Good evening everyone. Today is Thursday December 12, 2013. It's roughly 6.30 p.m. and this is the regular meeting of the Arlington School Committee. My name is Judson Pierce. I'm proud to chair this thoughtful committee where we have a few folks tonight. I know that Carlson Anthony is at the middle school for a big concert. And Mr. Anders is going to be at the party. Linda Hansons with us today at the table from the AEA. Welcome Linda. My brief remarks. I must report to you the very sad news of the passing of Marie Carroll Southern and Rich. Many of you remember Marie, our superintendent's officer for many years. She recently retired. Her name is Richard. Her name would be for a lesson. And maybe we don't have a brief moment of silence. Thank you. Tonight we'll hear from our middle school and high school principals and what they see as necessary for this year's 15th. We'll also hear a bit about a final end this week of a long chapter in our county school's history, which both people apart. But before we do, I wanted to speak briefly on the legacy of Nelson Mandela, who also passed away recently. He was 91. Many of you know Mr. Mandela served in the 1990s as president of South Africa. He was South Africa's first black chief executive. His government focused on dismantling the legacy of apartheid. But before that he was imprisoned for his beliefs for 27 years. When he was released, he showed us his amazing capacity to forgive and his great interest in reconciliation. Instead of exacting retribution on his captors, he expressed a want for peace and equality. Coming together, if you will, for a common purpose to achieve a set of higher ideals. He noted that if he were to be angry and revengeful, then he would remain a prisoner. So with that, I hope our teachers will teach our students about Mr. Mandela. That our students learn to live by his principles. And we're now in December. It's our season of hope and light. So let Nelson Mandela's memory be a beacon in this coming winter. We're in my best of December bowtie. There's no lights. Maybe for the meeting next week. Okay, we have a very special beginning of our meeting tonight. We have with us three eighth grade teachers. And they are here to present on the Odyssey Middle School Casper's project. We have Lucy Conroy, Julie Keyes, and Todd Stonstrom. If you would like to please come to the table here. I know we would have had some students here with us tonight. But before that wonderful performance going on. So I thank you so much for coming. And that is sitting on a little bit about what you're here to talk about. Can we start the slideshift? We have a couple of pictures of some of the research projects. And a bunch of pictures of the sample projects that we've seen. First of all, I would like to thank the superintendent at the Odyssey Middle School Committee for having us here tonight. On the medieval building project. This project is really a collaborative effort. And we appreciate very much the support of the parents and our administrators. And for all the community really to make this a positive experience for all of our students. We are in awe of these castles, individual, and manners each year. But behind the construction and all the group work, there are many steps of the research process that our students are learning here when they do these projects. From the pre-research on day one of the assignment to the multiple drafts of the work cited. To exploring and assessing a variety of sources. And we thank Ied Masan for giving fabulous books for us, for our students. Students engage with the research process in a way that is meaningful and motivating to them. And the culmination of these many steps of research, of course, is cast of day. It's important for us to be able to share. What we teach for many, many months is the Middle Ages. We have three full units on it. And when we were thinking about ways to incorporate our goals for the year. And we're sharing it as a group that we incorporate throughout the year. We really want to focus on some of the big themes when we talk about the Middle Ages. We talk about the political system of feudalism, the overarching powerful institution of the Catholic Church. And of course, when we think of castles, we think of individuals who think of malefars. People of economic background of the Middle Ages. We can think of a better way to put it together than these three. And use this as a way to incorporate our topics and our subject. And also with the research project that we have brought to you today. So the process starts with kids either choosing to work alone or in a group of up to four people. We really encourage them to think critically about who they're going to work with. We talk about scheduling.  So teaching these skills to kids about time management and getting together is as important as teaching the content with this. The students have to design, they have to research different parts of the building. They have to create a blueprint. So we're bringing in some of the technology STEM skills that overlap with their tech and science classes. And then they have to label a blueprint for different parts of the building so they have to do some paraphrasing and putting all the information from their sources into their own words. And then they actually build the model. We encourage them to use recycled materials for these as much as they can. So we see some really creative ideas. This is a paper, sorry, origami nuns that one student created. One student told me that they went to a local tile store and asked if they had any leftover pieces that they could use because they were doing a school project in the middle of the floor. So we're really impressed with the creativity that kids come up with every year. We've been doing this for nine years now and every year there's a new idea that comes up. It's absolutely phenomenal. Members, I have a question. I remember doing this when I was teaching. Did you use Macaulay's book, the cathedral and the castle? Yes, I did. There's many books out of that series. How long has the project been taking or going on? Nine years. The nice thing is to become a tradition of the school that brings a community. There's not been a person in school many years that we all have an open question. The nice thing is that they come into sixth graders and the entire school gets to go through during other classes to see it. So it's something they're very excited about. And there's this funny thing that they want to undo their predecessors. And I was seven up a notch. So it's been a great way to go into a break. And the kids really work incredibly hard.  If you ask anyone or any parent that's been involved in this, they'll walk the ton of work. But at the end of it, we always have parent offices right after it. So we get direct feedback. So basically, we get mostly positive impact, but it's just a great collaboration. Or even getting through hard times with groups and making things happen. So it's been a wonderful experience. How do you select the groups of kids that are going to work? Is it random selection? They choose. But they choose, okay. Yeah, and we're very conscious of how scheduled the kids are. So it's not per class, per the entire cluster. They work with anyone in the entire cluster. A lot of times. So kids can choose to work alone. But a lot of times we encourage groups to get together. Do you think we work together? I think the average group size is how many in the group? The maximum is four. Okay. And we prefer two to four. Obviously we'd rather do not work by ourselves, but sometimes just get out. Great. Who's next? Oh, I was just going to say, and speaking as somebody that's gone through this twice, I certainly have seen the evolution over the years. And, you know, it really is nice knowing that just the level that you've taken it up to and the thought that you make the students go through in selecting their groups. It's in the three year gap that I had between the first and the second iteration. You framed it much better for the children in terms of what they needed to consider to have a successful experience. And so thank you for that. We're very lucky because the three of us have been the eighth grade history teachers for 10 years. So that's pretty rare in our schools. We have a lot of turnovers. So we've been very lucky that we can evolve projects like this and really take things and learn from them and step it up every year. Our common planning period is to evolve around this topic for a month. Spitting our curriculum in and making sure we have the students that time. Because Thanksgiving falls in different times. Thank you very, very much for presenting on this. Thank you. And you should get some new high school classes. New high school.  Thank you. I'd like to welcome you. You mentioned Edith. You're part of this early operation here. You've been working with our students on projects in a new studio at Middle School. And with ACMI to tell us a little bit about that. So I cannot come with my students tonight, but I brought the tools of the trade. We have 27 students enrolled after school this year. So which is a big improvement.  So they took upon them to do auditions. So we have informal auditions with iPad and they love that. To me it was very nice because afterwards I was able to look at every one of them and see where the work stand and what we need to improve. Then we had formal auditions with the studio. So in front of the screen you can behind everything. And also my eighth graders did a writing for a press workshop. So I learned to write for news and I really enjoyed that. To the point that people who were there from September did train people who came in November. And that was incredible. They remembered everything. And we did film that too. So I thought that instead of trying to bore you to death with a lot of things, we did film in ten days, film, edit and everything.  Not all the students are in the video, but still it gives you a pretty good idea of what we do. Also this year we began to collaborate with teachers and we did our projects. We go to the classroom, students grab things from me and they try to take pictures or try to be accurate. Everything we serve either for the ONN or for the newsletter. And it was a beautiful ABC from The Other Sun which will be next week newsletter. And now if you would please enter yourself if you are in for a little walk with the ONN. My friend Stasio said a few days ago we joined our institute and it's an artificial authority. We're in science and we're in power class. And we just want to take a couple of minutes to talk about this. The project itself. And you should see the difference between when they did audition for some of them six weeks before or two months before and for this project. It's amazing the boost of confidence that gives. Well thank you so much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. For the participation part of the section tonight do we have anyone here to speak? All the participation tonight. Okay. Seeing none, why don't we move on to the presentation of our middle and high school and their priorities for our president. We'll start tonight with the principal of the high school here. If that's alright with everyone here, Dr. Janger is in the commutative district. Welcome Dr. Janger. Thank you. We'll hear from you first and Mr. Kim are here. Principal of the office of the middle school.  Are you ready to go? All ready. Does everyone hear me? Yup. Okay before I started I just wanted to announce something which I thought was sort of a wonderful thing that folks would like to hear. One of our students, Hannah Blannis, has been nominated to apply for the Presidential Scholars Program. So that is one of the most prestigious awards a student can receive. There have only been about 10 students nominated from Massachusetts. I think I was looking through to see how many won from each state. It looks like you get two or three per state. So that's a pretty amazing thing to have gotten to the point she's at. There were 141 students who won that last year. So congratulations to her. We're very excited and hopefully she will go on in how I do my little presentation. So I tried to keep it short and then I just kept writing more, but I kept it on the two sides of the page. And I tried, my understanding of this process is there's a larger process as we're going through priorities and nuts and bolts. It's what I'm really trying to focus on here are some big issues and big ticket items that I want the committee to know about. And so I'm talking primarily about three real big headings. One is the building, which we're all aware of, but I just want to talk about it a little. The second and the biggest is the building and staffing issues, which come with curriculum and staffing issues. And then the last is issues related to technology. And every time I start into sort of one of these little speeches, I feel compelled to start out with talking about what the quality of the education we get is at the school. Because then after that I start saying things about my own institution and make me feel bad. So I think it's important to remember when I talk about the building and the technology and the class size that in spite of all of those things, we get really amazing results at the school. We're one of the top 25 and we've heard this before. Schools in the state according to various different reports, one of the top 50 in the region in the state, which is performing well above most of the world in terms of performance for students. That said, you've all seen the building. Many of you have been on tours. I hope all of you will make some time to do that. We'll be happy to tour you around. It was once a wonderful and grand building, but it is now well beyond its usable life. And we are going to fix it hopefully in the next four to five years. During that time, however, we will continue to have 100 teachers teaching there and 1250 kids coming to school every day. And part of why we get the really great results that we get is because we have really great teachers. In spite of the facilities and in spite of the technology that they've got, choose to come work here. I think because of the fabulous community, the wonderful students, and hopefully because they are treated well as professionals and therefore have a good teaching experience. That said, it would be very easy for us to say, we're going to back off of construction, we're going to back off of painting, but if you look at the ceiling of the locker rooms that are crumbling and falling, if you look at the ceilings of the auditorium which crumbled recently, or classrooms that crumbled, those things would be needing to be repainted in four years anyway. So the paint we're putting on them now is just a regular maintenance issue. So the two things that I wanted to say with regard to that. We have custodial crew, which I believe is staffed around 10 folks. We have never been fully staffed since I've been there. When I arrived there were five or six custodians, they then brought it on contract, they've been trying to fill those positions. We've been working really hard. We have a new custodial crew chief, Jeremy Brandel, who's been working really hard to get folks working and to make good use of those folks, and in the last month or so, there's been a real change. You'll start to walk around and see that the building is clean. We need to keep it that way. We need to keep moving in that direction. We need to get the mice out of people's classrooms and the desk out of people's desks. So that's the first. And then the second is we need to keep working on those maintenance issues. We're not going to put huge amounts of money into things, but if rooms are freezing cold, or boiling hot, or don't have electrical, or don't have plugs, that's something that people need to fix