a complete report to you on this. We, I don't even know the number right now but I think at the end of June I had evaluated about 80 applications for buffer zones. So it's a significant number. It fell a little bit less than 25% because the buffer zones take about 25% of the town. The total number, as you can see, if it was 80 at the end of June, it may have changed now because last week, for example, we had 20 registrations and we're looking at 11, it's just ongoing but an absolutely unprecedented in the summer anyway. So let me reserve on that and wait and see. But it was not 25% of the total number for a kindergarten that was in that and buffer zones. In light of what you just said, Dr. Vody, I do wonder though, as we're adding classes to accommodate certain influxes for grade levels, what safeguards do we have in line for pretty much the design strand per grade for each building? So if we're adding a fourth bracket kindergarten, are we then putting ourselves in a position where next year we can never have more than three or we're forced to compress? I know. Those are some of the long range things that we have to look at. I mean, one thing that we couldn't do at Brackett, we can't do it in such short term this year is take a look at special education programs, look at daycare. But the thing is, as a community, do we want to have schools that are super large and other schools that are not? And I don't know if that percent of the buffer zones can really entirely deal with the kind of growth that we're seeing in areas that we're seeing. It's really just tinkering around the edges to keep them a little bit more even. But even then, the numbers are growing. Having classes of 25 and 24 and 26 are becoming more of the norm in this town than the not. I don't like to see kindergarten go over 25 and particularly dent this year because of the new tools of the mine curriculum that we're putting in. And because larger kindergartners do put in other pressures on teachers and we're trying to be able to do a full implementation this year. I wish I had a crystal ball to say how this is going to go in the next few years. I don't know, but clearly, clearly people love coming out and moving to Arlington. Which is a very positive thing. I do hope though, as we look towards the space issue that we also think about where the age divisions are in terms of which building students attend and whether we need to think about something different for the Odyssey span and whether that works well with the K to five. Thank you. First, I wanna point out that I have a conflict of interest and so if this comes to a vote, I will be abstaining because of that. But I did wanna point out, we need to hear, I understand we're mainly talking about elementary school here today, but we need to have some idea of what's happening with the middle and high school. I mean, if they suddenly had 300 students at each school or something in addition, we need to know that now or we're going to look really silly when we find out in a month or two. So I'm just concerned that there's a whole chunk of numbers that we have not heard yet. I will have to get you that report sometime in the next week or so. Right now, the registration for the high school and the middle school are done at the middle school and high school. And the high school has been doing it through guidance. So I don't have all of the updated numbers there yet, nor do I have the middle school. I will say that the schedules are almost done at both. And so far, the people who are doing the schedules have not said, we've had a few sections we've had to add, but not an alarming number. A few, you know, point two here, we need that and we need a couple other sections here, but pretty normal, pretty normal. This has not been the norm for the last couple of years, having this kind of spike at the elementary. Mr. Films? Oh, you finished? Thank you. So I have the same issue as Kirstie. I have a conflict of interest. I can't be voting on the motion. And you see I'm the guy that just puts it on the table. It's with me. It's a long, but I can't do that. So here we are. So I would say a few things. I think we have, as we, we have to learn from this experience and we have to do some, we have to be proactive about planning the FY15 budget in light of our experience this summer. And I think we're gonna need direction from the team, the leadership team, the district on a few things. First of all, what's the priority in terms of these larger schools? The bracket in Dallin is a priority, some more administrative assistance, administrative leadership to do the evaluations. Is that a priority? Yes or no? And why or why not? We need to start to think about that if we're gonna add those positions and if we're gonna advertise for those positions, you start advertising for a position like that mid-year. So we need to think about that. The second thing is we need to really think through is this a one-time event? Is 5% increase in enrollment? Or is this the beginning of a trend? And there needs to be some thought, reflection, research on that. Because that impacts the budget going forward, it impacts how many reserve positions we put in the FY15 budget. And then there's this ongoing conversation that educators always have, we always have about class sizes and teacher effectiveness and what's really important and what really drives student improvement and student performance. And so I think we need to have that conversation in public, perhaps in our subcommittees so that we can flesh out some of the issues that's around issues like class sizes and what really drives student improvement. Because there's a lot of debate and a lot of research about whether the degree to which class size has an impact on a child's learning and the degree to which the quality instructor has an impact on a child's learning. A lot of research out there on that. A lot of division and we should explore that, talk about it, think about it. So those are some points. But I would say there's a timeline here in terms of the direction we want to go for FY15, especially if there's a desire to add some staff to some of these places. And that is that we really need to think, get this straightened out and talk this through in September, October, and November, so that we can make some judgments for the next year. This, the motion is a motion to approve these recommendations. So we're not moving, it's not a budget transfer, we're not transferring money from one bucket to another. It's simply a motion to approve the superintendent's recommendation. Well, I can't move. Mr. Schlickman? I think the motion is to amend the budget by adding the positions. So my motion, unless I would stand corrected, I moved to amend the fiscal 2014 budget by adding three positions. A teacher for Brackett Kindergart and a teacher for Dallin, grade two, and a teacher for Stratton, grade three. Second. Any further discussion? Sorry. Do we, typically we don't actually state the schools and the positions. We should just, I was going to say, not that I don't like them to be anywhere else, but that's not, that's not typical. Actually what we do in the original budget is we have the staffing laid out for us within the budget and we're approving that staffing. So that if you take a little bit of budget book, you're approving positions relative to schools. Yeah, this isn't reserved for teachers that were approved. No, no, no, but pretty much we approve it in both ways. We approve the, And we're placing them in specific places, that's neat. You know, I just was raising the question of procedure. Okay. Procedurally, I think it sounds. I withdraw the question then. Any further discussion? All those in favor? Aye. All those against? All those abstain? Aye. Okay. Motion carries. All right, Dr. Bode, thank you folks for coming tonight and speaking to us. Please stay in touch over the summer. Have a good summer break though. Okay. This is very strange, watching yourself on the video. Just don't fix your hair. I didn't look up. I didn't look up. Dr. Bode, you had mentioned two other things on this. Yes, I just want to give you an update. We're going to spend more time on this. This is just a snapshot right now. Cause I thought you'd like to know since we're meeting anyway to get a sense of this. And I apologize that we don't have all of this to you more timely. We were sort of scrambling to sort of stay with what all that we're doing right now and getting some report to you, which we normally wouldn't put together until much later. So these are not final reports. These are just moments in time in terms of where we are with hiring. So far we've had 37 hires and we are not finished. Obviously for tonight we have more, but we also have a number of other positions that we need to fill. We have teaching positions. We have teaching assistant positions. And what happens in the summer, and those of you in schools know this happens, is just there is changes. I don't think a week or sometimes even a day doesn't go by where there hasn't been some change. People have to move out of town or they get a different job or various things. So this report here, and it's really, I don't need to go through it in any great detail, but Mr. Spiegel put this together for you in terms of just so you have an idea of where things are with respect to the different positions. But one of the things that I think that is worth mentioning is that it remains true. And I think this isn't just true for Arlington. It is true in other districts as well. One of the sure ways, the sure ways to have a teaching position, which are very difficult to find. At the elementary level in particular, we can get a thousand applications very quickly when we post something easily. Is that if you've done your student teaching in the district, or you've been a teaching assistant and people can see the quality of your work, that you have a little bit of an edge. So we put a lot of time and attention too into the people we have as teaching assistants. And very often, in fact, I would say, majority of our teaching assistants are either on the road to certification or have their certification. And as you can see here that we hired eight this year so far. And we also did people who had their student teaching here. Five did their student teaching in Arlington.  