Okay. I'm going to call the order of the meeting. Dr. Seuss is in route from a meeting she had in downtown Boston, so she'll be here shortly. As soon as she's here, the meeting will be in better hands. I want to welcome our A.A. Rep. Juliana Keyses here tonight. Thank you for being here. And we're going to start with public participation. The first person on the list is Pam Hallett. So just to understand the rules, you get three minutes. We can't respond even if you throw something at us. So the rules. Am I close enough? Go ahead. Just say your name, too. I'm Pam Hallett. I'm Executive Director of the House Incorporation of Arlington. I just want to ask that the board take a position in support of the town becoming a sanctuary city. I also want to bring to your attention that currently the HUD budget is cutting all CDBG and home funds. So you might also want to take some position on that that you want to see the CDBG left in the overall budget. Thank you. Thank you, Pam. Next, Elizabeth Dray. Hi, good evening. I'm Elizabeth Dray. I'm here to represent the Arlington Teo Sinti sister city project as well as Arlington stands with immigrants. And I'm here to ask the school committee to have a statement go out to the school committee to the school and their families stating that Arlington is a safe welcoming environment for all students regardless of their immigration status as several of our surrounding communities have already done. I think this is important for us to affirm the rights, dignity and contributions made by immigrant and refugee students and their families to reassure all internationally born students that they will not be targeted, bullied or discriminated against because of the color of their skin as well as to reassure all of our students that their peers, classmates and friends can focus on their learning while they're in our schools without fear of being targeted, detained and separated from their families. And I'd also encourage you to take a statement on passing a safe schools resolution as Summerville has recently done. And I submitted language from letters from the superintendent of Cambridge as well as Boston schools to committee member Dr. Seuss and Mr. Schlickman as well as the safe schools resolution that Summerville just passed. Thank you. Thank you very much. Could I ask you to give a copy of that at some time to the secretary so we can all see that? Thank you. Thank you, Elizabeth. Michael Ruderman. Thank you, Mr. Sealman. Good evening, members of the board. My name is Michael Ruderman and I'm pleased to be here tonight. I see on the agenda for tonight's meeting you have consideration of annual town meeting warrant article number 19. Article 19 is a proposal to study or other actions there too. The concept of having not an elected treasurer but an appointed treasurer for the town of Arlington. I'm here for myself. I'm also here for the one candidate who was on the ballot for that office in April 1st selection, Dean Karman. And I speak for him. For brevity, I'll go to the end of the story first. If you do not oppose article 19 when it comes up at town meeting and should it gain momentum, should it pass, the end of the story is that this committee will lose the authority over the chief financial officer of the Arlington public school system. The article is filed not out of a general sense of good government or adherence to best practices. It is filed opportunistically. It was filed only on the day after our incumbent treasurer announced his resignation in that one or two day span in which there was no candidate running for the office, which then of course changed when there was a candidate who took out papers. It is an attempt by the board of select men through the action of appointing their own treasurer for the town of Arlington to consolidate the financial operations in this town, including the school department. If this article is not opposed, if the momentum builds up, and if in three years' time, which is the shortest time table, if in three years' time we change our town's charter from electing a treasurer who has a policy component in his or her office to one who is appointed by the board of select men, you will see a consolidated finance in town with a chief officer who reports to the deputy or the assistant town manager, who reports to the town manager, who reports to the board of select men. This is the way it will unfold. And I ask for your consideration and resolution against favorable action on article 19. Thank you. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Rudman. Thanks for being here. And then the next person, Deb Goldberg. Deb Goldsmith, sir. Just made you treasurer of the Commonwealth. How's it going? Good. She can give us some money. I'm Deb Goldsmith. I live on at 21 Devereux. I am here to speak and I am here to in favor and strongly to support the movement towards Sanctuary City or whichever of the titles we might want to call it. But I am a member of the Democratic Town Committee, but more importantly for this purpose, I am a clinician in town. I'm a clinical social worker with a child and family practice in town. And it's from that base that I wish to speak because I have a number of children and parents in my case. The children in particular, some of them are terrified not because they themselves are vulnerable, but because they're friends and their relatives and extended family of their friends are vulnerable. And because they do see more of the news than some of us would wish that they would see, the trauma is profound. The sense of risk, the sense of vulnerability is not something we want for our children. It's not something that this town stands for. We work very hard in our schools, you know, as parents in our neighborhoods to provide safe, secure environment. And this particular situation at the national level has shaken that very deeply. And I'm expecting that none of these children will ever forget what they're going through right now for the sake of their friends and some of them themselves have relatives in Central or South America, for instance, and feel very, very vulnerable about what they hear is happening at the border or what they hear that our president wants to do. So please consider the emotional impact on these families and on these children as deeply and as strongly and as compassionately as you're able. Thank you. Actually, why is Jeff you're going to be the first? So, we kind of reversed, we did public participation first. I didn't do the MOA on kindergarten teachers because I didn't. Thank you. I apologize for being late. I'm unexpected. Well, should we have a quick discussion? I came in late about where we're sending this to. We talked about doing this at policy. Is that, is that no? Okay. I came in late. Maybe I'm confused. We're not talking about public participation. We don't have a public participation. We're talking about where we send things to. That's happened before. I don't know. I remember it came up at one point. The two people came and talked about sanctuary cities. That's an article I think we're talking about later on. A person talked about the electric treasure. That's an article going on. And the Tiosente group was similar to sanctuary cities. So they're asking for a resolution from the school committee. So that would go to policies. So I think what the question is, where do we consider that resolution? I would suggest we wait till policy and then at that point direct. Have a discussion at that point. Okay. That's all. That's all. Okay. Thank you, everyone. And again, I apologize for being late. So the next item on the agenda is the vote memorandum of agreement between the Arlington School Committee and the Arlington Education Association. This is something that we voted in executive committee and we now need to vote in public. It's a non-contentious housekeeping type of thing. Do we have a motion? We'll move to approve the MOA on kindergarten teachers for the 2017-2018 school year dated March 2nd, 2017. Seconded by Mr. Schlickman. And we have to do a roll call vote for this. Is that correct? Do we not? We don't? Okay. Okay. So let's not. Okay. I'm sorry. I'm still getting this. I will not. You'll get it down just in the last meeting. Okay. So all those in favor of the memorandum between the school committee and the Arlington Education Association, the MOA on kindergarten teachers, please testify by saying aye. Aye. And that's unanimous. Explain what the MOA is, people listening. Yes. When we did the calendar in January, we offered a different scenario. And after more discussion with kindergarten teachers, it was agreed upon that we probably would like to give next year one more opportunity with how we open the school year for kindergarten students this year. And what that means is that on the Tuesday after Labor Day, there will be an open house for parents at their child's school. Then on Wednesday, half the class will go to school all day. And on Thursday, the other half the class will go to school all day. And on Friday, all students in the class will go to school together for the full day. This gives an opportunity for these young students to our school to have the opportunity to learn the routines in a smaller group and then have a chance at the end of the week to come together as a class. So we collectively felt that this was preferable to what was originally proposed, and that's why there is an agreement this evening. Great. Thank you. Yes, Ms. Rayner. I know we've accepted it, and this may be just clerical. The actual memorandum of agreement does not specify, just as first day, first of the day after Labor Day. I don't know whether that is an issue. It would be a clerical change only. Mr. Spiegel? No, I don't think that was an issue. That was intentional, I think, to do it that way. Fine. It does mean the first day will be the Tuesday after Labor Day. Thank you. Okay, great. We welcome Julianne Keyes, the AEA rep, and to say that Cindy Starks cannot make it tonight. Okay, so the next item on the agenda is the approval of the Arlington High School trip, and this is a new trip. So we sort of look at new trips first before we make our approval. Mr. Ed Foley. Ed Foley? Okay, great. Thank you. There's a Latin teacher here at the high school. Great. First of all, thank you for hearing my proposal. So recently, Katherine Ritz, the director of World Languages here at the high school, was contacted indirectly by a school in Florence called the Istituto Marco Polo, and they were interested in doing an exchange home stay. So they would send some students here in September to stay with some families in Arlington, and then we would go during April vacation to spend the week with those same families. So having talked it over with Tony DeSanza, who teaches Italian here at the high school, and myself, we decided that we would go ahead, provided we could garner enough interest and see if it would work out. So I'm just here to pitch this proposal to you all. Great. Questions and comments, Mr. Heiner. I think it's fantastic. Thank you very much for doing this. My only concern is in that piece, and I direct this more to the superintendent talking about funds for students who have difficulty paying scholarships, it says no. I know we're tight in everything, but hopefully we can find something to help anybody that is interested in going. This year we've set aside a small amount of money for scholarships for our trips that we've developed a process by how students can apply, and that whole protocol is now in place, there's a few more tweaks, but my hope is that next year we can offer a little bit more. The funds for the scholarships comes from the international account, which is a very appropriate use for it, and what we're trying to do is to encourage more international travel for our students. So will we evaluate how much money is possible to do next year, and that will be available. Is there something available for this trip if somebody applies? The trip is next year. I apologize. There is some money left for trips this year. I don't think it's fully expanded yet. Thank you very much. Don't leave yet. Do we know if this trip is one where you pay to the company, or does the school take in the funds and then pay? We will pay directly to the company. The company is ProMate Tour, which is a company I know we've used in the past. Do students will pay directly to the company? That I'm actually not sure about. I would have to ask Katherine Ritz about that, but I think the students would pay directly to the company. Okay, thank you. I have a question. For a student to go on this trip, would they have to necessarily open their home to another student, or what if they're home is too small or whatever? Could there be somebody else step in to house a student from the group? As far as I know, whoever is planning to go to Italy will have to host this student. So I just encourage you, that might be hard for some kids, so maybe informally there might be another way to make an arrangement to somebody else can offer to host on a student's behalf if that were a problem. I think that could be a possibility, depending on how much interest we get in the idea. Okay, anything else? Okay, great. Thank you very much. Sounds like a great trip. Thank you. We need a motion to approve the treat by Mr. Cardin, seconded by Mr. Hayner. All in favor, please say it by aye. Aye. Yes, unanimous. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Okay, we are on to budget stuff. So I know that when we last met, we've sort of met and talked about budget issues for several times, but there were lingering questions. In the interim we've had a changeover of our CFO and so that makes it harder to answer some of the questions. I know that Ms. Mertz is here today again with us to potentially help us out. So how do we want to handle this? Do we want to... Do you have questions that you know that... You know we've given you already and we can start talking about now. And then if there are additional lingering questions, we can open that as well. Yes, there were questions that we took notes about last time and Ms. Mertz is prepared to answer the questions, but certainly to the extent that we can we're happy to see if we can answer other questions. I will preface this by saying it takes a lot of research because as you know how this budget is set up, it's set up through different lenses. And so it can take a lot of time to understand how numbers are regrouped in different sections of the budget. So I think we have Ms. Mertz's time for one day a week and so to the extent that we can do the questions as well as the other things that need to happen is the one the constraints we have here. So I'll turn it over to you because I know you actually have the questions written down you want to answer, right? Well, I think I've answered a lot of them on this memo. I believe that maybe the budget subcommittee might have some. If I may I talked with her prior to the meeting. She had already answered the questions most of the questions on the side, those that she hadn't answered when I got it back, she answered to me tonight to my satisfaction. Okay, I guess there's a couple of questions. One is are there lingering questions that the public would want answered now in public or are there remaining questions that maybe are tiny technical details, maybe not as much interest to the public that we would like to answer at this point? Let me confess publicly, since you're pushing me on this, I misread a line and it was a total line and not the line that I brought forward on transportation and my colleague Mr. Cardin tried to explain that and I wasn't paying attention to him and I apologized to him publicly as well. Thanks to her she hit me on the head and I got it clear this time. Okay. That was the big one, it was $5 million. So the other one my lingering one. Is that transportation