right now. So I just want to make sure, I'm not actually asking for money. The others will tell you what those things are, but I just want to make sure that we are on to make sure that those things continue forward. So the biggest piece of this conversation will be about curriculum and staff. So first we have rising enrollment. The big enrollment changes right now are still hitting the elementary schools in Madison. Our enrollment is creeping up and we'll continue to do so. But in spite of that, we are sort of historically understaffed and I'll tell you why that's the case. And so some of that is hidden. There are also things going on curricularly that are causing our class sizes to be larger and for us to have larger needs for staff, even with roughly, you know, with only small increases in enrollment. And those are. So if you look for example, I just did a quick check. I tried to do this in PowerScone, realized, like many of these questions, they are non-trivial. The anecdotal evidence, and I will point to some folks who speak to some specifics in their departments, is that we have very large class sizes. We spread them out in order to even outteach you a load, but particularly, you know, higher end classes, so the classes that have students that work hard and are easier to manage, we have many classes well over 25. If you run a report, you'll come up with 102 classes over 25 and 26 over 30, but that doesn't include any of our heterogeneously group classes and classes that get split in PowerSchool. So I think that I've done more work than I could do by hand in the short period of time. But you're already there just on a quick look. If you go through, and this is the hidden cost of the understaffing, in addition to those large class sizes, we are not supposed to have the record studies. But if you look, you have 75 juniors and seniors. These are not juniors and seniors with senior privileges, which means they don't have to come in at the last period or the first period. The juniors and juniors with holes in their schedule where they should have a class being sent to study. And they're being sent to study all because we don't have programming for them. In addition, one of the things that hides the understaffing is our PE classes. Because our PE requirements are three years of PE. When a student signs up for PE, you would think that meant that they sent a period of PE all year long. What actually means is that three out of seven days, freshman and sophomore year, they go to PE. And the other three out of seven days, they go to direct and study and study all. Now that's, in some ways, there's some programming going on during that time for freshmen and sophomores. For the juniors and seniors, they're supposed to take an additional PE class. Half of the students are taking what's called a PE contract. Now for some of those, that fills a hole in their schedule. For some of those, that's something that they want to do. But it's roughly half, 150 students. Many of them are taking less than really rigorous programs as a way of essentially stepping out. The other students who are taking a PE class are taking one quarter every other day, which means 18 PE classes in the course of the year to fulfill the one year requirement for PE. The other thing that happens to those students is after that, many of them end up in a directed study because we have no programming opposite. We don't have electives that are filling those gaps. And there's really no way to program for that at the moment. So I think that's got to be a backdrop for the rest of this conversation. So I don't remember exactly how Kathy and I came up with this range of 4.2 to 6. None of the ways I then subsequently added up the numbers came out exactly that way, but it seemed like a good range depending on how you want to add up the numbers. Somewhere, depending on enrollment, what students sign up for to see ourselves as needing between 4 and 6 new teacher positions. So the first ones I talk about are what I see as the hard targets. These really are, we need a teacher in this place to fill a very specific need. And I'm going to point, as I get to some of them, to the department heads who can give you much more specific numbers and a little bit more emphasis on those, and also I'll start with math. Math right now, our state and universities are starting to expect and ask for four years of math. As a result, in the last year, year and a half, we've gone from having roughly 70% of our students take the four years of math. 90% of our students take the four years of math. If you do the math, that's about 250. He'll do the math better than I will. That's about 250 new math students all of a sudden showing up. So it's pretty clear to us that we need at least one additional math teacher to support that. You want to say anything about that, Matt? Out of the 26 classes, over 30. Just a quick calculation. I think 12 of those were designed math. So there you go. Going on with science, the issue in science in addition to the large class sizes is the small labs. So we've been put on warning, one of the big reasons what we're put on warning for our building beyond the general prepiveness of all the facilities was the size and quality of our science labs. The MSBA would recommend that science labs be the students in lab classes not be larger than 24. After you have more than 24 students in a class the accident rates start going up because of difficulties of supervision. That doesn't even include square footage. I think Larry has told me that based on the square footage of our classrooms and again he's done the analysis and he'll give you the numbers.  Our labs actually should have between 16 and 20 kids in them. By adding this point for science teacher we'd be able to get our class sizes down to 26. Still a little over what we want and still too large for our labs. Nonetheless we don't have the labs to hire additional science teachers to run their classes even if we wanted to. Did you want to say anything about that Larry? In order to say time I was discussing that I prepared a little sheet of four presentations of research reports about that actually. I'll send that to Karen later but those are from places like the MSP who we're going to be dealing with and the national science teachers some school planning and management consultants as well as scientific which is one of our suppliers of chemicals and they do some pretty detailed analysis. So whatever we're talking about now as we look at the projections of the population in the next four or five years these are going to be even more traumatic issues. So the current norm is 60 square feet per student. In 2010 the MSBA recommendation was 1200 in 2000 after 2010 it went up to 1440 square feet. This is for classes of 24. Our square footage in our science labs starts at about 850 square feet. We don't even make the 2010 standards except in two rooms and when they raise the standard to 1440 square feet only one of our science rooms makes that threshold. So these reports talk about how when you increase the numbers the accident rate goes up exponentially. So and they deal with issues of not only safety but also programmatic issues because we have a new set of standards coming up the next generation of science standards. They have just come out and the state is just finalizing their final draft of where we should go with that standard and they're insisting on more laboratory work they're insisting on more engineering projects and activities and all of these are going to have square footage and support implications and that will happen at the elementary school, it will happen at the main school and it will happen at the high school. So for all those reasons I think the MSBA also is asking for new labs to be based on flexible space and spaces that can accommodate a number of different science disciplines not just chemistry only one because you add and take away courses engineering and oceanography etc. and they go into different rooms so you need that flexible space. These are just some of the reasons. I'll pass it over to Karen and then you can take a look at the data and the statistics on that. Thank you. So then I try to break it down the next ones largely have to do with the areas around reducing load and then generally supporting and programming for students and I'm going to ask Kerry to speak a little bit about this but there are two ends in the English and Social Studies classes these large classes are largely proven to be high end in terms of student performance and student expectations or AP classes that means these are classes where we do this because those are the kids that will bear the class of 26 to 30 or 36 but at the same time those are kids with very high reading demands, very high writing demands, very high feedback demands and you'll see some of the teachers who are teaching these AP classes having upwards of 100 recommendations right in the fall to get our kids into competitive college which is an enormous burden on top of teaching regular class at the same time because our faculty are booked to teach in those classes we don't have anybody free to give discipline, specialized support for students in small, adapted classes so unless you have a special education teacher who is also a subject area specialist and certified in the area then I hope it's important Kerry want to talk about that a little bit Sure So I first wanted to address the large class size over 25 and Matthew mentioned that it did not include the heterogeneously groups classes all of our social studies electives law, recent identity symposium and current world issues our economics class all of them are heterogeneously group classes so if we included those they're all over 25 they're all full, full, full there'd be another 20 to 25 classes over over that 25 student a little bit more target I guess so I didn't want to mention that but it is very limiting that right now in English and social studies we've got no staffing flexibility every teacher is used fully utilized all day teaching large classes and both English and social studies are requesting some extra staffing I'm requesting a .8 to dovetail existing .2 Deb Perry is requesting a 1.0 position to allow us just to have a little bit of flexibility to be creative so for instance in social studies I would like to be able to offer a literacy focused smaller group section of World History US1 and US2 to meet the needs of our students who maybe are newer to the English language or have specialized learning needs that don't really require placement in a separate program but still need smaller group and literacy focused approach right now I don't have the staffing to do that and having a little bit more would both alleviate some not all of the overcrowding in our honors AP elective courses but it also would give me the flexibility to meet the needs of some of our more at risk students as well in the general context to have those needs met in English language arts currently Deb Perry is offering one section of a double block English as a regular intervention for ninth graders who need an intensive literacy focused English experience she's offering one section there's high demand for that class she needs to offer more than that we'd like to be able to offer that in 10th grade and maybe even 11th as well but she cannot do it at all without any reasons so that's specifically what that request is looking for so again going to the issue of overall staffing that general pressure you see about not having to be able to offer elective that's what comes out now in the world where those would exactly go that's on a hard target because we're a little dependent on what students are up for and you'll see my math isn't very good world languages when we had that discussion it really is a full 1.0 teacher which adds up to 0.2 Latin 0.2 Italian 0.4 Spanish and 0.2 Mandarin which is 1.2 so as you said see mine that really depends on where the enrollment is and cornice of my own math skills which is why we need additional math teachers that was a joke and then similarly we find the same problem in terms of electives in our failing conditions of science so we don't know where exactly those will go we are increasing already this year we need to sustain that for next year and can imagine that increasing the woodworking program because we're reopening now so that's 0.2 we're adding right now just to try out beyond that just for supporting the general education program and this is sort of an interesting sort of thing to back up on something has happened to the economy I think it might have actually gotten a little bit better the result of that is those wonderful TAs were going to work for almost no money upon which we were able to support the program actually get jobs if they're any good and so what has happened was even though we set aside some funding to have some general TAs in all fall front desk any time we get anybody who's any good we lose somebody in special let we slide them over to the ESP position and we try to do the position again so there's two pieces to the funding issue here one is I think we have to realistically look at the responsibilities we're putting on these TAs and increase them at least what's called a BSP it's not really, that's a salary about a month or so, a title for a job but to that level of funding because we're not going to be able to hold on to those good pieces the second thing is that we have again covering up this understaffing you've all heard about old Paul he's not a workable solution in the long run for the school when you send four to eight classrooms full of students to a large room with one TA and a teacher on duty they're not having an educational experience and it's not uncommon during flu season when things really get stressful to have a kid who's going to be going through two or three classes in a day, it doesn't happen very often but when it happens that kid's spent three hours of their days sitting in a big room doing essentially nothing and what happens is that's a large room that teachers not even close to their monitor they sign out to go to other director studies to do the lab the library, we end up with large numbers of students largely unsupervised bottling up and down the halls to get to those places so educationally in terms of supervision it's really not a good solution we have really clamped down a lot on attendance, we really clamped down a lot on kids coming and going some of the program we've done in Special Ed has helped to limit and reduce the number of what we call wanderers in the school which makes it easier to support everybody else but we really need to continue to move forward on that to be able to support all of those students and so what I would propose is that .6 building subposition would be increased to 1.0 and we had additional buildings of the idea being there between two positions, we'd have three permanent building subs who most of the time could actually in classes substitute for teachers and some of the time we had to would be then going to build up all of the different pathways in addition we had what's called a play-doh lab play-doh recovery program that was a program that existed last year that teacher that got pulled into a classroom and is now doing that out of the goodness of their heart so we need a teacher to be supporting that program students who end up in those credit recovery online programs students who are not good self-directed so giving them an opportunity to work on play-doh or a credit recovery program at home or in their spare time is a way of filling their schedule and not their credits they don't learn and they don't do it so we really need to move back to having that position and then we also had I think the term was MacGyver there was a gap in someone's schedule and so they are now covering our internship program