So I think that this report will be updated. You can see from the chart here by school where the hires were, but it's hiring going on in every school. So that hopefully is helpful to you to see where that's going. Any questions from the committee on hiring? We will give you a more complete, I should say, I should have, we've had some more success this year in hiring, minority hiring. And you'll get a complete report on that later. Mr. Hannah. In the two positions we just approved, is there anticipation of internal people? The answer is yes in one of them. Because August is tomorrow and it's gonna be very, very difficult getting these positions filled, I think, this late. Well, we have some other positions too, elementary positions that are happening in two schools. And so the two principals there are going to, it's actually two grade four positions, and they're going to jointly interview and put combined forces on that. And yes, it is, it's a lot. And the principals, they have to pull together a little team. It's a lot. Thank you. Anyone else? Mr. Feynman. Do you have a sense of the salary exchange with some of these hires yet? Are you kind of tracking that or is Diane tracking that? Oh yes. We definitely track it. And in fact, that was one of the things we had to do was to tracking all the salaries against the budget to see where we were. And we were, a week and a half ago, just fine. Right now, we'll have to do that again in a couple more weeks. So there's not a surplus in the, I mean, so it's just staying even. So you're not saving money? We were not, no, we didn't have a surplus, no. It just seems that when you're replacing although, so it would you then I have to assume that you're, some of the teachers are replacing are not necessarily higher paid people. They're people that are leaving the district after four, five, six years or? That's happened. Yeah. That's happened. And yes, we haven't had a few retirements, but then if you hire someone that in some positions, the market is such that you're gonna, you might actually end up having an exchange of equal salaries. Because some positions are very hard to fill. Okay. Thank you. Dr. Bodie, if you'd like to, do you have another? I was gonna ask Laura to give you an update on where we are with technology. Did you have a question on the staffing? I have no further questions on the staffing. I'd like to ask through the chair approximately how long because how long do you think your presentation? I can do it in five minutes, 10 minutes, 15. You tell me how long you want it to be and that's how fast I'll do it. Well, we just got the materials tonight. If we could just have a brief five minute overview. Sure. Absolutely. And then we'll adjust it. Sure. We'll have a more complete one in the fall. This is just to give you a snippet of where we are. That'd be great. Okay. Thank you. We've been focusing on technology as Ms. Hyman talked about that was one of the, if we had end of the year money that we wanted it to go to that. In addition, we always have an investment that we make every year in technology. So we're going to be putting a large amount of technology at the elementary schools and a little bit at the Audison that's funded by the school budget. Those will all be in the neighborhood of iPad carts. We have had some pretty hefty professional development for every teacher that's going to be in a school. It's going to have iPad carts. We are also making it very equitable by the end of the summer. Every elementary teacher will have their own iPad and there will be at least three iPad carts in every elementary school and then all the way to, there runs the gamut till Thompson, which is going to be a one-to-one. And that's because of the construction that's allowed. We've also had a number of partnerships that we've now began to set up through the MASQ and an organization called LaunchLearn. We have four, actually five companies that we're working with that are going to allow us to pilot or beta test their software for free and we'll be giving them feedback. Two are in the area of supportive mathematics. One is in computer programming and two will assist us in doing our literacy work with our students. In addition, I would be remiss if I didn't talk about the fundraising efforts from the Arlington Educational Foundation. They, as you know from last year, have started a capital campaign for fundraising. We've had a number of events. We currently have in the neighborhood of $40,000 per year pledges for three years. This is to fund STEM technology at the high school. We actually expect that amount to increase and efforts are still continuing. Matt Coleman and I actually went to Google today and had a meeting with that company and we have another local entrepreneur that we're going to be meeting with either next week or the week after and these folks have stepped up and are hosting evenings where we bring in people within the district that are in the technology field and might be in the position to make sizable donations to this program and so we'll be continuing that over the summer. One of the things that I want to call to your attention is the Scratch Camp, which is a one week camp for programming at the middle school and that there has been, recently in the paper you may have read that there was a number of organizations in the state that have reached out to the governor's office to try to include the requirement for programming courses or the programming standards, computer science standards to be included in the next generation science standards. It looks like that that's very likely going to happen as Massachusetts selects which part of the next generation science standards that it adopts and so I think we'll be poised to be able to meet that need, should that go through? I just, the last thing I want to talk about is professional development for support technology because there was concerns raised about the committee, about the level of technology that we're putting into the buildings and would the teachers receive support? We've run a number of, already run a number of iPad 101 sessions where folks that received an iPad were required to come for four hours of training and many of them have signed on for additional trainings without that requirement of their own volition. For the second half of the year, the second half of the summer, we'll be running Tech University. If you have time then you're available if you'd like to come to Thompson. Next Thursday and Friday we have most of the Thompson staff will be in for the beginnings of Tech University phase one where we have outside consultants from EdTech teacher coming in to train our teachers. The next week, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday we have about 65 teachers coming of which about 20 are from Thompson and the rest are from all the other elementary schools and the middle school. We'll have outside staffing as well as our own teacher leaders that will be working with those teachers. But one of the things that we are very excited about is that we will be running a graduate level course, blended learning course for, primarily for Thompson, Pierce and Stratton teachers because it's gonna be funded by Title I. Next year to allow them to better utilize technology to meet the needs of all learners within the classroom. So we'll have more for that for you as we come into September. Great. Any questions from the committee? Thank you very much. No other? One motion? Yeah, I would love a motion. I'd like to motion to enter executive session, to conduct strategy sessions in preparation for negotiations with non-union personnel or to conduct collective bargaining sessions or contract negotiations with non-union personnel and to discuss strategy with respect to collective bargaining or litigation if an open meeting may have a detrimental effect on the bargaining or litigating position of the public body and the chair so declares and exit only for the purposes of adjournment. Second. Don't we need to name the contract? Yeah, we probably should. Oh, I'm sorry, I missed that in the middle and discuss contract with sternum Chandler, Miller potential renewal. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Okay, thank you. We are in executive session. Good evening, the alley the school committee tonight is started. My name is Bill Hanna, I am the vice chair. The chair is not able to be here tonight because of family obligations and Ms. Starks is also not here. Up front, I see no one signed in for public participation. So we will begin right away with the enrollment update from Superintendent Bote. Good evening, everyone. We have had a very active summer with enrollment unusually so it has spiked our number of elementary students since October one numbers which are official numbers of the school district are up even since the chart that you received are up to a difference of 119 students and we've had more people registering today and more appointments tomorrow. Which has, as you know, necessitated this summer adding five classrooms in total. Two of which had been part of our reserve positions from last year's budget projections for FY 14 but we've had to add three additional classrooms this summer. We were able, fortunately able to do that because of our grants, federal grants, came in even while we had made the assumption last year due to sequestration concerns of anticipating 8% reduction. In fact, when we began the, just as an aside as we began the budget discussions last year the recommendation was as high as 10 and we brought that down to eight with hoping that would be six. So when they came in in August level funded that was very helpful in addressing some of these enrollment concerns. So it has been distributed fairly evenly but one of the things that is also a difference from last year we are approximately up 40 students in kindergarten where we have an enrolled class right now and increasing of 470 students. Last year's enrollment numbers for kindergarten October one were I believe 434 in that vicinity. So we're seeing a major spike in our elementary enrollments this summer. I will say that it's been very helpful and I can give you a more involved report later this month but it's been very helpful given the spike in enrollments to have the redistricting plan in place having the buffer zones because we have been able to even off class sizes somewhat. On the other hand, class sizes are growing just simply because there's just more students and of particular note are down and bracket which are both over 460 students. So it's a lot of students and I don't know whether this is an unusual year or whether this is a trend. Previous years, the last, I should say the last two years we had seen some growth but sort of had really started to