or? I read it as vocational transportation and what it was was a total town allotment number. I read it in the wrong line and the the other question on teacher longevity is very convoluted. It's still a negative for this year but I believe going forward it will be a set figure and things will be working out. Yeah, it sounds like we're looking in the future to budget accurate numbers, right, rather than guesstimates. Dr. Allison Ampe. So I had a set of questions that haven't been answered yet. The most important one of those is in section 6 on page 3 of 3 on line 6848 and 6851. So the out of districts Yeah, it's just what happened to the money there if you look in FY18 level service versus FY17. So what I do know in terms of line 6851 of what we've actually spent for that line item in FY16 was 2.4 million. I think each of these different lines I think in total will add up to what we're spending for most of these line items but different sections of the book show different amounts everywhere and I'm not sure why but in total when you add them all together it gets us the number that we need to get to in terms of those two out of district line items. I don't know why the number in line 6848 is 5.8 million. No, so I know the run rate as of right now or at least for FY16 and what was reported in the end of year report was actually 3.8 or 3.6 million, not 5.8 but together I think it'll get us to the amount that we need to be at for out of district. I believe our run rate right now is 8 million dollar range right now which includes the circuit breaker piece. So we don't understand why those numbers were, I mean why the money is moved around. I think there's another question that you had on a different section that only shows like 53,000 so again, don't know why but I didn't know what we actually spent for that line item. Last year was 2.4 and then for the separate day both private and public and I believe 1.8 million at each side so about 3.6. So big picture, what you're saying is that we've got the right amount between the two accounts in district. I mean the day residential and the out of district separate day, this private day, separate day and residential and all together. Yes, all together gets us to the right number and we don't know why the numbers got switched around. Okay. I was hoping we would get some clarity on that but I understand that it wasn't you that did it and that it's just not clear. That was the biggest one of my questions. Looking at the other ones I'm not I don't think any of them are worth bringing up at this point. So are there any that you think are big picture that you feel like you can give the answer to now or are they all just smaller points? They're probably just smaller points. Okay. Yeah, Dr. Ruddy. But there is an important one here and that is the average special education growth over the past five years and actually our new accountant has put together a chart which I will certainly forward to you. I was looking at it today and reviewing the numbers and this is actually something that the finance committee would like too. So it's a chart that shows what our actual expenses were in a given year, what our budgeted number was, what's the difference and what's the percent increase. When you average, I think it's the last six years and of course this year is still not complete but the average increases was over 7%. It's quite variable. This year's increase is over 14% and then you have a year where it's under 1%. So that's the volatility of this. Any remaining questions? It feels like we're spinning around because we've actually been talking about the budget for a bunch of meetings at this point. Thank you very much. I'm a little confused by the agenda. Let me get back to it because we have budget questions here and then there's budget discussion and budget approved. So I don't know where to put some of these things. I think the budget discussion, actually I didn't create this exactly but it worked for me. I didn't change it. The superintendent is going to give her recommendation for that 300,000 and I think then we need to have a discussion about that recommendation and that's going to come afterwards. I mean that's how I see it. We're not talking about that stuff yet but is that same right? That's right. The organization of this really had to do with availability of people and we offered to have Ms. Mertz early in the agenda so she would not be here all evening. Those questions are not. Well thank you so much. Thank you. Now we get to hear, this is one of the things I think is really valuable at school community meetings is to hear what's happening in our schools from the curriculum directors because I think I talk to parents a lot and parents often have a sense that schools are the same as when they were going to school. They don't really get a sense of how much has changed and how much is going on. So it's really exciting that we can just point to them and say look there's this excellent presentation on all the fabulous things we're doing in English and history and math and whatever. So thank you for coming and we're looking for this. So next is Ms. Perry come up and introduce yourself. Karen I do. And so there's this microphone that you have to talk into just to get the public out there. So you can move it around. This is our director of English Language Arts K-12 and she has brought with her one of her esteemed high school English teachers Justin Baraza. Welcome. Great. Thank you. I don't ever think about showing things because we do words. So we may have something for you to see in a minute. The thing that I really wanted to talk about initially was words and the importance of words and how the whole idea of words and what they mean are part of what we do in English classes from the elementary through the high school. But it's become such a loaded political topic that I decided to shift a little bit to sort of think about what really goes on in English classes. What's the big sort of common sort of process that we carry out in any English class. And I came upon the idea of patterning. I was talking with Matt Coleman about this and patterning is a huge element of math instruction as well and we could maybe say that about any subject because learning is actually about putting things in patterns and seeing how they work. But I thought it'd be interesting for you maybe to hear a little bit about how patterning is something that we use and that we help kids to see as we go through the various things that we do in English classes. So I'm going to start with the idea of literal transference. Now most of the stuff that we do in English classes, we don't expect to see ideas that we talk about literally transferred to people's lives. We usually deal with ideas that occur in different ways. But recently an interesting example at Ottison where the students were reading in the seventh grade, Moria's Don't Cry. It's a book about the Little Rock Nine and it details the struggles of these kids who try to didn't try but they were in the schools and not wanted and it was really difficult. And at the end of that book, Rachel Godman, a seventh grade teacher, got a letter from a parent saying that her daughter was not going to be in school for a few days and the reason was that the family was going to go to Washington to the March on Washington in January. She cited the book as the impetus for the family deciding to do it, sort of acting on your principles, standing up for yourself, doing what's important. So that was an interesting and not very common experience to have something that was read in class actually have an observable result in somebody's life. So it's great for the teacher to know. It's one example of how the patterning that you saw people's lives, and this is a nonfiction book, that patterning sort of projected into actual daily life of our students. So that's one place, but as I said, it's not necessarily the most common, nor is it what we're really moving towards. The second area where patterning is really big is in the whole issue of meaning in literature, just meaning in general. I'll give you a couple examples. In Romeo and Juliet which is a book most of you probably sort of came upon at some point in your life. I know when I came upon it, I couldn't believe that I was so anxious to read this book or this play when I was a kid and I wanted it to be a love story. So you get into the first, the whole first act. I mean it's like people fighting and it's a terrible, terrible story. I was, you know, boys fighting. I was not interested in this book or this play. It just irritated me. And in fact what goes on in the whole process of this particular piece of literature is we have wars and we have wars between people. We have destruction. We have nastiness which is the entire environment. And then in the middle of this, we have two kids who are falling in love. And so what we have is the pattern of how people behave badly and then what happens when you try to get that germ of love in the middle of that and how one pattern affects the other. So without the whole war issue, the tragedy of the love couldn't have happened the way it did. So frequently in the literature that we read, we have one set of patterns, one set of ideas, one set of behaviors which create a kind of universe and then another set which create another universe. And it's the interplay or the juxtaposition of those two patterns where meaning sort of evolves. So that's one example. Another example from a book that you guys probably remember from some point in your life is from Mockingbird. And the thing about the patterns in that book are interesting because you've got little kids showing all the innocence of being little kids and you have a number of characters who show innocence and how lovely it is to be innocent. And if you read that book often, at least for me, I can remember back to the innocence of just playing around and doing silly things that kids do. That contrasts with the whole issue of ignorance. And a number of the questions that come up here are questions of, you know, if you are innocent, can you be ignorant? What is ignorance? How do those two go together? Is ignorance really lack of learning or how do those ideas play? So the patterning that you see, the constant set of examples of innocence play against an increasing set of examples of ignorance and bias and prejudice and bad behavior in all sorts of ways. And so neither of those sides without the other would make a lot of sense or wouldn't make as much sense. So you need both. So we ask kids, we help kids to see how the behaviors and the patterns of behaviors actually work to reinforce each other and to make meaning. And then the transferring of that, I think, to the way people think, is that there's the idea that kids begin to look for patterns. They begin to look to see how things fall into line and how things sort of make sense in a kind of order and what that order is and how that order could shift. So I mean we could go through every book that we teach but I won't do that to you. So the third area where patterning we spend a lot of time on the issue of patterning is around structure. And in literature structure is, you know, often structure is part of the meaning. Certainly the best example of that is poetry in a sonnet, the sonnet makes part of the meaning. In the Haiku the same thing occurs. In a play you have a certain number of acts and the acts begin to shape what goes on. You can only do so much and plays can't be that long. So whatever happens has to happen there. So we begin to talk to kids about how when you are reading something the shape of that thing adds meaning. That begins to move into the area of writing. So when you're writing something the shape that you put it in, how it's formed, that begins to make meaning as well. So kids begin to be conscious of how something goes together and the way that it goes together is the way that meaning occurs from it. In novels and short stories the same thing. We have lots of words that you're familiar with. Plot, the main issue of structure but then there's themes within that, there's subplots. There's all sorts of imaging, all the literary terms that you know, all those things begin to make patterns which make meaning. The final example has to do with sentences. I wanted to read to you the first sentence from a book by Toni Morrison which the seniors in the AP class read. The book is Song of Solomon and Song of Solomon is an incredible book. It's not an easy book to read but it keeps giving incredible imagery and ideas and it just keeps coming back at you. It's not a book you can passively read but it's a book that every time you put some energy into it you get a whole bunch more back. I'm going to read you the first sentence which is a goofy sentence and the whole first scene of the book is just a joke.  I don't need the thing anymore because you don't need to do this. The whole first scene of this book is a crazy scene. But the first sentence is this. You have it, I think I put it in your notes. The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Agent promised to fly from mercy to the other side of Lake Superior at 3 o'clock. Now that sentence in and of itself may or may not make a lot of sense. When I started this book I was petrified because I was going to have to teach it. I hadn't read it before and I thought oh my, I don't know what this is going to be and I read the sentence and I was completely demonstrated why I needed to be nervous. When I did it with kids we read it out loud a few times and I tried to figure out what these words could mean. None of these words is difficult. They're all pretty straightforward words. But Toni Morrison actually talks about this and I want to just read to you how she talks about putting sentences together and that's why this is, that's why I sort of included this. She spends a lot of time talking about sentences and how she writes them. So I'm going to read the sentence again and then what she says about her construction of it. The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Agent promised to fly from mercy to the other side of Lake Superior at 3 o'clock. This declarative sentence is designed to mock a journalistic style with a minor alteration. It could be the opening of an item in a small town newspaper. It has the tone of an everyday event of minimal local interest yet I wanted it to contain important signs and crucial information. The name of the insurance company is that of a well known black owned company dependent on black clients and in its corporate name are life and mutual. The sentence starts with North Carolina and closes with Lake Superior. Geographical locations that suggest a journey from north, excuse me, from south to north. A direction common for black immigration and in the literature about it but which is reversed here since the protagonist has to fly south to mature. Two other words of significance are fly and mercy. Both terms are central to the narrative. Flight as escape or confrontation. Mercy, the unspoken wish of the novel's population. Some grant it, some despise it. One makes it the soul cry of her extemporaneous sermon upon the death of her granddaughter. And she goes on. I thought it was good for you to hear this because the precision that Morrison describes here and her choice of words in this one sentence is the kind of precision that we would hope we could lead students to understand that sentences need to have or that conversation needs to have. We're in a time right now and it's making English teaching interesting where precision and language isn't necessarily something that says valued or it's valued differently than I remember it being or that I would like to think it is. So this takes on for me a fairly heavy meaning because if it's the only thing that we do to help kids understand that the words that they use represent the ideas in their heads and the ideas in the heads are what they are, you know, that we are all of the things that we say and the things that we write are us. It's the only way we get it out here is to get it out somehow on paper or in words. And being true to that is really key and important. So I thought that would be something interesting for you to know about. In a minute I'm going to let Justin talk about the new 10th grade course but I just want to read you one more thing from Toni Morrison's Nobel prize acceptance speech. She writes about words, word work and language. It makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference, the way in which we are like no other life.  