Good evening. I'm calling to order the meeting of the Arlington School Committee on Thursday, October 14th, 2021. I am Bill Hayner, the chair, but made me to confirm that all members and persons anticipated on the agenda are present and can hear me. When I call your name, please respond in the affirmative. Ms. Ekston. Yes. Mr. Schlickman. Good evening. Dr. Ampe. Yes. Ms. Morgan. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Mr. Carden. Yes. Dr. Holman. Yes. Dr. McNeil. Yes. Mr. Spiegel. Yes. Ms. Helmer. Yes. And I'm not sure if the student representatives here, let's see, Megan Carmody, are you present? I am not seeing either of them. Okay. I'll hold off. And tonight's meeting in the alley. Here's one. Here they are. Did you see the links? Yeah. Okay. Sorry. Megan Carmody. Just say yes, you're here. Yeah. Thank you, Megan. And Amy Chalario. Is she here? I don't see Amy yet. Okay. We'll, we'll get her intervention. Thank you. Thank you. Tonight's meeting of the alley. The school committee is being conducted remotely consistent with an act signed into law on June 16th, 2021. That extends certain COVID-19 measures adopted during the state of emergency. The act includes an extension until April 1st, 2022 of the remote meeting provisions of Governor Baker's March 12th, 2020 executive order, suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law. The meeting is being held on the town's website for this meeting. Allows public bodies to meet entirely remotely. So long as reasonable, public access is afforded. So that the public can follow along with the deliberations of the meeting. Before we begin, permit me to offer a few notes. First, this meeting is being conducted via zoom and is being recorded. And it's also being simultaneously broadcast on ACMI. Persons wishing to join the meeting by zoom. They find information on how to do so on the town's website. Persons participating by zoom are reminded that they will be visible to others. And that if they wish to participate, who are asked to provide your full name and in the interest of developing a record of the meeting. All participants are advised that people may be listening. Who do not provide comment. And those persons are not required to identify themselves. Both zoom participants and persons watching on ACMI can follow the posted agenda materials. Also found on the town's website using the novice agenda platform. And finally, each vote tonight will be taken by roll call. I'm now going to read a statement and I will read this at the beginning of every meeting concerning public comment. The members of the public who wish to address the committee, there will be 30 minutes of public comments set aside. Depending on the number of people who sign up, time allotments may be reduced, but will not exceed three minutes each. If the number of people who sign up exceeds what can be done in 30 minutes, the number of speakers will be capped and will be invited to the public comment. The committee will be invited to the public comment. It will be based on time stamp of their e-mail to Ms. Diggins. The school committee is respectfully request participants of the public to utilize their camera if possible while speaking and to adhere to the public comment policy BEDH that requires participants to provide the name and address. Speakers may offer such objective criticisms of the school operations and programs as concerned. The committee will not hear anything about school personnel or against any member of the school community, except for the school committee or the superintendent in their capacity as the operational leader of the Arlington public schools. Additionally, the committee will not hear anything that might identify or infringe upon a student's privacy by name or incident. If you would like to sign up to speak, please e-mail Ms. Diggins at www.ma.us by 12 noon on the date of the meeting. First item on the agenda is AHS student representatives to the school committee. Dr. Holman. Hi, everybody. I see that our student representative Megan Carmody is here and at this point I'll invite her to talk. I know that our student representatives were also considering or potentially needing to swap off when they would attend our meetings because they're very busy people with a lot of extracurricular activities. So Ms. Carmody, I would love to invite you to update the school committee on any student things that are going on at AHS that you think that they should know about as well as say hello to everybody. Welcome to the team. Thank you. Yeah. Hi, I'm Megan Carmody. I'm a junior at AHS. There is another student representative, but she could not attend this meeting. Her name is Amy. So you'll probably meet her in the future. Yeah. So what's going on AHS is that the drama guild is having their first play of the year and they'll be performing metamorphosis by Mary Zimmerman at noon and 4pm Saturday and Sunday. So if you'd like to go and see that, you can look at the AHS website for more information. As well at the end of the month, we'll be hosting a club day for students to find new clubs and get more involved in the school. And then on a student council