taper off a little bit and then this was totally unexpected. Most of these enrollments have occurred since May. As far as the high school and the middle school the numbers that you see are slightly down from last year but I would not think that these are the numbers. The numbers traditionally in the high school change in the first couple of weeks of school and I expect that to happen again this year. The middle school probably be closer to these numbers so the middle school numbers are staying somewhat even to where they were last year. So even though we've seen this big spike at the elementary level, our net district at this point is under 100 students. It's probably in the mid 80s. But again, these are not our official numbers and I know that they are going to change over the next couple of weeks. And Mr. Schlickman did a very interesting graph earlier about some of the trends that we've seen but the trend overall, the trend line in that was just a steady upward growth. Any comments? I'd just like to reiterate to the public that as I said at our last meeting, we're fortunate that the grant money came in at the level we weren't expecting it and it allowed us to do this. We will not be able to sustain these added classrooms on grant money. So we're going to need the public support with our budget coming up in the following year if these numbers stay the way they are. Thank you. Moving on, hiring, update on hiring. Dr. Bordi, Mr. Spiegel. Did you have anything else on the other room? Okay. Unless there's some other questions, we will give you a more updated report as we go forward. But this is just where we are at the moment and it is an ever-changing scene these days. Sorry. No. Sorry. Mr. Spiegel. All right, so we sent out the interim hiring report and again, this is interim staffing report as of two days ago, August 27th. It has changed, it changes a little bit every day as we, new teaching assistants are hired. Most, I think all of the teacher positions are filled now. I don't think we still have any to hire for in that are AEA unit A positions. That, you know, what you have from two days ago is 53 new people that is equal to 47.1 FTEs. You know, as I sort of gave you some facts about some of them, there's a, most, the majority are replacing teachers who retired, resigned, or taking a leave of absence or moved to a different position. About 19 are filling new positions, some of the positions that Dr. Bodie referred to earlier that because of the added classes, some that we, when we, when you approve the budget in the spring, we added another learning specialist at each school, we added Mandarin, we added some other classrooms.  You know, we have one teacher voluntarily went from full-time to half-time and we hired a half-time person to fill in and that worked out well. That's at the Audison that was, we were able to do that in that particular position. One thing that, one trend that we continue to see is that many of our teaching assistants who work in the elementary school, middle school, high school, get positions as teachers. A lot of our teaching assistants, as I've said before, are licensed teachers. Many have master's degrees. And because of, especially at the elementary level, there are so many, the pool of qualified candidates for all school districts is so large right now in Massachusetts. There's many teachers looking for jobs. We are, and many other districts are able to hire teaching assistants who have licenses and master's degrees and they do a great job in Arlington and the principals get to know them, the teachers get to know them and they end up getting jobs in Arlington. We've had six who did student teaching in Arlington. Again, we get great student teachers from all the local ed schools and if they do a good job and the teachers and the principals get to know them, that's a great way to get hired in Arlington when there are positions that open up. Another trend that we see is that we have returning teachers. Seven of our new hires this year are people who previously taught in Arlington and left for various reasons to step away from the profession for a while to raise a family and are coming back or went to another district and are coming back and I think that speaks well to Arlington, that people who have previously taught here and left on good terms and liked their experience here want to return when their time is right for them. As the report says, I've met with all the new teachers one to one over the summer in our shared office space over the summer. We were trying to find places to meet where Dr. Cheson and Ms. Johnson were sort of sharing an office for a couple months in the summer as there were some renovations up here but we were able to have the meetings with everyone. I obviously I reviewed the salary schedule with them, placed everyone on the salary schedule, reviewed essential information including ethics law, compliance, whenever health insurance options, the orientation schedule and et cetera and the orientation for all the new teachers just completed this past Monday. Obviously the first two days for teachers in the district for all teachers in the district were today and yesterday. There was a new teacher orientation on Monday at the Odyssey Middle School that Mr. Hayner spoke to all the new teachers and Dr. Bodie spoke to all the new teachers and there was some curriculum training last week for a lot of the different curriculum areas and the teachers get a lot of training here and we'll have a very solid mentoring program run by Marie Janiac. So we list the hires by school, by subject and grade. That's pretty set right now for teachers and I wanna thank again as always this is a team effort. The staff up here on the sixth floor do a lot of work to get the paperwork generated for all the new hires. Kelly Piggit in my office who manages benefits and many other things, helps all the new hires with health insurance and other benefits. Judy Chabader also in our office does a lot of work getting people set up. Maria Lalicata who is a new, who moved from the payroll office to the superintendent's office this summer, took on the role that Pat Plaggy vacated when she retired and that involves generating many, a lot of paperwork, a lot of letters for all the new hires and she's done a great job keeping up with it. There's been a lot of letters to go out and people in the payroll office, there's so much to enter in to make sure that we hire these people that get paid and there's a lot of work, the whole team and all the people who do the hiring, the principals and the curriculum directors have a huge job. Some of the other notable hires as you know, we hired a new high school principal, the Hardy School principal. We made official appointments in the budget to add a full-time high school assistant principal that was an increase from a half-time position in the previous budget and added a full-time middle school assistant principal. We added a school district accountants. We made the revisions for special education department. We have coordinators at each level that we officially appointed. We have a new nursing supervisor who after Lucille Nicholson retired, that's Sue Franke who had been a nurse in the district for several years. We have a new attendance officer, diversion coordinator following Ms. Digby's retirement and that's Cindy Sheridan Curran. And again, we've continued to hire teaching assistants. The final thing I'll talk about teaching assistants, we've really been in the last couple of weeks hiring a lot of new teaching assistants. Most of these are replacing teaching assistants who left and filling some of the new configurations at the schools as you might remember in the new budget for this year. The basic configuration for teaching assistants at the elementary schools is two special ed inclusion teaching assistants who will work with the new learning specialists and one building sub TA who will sort of float through all the building wherever needed. There are other teaching assistants in the special programs as well. So the hiring comes pretty late and it's actually maybe a little too late, later than we'd like but what tends to happen since I mentioned most of our teaching assistants have licenses and are looking for, they don't wanna be teaching assistants for their career, they're looking for teaching positions and there's a ripple effect throughout the districts surrounding us that their openings come up, these teaching assistants get jobs as teachers or guidance counselors or whatever and leave and which is understandable and so we have to fill in with new teaching assistants. So there's a lot of hiring going on right now with that and then we've just hired a new data assistant that was part of, there was a position that was approved to work with Leilani D'Agostino as director of data to help with the student registration and enrollment and our district data and that will be a big help and I can take questions if people have any. The next, just I'll mention, in one of the next meetings in September, I'm not sure if it'll be the first meeting or the second meeting in September, we'll have the ethnic diversity report that we always have but we don't have all the information yet to give you. Are there any vacancies or any positions you're still trying to fill? There are some teaching assistant positions that we're trying to fill. So all the other. I think everything else is pretty set with all the other, the teachers positions. I know we're trying to increase the diversity of our staff and I wonder if there's a path from TA to teacher in the district, if there's any way we can get any more TA's of diverse backgrounds. Yeah, yeah. And we do have some TA's of diverse backgrounds and I don't have the diversity report tonight but I can tell you just anecdotally, we have done better this year than we have in past years. We have some teachers of color that we've hired and I think they will be positive, it's positive for the district, they're great people. I think the people who hired them found that they were the best candidates for the job. So we'll have the numbers in September sometime but we are doing I think a little bit better this year than we have in the past. Thank you. I'd just like to thank you personally and I think the rest of the committee does too for the awesome work that you've done. I think very few school systems are on the first day, have all their teaching staff in place. I think you were the rest of you to be committed. So I will say the only thing, there are as always