That may be the meaning of life but we do language. That may be the measure of our lives and I think that's really cool because the language is what we say, what we think is the measure of our lives. So from that to Justin, go. To kind of just follow up on what Ms. Perry was saying first of all thank you for having me and entertaining this. The new course is actually a product of studying patterns in the classroom and in the ELA classroom and we're always asking our students what are you noticing, what are the things that you're noticing and the 10th graders especially are really really focusing on the things that they observe and the patterns that they do notice and to quote Ian Fleming in Goldfinger the original quote is once is an event twice is a coincidence and three times is enemy action. We modify that obviously because we're not dealing with enemy action necessarily but we are in the business of patterns all the time and so that's where many of the 10th grade English teachers are starting as opposed to these big questions about what's the theme of Macbeth which one? There are so many of them. We're asking the students to discover what the patterns are so that they can make their own meaning with these classical texts and that is where they start. They're engaging halfway between this very formal literary lens and this reader response lens of what's exciting to these students. You've got your language and structural patterns like Miss Perry mentioned but you also have the tendency to literally stab your best friends in the back in Macbeth. These are the patterns, there's something for everyone. It's moving on these patterns and we're calling this new course Examining Expression because the old course was called Literary Heritage and midway through the year as part of MCAS preparation just as a part of the normal preparation in the course over the 10th grade year we asked the students, okay so what are you noticing about all of these texts? Recently a student said something along the lines of everything is about war and life is horrible which it was hard to argue with that a little bit and to the point that was raised earlier some of these texts which are fabulous, really, really rich texts that are very, very dense and so nuanced and are considered canonical or classical works of literature, some of them were written hundreds if not thousands of years ago. One of the things that we wanted to do was move away from this idea of this or expand upon the idea of this is your literary heritage. You're all doomed basically to not figure out how to communicate effectively and everyone in your family will perish as a result of your ability to communicate and kind of open things up a little bit so we're hoping to turn the corner and really expand and challenge the students to expand their own experience as they identify these patterns into something where they're looking at all four modes of communication that are stressed by the common core for example but are really, really important in everyday life with reading, writing, speaking and listening. If most of these characters that they've dealt with already were a little bit better at listening or a little bit better at speaking everything would have been, I'm not going to say great, much better though and the students are recognizing this and so that being said we're hoping to create an opportunity to change things up and start adding things to the 10th grade curriculum that will encourage students to see a little bit more of themselves in the authors, in the characters, in the protagonists so that we're not reading things necessarily, again, these wonderful works of literature that are primarily if not in the 10th grade mostly all by deceased white men so we're moving towards this place where a student who does not identify as white can see themselves in the characters, in the authors while still understanding the patterns that are happening through what does effective communication look like and so by even calling the course examining expression we feel really, really positive about the idea that they'll be able to, you know, they'll be expected to but also be encouraged to and develop the skills to figure out, oh, this is what happens when I don't talk about my feelings appropriately, this is what happens when I don't listen to someone who's really trying to give me if not good advice some advice or someone cares about me. In addition to those skills about reading and writing that we're already working on in terms of, again, looking at those patterns one of my co-workers, Tim Martin I distinctly remember in his interview not exactly what he said but he mentioned that literature is how we get to examine something along the lines of literature is how we get to examine the more difficult experiences and decisions and ideas in a safe manner which is to say we don't have to deal with the real life ramifications of these things that all of these characters are experiencing but most of the characters in the 10th grade curriculum are choosing the worst possible thing you could do as a result and so that's the sort of thing that in this fast paced world I won't say shoot first but in this tweet first ask questions later environment that the world really really embraces now whether or not we like it we can still stay rooted in the text, in the literature no matter what that text looks like we can look at those patterns and see okay, it doesn't matter who's doing it being said, what is being claimed, what's the claim here and we can identify those patterns using the tools and the skills that will allow us to hopefully be less judgmental and communicate way more effectively than we currently do just kind of as a society and as a world so we're hoping to as I said expand and open up and even maybe this year start piloting at least one new text or a couple of new texts by the end of the year that will offer students who maybe have not seen themselves in literature the chance to do that in a way that they'll be able to really again use all four of those communication modes to demonstrate both that they are very skilled and talented in the things that they are reading but also that what they're reading does matter in the real world which as Deb mentioned sometimes it doesn't feel like that, we feel confident that we can help the students understand, obviously I keep going back to Macbeth because I think it's the stabbiest of all of the texts that we work with but a lot of them do in fact focus on war and things like that which hopefully is not the message that we want the students to receive over the course of the 10th grade curriculum so thank you for listening. Stay there, we're going to have questions and comments. Mr. Hayner. I have a question and a comment. When you do Shakespeare with them do you read it in the Middle English? Or is it adapted? We access, I mean we use Shakespeare's original texts and at least in my classes I'm sure in all of the other 10th grade classes we read what's on the page. We do have access to modern adaptations and there are things like no fear Shakespeare and things like that that help them. My 10th grade teacher turned me on by making us read or read with her from the book orally. Then she brought in and I'm going to date myself records from professional actors. I remember Dame Judith Addison, Anderson playing Lady Macbeth and hearing it and seeing it double modality you could get it right, we got it right away and then she would ask us to turn around. Basically it must have been a woman way before her time to what's going on in the world right now that is similar. The idea of Shakespeare was so alien to me after having this teacher we were all turned on to get excited about it and thank you so much for doing that. Thank you. So I have a general question and comment. How do you see English language arts having, how has it changed in the last 10 years and where do you see it going in the next five years? English instruction? Yes. Okay. In five words or less. Let's put it in notes. One of the interesting things that's happened which is not news to anybody is that kids you used to be able to go to the store and you could sort of quietly buy that little book that was the synopsis of whatever it was you were supposed to be reading now it's so much easier you just go click click and it's online. So we've had to be a little bit creative about ways that we have to own the fact that that's there. I mean, no sort of threats nothing's going to stop that from happening. So where it becomes where we really notice the changes in kids can get in addition to sort of information about whatever the book is about but also papers written on any topic that we could come up with. So we've changed the way we do our writing assignments in general and this actually coincides nicely with what the SAT is doing and with what the MCAS is doing and what PARC is doing. And it's actually much better educationally than asking kids to look at a couple of different pieces of text that could be music and a poem.  It could be any number of things nonfiction fiction and then ask them maybe they're on similar topics or somewhat similar topics. Ask them to read that come up with some places and patterning again where there's commonality and then come with their own idea about what that might be and then go back to the text and find the evidence. It's the same process that we asked them to do. It's actually much more creative, much more interesting and it's a little more foolproof in terms of kids not being able to find that thing or that question online and just copying it. So that's one thing. I think my own and you can talk in one second. There's this other thing that's happening to me. There could be lots of other reasons for that but I think it's happening to kids also where attention spans are shorter because of technology and people can get things so much more quickly and sort of access it and then get the real synopsis and then get in and get out. And so sustaining helping kids to figure out how to sustain focus on a piece of literature for instance or sustain focus on a piece of writing so that it's not just done. This is an age old issue for English teachers that you give them two weeks and they still do it the last night. I never did that. How to sort of reinforce that. But paying attention, paying close attention isn't the same given as it used to be and I'm not sure whatever was a total given but it's not as easy. And I think to kind of expand on that we're in a place now and we will continue moving forward into this place where anything and everything can be a text evaluating which things should be considered evaluating sources. Whether it's Wikipedia or the sources at the bottom of Wikipedia which I feel like I have this conversation every week with my students. There are different ways to obtain sources. Don't take the easy way out. Whether it is looking at a Twitter feed or a peer reviewed journal figuring out the best way to evaluate or how to evaluate a text for what it's best for or what the author does best or what the argument does best is really really important and becoming increasingly important when there's just so much out there. And on the flip side of that the creative piece we strive to have students create something that makes them proud to demonstrate that they learn something as opposed to just spitting something back out. And I know most of I believe the 10th grade, we have a final writing piece but we also have this creative piece where we ask them to work with characters across different texts. What would that look like? What would it look like if I think one of the examples last year was if Spongebob Squarepants were the cast of Macbeth? How would this work? And it's totally bizarre. But sometimes the tiniest, littlest things demonstrate the deepest nuances. It's totally silly. I couldn't name a character other than Spongebob Squarepants. But when the students come in and are talking about, no actually I made this character do this because if you look at this Act 2, Scene 3, this is something that's really important to this character. And now all of a sudden these connections between Spongebob Squarepants and related texts are really making sense to students. That's the sort of thing that really excites me. And we can get them to this place of understanding, know your audience. Hopefully you're not necessarily going to, here I am at the school committee meeting talking about Spongebob Squarepants. But hopefully you're not going to be defending your doctorate talking about Spongebob Squarepants. But instead the difference between I, thou, thee, in Shakespeare's Hamlet or something like that.  It's a whole spectrum of knowing when and how, not to strike exactly, but how to be surgical in your interpretation, but also your creation to demonstrate I've got it. It doesn't just have to be the answer to this question you've got in three pages or more. It can take many shapes. When you talk about them writing the evidence-based analytical essays, where do they learn how to write that? Are they supposed to have learned that before? Or is it in that class they learn and then also produce? It's a constant. It starts a little bit in the elementary. Some of the Lucy Cawkins units are about that. What we're constantly doing, or asking kids to do, is come up with an idea, and then why do you have that idea? What's the evidence for that idea? So it's a claim. I mean essentially it's a claim and an evidence. The idea of making it in a form of an essay gets more sophisticated as kids get older, but the process of asking kids to sort of look at something or think about something and then have an idea and generate an idea, and then figure out why they have that idea. That process is a constant. The whole question of writing, I know we don't, I'm using it all the time of the night, but the whole issue of writing a formal essay has come under a lot of criticism because the simplest way to teach essay writing is to say is the five-paragraph essay, which is why it has lived a life much longer than it should have lived. So you have this formula. You do this and you have the opening paragraph. You have three support paragraphs at each of those support paragraphs. You have three pieces of evidence. You develop the evidence. The last paragraph, you get out of it and it's great. It's fine. The structure's there. But it kills the idea of the fact that ideas don't always fit that form. So it's a way to teach process. It's a way to teach structure. But then pulling the structure away and having kids figure out if an idea needs five pieces of evidence, and some of them stronger and some less strong, and how do you organize that and how does that actually look and shape. They can come up with that. They can make that up. It can be legitimate because it's theirs. So we're fooling around with ways to have that happen. So we're switching. We're doing a lot of shorter pieces where kids take an idea and expand it as much as they can to get used to the idea of how do you make an argument. An argument is something that we do. I used to do some correcting of the freshman play some