which is a new program we have we had as 12 students 14 going out into the community working doing hands-on learning that's fabulous please come when we do the open house on that later this year and right now it's being covered by someone who ideally will be pulled back into the classroom so we're going to have to find that point into somewhere else so again when we talk about that 4 to 6 I'm not necessarily asking you to pay for me to have a point 2 building coordinator I'm saying as you look across these others we're going to need those FTE because when we lose that person in music Cheryl Crystal really shouldn't be supervising internships she should be running a music class that's her expertise she's really good at it but when that goes away we're going to need to find a social studies teacher or a family service science teacher or somebody else who's currently teaching another class to supervise that music and then moving on to special education so this year in special education one of our really great successives and there have been a lot of them has been this offsite program we have a growing number of students with mental health issues we have a growing number of students also in this community who are in transitional housing those students are sort of being secure those students are not as they come in and out of our community are not ready to come into a building of 1250 students we're not equipped to handle them and they are not successful here not even in our behavioral program so what we've created is an offsite program that serves a portion of those students it hasn't been very successful those students that are not it was originally formed in 6 I didn't write my notes down for it 12 students in the room they're not 12 students in the offsite program they're another 2 in transition 5 who've made the transition successfully to the school and then other students are being managed because that program often screens kids as part of a 45 day placement they're not necessarily ours and figures out where they should go appropriately paid for by their community so there's about 30 plus students now that are being managed by that program who in the past would have arrived at our door and been stressing on our system it's meant that our deans are able to attend to attendance and the other wanderers because they're not dealing with crisis situations it's meant that our behavioral program here is able to keep our kids from escalating because you're not getting kids that are beyond their capacity coming into it it's also meant that the program grew by doubles and it's still only serving girls there's a whole other population of boys similarly that should be served that way you'll get facilities to expand that program and move it closer to campus the result will be however there's no good deed goes up punish way that these things work that will end up having a program that's sizable in terms of money savings right now we're looking to move the social worker as a therapeutic lead out there full time, right now we have a .2 social worker who's using way more than .2 pretty much all of her time in that program therefore not serving kids within the building if that person moves out full time then what we would see replacing them within the building would be a half time social worker and a half time team chair they have one and a half special ed team chairs and we have one at the high school to get up to that level in order to make things work better now in the long run one of my big hopes is you have to imagine the expense that we put into these out of school placements when we spend one student off to an out of school placement because they've gotten elevated and not been successfully served in a behavioral program or other programs that's $50,000 to the district so making those programs work successfully and serving the needs of these other students who are coming in successfully is really a win-win so although I can't tell you where the savings is on the back end I would imagine the long one doing it right the first time measure once, measure twice that once is eventually going to save us money we really need to shift money into that area Dave, do you want to say a couple words about that? I just want to add to what Matt has said and kind of reiterate the situation with the TAs and the BSPs we've been in a difficult situation in our behavioral program this year we haven't been fully staffed since the beginning of the year simply because we had a TA at the beginning of the year took another job again moved up to another position we just had another one leave we replaced the first one the second one just left so we've been understaffed in that program and the situation is is that we invest in those TAs we put into the PCI training which is the de-escalation training we put into professional development and we really make them specialists in the area of behavior and then what happens is they get a job at lab or they get a job someplace else for an additional $10,000 or $50,000 and what's happening is we're really by leaving them as TAs when we really are developing specialists in those areas we're putting ourselves at a disadvantage because then they do have the opportunity to go off here and get an increase in their salaries so I think there are certain TAs in the high school that are working with our behavioral students that are working with our artistic students that are really working with a complex and difficult population and if we continue to leave them at the salary in which they're at we need to be a training ground for them and we're going to continue to lose the good ones we just lost one to lab collaborative who was an outstanding employee who did a nice job for us but we could not match the salary level that lab was going to offer them as an entry position with lab so I think when we talk about it with this special education about also rank changes in the BSP to keep quality TAs that's something that we I concern with in our specialist population the TAs the staff that's actually in the trenches with these kids they're the ones that are in the classrooms with them they're the ones that are deescalating them and redirecting them to the social workers but they're really our first level triage with our most complex population so I think we have to really kind of look at how we're going to handle them to really be able to keep quality staff at high school and so then the last thing that I want to talk about and again there's a hard target and then a really needed target is technology I think people I think we need to realize the nature of education and the workplace that we're educating kids for right now people are working we depend upon how effective technology our teachers are expected to do their grades their attendance online students are expecting and expected to be able to do research online be able to access all of those resources and are going to be expected to know how to use that when they get out right now our teachers are using 5 year old Dell desktops they don't work anymore about 50% of them literally don't work so imagine if you're a teacher in a classroom and you're supposed to take attendance and you boot up your attendance and then you wait 5 minutes for it to load during which time you've got a class in front of you which you start teaching at the end of class remember you were supposed to take attendance you don't even be able to try this training video or to use any sort of interactive resources that you could use because you can't reliably know that you're going to be able to reach it so the way I think of this is we've made it I understand more I can speak way more about this than I can but Laura did a good or requested from the capital $300,000 investment in technology in high school that goes to all sorts of infrastructure that needs to go into the high school regardless of anything we need to spend about $100,000 to do every teacher in the school in a laptop there's just really no way around that otherwise we really should just go back to the paper and not even kidding it's just not really worth asking people to do their jobs so that's the first piece in addition in that environment where teachers are expected to use technology as an instructional tool you need to be able to project that you need to be able to project it safely easily and reliably so many most of our teachers have some form of a project or a smart board in their classroom but they make everybody have that and then to get the wiring and little bumpers so kids don't rip the cords out of it knock them off the top of the table is going to be roughly another $30,000 and that's much of really that's sort of off the top of our head thing it's not as detailed as their plan in addition in the long run we want to move to an environment where you're using instructional technology throughout the class where students can many, many, most schools lots of schools all run if your kids come to school and they have a device one way or another they're able to or they're supported in kind of some sort of device so a teacher can expect that they've got a classroom full of kids who can access digital technology if we move to a bring your own device platform we said to the kids it's okay you can just bring your laptop to school we couldn't do this because if the kids whose parents were just buying them a laptop with no support whatsoever all started bringing the laptops to school and getting on to our network our network and Wi-Fi would be done we don't have the density, we don't have the coverage so we need to put that network in place simply so we can allow people to bring their own facilities to this school and in the next two, three years we need to figure out how to support everyone being able to have access what the program is going to be and how to support the digital divide for the 10 to 20 percent of our students whose parents are not going to be able to easily go full and get that so that's something I think you also want to follow along with and I'll tell my little story I feel like the high school and this school in general because of the high results we get is like when I was an elementary school principal people would come to me and say I know my kid's really nice and he's really well-behaved so you're going to stick him in the class with a teacher nobody wants because you know it will do okay I think it's really important that we not let our teachers and our students into that situation because it's not sustainable over time so thank you Thank you Dr. Chairman questions or comments sorry for doing this on I do have a question referencing back to when you were talking about the staffing needs and the science, I just want to make sure I'm understanding this correctly what I've heard is that right now if we utilize our scientific rooms completely which means every period the teachers wouldn't have access to them during their preparation time that.4 would cover it and there really is no other way to reduce science classes besides that Larry do you want to address the logistics of that if you would please come to the mic I'm sure I didn't want to I'm sorry could you clarify that can you just I could wing it actually what I've thought of her is that the point 4 that you're recommending for science would mean that all the current science rooms would be utilized 100% of the schools and there's no other space for anybody teaching science so we could never really get the classes with the current number of rooms we have to that standard even if we were able to give you more staffing. It's a problematic thing certainly because there are 11 science rooms and 11.6 science teachers so right now teachers share so some teachers are itinerant and move into other classrooms while the primary teacher in that room is in a sense on a prep period or doing a duty outside of the room so it's an issue there are of course the rooms that still have teachers in them have a prep period most of the teachers are pretty congenial about this and so they can be working inside the room while another teacher is teaching class it's not ideal but it's probably better than having 26 or 28 kids in a science classroom we have 58 sections right now and 14 of those have 26 or over students so a quarter of our classes or probably if I went down to 24 which is what the recommendations are we probably have close to one half of our classes that are over the recommended number of students so it's weighing the eagles so what I'm hearing is the only way we're really going to be completely able to address the science class size is the construction of new science classrooms that's right you know without unless we totally utilize every period of the day and sort of ignore the needs of preparing for the next class that's coming in by another teacher setting up chemicals on lab tables etc while another class is in there well if the 11 rooms and 11.6 teachers it sounds like you're already we're already spreading that thin and now I'm asking for another point 4 which would make it 11 rooms and 12 people so we would be doing some more sharing and it's not the perfect situation but again we're dealing with an imperfect schedule rotation for the teachers versus a safety issue for the students thank you and the other question I had once again about staffing was as I look towards the world language it's my understanding that there are not many people that as many people that are dual certified for multiple languages so is it realistic to find those partials for those languages or do we actually have to perhaps build a bigger buffering because we can't necessarily have people splitting positions I think it's a little both history but I mean we do have these part-time learning teachers we have a part-time Latin teacher so there are some staff that will potentially and some of those folks are they'll be challenged yes it's true this is problematic they don't get all teams the same way I just having been through this multiple times I guess we did have a priority about building our staff back up and it's good to see that work continue because the ratios are far from ideal to outperform our resources so from my perspective this is a nice balance between the three areas of need but I also I also feel like this is a very conservative approach to what we actually still need at that school as well so do I what I would imagine in terms of the world language is so we're saying to you here these things we know we know if you gave us this one we put it into the math, the science the world languages but we really need another 1.0 and we're not going to tell you exactly how we use it because we're probably going to wait till March to see where the kids are signing up and then we go out and figure out how to portion that staff to your floor thank you thank you very much let me put you through the usual set of questions if more students are taking math what are they taking less of my guess is probably not very much because there are holes so basically what we're going from is holes to actually taking a class so there is no movement away from classes as people are moving into others okay we don't run classes unless there are some academic reasons to do so or a limitation in terms of facilities and you're projecting an increase in enrollment right this is the question that I will not ask you to answer now and I ask this at every level but an answer at some other point would certainly be worth having is what are you doing now that we're spending money on that may not be effective and you might not want to be doing anymore so that if you're coming to us with an ad list sometimes it's much easier to play with an ad list there's also a bit of a subtraction list some place and I'm sort of pushing back a little and say not out of being meansverted or anything but just in terms of budgetary