and every year we're gonna have some leaves, maternity leaves, we have some subs to the long-term sub positions that we still will need to hire but they aren't starting right now. We have the long-term subs in place who are for the teachers who are out right now. Thank you. Thank you. Thompson School Ribbon Cutting Ceremony. Dr. Bode? This is, we are so pleased where we are with Thompson Elementary School. It is going to be opening next week. In fact, this last Thursday, there was a Thompson parent student picnic and students and parents were able to tour the school. We've had some committees and we're opening it up to try to get more employees down there, town employees as well to be able to see the school. Last week, though, which would have been a prime time was a very busy week as still furniture trucks were coming in, furniture being assembled, paper on the floor, but that is all very much settled down right now and teachers have been in this week setting up their classrooms. So I know that there's tremendous interest in the community seeing the new Thompson School and our new reporter at the advocates, Spencer Buelos here tonight, and he did a terrific article on the new schools with a few pictures, but we need to have more pictures for the community. And I think we're ready at this point to do that. It'd be nice to have more of the classrooms set up. I think by early next week, that will be, well, certainly by early next week, well, the school will be in tip-top shape waiting for the students to come in. But because of the tremendous interest in seeing the school, we've set the ribbon cutting ceremony I think a little earlier than we have in past, for past schools that have come online. And it's going to be September 15th at two o'clock. We have been working on the program for that day and speakers and the chair of the committee, Judge Pierce has agreed to say a few words. So we have a program, we had a committee that was a subset of the Thompson Building Committee meeting to work on what the program will be that day. We are going to keep it short as possible because I think that the real issue is being able to come and celebrate the opening. I think that's going to be about a half hour program. We're going to have some music. We may even have a student speaker. We're looking at that possibility. And Mr. McCarthy, who is the executive director of MSBA will be the representative from MSBA at the ribbon cutting. Following that, two weeks later on September 29th at two o'clock in the afternoon, it's a Sunday as well, we're going to have the dedication of the Thompson Library in honor of Mr. Bill Chase. And Mr. Chase was a member of the Thompson Building Committee and the permanent Tom Building Committee among all the other activities he's participated in over his very dedicated life to this community as well as Salvation Army and other endeavors. But specifically with regard to the Allington Public Schools, he with several other people on the permanent Tom Building Committee oversaw the rebuild or renovation of the middle school and the other five elementary schools. And his commitment was to finish it, to finish Thompson and certainly to see the upgrade of Stratton as well. So the new Thompson was a dream of his and he was a very special person and that the library will be dedicated and they're working on a program for that day as well. To which you are certainly all welcome. In fact, we would hope you would be able to come. So we could not be more pleased about the status of the school. I do want to take this opportunity right now since we're talking about the Thompson School and I will say this again because I think it's worth saying. These last two years could have been really, they were challenging. They were challenging here to take a very large school relatively and move them into different schools and the Thompson teachers were amazingly flexible but equally so were the host schools. Stratton, Bishop and Hardy. They opened up their arms and they made this work. We did something that we've never done before when we've had schools relocate is that when they were in the host school classes were blended. So Bishop students and Thompson students were in class together and the same thing was true in all the other schools. Teachers form new friendships, new strong collegial relationships and I think it was a bittersweet moment when they all had to part ways in June but it still was a very enriching experience for everyone involved and so I thank them for their flexibility and their graciousness and same thing for the parents. The parents, PTOs could not have been better in the process but we were ready to move on and thank goodness we were able to move on because these numbers this summer would have just been really difficult to accommodate. When you think about it, when you're talking about 120 new students in the elementary that's a third of a school in one summer, it's huge. So anyway, it came in on time and under budget and we're thrilled. I just wanted to clarify, I don't know if it was the acoustics but the library was being dedicated to Mr. Bill Shea. Oh, what did I say? I was Bill, Bill Shea, yes, I'm very sorry, yes. I have a friend, thank you very much. If it's just against the public because I think all the members of the school committee have been in the building but try to make the ceremony and try to stop by the building. It is a spectacular building, it's a great design and it was budgeted appropriately. We, I think we're spending less than a lot of other communities for our school in Arlington and that's a tribute to a lot of things that happened in the course of all the public deliberations to get to the agreement we reached. But it's an example I think for the rest of the state because it's a well-designed school and it's smartly designed and it's cost-effective. It's a cost-effective school and I think we've set an example for other communities. So it's a great school to go see and if you haven't seen it yet, take a walk around. There's some spectacular views too. I mean, just when you get in the building, the views are just unbelievable of the playground and the area around it and I think it's gonna transform that whole neighborhood over time. Yes, it will. And a lot of thought was put into the placement of the school so that when you didn't, any part of the neighborhood would not see a wall. It would be seen something that would have an angular diagonal view of the building. Actually, the way it's been placed on the site, there's more land there than you had the sense of when the old Thompson was there. The landscaping is very nice, the playgrounds as well. One of the things that is part of the green school is you'll see that there are raised beds for every class to have a garden that they will tend as part of their curriculum. In addition to that, they're outside of each one of the kindergarten classrooms, there's an open outdoor classroom where they can go out and there's a bench to sort of define the area a little bit better. But we were able to get pretty much, I would say close to the maximum chips points, which have to do with issues of environmental greenness and efficiency that really added to the state's contribution to the school. So it is, it's a very efficient school. Even little details about having the windows that face the sun in the afternoon, having outside shades to protect more light coming in, but at the same time, forcing the light along the ceiling so it's reflected into the classroom. It was very well thought out. So it's a beautiful building, very whimsical in some respects. I think Mr. Buell talked about that, that used that word too. It did, it has that quality, which I think a lot of children are going to really love. In fact, the principal, Sherry Dunn of it, and I should give her a lot of credit. She has been there from the very beginning of this project, and I think that she deserves a lot of credit and recognition for the work she's done this summer just to keep the project on point, and making sure the furniture was there, the technology was ready to go. And in fact, Laura will talk a little bit about some of the technology initiative around Thompson in the summer that involved actually the whole district as well. So all in all, it's turning out very well, and I think that Bill Shea would be thrilled to see this. And then one of the pictures that was here, in fact, it's on the, well, it's actually up in the library area. We'll see this mosaic. I think I can, I think I can. That was one of his favorite books. And of course, anybody who knows, knew Bill, knew what an energizer person, energy person he was. So it's, it'll be a great tribute to him. Cario, Mr. Thielman said, I would invite the people to come and see the shades. I won't say any more. The shades are a unique part of that building. I didn't know what they were when I first saw them and you had to explain it on the outside. On the outside, yeah, the sunshades. The shades are on the outside of the building and they do the job. I couldn't believe it. They're so simple. Go and see them. Was that, any other comments? A couple of weeks ago, I went and peeked into one of the windows. I was driving by about 530 on a Friday afternoon. And little did I know that Principal Donovan was in her office working and getting this whole thing ready. So I know, well, I don't think I scared her, but you know, I wasn't expecting to find her there at 530 on a Friday afternoon, but there she was. And she's so proud of the building and I think there's a lot of love that's gone into it and the kids are just gonna be thrilled. Even just going there in April and seeing the way it lays out. Kids on the third floor are gonna have such great, beautiful, inspiring views out those windows because the way it's set on the property and this diagonal, it's just, I don't think even by looking at the outside, which is kind of cool, you're gonna get a sense of just how spectacular it is on the inside and what a warm, positive place it is. Moving on, superintendents report? We have a few things. The first is, well, the status of the school is you ask that question, Mr. Heiner. We are, we've had a much shorter summer than in past years, ending on June 28th and starting on August 28th. It feels very much shorter and it has been a difficult summer with all the projects going on around the district to stay on top of all of the cleaning that goes on every summer. But despite that and despite some very hot weeks, our custodial staff, along with a lot of the