papers for MIT. They just sort of brought a bunch of people and sort of read these papers that high school seniors who accepted were doing. The kid had a paper that was a five paragraph essay. We just put it in the bin. The kid just had to sort of take basic media English again. It wasn't a good thing. No one likes that five paragraph essay because it limits creativity and it shows no sense of how really an argument should be formed and how your head works. So to answer your question, we do the process pieces all along and then we play around with the various forms that those arguments could take. Can I just interject? I don't know if anybody else noticed it, but it warmed my heart. The two of the social studies people behind you went like claims in evidence. We have been working a lot as a curriculum team on transferable skills and that's one of the key transferable skills. So while they're talking about developing those skills in English language arts, we're also developing those skills across all subject areas. Thank you. Thanks very much. Thank you. I can speak to the same thing that's going on in the middle school for sure. And the elementary as well. And so I think that that's one of the points is that we as a curriculum team including the literacy specialist for the elementary school and the math coaches will talk about what are those transferable skills and those are the skills that are going to help students to handle non-regular problems when they have the ability to take four projects, one when they have that bag of skills that they can just take and transfer to another subject area and they're used to that. And by asking them to do SpongeBob SquarePants against another text gets the idea that two things that look very dissimilar could have similarities. Thanks. Great. Mr. Coughlin, please come up. I know we saw you about a year ago and so this is just a nice update about what's been going on in the past year and what your thoughts are for the coming years. And I know you have some colleagues so please introduce them and I'll speak into the microphone. Yes, so very happy to be here with all of you tonight. And I brought two of my wonderful colleagues with me, Kristen Wachel-Hazen who is a sixth grade ancient civilizations teacher and Tom Buschel who is also a sixth grade ancient civilizations teacher. So they're going to talk more about some of the exciting things going on in our sixth grade curriculum once we get a little overview of things. But I appreciate you bringing up that. It was about a year ago that I was here because at that point my eyes were open really wide. I was trying to learn about the students, about the districts, about the curriculum learning about the teachers and it's so crazy to think about how much has happened in the past year, how much I've learned and just the work that we've done and the work that we have going forward. To start off we have two pieces of very, very good news. First one is that our Audison National History Day students, we have ten teams that are moving on to the state competition now. And Tom Buschel is one of the advisors this year while Jason Levy. So we're really excited about that. Audison is always well represented at states and at nationals so that's exciting. Then one of our other sixth grade teachers who is here tonight, Allison Stansnito has been selected as the Mass Counsel for Social Studies Middle School Social Studies teacher of the year. So we're also very excited about that. So lots of wonderful things to lead off. So it has been a really, really great year in multiple different ways. The top is a group of fourth graders at Bishop that I got to spend a lot of time with. They wanted to just ask me questions about the election process and I sat there for 40 minutes and it was a really, really, really great conversation that we had together. Then the bottom is a group of students from the high school. This year I'm co-teaching a class with one of our first year teachers and we took a field trip to the Ted Kennedy Institute where they all got to be different senators and argue about immigration bills. So I feel like I've been here, there and everywhere this year but it's been great. So to go over some things we'll kind of go over what we've done this past year and then we'll go over looking forward. The biggest district wide initiative was the election. This was something that I never thought would be so complicated in all the years that I've been in education so far. One of the things we did this summer is we got a group of teachers together to come up with some guidelines for teaching the electives the election. They researched resources, websites, readings and we broke it down grade by grade about what are the appropriate things for a first grader to be learning about the election and what are the appropriate things for a second grader to be learning. When do we even want to introduce the ideas that there's two political parties. So I feel really happy that we put together a really nice guide that teachers, specifically the K-5 teachers used to teach the election. In kindergarten and first grade we didn't necessarily even talk about Trump and Hillary Clinton. Instead students got to read about two different literary characters and vote for which one they liked better. We didn't want to take politics out but let them understand what this process of voting and what democracy really looks like in a different piece. So there were lots of mock debates. At high school students were debating the Master's since ballot questions. We had mock elections from the middle school and the high school to see who our students would choose. What could have been a very thorny subject I really applaud the teachers, administrators and the district for doing a fantastic job making sure that there could be good conversations, making sure that people felt comfortable regardless of their political beliefs. So that's all the teachers that did that amazing work on the election. But that's one of the things that we're really proud of this past year is the work on the election. So K-5 this past year, some new developments. In second grade we added the new unit. We added the Teo Sentai and El Salvador unit that was in fourth grade and we moved that to second grade. So now in second grade there are wonderful students doing Teo Sentai and El Salvador and they're also doing our sister city in Japan. So it's a nice comparison for the students. Students at the end of the year are going to come together and do a project that has them compare life in Teo Sentai, life in Japan and life in Arlington. So we're really excited about the level of synthesis and compare and contrast that second graders are going to be able to do. In third, fourth and fifth grade you can see a picture of me Hanson and Tim McBride up there, literacy coaches. We spent a lot of summer with elementary school teachers working on integrated English language arts and social studies units. Making sure that students can see those clear connections between history and between what they're reading and writing. So we worked on them for third grade, a unit on the pilgrims, fourth grade a unit on immigration and fifth grade, a unit on the American Revolution. In the summer we're going to be working on another one for first grade, which we're excited about as well. So teachers are piling in these units this year. We're going to come back together over the summer, see what worked, see what didn't work, and go from there really. Then another great thing that we had is some good PD for the fifth grade. The organization Children's Discovering Justice, we had come in and do a fifth grade PD. Discovering Justice is based out of the Mowkley Courthouse. It's all about civics. It's all about having students understand big questions like what is a right? What is fair? What is a law? What is a rule? We did some work with the fifth grade teachers to get them familiar with the curriculum and see if this was a curriculum that we wanted to pursue. So K-5 moving forward, one of the projects over the next year is geography benchmarks for each grade K-5. We want to have a nice level of horizontal alignment across the different schools. So make sure that every second grader by the end of the year is having common experiences and knowing common terms and locations and places. We're going to be working with our seventh grade world geography teachers to see when you get them in seventh grade what do you need them to know and then work backwards from that point. The integration of civics is another really important thing. A lot of them means that I've been in with the Department of Education. They said civics is the biggest change that's going to come with history. We really want to emphasize civics and the integration of civics throughout all disciplines. So we're continuing to look at the different ways that we can integrate civics within the curriculum of the content. And then in fifth grade, we're going to start a curriculum revision this upcoming summer where we're going to focus more on depth versus breadth rather than try to cover a very large historical time period. We're going to really focus in on the American Revolution and the U.S. Constitution to really get at that idea of civics so that when students are done in fifth grade they have a very, very solid understanding of how our government works and ways that they can participate in their government. The sixth grade did a very, very exciting curriculum rewrite of ancient civilizations curriculum. We moved from a chronological approach to a thematic approach and I'm going to let them talk about all that in a moment. In seventh grade we had new textbooks this year and we were using now in the seventh grade a digital textbook which is really exciting and it's been very, very successful this year having these up to date books and resources has been very beneficial for the teachers and the students. And in eighth grade along with this idea of thinking about difference and how we get along with each other we've been integrating some of my previous life at Facing History by this wonderful case study they have about the French headscarf debate in France to help students understand what religious pluralism looks like and oftentimes it's easier for students to think about these issues in another country's context and then bring it back to where they live and think about their own lives. That's the goal with this student as well. Moving forward for Audison, the sixth grade they're going to continue to fine tune the curriculum again this summer. There's a lot of time allotted for them to re-examine what worked and what didn't work. I think they've learned different things every day about the curriculum. So by in seventh grade we're looking at ways to incorporate more writing into world geography curriculum and technology. Julie Keys who's here also from the history department experimented this year with Google Expeditions. We want to integrate that into all the grades but seventh grade world geography fits really well so Google Expeditions is nice because it's a virtual reality experience where students can have their iPads or their phones and they can be wandering through the streets of Italy. They can be at Normandy Beach on D-Day coming out from one of the boats onto the beach. So I think it's going to change the way that we teach history and we're excited about that as well. In eighth grade we're going to continue to incorporate more civics. We've had a wonderful experience with the medieval building project and we're going to continue to look at that and think about new ways to approach that. Students love that project. They talk about it until they get to high school but we also know that our students are changing. Technology is more pervasive so we want to see are there different ways for students to show their understanding of their knowledge of medieval buildings and structures in that type of way. Then finally getting to the high school. One of the things that we did last year is we had common final exams so every 9th, 10th and the 1st grader took the same exam because of that. I sound like Matt Coleman here. We were able to get some rich data from it that we analyzed and I put into spreadsheets and it was very exciting and then just recently we were doing some grading calibration. So we had essays from the final exams as we're looking towards rewriting them for this year and we just sat together grading and talking about the ways that we were grading so it was nice to get us all on the same page there. Inspired by our 6th grade teachers, our 9th grade is now looking at a curriculum revision. As you might know, the 9th grade curriculum is modern world history. In learning about the curriculum last year, I realized that it was not modern nor was it representative of the world because we were ending around World War II and it was very heavily focused on European history. This is the one chance I think students have to get into history of the Middle East. Get into apartheid, understand revolution in Latin America. So we want to make sure that the curriculum reflects a knowledge of those things. So they're looking at right now we're just at the beginning processes of making that a thematic curriculum rather than a chronological curriculum. In 10th to 11th grade which are US history courses, their PLC work this year and the work that they've done has been on integrating diverse narratives into the curriculum. So we've been looking at ways in US 1 for example where we want to look at African Americans not just through the forms of slavery or as victims but talk about the cultural achievements, talk about the rich culture that some of them developed while they were on plantations, talk about Native American history and we've had some really cool connections in US 1 this year by thinking about the pipeline that's brought Native American affairs to current events for students. Next year at the high school we'll be offering two new electives, History of Massachusetts and History of the Modern Middle East. So we're always excited to continue to expand our electives offerings for students. Next up at, well here you can see some highlights from the past year at the high school from the Ted Kennedy Institute. The technology has been great this year. We've done a lot of Skyping. So we've had scholars, I know Kristen had a scholar on Egypt skyping with her class. We've had various people, New York Times editors, New York Times writers. We had, I'm blanking on his name because I'm in front of a microphone right now, but he was the chief translator for Nixon on his trip to China and he Skyped in with our seniors and juniors. So even though we can't bring all these people into our classrooms, we're still having really meaningful exchanges with scholars and academics which is great. HS moving forward, we're going to continue with our ninth grade curriculum work. We're going to continue to evaluate the 10th and 11th grade curriculum knowing that the Department of Ed is aiming for around 2019 to update the Massachusetts Social Studies frameworks. So I'm trying to stay ahead of that as much as possible because who knows what's going to be on the table with that. We're always looking to see whether or not we should be expanding our AP program. So two APs that we're currently reviewing are AP Human Geography and AP World History. We are looking at a potential partnership with Middlesex Community College to offer three MCC credits, college credits to students for completing economics classes, American law classes and psychology classes. And my wonderful English colleague said the idea of research skills, source reliability, corroborating sources has been something that's been really really important to us that we're continuing to think about as a department, think about just as adults when we're having our conversations and how we get students to try to understand that. So that picture there is from one of our New York Times upfront magazine that students get talking about fake news and some of the activities that students did around that. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to two representatives from our awesome sixth grade team, Prisen and Tom, and they're going to go forward. So last year we got really lucky. Denny came in and he gave us the gift of reflective practice, which we're often given and asked to do in our own personal practice, but it's rare that as a collective sixth grade you are kind of given the ability to reflect as an entire grade as teachers and look deeply at the curriculum and how it could be improved and how its effectiveness is translating into the classroom. And when we did this, we decided that there was a whole bunch missing. There were gaps between major connections that were being made. I know at least in my classroom a ton of the students would think that when we stopped the Egypt unit means that ancient Egypt stopped and then we moved on to the next civilization. So they were really missing a lot of the rich and deep connections that you can make in the ancient world, especially with the interconnectedness and the way that they're constantly influencing each other. So we kind of started from square one and said if we were to build a curriculum around ancient civilizations and pair it with the skills that we really want our kids to leave the classroom with and go into their academic careers, what should we look for? What do we want? So one was definitely what skills do we think they need not only in history but in cross curricular because a lot of what the English department was talking about we also strive to do with the claim and evidence based writing just to name one example. And then we also wanted to think about the whole civics, how are our lessons meaningful to the students, how do they connect to their lives and what's going on in the world today. Next we thought about this great gift that was given to us in technology. We have the iPads at our fingertips and that really allows the students to do more inquiry and project based learning. And we find that with that and with the use of that technology and all the information at their fingertips they're really able to produce substantial work with deeper connections and connections not only between civilizations but in the modern world and in their own lives. So we've had some really great production as far as that goes. It also allows us to teach with a little bit more flexibility as far as the civilizations go so we're able to kind of throw in a couple more civilizations that we weren't looking at before like the Indus River Valley, the Persian Empire, Kushmasso America and we don't necessarily use these with every project and everything that we do. But there are a lot of students I know that sometimes felt misrepresented. We have a lot of students from India and they often would ask where their parents would why don't we learn about India and ancient civilizations. So it really gives them more ownership over the curriculum and a lot of times they get to choose certain civilizations as an independent project or as a connection that they want to learn about. So that's a really great addition. We also really wanted to make sure that students were able to compare, evaluate and examine history rather than just memorizing it. In my classroom I got rid of tests all together and we've really been doing in Korean project based learning and activity hands-on things where they're able to own the material and not just kind of regurgitate it which I say often in the classroom and they laugh at me but that's really what happens a lot of the times on testing and then the information's gone and it's not a skill or a mental thing that they've learned and they can take with them in their educational careers. It's then gone to make space for the next thing to memorize. So we found great luck in that and we think that they own the material a lot more based on that approach. And it also allows us to accommodate various styles of learning not just to our special education children which it definitely does but also to our more gifted students who are often looking for that more of a challenge especially with integrated technology into that. We have a lot more freedom to allow them to stretch and challenge themselves as often and as frequently as they can. So up here on the board you can see this is the current AP World History themes and I'm not going to read them out to you but you can see that this is what we used as our inspiration when we were looking for something to model our curriculum after. So we added one right before theme one. We just wanted to get that foundation skills how do you study history? What is an artifact? What's a primary source? What's a secondary source? But then we moved on to trying to model after this list because to master these themes you really need a lot more higher order thinking skills, a lot more critical thinking skills that we were really hoping to push them towards as opposed to the foundation of names and dates and the like. So that's my slide. Yeah great and we also Dany was talking about vertical alignment and we were thinking about that too when we were looking at the curriculum what are they doing at the high school and what are skills that we can start working on in the middle school that they can then utilize and have a foundation for when they get there. So theme one thinking like a historian this is we spend a lot of time in the beginning thinking about cross curricular questioning. So in history and science in a lot of different areas we kind of study based on questions that we come up with and so learning how to question is really important so that's where we start and with that we also talk about archaeology and look at specific applications of that questioning not only within archaeology but within prehistory and specific artifacts within prehistory that we can then start that inquiry based research and development. Our next theme is interactions between human and the environment and what we really wanted to do here is this would have been geography but we wanted to do more than what we typically did with geography because there's so much more you can do so not only do we focus on geography of a civilization but we focus on how that geography how those physical features impact the people that live there and then how do those people in turn impact their environment and their geography which really lends itself to thinking about okay now thinking in modern terms especially with modern technology how has that then changed how humans impact their environment and how environment impacts humans so we do like a really great environmental study for the kids and they kind of can see what's going on now that we have all this new technology and how does that change the way we impact our environment. Theme 3 is the development of culture which we've been spending a lot of time and we've been noticing there's so many ways to investigate culture so right now for example the students are doing a passport to the ancient world and they're actually flying to the different civilizations and they're experiencing it not only just answering questions but if you're putting yourself in the shoes of the ancient people what are you hearing what are you seeing what are you tasting so it's those higher order thinking skills that's making them apply what they learn to actually kind of have a simulation of an experience of what it would be like to in fact live there during that time. So this is about where we are at the moment we're wrapping up the culture unit and part of the beauty of this pilot year is that we have the flexibility to try different things in our classrooms and then sort of regroup at the end of the year and see what worked and see what didn't work so while some classes are doing that passport to the ancient world others might be doing a research project or some kind of comparative activity where you examine cultures of your chosen civilizations and make connections that way but next up we have power expansion and conflict which is where we'll look at things like government nations coming into conflict related to today's world as soon as possible we'll do inventions after that and then we'll finish it off with trade networks just to again try to build up as much connectivity as we can and really give them a global this is all happening at the same time feel so that's where we're heading. And I think what's really great about this and with the themes is ELI was talking about patterns and so in teaching in a theme with something like power expansion and conflict they're able to see all of this unfolding together they're able to see the patterns how one is affecting the other and how things are actually playing out seeing different perspectives versus just seeing a one sidedness of these are the causes of the Persian war from this perspective so they're getting more of a global approach all the time as we're looking at it and being able to make more deep and meaningful connections so we're really excited about the end of the year assessment that we came up with this year mostly because just as ELI was talking about a lot of times the students are able to engage more and give a better final product when they're able to choose how they show what they learn and that's something that I've been doing in my classroom since I've been here and I really enjoy how much better the final product comes out when the kids are more engaged in it when they are more invested in it because they're taking ownership of it because they are able to choose how they're going to show you what they know so we've decided every theme they're collecting a piece from this theme and so we've started kind of these portfolios for them some of us digitally some in paper some kind of mentally but they're taking an element from each theme and they're taking ownership of it and at the end of the year they're going to create their own civilization based on pieces and connections that they've made over the course of the year so it's kind of a worldly perspective of what they've learned just trying to add on the comparisons and the deeper comparisons that we want them to make all year long so for my class so far they created a physical features ad based on the ad that they think would most benefit civilizations to live near and that is one of the physical features they have to include in their civilization at the end of the year they created a super god that is composed of all different elements of gods of all different cultures of the ancient world and that is a god that they will have to include in their civilization at the end of the year so not only do we want them to examine closely and apply their knowledge and their connections while they're in these themes but we also want them to be able to carry that on and to be able to show what they've learned throughout the year in Minecraft or in a poster or in a model and something that they will be able to apply all that knowledge and be really proud of and be able to kind of take that with them and use that understanding of what they've learned in the connections in the different groups of settlements of people in the world and carry that on into their other history classrooms Great, thank you very much. Questions, comments Mr. Heiner? I have a question and a comment you do enjoy what you're doing, don't you? Yeah, absolutely. And I gotta say I think that's the best part of teaching to get paid to do something you really enjoy Thank you very much for everything, it's exciting. You know every time I hear this I'm like I wish I could go back to sixth grade, right? It sounds really cool Yeah, it's great. Well we're really lucky, I mean we wouldn't have been given this opportunity if it wasn't for Denny So we're very lucky. Thank you. Mr. Slickman I noticed at the beginning of your presentation you have an APS history department Twitter account just hit and it seems you're doing Selfie station exit tickets? Yes So Allison has a Twitter account. I have a Twitter account but I only created it when Zahi Huas, the former secretary of antiquities for Egypt skyped with my class because I saw he had one so I tweeted it and he retweeted it and then I just quit Twitter right then because I thought it's never going to top this. But yes, Allison tweets out so we're doing the passport to the ancient world right now and after they visit their homework assignment for this whole week is they're tweeting out their experience and the civilization that they're in so they're not actually doing it on Twitter, they're doing it on Google Classroom but we created a form for them to be able to do that so they're having a lot of fun with that. I thought it was quite impressive that we had two students on the great wall of the time Yes, there is an amazing green screen app that comes in very handy. Well, it's fortunate it's a low budget item. We have somebody on the shoulder of a stack. This is great stuff. This is going to be fun. It's very fun. The kids like it. Mr. Carton Your last year so I did see your visitation day but it was like you were going to ask questions so I'm not supposed to be on the 6th grade but I do have a 7th grade and a daughter in the 6th grade and they're still being required to learn my pet peeve, state capitals and country capitals and that seems way out of line with all what you're doing in the 6th grade. Do you see it moving forward, moving away from that kind of stuff or is that still, you certainly can understand them needing to know where countries are but memorizing a list of state capitals and country capitals just seems so old school. I completely agree with you that kind of memorization is very, very beneficial for students as you noted but I also didn't want to come in and uproot everybody at my first and second year so a lot of it is, you know, I'm having conversations with teachers. I'm asking them questions even at the high school where some teachers are having students take notes on the textbook for homework. I'm saying is this a meaningful assignment similar to what DePerry was saying I asked one of my teachers a question and I said if it's this easy to cheat into copy and assignment, does that mean it's meaningful? Because now you can go online, find any textbook and find somebody who's taking notes on that textbook and just copy and paste that. It's crazy. So we've been thinking about this idea of meaningful, we've been thinking about this idea of the application of skills and what that means. So this is a direction that I hope social studies goes on throughout the district and we're chipping away at it little by little. Thanks for coming. It's very exciting. So I know we are a little behind we have a very full agenda. The next agenda is the superintendent's recommendations for the circuit breaker and this is our last meeting we voted to potentially use 300,000 of the circuit breaker money for next year's expenses. This is money that wouldn't be available usually until subsequent years but our vote was to use it for next year and we directed Dr. Brody to come back to us with some suggestions of how she would use that money. So this is what that is. We discussed this at the budget subcommittee this week and a copy of the recommendations are in novice. But let me just go through them because people listening would not be able to access that right now anyway. So it's 300,000 and that's what we were aiming for and looking at what were the asks, what were some of the areas that we felt that we really did need to have some extra funding and one of course we've talked about is reserve teaching positions. We have two positions in the budget as it stands. This additional