reality our resources are finite and it's easier to add when there's also some give some place else that we're doing something that we maybe don't need to be doing anymore so actually do sort of have an answer that because I thought pretty hard about it one is that this isn't a zero situation we're dealing with increasing in curricular expectations so it's not a matter of we're adding this on because we want to expand our programs we're adding these things on where we want to maintain or sort of prioritize so students now are expected to take four or a few years of math to get into the local universities you're actually expected to take three years of language to get into the local universities and so there's an expansion in the program for those things and we already have been for systematic understats we're filling in gaps and that's a I'll go back to the other point which is I think if you do these things right we're going to find ourselves saving a lot of the money out of kids who have children because I think there's a lot of ways when we are doing things two or three times for kids because we do not interact together and when you've been on your staff and they're all inscribed money and that's what they intended to do and I actually forgot to know a little bit about athletics in particular things cost more than that because you end up buying it because you broke it and the kid ends up going to an out of school placement one or two out of school placements break the bank and so I think that's where we're going to find that money I'm doing it right the first time there are lots of things in a high school that seem right in terms of policy and this could also be a policy question for us that begins to repeat classes they might not necessarily need to academically but our policies are requiring that that's costing us money things that we are doing that cost money that we shouldn't be doing anymore even if they're programmatic or something that we've done because we've always done it before that don't make sense anymore we should explore I agree thank you just a couple are there models of multi-use loans I have visited a few schools around recently I went to a flexible flexible land of course they have a brand new building and so it seems to do from the start I didn't know the MSB the state I know they push different things of this nature they have actually the resources that I'm sending to Karen they have some model classroom designs on there the students that are now in directed studies because we get to follow up with Mr. Schultz are there any issues of meeting the required decision? no I don't believe so I think there is more an issue in our state requirements in our number of minutes and we are broadly interpreting that the students are taking what the state would consider to be a fold up for many of those students just a little logic then if they're taking the full load and taking the math course but you told Mr. Schultz that I'm cutting anything am I missing something here? you told Mr. Schultz that with the additional fourth year of math they're not going to be cutting something else to fit that in the question was are there classes there for the people moving away from my answer was there are no classes that are not going to be available okay obviously any student is making choices about whether they're going to take if they're taking the fourth year of math in their own individual career I don't know what they might therefore not be taking family and consumer science all I can say is family and consumer science classes are all full and we still have gaps in fit schedule thank you my last question does DESD set the science standards does the Department of Education set the science standards that you just mentioned are going to be updated or are these standards done by a professional organization? no the the next generation science standards are a national effort much like the Common Core they are not mandated it's a nationwide program and it's only there for the states who opt into it so Massachusetts has decided to take those standards and now tweak them a bit to their own and then they will adopt them as the Massachusetts standards based on the national will they have a ripple of an effect on the labs and things of that nature? they will they're very much oriented towards more laboratory work more engineering programs and they're also recommending the certain optimal sciences for science classes and one question what do we pay the permanent subs is it a salary for the permanent subs or is it very the building subs they're paid at the same rate as the teaching assistants so it's a salary they're full-time employees I mean they're eligible for I guess to me the idea of a permanent sub is a full-time teacher a teacher a T.A. seller a T.A. 135 permanent sub I want to come back to your question about science labs and I may be speaking for Larry but you were asking whether it sounded like you could sort of multiple use now you know if you said to us we'd really rather give you two more science teachers even though you don't have enough lab spaces you know you could rotate people through the labs it would be a very challenging thing to do but I don't know that Larry would say no about offer about an additional staff my son is a physics and chemistry teacher and he has two separate labs and he would give anything to have one home that you could do both that wouldn't be possible in our building without serious renovation you know would take up the whole part of the chemistry labs you know so that is ideal and that's what the new standards and the state MSBA is aiming for but it's not going to happen here without a renovation thank you I just wanted to thank you Dr. come tonight tell us what your cars are and the department heads as well I went on one of the stores and I was I opened I wasn't in a lot of parts of the building and I would recommend everyone out there to see the high school inside of it there are parts of it that are just not usable you're right I wanted to ask a question Dr. Allison Ampe could be with us tonight she had a question regarding the class size she'd love to see broken up by self-cultivated not just as averages so if that could be done and shared with the committee and I will also add to that by level because I think seeing the differences between class sizes and the honors may be level thank you very much I think that what you're hearing is well first of all it's very accurate and there's a lot more that could be asked than is being asked this is a very conservative approach we are still seeing the effects of the reductions we've had over the years we've really not increased staffing tremendously at the high school or the middle school in the last few years we've had a focus on a number of other areas special education elementary class size for sure and as the enrollments increase it is in this is what is happening and I think this year in particular not that we didn't see large class sizes last year we did and I think that it's a testament to the teachers as to how well our students perform despite the fact that we have AP classes and in fact probably a majority of our AP classes that are very large sized certainly that's true in everybody's shaking their head yes because we know that the students are motivated in doing the work we are still in the fourth year in a row at the college board AP honor roll for the great work in terms of both expanding opportunity as well as maintaining a high level of students performing at the level they want to see so it's really kudos to the teachers because but I think it's really starting it's at a point where we really do need to take a look at staffing here because this is just not sustainable to be having these great our kids are and they are great to have these class sizes the other problem with the I think you saw on the tour is that a lot of our classes are really not big enough we're talking about high school students that are well fully grown adults at least physically that are in these classrooms and some of them are so small in fact we were in one of the AP four language classes during one of these tours and it's a triangular room about 400 square feet and there's 30 kids in this classroom well that's less than half the size of what they recommend for MSBA but there are really no other places to be putting these classes so there's a real sense of being cramped and it's a challenge for teachers to put students in group or I was walking through one of the math hallways about a week and a half ago and looking in there's a lot of group work going on which is terrific but there would be no place for a teacher to walk between the groups because they were literally so scrunched and in some classrooms you couldn't put your desk in that kind of configuration that was the number of students you have in the classroom it just wouldn't work and so you do see some classrooms where they line the perimeter but meanwhile you're practically like this in the classroom with the student next to you so it is something that we need to look at we're not solving the configuration of the rooms right now and quite honestly the type of thing that you're seeing with science with classrooms with math if we wanted to have more math classrooms where would we have them we don't have that we have some transient but again if you want teachers to have a place to do preparation and sometimes in some situations setting up the room for next classes they don't have that opportunity it also is not ideal teaching environment we know that we've had some teachers who have been transient and as much as they might love the school they're looking for some permanency in a classroom and if they can't find that they're going to look elsewhere we've lost a couple of good teachers for that reason only so we're in a sort of a little bit of a bind here in that we do need more staffing but we also don't have the room to have a lot of staffing which would really make an ideal difference so this is something that we need to take into consideration as we move forward with hopefully doing a renovation of this building in the next four years or so can I just say two more quick things there's a study done where they looked at these sort of excellent teachers one excellent teacher and they looked to see what was the long-term outcome in terms of the students and what was remarkable was that students who had just one of these lot of changing teachers the long-range impact on those kids in terms of earning, career was substantial so when we think about losing just a couple of really excellent teachers because we're in a facility we have to understand that that's a long-term impact on all of our kids and then the second thing was when we were walking around was once upon a time in this school had 3,000 kids what happened? it seems like a very big building and I talked a little bit about some of the special needs studies that we had and some of the classrooms and spaces, the superintendent's office the preschool that we lost but what I realized that was out of the picture if you go back to the 70s and 80s when we had 3,000 students in this building that was a time when it was really considered perfectly alright about 15% of our students didn't graduate and it was a time when your college high school graduation requirements were 4 years of English I'm roughing it now I actually have that I went and got a little program of studies from 1967 to 80 but it was 4 years of English, 2 years of math 2 years of science, 2 years of social studies had a lot fewer credits and so we have the same number of kids with the expectations in terms of what they're supposed to do all of them and now we're expecting to have 95% of our students in college the expectations that they need to get into those colleges are much higher the requirements for graduation are much higher so every one of those kids that's here now is one and a half kids from 1980 and so that's why we are stretching this space and thank you I'd like to move on I'm from middle school I'm very very sorry I thought I would like to join the table during the conversation I just want to apologize and listen a little while I slip out because I have a baby seat anyone else who would be pleased to speak just please come to the table again my apologies sorry if you're about to ask that question yes I have a pretty good idea of where I wanted to start and then in the hearing I started taking notes and now I have three pages of notes and I can use that as a number of places but I would like to start with a couple of things that we are doing at the middle school I'd like to thank the A3 teacher for coming the Castle Project is always one of my favorites one of my favorite things about it is after they pick the award winning students I get to hand out the awards and we do it in my office every year to see them down there and see their gases is one of my favorite things something else we have going on this week is it's code week we're using a website called code.org and our digital citizenship class we're starting to increase rigor as we talk about CCSS and bringing mastery the new leadership magazines all the old magazines about reaching mastery and also increasing rigor these programs that we bring in the underwater Lego Robotics program that we have going the code.org website with code week these are great things that really challenge our students we have a critical thinking program that we're starting at middle school with Suda Ramsey who is one of our parents I've been doing trials for them for the last five years we're really excited about the digital citizenship class because we're really going to we've been working with the AVF and we're really going to do a lot more programming in that class and this gives the students a taste of how to do programming and how to think programmatically as far as computers go so it's really exciting so if you go on to Google Plus and you look for Jeff Snyder and you add Jeff Snyder there's a video of a seventh grade class that is working through a code problem solving class and it's really cool and I'm excited to get into that more with the students and that brings me to you know thanking you for the last five years of being able to help us develop a better middle school and I know that you know what we need and you appreciate what we need but there are only certain things that you can give us so you have to be able to select well and I was thinking about this last night when I had my sons fill out their Christmas lists their presents and I gave them the list last year my son Matt just went for broke he had asked me for diamond earrings he wanted a lecture a tutor and all these things but they're getting a little bit older so this year I can see them thinking and they're like well I know dad loves us and I know he wants to buy us everything but we know he doesn't have a billion dollars so why don't we think better about what it is that we can ask for so that we can see what he can actually get for us because we respect dad so at least I hope they do and so we're going to be judicious with what we ask so I'm going to try to do the same so we have a lot of needs at the middle school our class sizes are up our enrollment is going to increase greatly over the next five to eight years and I echo a lot of what Dr. Jangers has said so a lot of what he has said applies to us now I'm not going to take the easy way out and say so have a good night we have some differences at the middle school we don't have the same programs that the high school has we don't have the singletons, doubletons tripletons, AP, honors classes and a lot of the other selections that the high school does have but we do have our building needs we do have our staffing needs we do have our security needs and we do have material needs that I go over