college students we hired, did a terrific job. Other than the high school, which will be finished by this Friday, the other schools were ready for teachers to be in them a week or so ago. So in fact, if you were in any of the elementary schools the end of last week and certainly this week you'll see a lot of teachers back preparing their rooms. So they're in great shape and as you can see up here we completed this project which was initially inspired by being able to put these new HVAC systems in which will save us an annual cost of about $50,000 in electricity and we were able to fund this through a grant. But in doing so we were also able to upgrade this room which is used all the time during, even though you use it, this district uses it as well for a lot of professional development. So this looks, I think a lot better, I know a lot better. Yeah. When Diane Johnson is here at the next meeting when she gives you a finance report she's also going to give you a more detailed summary of the capital projects that were done this summer just so that you're aware. At the last meeting on July 31st we had a number of parents from Stratton attending concerned about grade size, the number of students in grade three but they were all the one parent and expressed a concern about mold in the lower level of Stratton. And in fact this had come up the night before when I had met with them up at Stratton and we don't take these types of things concerns very lightly. So what we did is we hired a firm out of Wuburn called ProScience and had them do an analysis of the rooms that are down in the lower level and in your report that you received you have these specific room numbers. And to take a look at what mold structures may be in the atmosphere of those rooms. Since there are no state and federal guidelines around what is the proper number to be in an interior space the way that it's done this is the industry standard is to compare the outside mold structures to what the concentration is in the interior spaces. And that was what was done. And what they found is that the outside structures per cubic meter was 916 structures per cubic meter and the indoor concentrations ran range between 32 and 194. So if you are to average that over the classrooms there were test is about 85 structures per cubic meter which means that on average there were 10 times more mold structures outside the building than there were inside the building. One of the things that you always want to do too over the summer when you have a lower level such as we do with Stratton is to make sure that you're keeping the moisture level as low as possible. And all summer long 24 hours a day we ran humidifiers in all those rooms. The carpets were cleaned, in fact, rye cleaned. And so I feel very confident to say that those rooms are very safe rooms for our students and staff to be there. And in fact, the company when they wrote the report said that there's no abatement is recommended at this time given what they found. So I just wanted you to know that because you were made aware of this as well at the last meeting. Good. Just to look, the current emphasis on new schools and new classrooms and stuff is not to have any rugs at all. Is there any thought to removing these rugs in the future? Absolutely. We've had that on our capital list. It's actually fairly expensive. I understand that. To do it because we're actually gonna have to replace the flooring underneath, which by the way our custodians did go in, our maintenance people as well and do visual checks. And there was no visible mold under the rugs or on any of the structures in the room. But when some of those, there's a couple of rooms that we know that when the carpets come up just because of the, that they're gonna bring up tiles. And so we really have to retile everything as well. And probably we would need to do, right now it's contained, but we might have to do, if we test it and see what we'd have to do to more abatements. So we don't, we know that it's gonna cost about 15,000 in rooms, something like that to do. How many rooms still have carpets? I think there's five. I've rooms that do. Thank you. But you get the idea of where it is, so. There's a lot that still needs, we have money for the windows and the library. We want to get those in this year and just the number of things. But it's on our radar screen and we're trying to move forward with Straton as we can. All right. I was gonna ask Rob if he would talk a little bit about the report I sent you from the Traffic Advisory Committee. And let me just preface it a little bit. Well, I'll let Rob talk to it. But basically, anytime we have decisions we want to make around where they advise traffic supervisors to be stationed, we go to the Traffic Advisory Committee to get their analysis. And Rob, you can talk a little bit more about that because you've attended some of the meetings this summer. Yes. So as you probably, you know or recall that when Thompson has been closed the last two years, we have redeployed several traffic supervisors to the Hardy area. We actually had two on Mass Ave this past year, two years. And one more right around Hardy for the additional students coming in walking from Thompson to Hardy. Now that, and we also deployed an additional traffic supervisor to the Straton School because of the Thompson bus. We needed some help there because of the students coming on the bus. So there are actually four positions that are gonna be redeployed from the three from that were added to the Hardy area. One that was added to Straton are being moved. We also, we had one supervisor we've had at the Dunkin Donuts that has been a Thompson position on I think the North Union and Broadway Dunkin Donuts that Dunkin Donuts pays for. And we've had that and we're gonna continue to have that. So what's gonna happen is most of the traffic supervisors are on the list are gonna stay where they were last year at the other schools. The changes are Thompson were, there were a couple concerns of with the safest places and the best places to put the traffic supervisors now that we're back at Thompson. One is going to be at Broadway and Everett Street. The other one is, as I said, staying at Dunkin Donuts. Then there's gonna be one on the North Union, Fremont Street Purcell intersection. There's a lot of walking to the Thompson from that area. So there'll be one there. And then there'll be one at River Street University Street, River Street University Road Cornell Street, which is a block away from the main entrance to the Thompson on Everett Street. There will be staff at the Everett Street River Street crossing that will help the students across the street and during the busy traffic times. The other place, so what happened is we had 15 traffic supervisors total in the budget from last year that were carried forward in the budget to this year. There was, the Transportation Committee looked at options for the 15th traffic supervisor location. And they listed them in order from their perspective on safety priority based on traffic and they listed them at Chestnut Medford Street, Ridge Street, Crosby Street and Ryan Cliff and Dow. And we can only put one, we only have the funding in the budget for one position at one of those locations. So we are going to add the position actually at the Ridge and Crosby Street location near the Bishop School. We have had one, one at the Bishop School and we would add one more at that location. The recommendation is, they did recommend one at Chestnut and Medford Street. I know the superintendent has been in touch with the administration at St. Agnes to see if they would fund a traffic supervisor there but because it is not an Arlington public school, it's a parochial school, a private school. We do have a position at the international school that is funded by the international school. So we would do that if the St. Agnes would fund it. I don't know if the superintendent has any other comments about that. We would, we just, they were, the principal is going to take it to the board but I haven't heard anything further. Any comment? Yeah, I actually emailed MASC about that position because I was wondering about the legality of it and they said that we would definitely need to talk to our legal counsel because that the town or school district is barred from providing services only to a nonprofit using public funds by the anti-aid amendment of the state constitution. And I'm not saying they don't need a traffic supervisor near St. Agnes, just that I'm not, it's not clear that we could do it legally and fund that position. Yeah, I actually have not talked to town council specifically about this and I will, if there is funding for it from St. Agnes, I would. Oh, if they're paying for it, I don't think there's any question. I can forward you the rest of the email. Yeah, I mean, that was obviously one of our concerns as well. But yeah, I mean, this is a public safety issue and I think in some ways, I mean, it's a difficult position for, I'm not a public safety expert. I mean, I think the people at the police department are public safety experts and that's not my role, but it's sort of learning more about it in this job. So it's difficult for, in some ways, this is a town function that we have assumed. Yeah. Any other comments? I'd like to just, number one, these are Eilington residents. This is an, I'm talking about Chestnut Street. Eilington residents who paid taxes to the town and these are public streets. These are not part of the school proper. If we were asked to consider putting something on that and I don't feel it's an equal comparison with the international school because the majority of the students at the international school are not Eilington residents. The, as far as providing a service to the school I would disagree. This is providing safety to the Eilington children. That's my comment in that. I would ask if there was no, I would ask you this, if there was no funding coming, if they weren't willing to fund it or capable of funding it, would you, and there was not a conflict, would legal conflict of doing this, would you reconsider Chestnut Street? That's a hypothetical. I mean. It's a hypothetical. And you may not want to, I appreciate your position, but. It's, it's a, I don't think that there is an issue that it's needed, but I'm not saying that, well, TAC did order these. There's also a sense that all of these places they recommend are equally necessary. I would say, I want to put this in perspective. A number of years ago, we had, I think at