money would allow one additional at a rate that we would have an elementary teacher. There's also an additional FTE of a teacher FTE for the high school for a combination of academics and administration. I've had conversations with the principal of the high school and curriculum leaders about where are areas that we need to expand different offerings both for core classes as well as electives. And originally the high school had asked for 2.7 and even that had been pared down. Over the last few years the high school has really not been given a lot of additional FTEs and yet the number of students that have entered the high school has been increasing and we're going to see an increase next year also somewhere between 60 and 70 students. So the high school is very close to having students select their courses. So how this actually gets distributed, so with this 1.0 and the other 2.0 how it gets distributed remains to be seen with respect to the choices of students. But included in this is some money for extra administrative help. Can I ask you a question, would there be a single person who is both an administrator and a teacher? Yes. So that would potentially be a union issue, right? It would be a union issue that we'll have discussions about. As we do on many topics like this, we do. Alright, so that was the high school. We also know that we probably have an inadequate number of reserve teaching assistant positions. Currently in the budget we would have 5 in reserve, this would allow us another 4. And I have, I just want to mention here, I've had a couple of emails recently, I think maybe some of you have too, from parents concerned about teaching assistants in the kindergarten. And I can tell from the, at least one in particular, there's a misconception that we are not having the current level of TA support that we have next year. And that's not the case. We have half-time TAs right now in all of our kindergarten. Some kindergarten actually have a full-time TA. And those choices have been made for a couple of considerations. One might be a one-to-one teaching aide who then also supports the student and is in the classroom. But we also have a few large classroom TAs as well. All of our kindergarten teachers next year will have a half-time teaching assistant as they've had. In fact, that was a really important choice we made a year ago because when the kindergarten grant was no longer funded by the state, we had to make that decision as to whether we were going to actually move teaching assistants in the kindergarten into the operating budget. And we did do that. To have full-time teaching assistants, we're talking in the neighborhood of an additional $200,000 someday. There's also some additional district professional development that was not addressed in the other budget. In particular, that we felt very strongly about but hadn't included at the time. And that is a continuation of our week-long summer course on responsive classrooms for elementary teachers. There is a tremendous demand for wanting to be in that course. And it's a fairly expensive course to offer, but this will give us that opportunity. The only thing that hasn't happened yet is deciding on the week. We also talked in the budget about having half-time assistant principals in a couple schools as a pilot. But the money that was allocated in terms of two FTEs at the administrative level wasn't quite sufficient for every principal to have some additional support. This small additional amount of $25,000 will help to make sure that every principal has some support. And the preferred support for a number of our principals is to have another behavior support person in the building. Then there was some concern expressed at this table about the building subs being reduced at the middle school and the high school. And so this restores a building sub both at the high school and at the middle school. And then lastly, one area that we have, we've done some work with elementary math interventionist through the Title I. We are concerned that Title I may even be more reduced than we think it will be when we first put in the budget what the revenue would be from Title I. As we were hearing about the block grants, there is a move at the part of Washington right now to really contract entitlement grants. So this is, you know, if we don't have a contraction, then this will also give us a way to be able to help more students that need some support. Right now at the elementary level we have coaches for our teachers and this person would work actually with students that have been identified that need extra support.  And there's one other change in the budget that I do want to mention tonight. In terms of money there's no change, but in terms of what it would be. In the other budget, the budget's been proposed and we asked for two learning specialists at the elementary. And after more discussion with principals, we decided that probably would be more beneficial and given the caseloads that the department has looked at to have one learning specialist and have another literacy coach. Right now we have two literacy coaches who are being stretched tremendously. And I think the one thing you heard from the teachers at the elementary level is that they want more of that type of support and they also want more teaching assistance. So they want more support. And so that's why we made that adjustment. Okay, so now open it to discussion questions, comments, similar type of thing on the proposal. Dr. Allison Ampe. I just want to say so budget met on Monday and we did hear the additions that you heard proposed. And we made a motion which passed to move that the committee approve the additions as proposed. Not to say we can't discuss it, but I'd like to bring that motion forward. That's the motion making tonight or that was the motion you're reporting on? That was the motion that we made for, I mean we're bringing this. You're bringing the motion tonight. Okay. Great. Okay. So discussion on the motion then. Okay, that's good. Mr. Hayner. I just want to be on the record saying that I personally believe for educational reasons a full-time aid kindergarten and all kindergartens is essential because the year is a prescriptive year to develop the diagnosis going forward. Early identification of developmental educational psychological needs is most important. It's financially beneficial to identify early and remediate as early as you can. I've said this before, it's not no. Mr. Carton. Yes, and I'll just chime in as well that I mean it was the administration that made the choice to move with principal support rather than doing the full-time kindergarten TAs. So certainly if people are concerned about that they can talk to their principals and get more feedback on why that choice was made. Okay. I'm going to, oh, Mr. Schliffman, yeah. I just want to note that our schools have expanded tremendously over the past few years. We've added over 500 students in the past three years. Our enrollment's gone up 10%. Much of this enrollment increase has been at the elementary level. And the model of a principal and a secretary or clerk being responsible for building worked 15 years ago when the enrollments were in the two 300s and we're pushing 500 kids. And leadership matters. And if principals do not receive sufficient support, they're going to start looking for positions elsewhere where they're going to have to be supporting infrastructure to do the job. The state has come forth with a lot of additional requirements in terms of staff evaluation. It is an onerous task to do that alone. We want our principals to be instructional leaders and not doing administrative trivia. In order to make the school really great, our instructional leaders need to be free to do that work. And every year they've come for us unselfishly looking to move money to teaching in classrooms. This year the teachers came into this room and said our principals need help. Our administrators need help. They're overwhelmed. And to move into support for the administrative leaders of this district is essential for us to maintain quality education in the building. I just have two questions. The total number of reserve teaching positions in the district now and the budget will be three for the whole district. Well, I think more realistic, three at the elementary because the additional FTEs at the high school will fill that gap. Okay. And the academic and the FTE at the high school, I was reading something else. That's the dean position. Is that what that is? It's a combination. The dean position could be a point for more than likely that's what it would be next year with the idea that this is going to involve into a full time position. To be teaching. To be a combination. We'll work on with the union and how that looks. Okay. And then I just want to say the thing I think I always say is that we, you know, we pass this and then the superintendent has discretion over the course of the summer to fill positions based on, you know, availability. So just a word of that. Thank you. Mr. Hinner. I just want to make it clear. I am not suggesting that we should not listen to the principles, not listen to the requests. I just feel that it is very it is paramount, in my mind, as a former educator as one who's done a lot of research in early childhood development, the importance of that. I'm not, I don't want us to be in a position, either or and I would like it to be found somewhere else. I just want to make it clear that I'm not opposing any of the things that are going in and being added. I think they're all necessary in going forward. Thank you. So I'd like to open a can of worms and I'm just opening it. I'm not advocating for it necessarily. I just wanted to say maybe we should discuss it next year. Which is that our relationship with the state funding formula in Chapter 70 means that additional kids no longer give us as much additional Chapter 78. Which means if we were to re-institute small kindergarten fees, we wouldn't lose any money from that. No, I'm not advocating it. It won't work. You can't. You can't. You cannot institute a kindergarten fee. For a full-time kindergarten. For a full-time kindergarten. Because what has happened is a result. Okay.  And the thing is, is that when we were at halftime, we were technically halftime in offering the other half for a fee. We were only getting aid based on halftime student. But the formula's changed for now. No, no, no. The formula itself hasn't changed. But we would not gain anything by giving back the full-time tuition and charging money. We would only be hurting the kindergarten parents. As I understand it, because we've gotten wealthier, we don't get additional Chapter 78 in that way. The reason why the Chapter 78 is lagging is because the governor has not properly inflated the underlying Chapter 70 budget. And so that more and more cost is being placed on the cities and towns. Because as the underlying Chapter 70 cost is underinflated, that means the state's share is compressed. Because we still have a formula-based minimum local contribution. Which we have to meet. But if the state says it costs less to educate kids, it's their share that goes down. The big action item we have before us, if we want our Chapter 70 money to go back up where it should, is to make sure that this millionaire's tax passes next year. And put pressure back on the state to say that they have an obligation to fulfill their share. I wasn't advocating for it. I just wanted to throw it out and let's look at the analysis next year. That was all I wanted to. I didn't want to speak to her. Okay, go ahead. I think Dr. Seuss is correct that it might not affect how much money came into Chapter 70 if we were to switch back. However, I think it would change our relationship with the town. Right now we get almost a million dollars earmarked as in lieu of kindergarten tuition. So that money would go away. So there would be more money coming into the town coffers. Because it wouldn't be coming to us. Anyways, no, I don't think it's a good idea. Again, I wasn't necessarily advocating. Anyway, yeah. Okay, so let's vote on Dr. Allison Ambe's motion. Seconded by Mr. Thielman. All in favor? Aye. Opposed? No. Okay, so six in favor, one opposed. Oh, so five, you're right. I was counting wrong. Yes, exactly, five because Dr. Seuss is not here. Okay, so do we have additional... So now we have to move to the budget, to the final budget. So I move approval of the budget as amended by the budget subcommittee. By the budget subcommittee's amendment. Okay. Seconded by Mr. Cardin, Mr. Thielman. Any discussion of that motion? Mr. Hayner? I will know as I did before for the reasons I've stated before. Thank you. I feel it should be increased. Okay, any other discussion? Dr. Allison Ambe? I'm going to vote for it. I am...as Mr. Hayner feels, we need more money and there's places where I feel we're not doing as good a job as we could be if we have more money. But I think that this is a reasonable allocation of the funds that we were given and by staying within our budget this year I think this is a good thing for where we may need to go next year. Okay, so motions on table and seconded, all in favor of passing the budget as amended? Say aye. Aye. Opposed? No. Okay, so that is five one. Okay. So now we have a discussion approval for the principal Gibbs School job description and Dr. Bodie, do you want to give us some background? Yes, we are presenting to you tonight and I'll have Mr. Spiegel speak to it. A new job description. This is a new position in the district and when we do have a new position, we bring forward to you the job description for your approval and that was...you've had that in Novus. So our plan is once we have approval for the job description, then we will go forward with a posting of this position and go through the process we usually do in which we have a select...a search committee that will meet with candidates and we already have the people selected from the AEA as well as I believe we have the...we have parent representation and we also have representation from AAA. So we're ready to go but this is...before we can actually post it we need to have your approval and so I don't know if Mr. Spiegel would like to speak a little bit to it. Anything that's any different than any of our other principal job descriptions? No, I mean I think it was based...it took a lot of, you know, based on what was in existence at the Audison principal position description and revised it, amended it to be more specific to the sixth grade a little ways but I mean a lot of what the principal does in our schools is similar in any of the schools so you know this is...but this is a new type of building for Arlington with just one grade and what that's gonna mean and so...and the other thing that's different is we are posting for the position...we will post for it now at this time of year and hope to hire someone this spring and the position would officially begin in July of 2018 however we would appoint someone for the 17-18 school year on a stipend basis most likely to be involved in the planning process but that person would...it would not be their full-time job to be the Gibbs principal for the 17-18 year, it would become their full-time job in beginning in 18 July of 2018 Okay, yes, Mr. Othman. So just a time of question, you're posting now, you hire the person, they'll be part of the district they'll be somewhere that's presumably working in one of the schools and then...and then...and you're also gonna...as soon as you post this you'll invite people to form a committee to be on the committee. So we already...we've already...the AEA has already chosen the representatives to this committee there might be some...I know some parents that the superintendent reached out to...district administrators will be part of the committee. I don't think