so even though there are constraints we still create I believe a wonderful experience for our students but each year this is done under the conditions that it's being done and by no fault of anybody in here as I said earlier we do have to, you know, hike back and think about what Dr. Bodey said about five years ago at the end of my first year I had to cut ten positions we're still down seven positions you know, before I got here there were five clusters in the sixth grade then my first year then I got in fourth now we have three we're graduating 312 students and 405 are coming in so after going through this year after year and seeing more and more kids come in it begins to take a toll on the parents it begins to take a toll on the students the staff the administration the school committee the central administration because as I said earlier with common core state standards the need for students to have more rigor and reach mastery how do we do this if we don't have the staffing and the resources that we need so you are correct we do need to and I will take help from anywhere if I'm going in the wrong direction with what I think I need I'll take direction on where we can tweak I did visit some other schools we are looking at working with the ADF we want to work on restructuring the middle school we want to take a large school and make it feel small we want to make sure that our students are getting the most individual experience that they can get so I went to visit Middleton middle school Higgins middle school in Peabody and McCall middle school in Winchester they are roughly the same size McCall is a little bit bigger their numbers are dropping Higgins is the largest in the state there are 1,300 right now but their numbers are dropping every year and our numbers are going to be at about 1,300 in about 4 years so pretty soon we are going to be one of if not the biggest middle school in the state of Massachusetts I went there and I thought to myself we do very well what do you do in tech education we don't do that what are your science teachers doing with the comic book we don't do that your orchestra is playing in a classroom and you are still invited every year we have never been invited to that performance in Boston at the seaport hotel and you guys have won it how many times your chorus has been invited your orchestra has been invited your band does this we haven't done those things and these are people with far more resources so we are doing what leave us at earlier we outperform our resources and I thought that was great and if you don't mind I'm going to use that a lot and I did write down your question for later I would have to think about that a lot so I think the first thing we have to do next to grade 7 and 8 on the handout that I gave you Crossout Cluster there was a lot of back and forth today with Marie, Karen and myself and for some reason the word cluster get in there so we are not looking to add a cluster for 7, 8 although I would like to we talked about adding a cluster to grade 6 but then we backed up a little bit and said alright we have needs in a lot of different places if we also need third baseman outfield so we need to spread the wealth a little bit so we thought let's back up a little bit and look for a half cluster in 6 that might go through and move up with the bubble class because eventually the class is going to start to level off and also reduce and again when I went to visit McCall they do do that at McCall they move the half cluster so it's a social studies English teacher so a humanities teacher and a math science teacher so we have to look for people that are certified in those areas we do have some people that are certified and what McCall does is they move them to the bubble classes or the bigger classes so those teachers were hired with the expectation that they would move on a regular basis some teachers are excited about being able to do that so that's what we're looking to do so that half cluster would move through right now our grade 6 class is 360 that's 360 to 370 it will be 405 next year so that 370 will go up to grade 7 and then grade 8 will be 382 our average class size right now is roughly 26 to 28 students I will have a better breakdown for Dr. Ampey as well and I will try I will do it by grade I will do it by subject end and I will break down math classes advanced and standard level classes so that would be our need for the clusters also our science classes too and Larry will tell you this as well our science classes at the middle school are very large and we also have labs in 7 and 8 and our class sizes in the clients at 7 and 8 are large as well we have a lot of clients there our auto cluster needs our begging for attention as well so our cluster our cluster classes because we do want to stay with the middle school model we're committed to staying with the middle school model we're looking at some restructuring ideas that I would love to talk to about at a different time but this is about our budget priorities so if we look at foreign language we had to four years ago go to change the grade 6 months of the exploratory a lot of parents feel strongly that they would like their students to come in and get three solid years of a foreign language the exploratory they like for some reason where you get exposed to a lot of different foreign languages you get exposed to culture but parents still feel strongly that they would like their students to get a solid experience of three years of a foreign language to do that we would at least one more FTE for foreign language if we wanted to get back to where we were before we need at least 1.2 if not 1.5 FTEs in foreign language in order to really bring a compliment back to where it was but the 1.0 would be a must especially with class sizes right now bursting at the seams in foreign language and again Catherine you can feel free to jump in at any time with that but I think that that would be what we would need to do in order to bring it back to where it was and it's really wonderful to have Mandarin this year and we're hoping to increase that as well next year which Catherine can talk to you about we did a we worked very hard at Maury Murphy at the middle school and Jack Mr. Flegwell bouncing back and forth between the concert and here actually it's at Town Hall so Ms. Murphy is at Town Hall right now she said she's sorry that she couldn't be here she worked really hard with us on the schedule last year because we had 200 directed studies so what we were able to do was take that 8th period directed study where band chorus and orchestra were practicing and build that and get rid of that class band chorus and orchestra able to work during the first period that took months alone that took months to do because it's so tight right now that it was really it took a tremendous amount of effort for her to be able to do that so what we're looking at right now is we either need to increase the amount of .5 FTEs at the specialty level or we need to stretch out when students are allowed to take specialty classes so they would get less exposure to the specialty classes so we'd have to go to a 6 day rotation instead of a 4 day rotation and they would take a certain specialty on AB day another specialty on CD day and another specialty on EF day now the problem with that is when they're not in those classes they're in a study so we've done we've reduced our studies and this would be very unfortunate because the reduction of studies has helped reduce downtime for students which has shown a drastic reduction in discipline issues we went through this the other day the assistant principals and guidance counselors got together and we talked about it we went on power school and we looked at the last few years when we had that 8th period we started to get back to studies in the building and then this year when we don't from the beginning of the year to December on those years we had far more discipline referrals than we did this year so the fact that there's more time on learning has reduced the discipline which is a huge thing for us and we'd hate to go back to having more studies in the building because the studies that we do have that we would have to have would resemble Old Hall and as you heard Dr. Janger earlier saying that he wanted to go away from having Old Hall as much as he can now we haven't been able to eradicate studies altogether that our schools that have been able to do that I'd love to be one of them but I want to get away from that Old Hall field we should never have something like that at the middle school so in order to remain to maintain the reduced studies and maintain the class size but maintain the large class size that we already have we would need .5 facts .5 art .5 music .5 ELL teacher and then the .5 social worker is in there because of the larger number of students that come in we have the larger number of students with social work needs anxiety depression and we actually had a presentation here yesterday afternoon was a wonderful presentation on how to deal with students with behavioral issues anxiety depression and other mental health situations that they have to deal with so the larger population begs for more social work we also need a .5 tech engineering and the reason I left that for last is because that one we really need because the class sizes are putting us out of the regulations for safety we're breaking the regulations for safety we also have some special education needs what happens in the middle school is that we do have a class system our team system where one team member we need to go to a team meeting for a student that's on an IEP so what happens is with reduced permanent subs building subs we need to have an additional building sub to cover just the special education meetings because Mr. Flood is constantly trying to scramble to get if he has 15, 16 teachers out on a given day for professional development personal days, sick days or whatever he has to cover those but then there's also 5 or 6 IEP meetings and he has to cover those as well well it's finite we try to do the best we can but then the teachers are late for the IEP meetings because we're trying to get coverage and it's just impossible so if we had this additional building sub it would really help us to cover those meetings so that we could run the IEP meetings more smoothly and Mr. Help, I hope you can try to run that as well as the additional SLC teacher so one thing that's really become important and has really worked really well this year is that we've been working to build the capacity within the general led to work with our special ed population so working smarter, not harder the idea is what's happening is when we have these team meetings and the general led teachers are not really a part of it we're losing that ability to transfer that knowledge into the clusters and getting those teachers to build the capacity to work with our top of students so without an ability to really continue planning them we're not really supporting our students to the best of our abilities in addition we are seeing a huge increase in the emotional and anxiety populations within the school and what's happening with that is that we're having a hard time addressing that just from our learning team data last year out of 54 students who were brought to learning team 44% of them had emotional needs those were hospitalized this year alone out of 16 students 63 of them came as a referral for emotional needs these populations are there now and they're only getting worse and what's happening is we need a way to really address those needs in a more systemic way and this SLC teacher would allow for us to really have that combined effect of really reaching out into those clusters getting the work that needs to get done into the, in where the students are as opposed to pulling them out and really thinking about how we are branching out and working with those students where they are right now So moving from the staffing needs we do have other needs in the building I know that the emphasis needs to be on the high school due to the NEAST report and the fact that the high school has really gone unattended for a long time and been very gracious about that where other schools are being built and the middle school has had newer construction than the high school as well we do have some construction needs and as well as some security needs due to the events of last week there were people that brought to our attention that we do need more cameras around the little the Benjamin Road door needs a camera where the blue Jim is in the back of the school it would be helpful to have a camera there as well as a swipe card system that the high school has I think that would be very beneficial for us really in the face of everything that's been happening so that's something that we would like to discuss as far as construction needs with the enrollment going up we are going to need to divide classrooms so there are four or five classrooms in the middle school that are very large that we could divide and we could turn those four or five classrooms into eight or nine classrooms so we need to have construction done there teachers are going to be traveling they're going to be moving more as far as having your own classroom we want to do that as much as we can but the teachers are going to travel more so we want to be able to build some work spaces for the teachers as well so that would be construction needs we also will be moving the assistant principals to be in the wings with the with their classes so now that we have three assistant principals to personalize education more we want the administration to be on the wing with their their classes so that's something that we might have to do some minor construction there this will also help with the personalization the modulus could be something that we would look into at a later date I think when we get when the school gets to be about 1300 we're going to be way capacity and we may need to look at that the lunchroom right now we have three lunches if we're going to stay at three lunches we are already at capacity for the three lunches with the class coming in at 405 we still have to add more to the lunch it doesn't sound like a big deal I was in Peabody where they have 1300 students they have five lunches so that's crazy, students are going down to lunch at 10, 15, 10, 30 in the morning so they have breakfast at 7 o'clock, 730 they're having lunch three hours later and then by one o'clock they're hungry again before they've even left school and there's no snack time unfortunately but so this is something that is a big need as well I was talking to Dr. Bode earlier and she was stating that that is something that could really affect the schedule in a major way we'd have to redo the whole schedule so it sounds like a small thing but it really isn't and as far as school material needs we have the math curriculum for grades 6 and 7 and we would need to purchase a great egg, Matt would you like to say anything about that? Yeah, we'll just complete off what we have essentially done if you guys want the numbers for class sizes I can tell them to right now the average 6th grade class is 26 Thank you for having me average class size for 6th grade class is about 26 in 7th grade the advanced class is roughly 30 to 31 the highest is 37, lowest is 25 for the regular most of the classes are 22 the highest there is 26 and the lowest is 16 and for the 8th grade those class sizes because of the fact that the overall class is a little bit smaller are much more manageable the advanced classes are a good 25-26 and that's roughly what the lower ones were right now 7th grade that's essentially where you go from heterogeneous grouping to then choosing and right now you're just the way in which it's set in terms of making a choice sometimes a little tough