one time we may have as many as 40 places in town where we had traffic supervisors. That's why we, we work closely with the traffic advisory committee because there are, there's a lot of need to do this. But if you recall, when we had the budget, we had to do $4 million worth of budget reductions a number of years ago, that was one of the things that we made a decision about. So we have added more in, in fact, was when Thompson was being relocated that we did add a couple more positions, but our budget is where our budget is at the moment. I appreciate that, but my concern is that this is one of the most busy traffic areas in the town. They're all, and the priority they have to me, it's a cut through. It's a traffic cut through in the morning and in the afternoon. It starts at about two o'clock in the afternoon. I'm concerned about it. With the, with the committee's acceptance, I would ask Rob to just check with town council about the conflict, potential conflict. I can shed some light. There was a time when we paid for, one of the 40 slots was at the St. Agnes and the district paid for it. So then we cut the traffic. So I'm not sure, I think legally we were fine and it was because it was a public safety issue. I think it was, it was cut. I don't know when we made the cut years ago, it was, it was due to the budget. It was just due to the budget. That's all. When we had the budget supervisor, this is the budget supervisor. When we had the traffic supervisor over there, they were stationed at, right at the traffic signal, all they were doing was pushing the button to change the traffic lights, which certainly was non-productive. This goes back to about 2004, 2005, when we had the 40 traffic supervisors and we went around looking to see where there was actually kids crossing. And our pedestrian flow and our kids were not aligned to where our traffic supervisors were. So we had traffic supervisors sitting in their cars at a location with no kids and some really dicey locations like on Mass Ave that had no traffic supervisor and a lot of kids crossing. So we, I'm really happy to see the attack getting involved in being strategic in terms of the placement. MASC, I saw the email back and it does raise an interesting legal question that if the police department out of their public safety budget decided they wanted to put a traffic supervisor in a location for pure safety reasons, that would certainly be within their purview, but for us to go and do it was sort of their legal question. And they didn't come out with a firm statement, but they said, tread carefully and check with your legal counsel. But if they are willing to pay for it, I think that's probably the best option because I mean, if the more we go and open more buildings and change our traffic patterns and have more kids going in more different places, we're spreading out the resources we need for traffic supervisors. And I don't think it's inappropriate for us to ask for a partnership when a private school opens and creates an additional need. Just to clarify, I'm sorry, go ahead. We will as both of you. I just wanna rephrase what I heard. There were three locations that there was the recommendation, Chestnut Medford being one, Crosby Ridge being the second, and then the third location. Based on our student utilization, we felt at this time Crosby Ridge was the best placement, which is a major cut through. People do that to cut the corner of route two and two A and three. So I certainly see the merit in that placement. I think that if we're getting to the point where we're spending more time on traffic safety than we are on what benefits Arlington Public Schools students in terms of their learning and safety in arriving to school, then perhaps this is a function that we need to consider whether it is properly housed as the public school because our purview is the public schools. And I've said my piece. I just wanted to read the rest of the email that Paul sort of alluded to. However, the question that arises here is whether the placement of a crossing guard near the Catholic school also provides a public benefit to public school student, public school children or the community at large. If there's a benefit to the public school children, the payment for the crossing guard could be justified in the school budget. If the benefit falls to the community as a whole, then the municipal budget may be the more appropriate place to appropriate the funds. So I'm not disagreeing that there is a need for a traffic supervisor there. I'm just, I'm raising the question, which I think honestly was never asked before, whether it was legal for us to pay for that position and saying that I think we should find that out before we reinstate it. Just a second Jeff. I'd like to clarify one thing. As far as a traffic supervisor pressing the traffic light, we have one at Pierce and we have one at Hardy. They're necessary there for those people that try to run the light or kids are still crossing when the light changes. And that's the benefit and the safety part. I think the best thing, we spend an awful lot of time whenever this comes up, even if it has nothing to do with a private school, the best thing for us to do is try to get this put where it belongs in the police department and away from us because we are relying on a police function attack group to make judgments for us to pay. So while we did ask years ago about this and we were told by town council at the time that it was not a violation. So we have a new town council now. Maybe there'll be a different opinion, I don't know. But years ago we were told it wasn't a violation. We have tried over the years to move this to the municipal budget and it's in our budget and that's where it is and we have 15 supervisors. And so I don't know. I think there's nothing for the school committee to decide at this point. Other than we've got a recommendation from TAC, the school administration looked at it and made a judgment that I support. Would you get back to us to let us know what the other board says if they'll come up with the funding? Oh. Thank you. If they do, I'll let you know for sure. Can I just say one thing? I mean it might be something that the superintendent would say and I don't wanna step on her toes either, but I think the public safety aspect of the traffic in Arlington, especially with school starting Tuesday, I mean I think we need everybody in town to be extra cautious. Absolutely. There's a lot, as we said, there's a lot of new students coming in, a lot of new people to Arlington who may not know the traffic patterns as well. And so especially a lot of kids are gonna be out walking to school, driving to school next week and we would ask everyone to be cautious. Thank you. Well said. All right. George, I just wanna give you a quick update on some issues around technology with Thompson and we can do a much more in-depth presentation about technology this year. As you know, Thompson will be our first one to one school where there will be one iPad for every student. Teachers also were given MacBooks as part of the construction budget so that they would be easily be able to translate the files that they would do on the MacBook to the iPads and vice versa. We had about a hundred teachers so that exceeded the Thompson teachers during the early part of August. And I think the best way to sum this up is for me to read a quote from Anita Christina Calcuttaire, who was a teacher, fourth grade teacher at Brackett, who participated in a very unique role at the university. She was one of the instructors but also one of the students in the sense there were times when she worked with teachers as an instructor but there were times when we brought instructors from outside and she participated as a student. And I asked teachers for feedback and this is what she sent me. Tech University prepared teachers to use iPads by befriending them with direct instruction and opportunities for hands-on creation with iPad applications at a range of levels from both the very novice to the very experienced. It provided mixed-level groups where several presenters guided teachers through in-depth use of applications, how to differentiate with iPads, classroom management tips and innovative applications available to the pilot. The presenters skillfully met the range of the skills of the mixed groups. In addition, it was a wonderful opportunity to learn from colleagues, the results of their work in the pilot iPad program, collaborate with others with the technology to design curriculum and to be part of discussions as many, many questions were asked and answered about a range of topics from tips on sharing iPads to troubleshooting storage problems. It was a very, very exciting time for all the teachers that were there and I'd like to again thank the Arlington Educational Foundation for their grant that made the Tech University possible and it is something that I could see us holding every summer because the teachers felt they not only learned the technology but they were able to do curriculum work at the same time together. Thank you. The last thing I've surprised you of but I think it's worth talking about here at the table is the parking situation here at the high school. We were notified, the school was notified for the first time on August 26th. I know that there is some belief on the part of selectment that we were notified in June that's not accurate. We were notified on the 26th that what was going to be happening is that there was gonna be much stricter enforcement of parking on Mass Ave and the side streets and I know that this comes from perhaps concerns of residents on some of the perpendicular streets into Mass Ave but it is a major concern right at the moment. The enforcement lease on Mass Ave is going to be not strictly enforced if teachers have decals at Arlington High School but it's still something that we have to figure out a solution to. The problem we have here at the high school is that there's not enough parking places for all of the staff and teachers. But there's also no parking for students and we don't have a busing program here and Mass Ave is an artery, yes, but we also have students that come from parts of town where it may not be easy to get public transportation and certainly perhaps a long walk to school. So this is something that's going to be an issue that we're gonna look at a little bit more carefully over the next couple of weeks but it was a bit of a surprise coming out of the clear blue two days before school was teachers were coming