it's been completely finalized but we will have...I think it'd be good to have some parents in that committee. We will. So I understand that the parents are coming from the already existing Gibbs committee so that we're not making... We're not actually going out again. Got it. Okay, that's what I want to clarify. Thank you. Yes, Mr. Hayner. I have several questions and possibly a comment. Thank you to look down through the different ones I'm going to address under the qualifications number two. Shouldn't it be specific to either middle school or secondary certification? So here's the thing about the licensure. I mean the licensure I think if I look for principal in Massachusetts is either K-6 or 5-8. Is no secondary? No. Well there is for...not secondary. It's...I think there's really elementary middle and high school principals in our license in Massachusetts. And so I think we could conceivably hire someone with either a K-6 license or a 5-8 license. So they'd be appropriately hired for this position. If someone had both that would be great. I think it's important to be specific on down to number three. It says at least five years of successful elementary and middle school teaching. Why would you have to have an elementary? Can I answer that? Yes. Only because I was the one that kind of brought that forward as a requirement. This is a school that's going to focus on the transition between elementary school and middle school. And so after much discussion with teachers and other administrators, it was felt that if a teacher had or a candidate, sorry, a candidate had both elementary and middle school experience, they would understand the trend. They would have better understanding of the transition. So this is our preferred. It doesn't mean that we would discount out a hand someone who did not have this, but this is what our preference would be. I'm just a little bit concerned. We've spent a lot of money on people dealing with the emotional transition. The issues of like that where we're looking for an administrator, we're looking for a, I'm just responding, an administrator and someone who's going to be doing evaluations. Yes, be concerned about the child as well, but because if they go for that middle school certification, that's part of the training in it. That's just my response to this. Previous administrative experience required at what level? So that, again, that is could be elementary, could be middle, could be both. I mean, I think we would, because this is unique, because there are some districts in the state that still have elementary schools that include sixth grade. There are some districts in the state that have middle schools that go from five to eight or four to eight even. There's a range of administrators from different places that could potentially qualify. I get all I'm saying is I'm not questioning any of that. I think it just, it should be a little bit more clear. That's all. Now down to number ten, other qualification acceptable to the superintendent. I mean, that is, to me, to me, that leaves it, I can pick you or I know I want you and I don't want you and you're going to have those qualifications because we're not telling the people up front. I think this is just very broad and open-ended. It may have been in the oddison, old oddison description. I mean, it's not essential. And this is my opinion, my opinion only, but this in my opinion seems to be written with specifically someone in mind. I'm not making the accusation. That's my opinion. Yeah, I mean other qualifications is acceptable to the superintendent. I just don't think it's an appropriate sentence to be in here because if we're going to be doing this the right way, we're going to be up front about what are the qualifications we are. And if we have double secret qualifications, it just doesn't work. The other thing is that we really need to take the minimum qualifications and divide it out from the preferred to because if you take a look at something that states minimum qualifications you know, if you see at least five years of successful elementary and middle school teaching experience with evidence of strong leadership ability, you're saying that you're requiring somebody to have middle school and elementary and if the statement at the table here tonight is we prefer to have somebody who's had both elementary and middle, the statement at the table conflicts with the statement in the job description so that I would want to see the qualifications to reflect what the must-haves and nice to have. Otherwise we may have good candidates who will self-select out of the process based on well, they want this and I don't have it so forget about it, I'm going elsewhere. The other thing is to my mind I guess I'll ask the question first, how are we doing on the Odyssey search? So we've had some interviews. I think we're probably going to have some more interviews. You know, we got some candidates that look promising but we would like to go back in and see if we can see who else is in the pool that we could bring in so we're in a couple weeks I think we're going to have another night of interviews. See, the reason why I ask that is to my thinking I wouldn't want to go put out this job until we resolve the Odyssey job because I think one of the things that we need to work off of is work off of who the partner will be in terms of dividing the school at. So I am not ready to approve a job description in a posting until I see the outcome of the Odyssey. I just want to know. I have a clarification question. So are you saying the posting or because you could post something and then not look at the results or not have made decisions about them or do you mean the final approval of the Gibbs principle? I'd say that I wouldn't want to put it out and start looking for people because you might take a look at the candidate we hire and might want to adjust what we're looking for based on the Odyssey person coming in. The thing is that there's going to be a definite partnership both in terms of dividing the school next year and in terms of operating with the Odyssey principle in subsequent years and it would be a two for to have a Gibbs principle who compliments the Odyssey principle and if we know what we're getting in the Odyssey principle we can craft the desired qualifications to align to what we have in that position. Just for clarification on that, when we went down to Needham the biggest negative they had was when they hired two principles in their separate middle schools, separate when they hired them jointly with input from one to the other, there was a compatibility that worked real well. They emphasized that. We do not do the hiring. I want to make that clear. We approve the job description and the hiring is left to the superintendent. That's 100%. We don't have any input in that as a body. The points that Mr. Schlichman is making, that it would be nice to have one and then get the other. I'm concerned about the timeline and that we're going to be building a school and basically creating a school out of nothing and I feel no matter whether we have an Odyssey principle or not we need someone working on making this school out of nothing come June, July and I'm thinking of how with the high school we took two years to do the search and it was good to go back and we got a really strong candidate but that first year we didn't find anyone that we wanted to bring forward and I can not having any knowledge of how the Odyssey search is going I could see that could happen. I disagree that we should hold on this I can see in the best of possible worlds, yes we'd have these things in order and have lots of input and stuff but I'm just not sure timing wise and potentially candidate wise we're going to be able to fulfill all those qualities and I think it's more important to find a good principle and to have them in place and to have them help shape the school as it's being created. So I think, so I agree with Dr. Allison Ampey, I think that there have been a lot of conversations about doing a search. The superintendent wants to begin a search. Superintendent by law doesn't have to do a search, he can make an appointment and that's it. We're approving a job description. You know there's a, the second paragraph of the job description just talks about timing so it's really not part of the job description actually. I mean you know when you're evaluated, not going to be evaluated on that second paragraph, you're going to be evaluated on the on what you're supposed to do. So I think right now we should, my vote is to approve the job description and then let the superintendent do her job. Just one more point and I think it's to Mr. Spiegel in the second paragraph up at the top it's a job goals. I'd ask you to look at the second paragraph and right after spring of 2017 I would suggest eliminated be expected to. It sounds like a choice thing and at the very end if the committee chooses to approve this tonight I would suggest approval subject to the committee approving the stipend and final salary because that, I mean and that should be done in executive session not in the job description but going forward. I mean, can I have your response to that? I mean that was that will be posted and I can revise what would be posted in terms of the language. It's not necessarily part of the job description going forward from July 8th but it is the expectation of whoever we, when we would post it that this is what we're looking for. Someone who can jump in now but will really take for time. I understand but this is a new stipend, this is a new salary because it's a brand new position. We own that piece of it. It would be very detrimental to have interviews with people. They may ask what is the stipend or what is the final salary. It can't be done until we approve it. That's all I'm saying. Whether it belongs, it's something for us to consider, something for us to remember and I don't want to tie the superintendent or whoever the hiring people she may designate hand by having a salary still out there dangling. You say to somebody, we're going to offer you something in here but the school committee has to approve it. We have a salary in the budget right now and if we are going to exceed that, yes. Of course, we have to have a discussion about that. Did we approve that? This is an issue that I brought up before. If you put salaries in and it's just an overall salary budget, this is a new position and we have the right, even though we may have approved a money, we have to approve the dispersing of that money in this position. Well, maybe we have a salary in there for our audits and principal and that gives sort of a range, an idea about what a middle school principal would have because this is a middle school principal. Clearly when we get to that point we'll certainly have a discussion and perhaps we can put that on a future executive session. I want to talk to one point on the job description and that is the last one that people are having some disagreement about the superintendent can assign. This isn't a selection issue. This is once someone is in a position... We're not questioning the performance of the minimum qualifications. I wouldn't have any problem that being put into the contract. Other qualifications as acceptable to the superintendent as a minimum qualification. It's just, it's awkward. I think when you say minimum, you should really mean minimum. And then, you know, suggested or preferable. But that line belongs in the contract, not in a job description. That's all I'm saying. So I think we're deleting 10. It's just 10, but we're not deleting number... The position that is requested by the superintendent is valid language and it belongs in any job description. That's not a problem. Okay, Mr. Carton. So I'd like to move approval of the performance description with two changes. One is the deletion of qualification number 10. And the other is changing qualification number 3 to elementary and or middle school teaching experience. Second. Okay. Great. So that's a motion on the table. Any further discussion of the motion? Dr. Allison Ampe. This is for the administration. Possibly Mr. Spiegel. Is it better to say elementary and or middle school? Or do you want to say five years of successful teaching preferably with both elementary and middle school experience? Yeah, but that can be either minimum qualifications and you got to have to separate. I mean, one thing I could... I could just say qualifications instead of minimum qualifications. That's one thing. And then qualifications. And then within each one we can say preferred or... And I might defer to Dr. Cheson on that question that you had. If we change it to qualifications, I mean, we definitely want the person to have middle school and it is preferred that they would have upper elementary so in terms of, you know what I'm saying? But I'm happy to word it any way the committee is comfortable. I just want to make sure that the person has the visibility to both sides of the coin because we really have talked about how it's so important to have this be a real transitional school and to build a school that helps with the transition both in and out. And that was my only intent. So I have a question. There seems to be so many changes. If we delay this to the next meeting, is that a problem in terms of our timing? What we would like is to have person in place by late spring. Some of the good news I'm going to give you tonight has to do with AEF giving us a very generous planning grant. And so we will be putting together committees. In fact, that we've already determined what the committees are. There's going to also be curriculum committees in thinking about what this transitional school is going to be like. I would think that the person that we hire would be great for that person to be part of summer programs. Now we have sort of guidelines on stipends in terms of the work and the summer. So there's nothing that's going to be off the range here. It's going to be pretty much along the lines that we've we do. And actually if it's a person in district then there also may be no need for much because it might be during a regular work day. So there's a lot of options here. But I don't disagree that I want you to be aware of what the stipend would be and have you agree to it and what the salary would be when we get to that point. So waiting another two weeks would be alright. And then we would post after that. So that's I think it might make sense to wait but we also have a motion on the table that we need to vote on. Does that give you enough time? Yeah. They think it's okay. It just seems like there's enough changes that might be helpful. But does it give you enough time to have a full process with lots of participation? That's what I'm concerned about. Yes, we would post it and then there's a period of number of weeks that we have to have the posting out there and then we'll begin the interview. Just for clarification, correct me if I'm wrong. Your intent is to do an internal search. That's correct. As far as time. Sending things out to newspapers and stuff like that. I think Mr. Thielman was asking about community and teacher participation in the process. We can set up the committee prior to agreeing to it. So the motion has been withdrawn so we're going to look at this again in a couple of weeks and hopefully we can make more sense to us hopefully. And if anyone has further comments after looking through this again they should send them to Mr. Spiegel. Okay. So discussion on warrant articles and this is what I did is I just sort of threw all the warrant articles on that have anything to do. We may have no discussion on some of them or we may have a bigger discussion. We are actually not quite as bad timing as we were before but Just to clarify procedure, are we just discussing or is the discussion subject to a motion for support or what? Are you going to leave that open? We can leave that open. I wasn't necessarily thinking that we would take motions but if there is something appropriate and someone wants to do it, absolutely. The reason I'm asking in public participation, several people were asking us to support Sanctuary City. No, it's not necessarily. And then ask for a resolution so maybe we can deal with that piece. Right. I actually think this is something we should discuss next time we meet. Sounds good. I think it's a full agenda item. It might give policy a chance to do something. And then policy might be able to look at it and it just feels like this is something that we need to have a bigger discussion about. So just so that I think the what we usually do with these is if the school committee wants to take a vote on it, then the chairperson or another member of the town meetings on the school committee will get up and say school committee discuss this, we voted to support otherwise at town meeting you vote whatever you want. That's all it is. And most of the time you don't do much. Great. Mr. Cardin. Just to clarify though, for most of these we don't have the recommendation yet to support it. Right. We don't have exactly. So we can discuss and say yeah, we're inclined to support that but until we get the recommended vote. That's a good point. So we should probably write. We don't have the exact language of the warrant article because when the select man. Right. Was going to vote on the select man. Are you suggesting to wait to see what the town meeting warrant specifically says? So what we're saying is if we were to vote on something, we would have to also schedule a meeting during town meeting because the language of the warrant article could change. We usually have it in advance. Or just that we will have information a few weeks that we don't have about the language of the, I mean. I don't see it changing dramatically on any of the articles we have before us because it would be a substance of change and that would require opening the warrant. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. They all change dramatically. Every single item changes article 19 article 15 are not going to change unless they open the warrant again. Substantially that I cannot imagine. I think it's like it's been intended. Right, Paul. The article itself is the warning to the town what the possible vote is. Right. And as the moderator points out every year, the article is not the recommended vote. At some point, a recommended vote is going to be put forward. Now I know that the select men have looked at article 15 and there's language that they're reviewing. I don't know if they've reviewed it or not. I don't have their approved vote. But if we want to say now that we are inclined to support it, then the homework would be to go and find out what the proposed recommended vote by the sponsoring body is be it the select, be it reported out by the select men or the finance committee or whichever body it is. It will happen in a few weeks. And then confirm that we support the recommended vote of the select men or the recommended vote of the finance committee. So if we talk about something and say we have no interest in talking about it going forward, we ignore it. If we look at it and say we want to take a position on that, then the next step would be to go and research what the proposed vote at town meeting would be, inform the board who'd be making that motion to the floor of town meeting, inquiring as to what their proposed vote will be, looking at it and seeing if we want to sign on to it. So that should be the way we approach it. Excuse me, the select men did take a public vote on articles 15 and 19.  It was unanimous. I think what makes sense is to go through these, have a brief discussion of each one, and then if we want to come back and take a vote on the recommended vote. And I understand there's some that is up there. I don't know if it's been reviewed by council. Actually I don't know the size of it. I'll clarify this tomorrow. So article 15 is the bylaw amendment to the pride commission. And what I want to note is that this commission will have a school committee representative on it. So if it's voted by town meeting there would be a place for the school committee to appoint somebody. And if that were to happen, that would happen in the fall. So just to make that note. Any comments on that? Mr. Slipman. Yeah, I mean one of the jobs we have here is to ensure that our schools are safe and supportive for all our students. And I think the pride commission is taking on that task and as a focal point of supporting our students takes, you know, sexual identity issues are really come to come to head while kids are of school age in many cases. And they need support. And to have, my thinking originally when I saw this is I hope that we have an appointment or two to the commission because the importance of providing a safe environment for our kids. And that if there is a school committee appointment to this commission, I think we look at the language and support it because I think it's an important thing for us to be behind as well. Okay. And I have to say we did discuss this in community relations because we got the heads up that there would be a suggestion to have a school committee appointment. And community relations was in favor of it. Okay, so next one. So I mean a motion could be that you know the school committee supports having a member of this body on that commission. We can make that motion today. We can make that motion today. It's in the record. Okay. So I move that we support having at least one member of the school committee appointed to the one member appointed by the school. One member appointed by, thank you, one member appointed by the school committee to the commission. Second. Okay. To the pride commission. Any more discussion all in favor? Okay. Do we have to frame that as a request? Because we're not the ones organizing it. For me? They asked us to. Oh, I'm sorry, I missed that. They asked me. So this is our response. Okay. We will have some discussion in community relations. And it's now in the official language. Okay. So, what? Call it. Okay. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Opposed? Okay. It's unanimous. Any more discussion on article 15? Okay. Article 19. Now this is the town treasure. This is a potentially interesting discussion that we'll have. Mr. Hinner. The article itself is to vote to convert the office of town treasure from an elected to an appointed position. I'm paraphrasing it. There's a little bit more. At the discussion with the selectman when they voted to approve this unanimously, they tried to separate this from the what has come in the past of consolidated finance. I'm going to quote the chair of the selectman, Ms. Mahan, from the League of Women Voters, the document that she went. That was a question asked for not only select people, but for the three of us on the school committee. Her answer was the town's financial management structure needs to be reorganized so that the various financial decisions making centers are accountable to the town manager through an appointed treasurer. The chair in her response, our chair, Dr. Seuss, stated she'd like to see a consolidated structure using the language. I'm quoting from the DOR report January 2012 which was basically the following explains how the consolidated finance department works in Constable, the model used in the DOR report and recommended for Arlington. And this is what's going forward and I'm surprised it was alluded to by one of the people tonight, Mr. Ruderman, of the consequences. Quote from that report, the school department has dedicated person. They're talking about Constable, the assistant finance director who focuses solely on school finances prepares the school budget and oversees all school accounting. She is certified school business manager. No problem with that. And then, comma, but reports the finance director. It's on page 20 in the fifth paragraph of that DOR report. My issue as it was several years ago is that if the CFO or whatever we call it does all that work and reports to the town manager, we no longer have control over that position and as such, we may, we would be relinquishing our fiduciary responsibilities. Can I finish, please? The issue, the issue here is it was before, we have to vote to relinquish that power in order to have a consolidated finance department and it was clear in the DOR report it will not happen if the school committee does not go forward with this. This is the majority of the select committee have already indicated it in public meetings and the majority, the whole, I'm sorry, at least four of the members indicated they want a consolidated finance. The article itself only calls for an elected treasure. The person who is running Mr. Common, the one who is going to be elected, he's the only one running has indicated that he supports an elected position is looking for efficiency in this department, is looking to appoint the deputy treasurer as the full time as the day-to-day worker, that position is appointed by the selectmen but supervised and responsible to the treasurer. I am nervous about this, this to me is a backdoor technique in my opinion of getting to what they want. Yes, we will have a final vote but once the town does the appointment, makes this appointment, I've said enough. Okay. I think we're addressing two different issues. We have a legal responsibility for our own budget. It is our biggest policy document. The formulation of this budget, the monitoring of the budget, is our legal responsibility. We have before us here person's agenda and the vendor warrant which we need to approve. Every check that's being sent out by the school department is approved through this warrant and this is our legal responsibility. We have many legal responsibilities which cannot be taken away from us by law unless the state legislature makes a specific change to invest the power of budget from this committee. And I don't see any reason why we would go along with that. The town would go along with that. It makes absolutely no sense. We need a licensed certified school business official to not only understand schools but is reporting to us as we craft our budget and we monitor our budget. That said, there are functions that happen across the street in terms of paying bills. All our money comes from the town. It's spent through the town. What we don't want to have is waste and duplication of efforts of people keying in or doing approvals on one step and doing the same thing all over again once it goes across the street. I favor any efficiency we can squeeze out of this. I do not favor in any way losing our authority or responsibility over the budget. Because if we have budget and policy and we give up budget we have nothing before us. On the other hand there are a lot of places that have appointed town treasurers and city treasurers where you have very effective school committees, school departments, and operations. I do not see the election or appointment of the treasurer in any way by itself compromising our ability to function over here on school expenditures. As a policy matter hiring a town treasurer we have a more diverse applicant pool if we extend our request for candidates beyond the borders of the town of Arlington. And we have a more efficient hiring process rather than who can get the most votes in a town election. It is a professional position. I do not see it as much of a policy position as some do. I think it is a managerial position. I think most of the work should be directly accountable to the townside that is responsible for the administration of the budget. We have software clashes between the town and the budget and the treasurer's office. The efficiencies of incorporating the treasurer's office on the townside I think are worth considering. And I did write in my league statement that I support that first step. I do not think we need an elected treasurer. I think that in a modern society where we can go out and find qualified applicants the best applicant will be one that we can hire professionally. And for full time. So I favor the article if it is limited to exploring further for the purposes of putting on the ballot a question whether or not we should appoint the treasurer. I think that is a reasonable conversation. The question is will potentially be put on a ballot. So the question is what is the proposed vote?  Thanks. The question before us is specifically about whether the treasurer is appointed or elected. I don't think it's something for the school committee to weigh in on the other plans that people are talking about. Obviously have effect on us, the consolidated finance department. But our interaction with the treasurer are quite limited. We have much more interaction with the controller than the treasurer. So I move that the school committee does not take a position on this article. You recommend it. I don't know if we want to vote on it. But the recommendation that we don't take it about. Yeah, it probably makes sense. But Mr. Ethelman. So I would say Wait, okay. No, we didn't. Gently encouraging him to withdraw it. So I was on the town government reorganization committee several years ago with John Billifer and Steve and it was a very interesting group. But the way the thing was framed is that we couldn't talk about having an appointed treasurer. So that was sort of this restriction on this committee and was about how we consolidate and communicate better between the school department and the town. I haven't reviewed those documents in several years. It's a DR report that Bill's talking about 2012. It's been a long time since I've looked at that. So I think it's, I don't think, I do recall though that the school committee would have to take an affirmative vote to change the duties of the CFO in any way shape or form. So it doesn't really matter what the town meeting does. This body has to take a vote if we want to change their duties. So I think I remember that accurately from that time. So I agree with Len. I think we don't need to do anything except be aware of it. I think it's a good, and I think at town meeting we've all been prepped for this and we can all pine. But I don't think there's anything for the school committee to do tonight on this thing. So I don't, I just want to have one little thing I know we've talked about this a lot which is that the DR report, I mentioned this in my league strongly suggests that the town get consolidated before you even consider bringing in the schools. And so before you even have this discussion, there's a lot of work that needs to get done on the town side I think. And we can't really look at what the real proposal is I think until that has gone through. But if I may, the DOI report, the statement of consolidation means take the town finances and the school finances and consolidate them. But they recommend do the town first. The major issue with that time, and I don't want to drag it up, is what had happened in 2010 with the deficit and the town had to deal with. That was the main purpose of doing it at that time. Then 2012 came and looked for the consolidation again, which they used the report. I agree with Jeff. We have to make a final vote at that time. We're not taking any action now. Okay, so we're not taking any action. Let's move on. Okay, so 27 legislation, a special education reserve fund. This was in a couple of places. This is one of the ones that was doubled in the special as well. No. Two votes. This one here is an acceptance of legislation around creating a special education reserve fund. And it would operate, from my understanding, much like a revolving account. That you could, like the year we deposited, we've done that actually twice. Money we put into the stabilization account could go into the