so the class sizes are getting big they're getting real big at that point I can even tell you the high school numbers if you want a sense of that too so in the high school the average size of the honor slash AP for high school math is about 30 and I'll give you the range for curriculum A because that's a little bit more for curriculum A it's about 24 to 27 and then for curriculum B classes we were able to get them to about 16 or 17 in past years those are usually around 24 which really didn't suit that population all that well so in terms of moving things around it's what we're trying to get to and trying to make it a little more manageable but in terms of the overall staffing it is a little bit of a pinch at all grades from that thanks I thought I'd just expand a little bit on the word language exploratory program so right now we have 285 students in the exploratory with 12 sections so we have an average of 24 kids per class and I think it's interesting that there are 370 students in the sixth grade so we're not servicing a lot of them and honestly when we enrolled students last spring and I saw the numbers I started panicking because I was like there's 35 kids in each class and anyone who knows me know that I want every single student in world language and I called up Tim and was like we can't service as many kids they need to be put somewhere else and thinking about 405 kids coming in next year is it's not sustainable the exploratory program I think to quote Tim's words we're making it work I'm actually teaching two sections of the exploratory this year and I'm a dual language certified teacher in French and Spanish which is a hard person to find and we certainly can't find triple language certified or quadruple language certified now that we have Mandarin we by chance have a dual teacher who's doing the bulk of the sixth grade sections who's certified in French and Spanish can do Latin and has been setting Mandarin for three years by a short miracle really so she's picking up the bulk of the exploratory but I just think it's not sustainable and we do want to return ideally to a full three years of language in the middle school and I really thank Tim for crunching these numbers because they're I guess we'll hold questions for the end I think we're so we're asking for six full-time and I think if you have any questions just leave we're all here I would like to add something I appreciate Matt for providing those numbers which are basically the same across all disciplines at the middle level because of the cluster system just the qualitative experience of somebody who's frequently sitting in an observer in our middle school classrooms especially in the younger grades it's like looking at a picture of a beehive where all the bees are fighting to get into the same little crevice at the end of class in a sixth grade classroom when the bell rings and every kid has an individual question to ask the teacher they're literally almost crawling over one another to get the teacher's attention and to ask that one last question before they have to go off to their next class it's really something to behold and speaks to how every kid needs individual attention and how hard it is to give that individual attention in a large classroom the other piece here is curricular where with the Common Core classes content area courses that used to be not literacy focused now are and the grading load is tremendous and I'm constantly pushing my teachers to do more writing instruction and reading instruction so if I see a wonderful project Julie my next question is like how do the students research can you show me what they wrote about it and you know there's been a transition there but the take home work of the teacher has grown tremendously and the expectations of every content area teacher has grown tremendously as a result not just of the Common Core but the last five years of transitions in education in general so and even in an era of rubrics nothing beats personalized feedback and improving students' writing and it's hard to give that personalized feedback with numbers that are through the roof I just wanted to go back to the original request in terms of cluster you were talking about adding a half cluster at the 6th grade level and then having that half cluster coming up even if we're going to be here about the 7th grade class sizes is there actually a need for additional staffing at that level and because part of me followed up with the subject specialization of the Common Core really seems to be driving whether whether we might be in a better position in terms of what we provide to students to have a full cluster that is doing half 6th grade and half 7th grade with our content certified for both it would be well can I give you two scenarios so my first scenario would be the numbers are going to level off at some point but we're going to have we're having four or five minutes and the next class is bigger and the next class is bigger and the next class is a little bit bigger so ideally it would be wonderful to have a 6th grade cluster I mean again I know it's Christmas and I can only ask for certain things in my house and I'm trying to be good and not ask for too much but ideally it would be great to have a cluster in 6th grade that would be welcoming we're trying to personalize we're trying to work on transitions we want the transition from 5th to 6th to be as smooth as possible and again it's like getting you into the directed studies I think we've done an outstanding job at making it a better transition now we're working on the transition from 8th to 9th as well as still from 5th to 6th we've done a really good job in having a smoother transition I have more and more parents letting me know that the transition has been very smooth and we're very proud of that and then having the 7th and 8th grade split cluster so taking those extra 60 kids that are in 7th and 8th and having the split cluster do half 7th and half 8th that would be 8 teachers right there so that's a lot and then the other scenario would be back and off a little bit would be having this split cluster be 6th and 7th and then but what we decided would be feasible right now to ask for and you know graciously ask for it and it would be a half cluster for grade 6 so in order to do our job well we can't give you everything to ask for I know so and as somebody that has run finishing up for time at the office and then had somebody there right before the 10 positions were cut there definitely has been a difference with that that smaller classes as they enter and go to a full rotation and see what it's meant for the instructional quality because the children are so much more needy at the 6th grade level and it would be nice to have that continuum of the personalization at the middle school because there is a clarity about the building for the children you know I don't want to go into the farm you want to see us do education as you said pretty much invest in programs that right up in the front keep us from doing more expensive programs because middle school is the point where we have the first equalization in terms of content and it really does become very content driven and it seems like there is more participation at middle school level as a result and so I would like to see you do that same comparison when we personalize it we reduce our student to teacher ratio here's what we expect to see in terms of other stages I'd rather see it done right at the first time than us having to do RCI and special ed and everything later on and and I would in English teach you I often speak in analogies and I drive some people crazy but it's like a blanket that's too small so if you pull you can light it up to cover your shoulders and neck, your legs and feet are cold if you pull the blanket down cover your legs and feet and your chest, shoulders and neck are cold so it's just how can you sleep better with your legs cold or your shoulders and neck cold and you just have to decide because they're children they should be a little cold okay it's been an enlightening discussion and I want all the principals to know through this discussion that I understand the competing needs and the pressures that are on especially in the context of increased enrollment in the district and I also understand what happened to the reductions because I was on this committee from 01-07 in the local aid, the 20% local aid kind of happened in 2004 which is the big event that we happened to cover from so I know what we went through also reminding children that your father works for the Arlington Public School so that does restrict your Christmas list which is what we're doing here as well is restricting the Christmas list because we don't have an unlimited amount of money and you're talking about future enrollment increases whereas the elementaries have already been really hit with enrollment increases and there's not a lot of give or play within an elementary schedule so the first question that I have for you is as you're looking to restructure the school are there ways to make your schedule more efficient to provide more services for children with the current level of staffing? Well we did that this year by reducing the schedule to the southern periods and really tightening it up all of our different programs and being able to coordinate the math support classes so we were able to work with the schedule so we could have more students identified early for the year starts we have more students now scheduling math support than ever before and the reason that is is because we looked at how we were scheduling students and so we get the schedule different so we could get more students that needed math support so we identified them earlier and we got them in there working with special education to identify those needs and working with the schedule for that so I think continuing to do that so we can identify students with emotional needs anxiety needs because these are the things that we need to do in order to keep to have them have a more successful experience Understand that we're going to the finance committee with an argument that says what increased enrollment and the reason why we need more resources in addition to what is in the current fiscal plan is because of the increase in enrollment and so that if we do get additional resources in the district beyond the inflationary number of the fiscal plan they are basically going to be directed at the schools and the grade levels where there are demonstrated enrollment increases so that's we're not having we don't have a lot of Christmas roominess so what you're asking too is you're going to be able to give us what you're going to be able to give us and then we're still going to have to be creative after that we're still going to have to take risks we're going to have to be creative and we're going to have to look at what we will do with the schedule so when we know what we're going to be able to have what our final we're going to be able to say ok this is what we have then we're going to have to go back to the drawing board and say alright what risks do we need to take how creative do we need to be what are the things that we're going to need to do with the schedule so these are things that unless we know what we're going to be able to give us we don't know really what our schedule is going to look like so can we be creative it will be tougher but we're going to have to be we're going to have to look at being creative with space we're going to have to be we're going to have to be being creative about where teachers are during the day how they travel and how we structure the schedule so that the students are in all the classes that they need to be in so yeah two other things that I'd like to ask the rule one is that last year when we went through the superintendent's goals we targeted the student growth and achievement measures for the superintendent and the place one of the places that was challenging were in a couple of great levels, the odyssey you know I've noticed there's been some marked increase in student achievement results this year, recently past years persuasive argument in my mind will be what resources are important to continue to improve student achievement numbers in grades where it is traditional or lagged well if you look at seventh grade math or that's one of our goals for this year is to increase the rigor in math for student achievement based on the common course that's one of my goals for this year to continue to push so math is always going to be a goal for me so that's one of my goals and again in order to increase student achievement personalization not one of the goals that I have in my school improvement plan for this year so by being able to restructure and personalize by creating different programs I don't want to get into them right now because I'm still discussing some programs with my staff and my leadership team but there are different ways that we're going about working with my school improvement plan to do that so we are continuing to say this is what we did last year we had an increase what's the next step this is the next step that we have to do to continue to increase student achievement I mean a time budgetary request to an improvement plan and demonstrated needs is probably the most persuasive argument to make certain things that in terms of discussion if you go to a finance committee and say if you don't give us more money and the average class size is going to go from 23.8 to 24.1 you know but let me tell you something 37 looks good on my car spec but when I heard the class size of 37 in a high school I want to know how that happened in the line 37 37 well Matt yeah I mean there's a couple of reasons one I think one of the things that we always have to make decisions about is typical future of the cluster so in past years I would say that the overall percentage of the way which was distributed was probably closer to 70% of the events 30% of the events in the rate of the major class so those numbers divide much easier because you can take 3 and 2 and they become much more balanced so this year it's closer to about 60% 63% and I'm going to read it so how do you divide that by 5 and one of the top things is you make a choice so do you want your advanced kids to be in the class of 22-23 if you divide those events 60% by 3 then you talk about 20% of the kids and it's very forced to be other classes to be around the 28 so the additional numbers when they came out a couple of the fact that you always have the ability to override and move up so we had a nice healthy balance going in the numbers that we talked about but then if you set up those class emphasizes and then allow there to change which happens then you end up with that one section that ends up with 37 full scale changes after the fact that's unfortunately in that one class it was just a perfect solution a couple of little events is this a function of being in clusters and then maybe we should be looking at clusters, I don't know the flexibility that's something else that we may have to look at again depending on what we're able to what you're able to do for us we may have to, that may be part of the restructuring so that's always something that we have to look at and I did talk to Dr. Bode about that very thing today which I haven't been able to discuss it with Mr. Coleman yet so I don't think it's fair to say it without talking to him so it's a conversation I mean it comes to the point where you say clusters are nice but if you've had such an imbalance what are the other class sizes for the upper level math that grade of well then how much does that mean I have an 8 I have the upper level 6,000 so the class size is for grade 8 the 37 is in the upper level class grade 7 class right how many upper level grade 7 sections do we have in the building and what are the