for the first day and of course, as you can imagine, it created a little bit of a firestorm in the school and but I'm working with the town manager and we're gonna see what we can do over the next couple of weeks. So just to clarify, they're not going to enforce the traffic rules and orders, Article 5, Section 2, Schedule 1, if you have an AHS decal as a teacher. For the next couple of weeks, yes. Are they gonna give us time to get the decals to the teachers or do we already have them? We have decals. Okay, how about the students? As far as, my understanding from the slackman's office that they will be allowed to buy the same thing that the AC students have for the public parking lot. No. They won't be allowed? No, no, that's no provision for that at the moment. That's my understanding. Well, you're not gonna see me flip go the other side what's good for the private school in town should be just as good for the public students. They're using a municipal parking lot which is, they're able to buy that at $50 a month there is no municipal parking lot nearby downtown. It's a municipal street municipal parking lot they can set up permanent if they want. And my question is, and I've gotta be really serious about this, is this targeted against us or is the slackman actually going to insist on rigorous parking enforcement from one end of Mass Ave to the other, including the box truck at Lake Street? Are they going to take Chestnut Street which is full of cars every day and it's no parking anytime Monday through Friday and there's never a ticket there and it's always parked up? Are they gonna take Chestnut Terrace which is no parking at any time and start enforcing that? Are they doing something rigorous throughout the town or is this just another special situation where we're gonna have inconsistent and targeted enforcement against the people they decide to go after? That's my question. You can purchase a permit for day and night parking at a reduced rate at any on-street parking on the public roads in here. That's- I think we should leave this to the superintendent to get more clarification. I'm sure you're gonna protect our students as well as the teachers. I think the slackmen are reasonable people. They don't wanna make it impossible for kids to learn and teachers to teach. I think that we need that. Kathy needs to meet with them and maybe something Paul is excited about this. So maybe Paul should be the liaison on this. We do have a selectman's liaison. Yeah, who is the liaison? Does anyone want to? Is it Chuck? I think it's Mr. Pierce. Yeah, it's you. And Mr. Pierce is a most reasonable person. And he's not here. I think the selectman would much rather see him on this issue than me. Maybe you both should go. Well, maybe. Yeah. Maybe you should both go. You're good in the bad part. But I think that we should see if we can't, if this isn't really resolved right away, we're gonna have to do things to maximize the parking on our property. And that might involve doing some pretty drastic things to recover spaces for public school department employees. Because we have control over the parking spots on our property, even though they're say municipal people who might be parking in them. And if the town is willing to go and give a permit for their employees to park on the street, maybe that'll work out. Who knows? But if there's a lot of cooperation between us and the town, we let them use our parking lots overnight for overnight parking. We really should get everybody in the same room and come up with some sort of a long-term strategic plan for working this out. And the fact is that the selectmen would go and pass these regulations and quietly announce vigorous enforcement around the high school without consulting us and without consulting the superintendent. I think it is a problem. And I think that we need to request, in fact, I'll make a motion requesting that the selectmen meet with the school committee to discuss parking issues around the high school. We have a second? Yes. Any discussion? I mean, do you like an amendment to that? I just, you know, I just wanted some clarification. We could, I'm happy to, it's always good to have a meeting with the selectmen to talk about anything, but are you, who are you meeting with now? Our manager and I are going to be working on this over the next couple of weeks. And why don't I just report back to you and my suggestion would be just to wait on that until we can do. We have a meeting on September 12th. So today, so two weeks from today, you're going to give us a report on the progress of your discussions with the town manager. Let's see what happens on the 12th. When you report back on the 12th, if there's no resolution, then I think that's the next step. Well, then I will draw the motion then and just ask that this get on the agenda for the next meeting. Good. Casey, did you have something? I was going to. Okay. Leva? I agree with Paul's withdrawal of the motion, but actually part of the reason I did second the motion is one thing we have historically done is have a joint meeting with the selectmen at various points. I'm not sure when our last one was, but given the nature of some of these issues that are coming up, it might be worth discussion about whether that is an option for this year to pretty much make sure that we are all on the same page because we are one town. I think that meeting should be left to the chair and the superintendent and the selectmen will work that out. You will report back to us on this. My only concern is the potential ticketing of students between now and then. So hopefully you can resolve it. I don't know whether I can resolve that, but I know that the high school principal, Mr. Janger, is going to notify parents or has, I think, already notified parents. Thank you. And students, I would hope. Pardon? I think the notification needs to be going not just to parents, but to students because the students are gonna be driving and I don't know from what I'm seeing with my middle school or by high school, I doubt that there's gonna be that, I was like, go to, they're off to school. I'm just saying that let's make sure we're notifying the people who are actually gonna be getting the tickets, which I think is gonna be the students. Sure, there will be a lot of discussion the first day of school on this. They have assemblies. Yeah, okay. Right, Ms. Sarathan. Is that it? Do you have any more? No, I don't. Moving on to the subcommittee and liaison reports. Policy and procedure, Mr. Thielman. Okay, so we have a number of policies to go over and just to clarify. In June, early June, the subcommittee adopted modifications to policy BDFA-E-2, which is the district-wide goal setting and performance objective process and CBI and CBI-E. So I wanna talk about those for, I wanna take them in chronological order. Mr. Hayner said the other day at the meeting, aren't we already done with this, shouldn't they be on the website, shouldn't they be posted? But the fact of the matter is the chronology is this. We adopted these, we made this recommendation on June 5th. We brought these to the retreat that we had in June. We discussed these at the retreat. The discussion at the retreat, there was, so there's been no change, we all agreed to this at the retreat. However, that's not a first reading. The retreat's not a first reading. So we have to do a first reading tonight and then people can make amendments to these policies at a second reading on September 12th. So it's pretty much what you saw at the retreat. There's absolutely no change. It's what we agreed to in terms of the new process with the superintendent for both BDA-E-2 and CBI and CBI-E. So it's what we agreed to, what we discussed at the retreat. It's just basically a new cycle that's consistent with the evaluation process that the state has created. So that's the first reading on CBI and CBI-E and BDA, BDFA-E-2. Does anyone have any comments or additions you want to add? I do. I just want to state for the record, I'm still concerned about having May 15th as the deadline for submitting district goals in that we won't get MCAS data and stuff. I'm concerned about what data they're going to be using to set, but I also understand there's the contractual obligations of the new district educator evaluation system. So I'm just voicing their concern. Liva. I just want to point out on BBA that I think... We're not doing that one yet. Oh, sorry. We're not there yet. Why did you move it to the right? Sorry. Okay, so thank you. Yeah, I mean, I think we all have the same concern about the May 15th deadline, but there's a contract, so I'm not sure what else we can do. All right, so that's, those are two policies, that's first reading. Okay, so now let's go through the second, the first reading of all the ones we adopted the other day. So now we'll go back to the order. Okay, BBA. During the sessions we had with the MASC on our governance, we... Questions were raised in those sessions about clause 10 of policy BBA. So the subcommittee met earlier in August and then earlier this week to talk through the concerns that were raised about clause 10. And we came up with this modification, which is basically saying approval of new, I'm sorry, approval of job descriptions for new positions with reference to qualifications for employment, salary schedules, annual budget and other personnel policies is in our purview. Approval of changes to the job descriptions of the superintendent, assistant superintendent, chief financial officer and special education director, because we hire those folks according to the law. Be informed by the superintendent of modifications to job descriptions for posted positions and ensure that the district has updated job descriptions on file for all personnel. So our feeling was that anything new, any new position, the subcommittee's feeling was that the school committee should still continue to approve those positions. Obviously we approve any changes to the people we hire directly. We should be informed about any modifications to job descriptions for posted positions. And we should ensure the policies should, you know, say that we ensure that the district has updated job descriptions on file for all personnel. And so that's it. That's the first reading on that one. I, Ms. Hanna. On that one, while this doesn't pertain to a section that's been altered, I believe there was a formatting issue that changed. Yeah, right, right, right, okay, you're gonna, okay, and thank you for modifying that for all our concerns. Just like to