class sizes across the board what is 25 the highest 37 for the management okay so you've got one class of 25 and one class of 37 and the reason for that is because of maintaining the utility of the cluster setting right as we allowed for those two sections yeah I just my priority looking at it is that the reasonable class sizes are more important in keeping the clusters I've got somebody in the back room shaking their head no you know I think we've got to think about what's happening if we're locked into a formal game for the 17th Mr. Fletchman, have you heard about Carpenter and Opinion? my two colleagues let's see I just want to make a clarification about FTEs that you're asking before so half cluster in the 6th grade plus the 3 or 4 FTEs on the in terms of specialists how many FTEs are you asking for? I realize this is an informal ask but how many are you hoping for? well I may have stuck an extra one in there yeah my math came up with so I knew it would be 2 3 and then the half cluster would be 5 so it's 8 so it's 5 8 well the half the two the second fact is one our music is 2 the L of social worker 3 SLC would be 4 and then the half cluster would be 5 and 6 language? language building sub that doesn't count? doesn't count as a teacher count the way you want so I missed the 4 and 9 so okay I was going to make the point that Paul made but I think it bears repeating is that every year we set goals for the superintendent and so I suspect the priority is going to come from the superintendent and that is that in terms of the FTEs that are added next year it's it's got to show that it's going to drive student achievement I mean it's that simple so I think when you're putting together the priority as you're putting together the actual presentation and the school committee it's got to show these FTEs are going to ensure that we're going to SGP if you learn better it's going to show that it's got to meet the targets of the superintendent we have for the superintendent schools and so that's what I would encourage you to think about I suspect you already have anything to do about this I'm sure you have the superintendent has talked to all of us about the superintendent's goals and the district goals and the our goals which go into our school improvement plans which are tied into our staff needs and it's all based on student achievement so my three school improvement goals which are our math goals and my personalization don't all have to do with the staff that I need which is going to increase the achievement so you need the superintendent that needs to meet the goals yeah I mean it's fair enough fair enough and I think that needs to be said clearly and loudly through as many constituencies as possible this is it we've made this a priority we've improved that middle school math middle school subgroups is a priority and so to do it we need 7.0 FTEs and that's what you have to and that is my math goal this year is middle school subgroups so to do it it's 7.0 so yeah okay we appreciate the extra math support the last year we have I just want to thank everybody for all the effort in pulling all this together for us we are as the budget chair I do want you to know that we have gone in front of the town we are making them aware of the enrollment pressures that are being put on the schools and asking for additional funds to help us out with that so I think all of this really helps us a lot when we have actual hard numbers we can go to them with and say you know the enrollment pressures are such that these are the minimum FTEs that we need just to be able to serve the kids that are in the schools and so I just really want to thank everybody for all of that because I think it really helps us as we continue those discussions and I just want you to know that they are going forward and we're not just sitting here going we can have to make do with what we have because we realize that we are currently serving everyone is used to Arlington being 4,500 students and we are at 5,200 and we need to keep telling people that we need to keep saying it out loud and not letting people just rest on the fact that we can't serve that many more hundreds of students with the same amount of money that we've always been dealing with and so I just want to say this is great and this is much very useful so I appreciate all the effort I know that was a lot of work to get all of those things done so thanks. It's going to be a combination of what we're able to have and then being able to take the correct risks and correct a lot of the activity. Divining up the classrooms how many more students do you figure that would allow for not thinking about 4,000 I'd have to do some more work on the numbers before I can say we're still we need to know what we're going to get for teachers they don't know exactly what we need to do as far as dividing the rooms up and then we'll be able to determine how many students are being into the rooms. I appreciate it might be a chicken and an egg sharing the facilities and I can support the teacher if I have an idea of how many students as opposed to having to go out and buy importables and stuff like that I realize it's a short term fix so I would ask you if you could I would say a ballpark figure it would house us for 3 more years. Thank you I won't hold you to that exactly I'll tell you what I want to be here 3 years from now to say we're good, we don't need the modulus but hopefully we won't but they need to know Thank you very much what Cindy just said presentation is very very insightful for us we heard from Dr. Jango about technology in high school a little bit about what the bandwidth is what the infrastructure is like what the facilities do you have for technology The Audison has the oldest wireless network out of any of the schools because it was the first wireless network that was put in I had an update meeting with the tech committee today and a lot of the problems that we're experiencing at the Audison is because it was the first network and the technology has changed dramatically if it was just a matter of time or money we could solve all the technical problems they have a lot of problems with their wireless part of it is the structure of the building but part of it is the years that the technology was put in so they actually have more infrastructure problems than the high school does because of the timing of I know I see your rolling your eyes because of the timing of when the Wi-Fi was installed what their other technological needs are most of the teachers are in pretty good shape there are a few teachers that are not but in terms of the students we're running some pilots right now to determine what would be the best technological solution for them I want to thank also Tim and his staff for working on this I want to just point out a couple of things because like the high school we have teachers that are working very hard the effort to personalize and to give students the attention is something the middle school prides themselves on and they do a pretty good very good job of doing that despite the class sizes but we're looking at teachers even though they have a cluster that is fairly fairly large probably a lot of the clusters are about 130 that's a lot of students to be responsible for and the correcting and so forth and when you when you visit middle school classrooms when you have a compliment of 30 students in that classroom it feels tight it's there's not a lot of extra space and these classrooms would be were designed and at the time that the was renovated in that 22 to 24 was considered a high number so when you get that number of students in classroom it's just the ventilation isn't good the just the sense of being able to move around and there's not a lot of open space to take a class if you want to do different kinds of projects that require more space so it's a compliment to the teachers that they just are very very creative about what they do there and they get are getting very good results and so I think it's really important to say because they're facing some of the same issues that we're facing here in terms of the class sizes as they said over the last few years when we've had we've been building back the secondary level really hasn't had the attention not that we haven't been aware of it but we've been making do and I think we're past the making do stage of this and we really do in this budget cycle have to put some real attention but as you know from the elementary principals listening to their needs there are lots of staffing needs throughout the entire district but what we see at the secondary more than we see at the elementary is staffing needs in all of our academic subject areas in middle school they need extra staffing in all the specials because these class sizes are running very large the class sizes in the P.E. are in the 30s and it's a very difficult situation for all involved as far as your question as to when we would need portables one of the things we are looking very closely at is how we can re-divide what programs we could take out of the middle school there's one possibly that we're going to be working on doing which might free up two classrooms we're looking to see how we can create spaces that match the size of the classrooms we do have a couple of specialized classrooms which are larger in what they need so it's re-looking at all of that and seeing how we can do that but but when you talk about adding a cluster that's four classrooms that have to house 25 minimum students and that is going to be the challenge three years may be optimistic if these numbers continue I think we could get close to three we hope we can get to three but it's going to take a lot of construction really in terms of how and changes in the schedule and maybe some changes in expectations in terms of um, teachers moving from different classrooms and that may happen more more sharing of spaces and utilizing a classroom for all periods of the day so there are a lot of things that we're going to be looking at short of having to finally do that and as you know there's a major still building facility needs that are out there and of course one is addressing with terms of space we are committed as a community to completing the update of Stratton and then this facility speaks for itself I think those of you that toured you know you've heard about the facility but I think you know pictures are a thousand words and we're going to be looking at different ways in the next over this next few months a little bit more about the conditions here so they have a lot of challenges in terms of space and trying to do it scheduling middle school is the hardest level to schedule far none it's so difficult to put all the pieces together and that's actually one of the things that sort of contributes a little bit to how some class sizes can get uneven but Tim is absolutely correct the amount of time that was spent on getting the schedule to that place this year was enormous and there's a major push this year to get the schedule even done earlier so more tweaking can be done over the summer so there are a lot of needs and if you just put the high school and the middle school together and these are not these are sort of the minimum conservative you're looking at seven in the middle school and you're looking in the range of four to six so right away we're looking say we had six at the high school we're looking at 13 FTEs and that's an addition to all of the other needs that I know you're very aware of so everyone fully is aware that if we are not able to fund those and that's some of our discussion over the next month that we're going to really have to prioritize what are the most important at the not only within a building but within a district and that's the discussions we'll be having as a administrative team shortly. Thank you very very much. Thank you. Everyone out there. Thank you. You can meet all of our department chairs here. Yes. Moving on now to because of some of the timing last month we received the forgive my voice. I can hear you so can we wait till then? You won't. Yeah well you know I know she's hurting so I don't want to. You're hurting the voices of all three of us. I know. All right forgive my froggy voice. Try to be as clear as I can. Due to the timing of the monthly reports last month there's really only been one payroll between the last set of monthly reports and these monthly reports so nothing is substantively changed from last month. Very cute that I promise. I want to thank you for the extra reports that you sent us this time. If I could ask you just take a look at the revolving expenses that you gave us. One you gave us. Just basically under the foreign visas it was a $10,000 single credit card charges. Yes that's the fee that we pay to the credit card company for handling our credit cards and that is defrayed by people that are when they elect to pay a fee by credit card there's a surcharge on it. And so out of that we as we have to pay the charge to the credit card company and so we pass it back to the employees but we aggregate the charges in this account. Under the foreign visa. That's just a place to put the expense. One more I'm sorry. Up above that under the athletic ticket sales there were two items that had no budget. Yes I don't break out a budget line for each of these subcategories within the revolving account because the way the revenues come in it would be a lot of beam counting. Thank you. Any other questions? I just had one. I note that you over the last couple of meetings have been telling us about the $700,000 that we might that we will project to run over. As of today and looking into the next seven months that's well grounded we have funds to cover it this year. And that's through there's a $500,000 reserve that would have to be voted by town meeting and we have reserves from prior years from the tuition and account. Just a quick expansion. Is that a result of increased enrollment and additional special education expenses? There are more students placed out of district than there had been and some of the students that have very expensive placements. But the additional student population is that benefactor as well? I know it's not as much. In this case the overage is an out of district tuition and I can't tie that directly to enrollment pressure though I would say it's logical to assume that as our numbers grow overall it will add to the pressure of special ed. Thank you very much. Moving on to our superintendent support of the moving. Yes I have a number of things. First of all let me just begin with formally stating our meeting that we have reached a settlement in the Boris Coughlin case and I'm just going to read a very brief statement about this. The town of Arlington public school system we are pleased to report that as a result of a negotiated settlement the case has been concluded in favor of the town. And that is I think all that is necessary to say at this point. I think it's been a long journey and as a result of this settlement all parties are going to be able to move forward. I want to also address another topic I know that's been on a lot of people's minds over the last this week in particular and that is the issue of security. We're in the week of the anniversary of Sandy Hook and I know there's been a lot of news about that and I think when we revisit an anniversary it just brings up a lot of issues around feelings of security in our buildings and I think that all schools and I can speak specifically here for Arlington have really changed their mindset about security in the last number of years result of these tragedies including in a whole variety of different ways certainly there's the physical security of the buildings and all of our buildings now are locked. We still have areas where we'd like to have more cameras we're going to be looking funding