inform the representative from the newspaper, he's the first readings and they are not ready for publication. Well, they're public documents. Yes, documents. But they will not be policy until after the second reading. Yeah, they're not adopted, we're just presenting them for the first time. Yeah, okay, so that's, okay, so now we're on, okay, so there's two other, I guess it's not on the agenda, but it wasn't listed, but there's two other policies that we took up at our meeting on earlier this week. GBCA, Staff Health. The reason why this needs to be deleted, the pink one, is because it's, the law was changed, the law was deleted, what am I trying to say, the law was taken, the law. The law that it references has been repealed. And repealed, right. So we can't have a policy that requires us to comply with a repealed law. So that's GBGA. And then GDE-GDF needed to be consistent with our contracts, support staff recruiting, posting a vacancy, support staff hiring. So that means deleting the first paragraph and basically just having two sentences. When a vacancy occurs in a support staff position, the vacancy will be posted following applicable collective bargaining agreements. Interviews of support staff applicants shall be conducted by the immediate supervisor of the position being filled. So it's that simple, it just makes it consistent with all of our contracts. That was something that Rob picked up. And then the third one, I mean the next one is the bullying prevention policy. It's a little, anything highlighted, the highlights, anything highlighted is new language that is consistent with the law and this was developed by our legal counsel. The subcommittee went through it with Cindy Bouvier at the meeting earlier this week and we adopted this, we had, we recommended this to the full school committee for adoption. So basically the changes, Kathy you should help me out in case I'm missing something here, but bullying is the repeated use by one or more students and then there's a new language and we're reading in the second paragraph that's highlighted or by a member of a school staff including but now limited to an educator, administrator, school nurse, cafeteria worker, custodian, bus driver, athletic coach, advisor to an extracurricular activity or a paraprofessional. So basically the law now adds adults and then on page three of five investigation procedures, one, two, three, the fourth paragraph, the paragraph that begins with confidentiality, the law adds to the extent consistent with the school's obligations to investigate and take appropriate action. At the bottom of page three at a minimum the principal or his or her designee shall contact the parent or guardians as to the status of the investigation on a weekly basis. The next one, if a violation is found the parent of the targeted student will be informed of what steps will be taken to support the student and to prevent further acts of bullying or retaliation so long as consistent with applicable legal restrictions. For example, specific information about discipline and action taken will be generally not be released to the target parents or guardian unless it involves a stay away or the directive that the target must be aware of in order to report violations. Then the next paragraph, what is added is discipline and action for staff who have committed an act of bullying or retaliation shall be in accordance with expectations and standards appropriate to their roles and responsibilities. So essentially what the law does now is it adds a requirement that staff are included in this and there's a notification for parents. Did I get it? You did, I want to clarify, the new law is adult to students. Yes, adult to adult. Correct. Very, that's right. Correct. And that's why the language was written the way it was. That's correct. That's it for first reading. Any questions? The school committee, the subcommittee agreed to look at section G which is all about personnel because we have new collective bargaining agreements and there were several policies that are inconsistent with their agreements. There's four policies we're going to work. We have not set a date for our next meeting, but we will and there's four policies Rob is working to revise. That's it. Thank you. Budget, Ms. Starks is not here. So community relations. No report. Curriculum Instruction and Assessment Accountability. No report. Facilities, no report. Legal services review. Mr. Pierce is not here at the moment. That's me. We'll discuss our recommendations in executive session. Thank you. As the chair, I apologize for my nervousness and remiss in not introducing Valerie Sarazan, the AE rep sitting over here. And I would like to offer my congratulations to the administrative staff for the opening days, the two days that I attended last Monday, the new teachers up at Audison, the excitement other than making me feel very, very old. I thought they were all very young and energetic teachers and excited. I saw a couple of them afterwards. They were excited about the programs that Dr. Cheson provided them. And then yesterday, seeing the whole faculty here was the enthusiasm and I publicly would like to commend Dr. Bodie and her remarks, they were, they held me. And not often on the first day, can I say that about a superintendent? They were very well and very well done. So thank you very much. And please pass it on to the whole staff, including the teachers, their enthusiasm. Okay. Am I remiss on the agenda that I'm looking at? We do not have anything on the consent agenda? Okay. So moving on to executive session at this time. Can I impose on Mr. Schlickman to read it? I move that we go into executive session to conduct strategy sessions in preparation for negotiations with non-union personnel or to conduct collective bargaining sessions or contract negotiations with non-union personnel and to discuss strategy with respect to collective bargaining or litigation if an open meeting may have a detrimental effect on the bargaining or litigating position of the public body and the chair so declares for the purposes of discussing the unit C contract and to discuss contract with Stonem, Chandler and Miller and a potential renewal of that contract. And we will be coming, sorry, thank you for the second. We will be coming out of executive session back to the public session for potential vote. I'll call the roll. Aye. Aye. Thank you. We now adjourn for executive session. We are returning from executive sessions for our regular session. At this time, I will entertain a motion. Okay. I move that the school committee authorize the chair to accept and sign on their behalf. The new agreement was Stonem, Chandler, and Miller for the next three years of legal services and retainer. It references a letter dated August, the services are described in a letter dated August 29th to Mr. Pierce and attachments. Your second? Second. Any discussion? I'd like to, Mr. Pierce had asked that I read his statement of why he was recommending the renewal. Stonem, Chandler, Miller. So this is a note for Mr. Pierce who was unable to be here this evening. Stonem, Chandler, Miller is experienced professional and has an ongoing relationship with the district that is beneficial to both parties. Institutional memory and knowledge of the way things are done in Arlington is present here and we should take that into account. It is the most cost effective way to handle our general school law and special education legal matters. We've learned that many firms, not many firms do this type of work in those that do charge more than SEM. It represents a collective effort to better clarify and enumerate the responsibilities of both parties. It represents a compromise in that the exchange in exchange for a significantly reduced hourly rate, a retainer plus arrangement that many districts do not have the benefit of having with a law firm. The APS will contract for three years and use SEM exclusively for general school law and special education matters. Finally, we have seen growth in our long-term relationship. For example, more clarity in our relationship is evidenced by this proposed agreement and different attorneys having been assigned to handle our cases responsible for better serving our needs and more growth is expected. Indeed, Attorney Stein has made every effort to say that even after a vote of approval of a new agreement with SEM, further communication about our ongoing relationship with them is not only helpful but welcomed. So he wrote this in recommendation of supporting the renewal of this. I'd like to add, for me, speaking on a personal level, I feel that Stono-Taylor-Miller has addressed some of the issues and concerns that we had brought forward and I hope that our relationship will continue to grow and thrive. Ms. Hayam, do you have anything? Yes, please. I'm going to be voting in support of this in addition to it being the recommendation of the subcommittee and our superintendent. I have found over the years that they have been responsive to the directives of our district administration and I believe this is the best interest of our continuing work with our students and I will therefore be voting to support this. I don't want to add. Yeah, for me, this is kind of a tough vote because I'm out of my area of expertise and we've got three people with, I think it's three people with a lot of agrees on this committee, two of which have one opinion, one has the other. I think that in my mind, it's sort of a close vote, but given where we are right now in the process and what we have before us, it's not an ideal situation, but I think it's the best option for the district, which is I'm voting yes. I would like to make it clear from the outset that the following statement is my opinion. I will be voting against continuing with Stoneman, Chandler and Miller as the Allenton School Committee's legal counsel for special education and general school law issues. This committee and past committees have invested a lot of money in this firm. I believe that Stoneman, Chandler and Miller have not always acted in the best interests of the Allenton school system in that they tend to be reactive rather than proactive in their legal advice. I believe that Allenton school system would be better served by seeking other councils where represent us special education and school law matters. Does anyone else have anything to say? I'll call the vote. Aye. Aye. Aye. Nay. I will entertain a motion to adjourn. So moved. Second. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Thank you.