for that. We have a couple of buildings we want to put some alarms on or some additional intercoms so that there's a better sight line and perhaps they're not opening the door within a vestibule so we're working all of that. Different protocols that use not to be in place are in place when teachers go off to recess the doors are locked and they have a key to come back in or have to buzz to come back in so those are in place. This and we continue to do this this is something that we are not complacent about is something that we are continually looking at ways that we can improve here at the high school this year we have someone that now sits at the front desk and when people come in they have to sign in they get badges to go they need to go so we have a little bit better a lot better sense of who is coming in the building. But there are other areas too where I think that we need to continue our work and actually while the physical part of it certainly is a focus another part that we are working on as an administrative team and certainly in partnership with the police department is just making sure that all staff because we do have new staff every year are aware of all the protocols and aware of all the safety procedures that we have in place and each one of the rooms we do have a little flip book that has information and I have encouraged principals to make sure that there is ways that they can make sure that teachers are aware of what is in those booklets particularly our newest teachers who are not who haven't gone through some of the professional development a more veteran teachers have done but we have a very strong and positive relationship with the police department and they have been enormously supportive in many in many situations this year but what is also a great asset to the Arlington public schools is that Arlington belongs to NEMLAC and in that relationship we have access to resources that we would not have otherwise which includes the STARS team and every part of the STARS program which is an acronym for school threat assessment and response system we have books like this for every school and one of the little things we did this year to change one of our protocols is that these contain maps of all the schools with exits and just where all the rooms are located and while the police department have these maps on their computer systems in their vehicles electronics can sometimes break down and that can happen or the slow to input or to upload and so one of the things we do is this is now part of the package of materials that go out of the school in a fire drill or any kind of evacuation so that we also have a hard copy onsite in case of an emergency so we're working on these types of changes little things which can make a big difference I think of emergencies you know there's certainly the emergencies that we're concerned about in terms of intruders but there are a lot of other kinds of emergencies that happen and we need to make sure that the communication systems are in good working order that everybody knows what they're supposed to do where they're supposed to go how teachers can one of the things that we're working on is how can we communicate with teachers other than email through some kind of a text-based methodology so the focus this year is really on reflecting on our current communication systems and improving them streamlining them making them more known to all of the staff so I did want to mention this because I do think that there is still and rightly so there's a lot of concern about safety that exists in a community oh sure we'll pass this along but I don't know if anybody had any questions on that one before I go on to some other issues down at the school committee conference I went to a seminar on the SAAS program and I'm very happy to be involved with it alright actually I was going to have Laura talk a little bit about the code program but I think it's pretty much covered in the context of the presentation. So I'm going to start off with the first question that you'd like to say. Just briefly I just want to let you know that Otison, a thousand students of the students of Otison Middle School have participated in the computer science education week which is the code.org that he was talking about. They participated with 11.5 million students in 160 different schools. So I'm going to start with Microsoft and Google to train four of our teachers to be able to offer more computer science classes. So Microsoft and Google will be one of the eight school districts in Massachusetts that were selected to have our teachers to have two teachers at the middle school and two teachers at the high school trained so that we can offer more computer science classes next year. I just want to mention that this last week we received a notification from Massachusetts School Building Authority which I forwarded to you that the window has now been set for submissions of Statements of Interest which we call SOIs. And that window is to April 14th. April, I'm sorry, April 11th. So it is as the representative from Massachusetts Building Authority told me that window is pretty much the same as it was last year. So we have already been working on different components of that Statement of Interest. But one that I know that is of interest to Board of Selectment and to the Capital Committee is actually having an architect take a look at the layout of the building from a programmatic standpoint. Now you've heard a lot about that discussion this evening just in terms of science classroom sizes, adequate space for any of our classrooms for that matter. And that's one of the things that we are also going to undertake over the next few weeks with the plan reporting out probably sometime late January early February which could, which will add to what we are able to say in the Statement of Interest. I think that what's going to be very compelling about our Statement of Interest is of course the facilities. But there are a lot of facilities in the commonwealth that need updating. But when you combine the state of the facilities and how crowded the facilities are for the enrollment growth that we're getting, that is going to be very compelling in our application. So I think that I'm looking at doing more tours as we move into the winter. I think it's with a thousand words. So I'm also going to look into having some kind of a walk through video done that can be that I hopefully will work with ACMI to be able to have shown because a lot of people aren't going to be able to do it. Both tours have taken two hours. Granted we're talking as we go through it. But we haven't even done, we've just done a few a few of the pathways. It's quite it takes quite a while to move through this complex. But I think it's helpful for people to understand and see what the facility looks like. We probably would have the video without students in it for privacy issues, but we might. I think seeing a class of 30 students in a room can give you a much better idea of what that's like, particularly in a science room. And also seeing the the lack of, maybe not say the lack of vision points that you can see the board in many of these rooms. So this part is moving forward and thank you for those of you who participated. I think you found it very worthwhile. In fact, I know Jeff you said you should do more of these and I agree with you. We need to do some more. And I was talking with Matt Janger about this, so we may involve a bigger day where we have, maybe we can allow 100, 150, we'll have to think of what the number might be and involve students. So that we'd have different ways in a tour path so that we can do more in one day. So we're working on doing something like that and I'll certainly let you know as we get that planned. I want to thank you and the staff for opening the school up on Saturday and bringing us through it. It was hugely instructive. I knew we had problems in the building just from being in the building but I've never really looked at it in that critical eye and things that I thought were okay I learned weren't and the building's in a lot worse shape in terms of design in terms of initial construction in terms of systems that we haven't neglected things we've maintained it as best we can but given what we have it is woefully inadequate. It is functionally obsolete. There are significant problems that need to be addressed and the problems are greater than I ever expected so the more people who are able to see this the better the case are going to make and I'm looking at the other high schools that have been on the list for the state and I can't think that some of these other buildings would hold a candle to the issues that we're facing right now so the town really should be encouraged to move forward both based on the need and the desire to do the right thing and for the potential loss of accreditation in 10 years. I went to the previous tour and what was more enlightening I agree with Mr. Schlickman I thought I knew the building and some of the size of the classrooms and Dr. 20 and I were talking about the danger of some big guys in the back of a room getting caught in the chairs and stuff. One of the people that came with us was a farmer and she kept talking about what it was and what now it isn't and I would suggest if you put the video together get a range of people to make comments about what they had the great place it was at one time and what it's becoming to add to it she was very shocked. I think that is a very good point in fact the person you're talking about went here and there were relatively large class sizes but I've also talked with people whose children went here when there were 3,000 and people said well I don't understand why you're crowded when we had 3,000 here. This was a science room at that time. Yes there have been different uses but then at one time in town there were two different locations for administration. At one point there was even a white little building on the front lawn here that was administration so that building was torn down and administration moved in here. Well it's possible that in this we I don't know it's possible to go somewhere else but the question is where and the other question is didn't in the preschool but even at that time we had a more robust technical program as well and we do have some spaces down there where it's not huge space it's not used except for crew storing our crew I love that we store the boats down there. That was fun. But also as we've been having these discussions about this space I haven't been hearing us talk about the fact that the expectations on the teachers and the instruction really has changed tremendously because we're not expecting our teachers to have the children sitting in rows which is a much more compact usage of that space. We're modeling them for their college work for their career work and that involves working the improvements moving throughout the periods we've gone to longer periods which require more transitioning and all of those have impacted how we use our space as well. You make a very good point that's what I was saying earlier we've seen the classrooms with the groups when you turn the desks like that you can't move it's when you have these really large class sizes even if a teacher wanted to do groups what they often do is just put them in rows or they make horseshoes that are right so that you can get as many desks in there. Actually that was a problem at the beginning of the year a lot of classrooms didn't have enough desks not the large sizes we had. So yes the usage has changed that what goes on in science rooms have changed the use of technology but the collaborative work and in fact a lot of the new schools that are built have some more spaces where students can collaborate. And that's a challenge I mean my hat is off to the 8th grade science teachers all the kids didn't do the work there the kids still have to if they're going to do any kind of group work in the middle school it's again the same thing they're just finding it hard to get into those spaces. So it's a journey we have we're going down and I think the more people that get educated about this the more they can understand why we need to move forward. All right well Matt already told you about the presidential scholar nomination that is just terrific and congratulations to her and hopefully it becomes a national presidential scholar I also want to you know speaking of another facility that we have begun the process of looking at Stratton in terms of planning for the future a Stratton building committee has been formed and in fact maybe I don't know if you want to address that at this point I was going to ask for a vote to have a representative of the school committee to put on the Stratton if you don't know us I've thought so great for many years I think we had some interest from Mr. Haney I will be happy to do it if Dr. Ampe is not interested I will serve if she's not interested in doing it she may be interested I know her life is hectic I don't have those responsibilities unfortunately that's a good time the motion is just and the chair will figure it out our first meeting is this coming Monday it would be wonderful to have a school committee representative on it even if this Monday doesn't work this is really just a committee formation time and looking at the chart I think the school committee is very aware of what the chart is moving forward I think that I second the motion Mr. Hamer yeah just to just to direct the chair to appoint someone hi hi all right just a quick thing one of the things you'd like to have updates on is how the evaluation system is going and I think just a quick I'll let Laura talk about that so far we've met every date that we've had we've had a number of trainings also on inter-rater reliability and we'll continue to do that I meet with a couple of subgroups of study groups one at the middle school and also the special education folks I think we're doing pretty well with the new evaluation system not that it's easy mind you but because it is quite draining a number of evaluators have way over what we would really hope for them to have in terms of their evaluation load but they're handling it thus far also I'm moving forward with search committees for the Down principle and a letter is going to go out which you'll get a copy of we'll anticipate and they'll probably have interviews beginning in the mid-January time frame we have a fair number a nice number of applicants in that for that search we do not have a lot of applications yet in the director of special ed search so we're going to probably be doing more some more advertising when we advertise for that are we just in state or do we go beyond on school spring it reaches everywhere I mean so people who are looking nationally on school spring will see it but we have not so far have not advertised in some of the national education publications other than school spring but one of the things that we have found and this is not just Arlington have found I think the districts would say the same thing I certainly talked to a number of people about this it's actually very hard to come in from another state into Massachusetts with our special education laws they are singular and one singular sensation there yes and much more a nice way of putting it yes and much more detailed and sometimes they come in with a view of how it's done in another state which may be closer to some more national standards of how special education regulations are and so it's hard to adjust there's a learning curve and I'm not saying that we wouldn't entertain applications from out of state but it would be interesting to know what their experience was we'll have to look at those applications now the other thing one last in fact is snow we are at that time of the year here it comes yes here it comes and we dodged