update, the student council is currently holding their freshman student officer elections. Megan, I just want you to be aware that as each item comes up, I will invite the members of the committee to make any comment. And I will, if you want to make comment, just raise your hand and give us the student view of this. So thank you very much for attending. Really appreciate this. I would like to take Mr. Spiegel. Sorry. Sorry. One other guest who's here at the very top of our agenda. I apologize. I didn't update my agenda. Go right ahead. Okay. I just want to take a minute because we had, we had put this up at the top of the agenda. And I want to make sure Sarah Marie doesn't feel like she needs to stay though. She's more than welcome to, because we are celebrating Thompson in all sorts of ways tonight. Sarah Marie Jenny is a teacher at the Thompson school. She's teaching third grade this year. And she is previously taught. Is it fourth and fifth grade? Sarah Marie. At the Thompson school. And she was recently recognized. She's actually recognized in the spring as a finalist, semi-finalist for teacher of the year. And they recently published an article in the globe about this. And I wanted to take a minute to applaud Sarah Marie and celebrate our spectacular teachers as we celebrate Thompson today. And invite her to say hello to the committee really quickly. And for all of you to give her our congratulations as well. Well, I spoke about 15 months ago to the community. You might remember it. I was pleading to teach remotely. I live in a multi-generational household with my Mexican American mom. And COVID has disproportionately affected people of color. And I was terrified. When Karen told me that I could teach remotely, I promised that I would do whatever I could to make it the best year ever.  And doing something brand new. And so hard having that confidence really pushed me through. I learned so much. I grew so much. It reminded me a lot of the Peace Corps where you have a plan and then something happens. And then it's totally different, but you roll with it. And a big thing I learned was the questions my students asked more than ever. I needed their questions to know if I was being clear across the screen. I needed to know if my directions were good enough. I was moving too fast, but we developed this community where any question mattered, every question mattered. And by having that understanding, I could pause and know that I needed to take care of whatever they're asking, because for these kids, a tenth to a quarter of their lives has been lived in a global pandemic. And they don't remember things that happened two years ago. Like my daughter doesn't remember going to the museum of science. And she's nine and we used to be members. So they're going through so much. And last year was about community and making sure they felt safe and loved. And it was so hard, but I will treasure it. Always. I missed there. I missed the little toddlers who'd come in and the pet turtle that passed. Sadly, and there was a bearded dragon. We just had, it was such a community. And I felt very privileged to have had the opportunity to work remotely. I'm never going to be grateful for COVID. But I am very grateful to have had that opportunity to push my, my profession in myself. And that was one of the reasons why when third grade opened up, I thought I'm going to, I took that challenge last year and I'll do something new this year. So. But thank you for having me, Sarah. Thank you. And I'm very fortunate to have teachers like you. Without children. Thank you so much. Now, Mr. Spiegel. I ring updates. Sorry. Wait a minute. You have a hand up, Mr. You have a hand up. I'm sorry. Jenna. I apologize. Go right ahead. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. That's okay. I just wanted to congratulate Sarah Marie as well. She's not only a phenomenal teacher. She's one of our phenomenal building reps. You know, supporting her colleagues at Thompson. So congratulations from the AA well deserved. Thank you. I am going to leave with my husband and I are having a night out away from the kids like the second in like. A long time. I can't even remember before. So. Thank you for, thank you for having me. Now I'm going to pause. I'm going to check. One more time. Mr. Spiegel. If you don't make it this time, you're off the hook. You can go away. Go for it. Okay. Well, thank you. That's it. That's hard to follow. So I'm going to be giving the staffing update and.  We've recruited educators and staff. To. To serve our children as well as Sarah Marie. And it's a tough, it's tough to follow, but we are. We are. Attempt is to always hire excellent educators. So I'm going to, I think I can share my screen. Okay. Can you see that? Oops. Yes. I'm going to play from the beginning. Sorry. Okay. So here's the staffing update. So as you know, we have several new administrators in the district, including the superintendent, director of DEI this year, if there's a new position for the district. You know, I think we're going to need to do that. I think we're going to need to do that. You know, because Margaret became the director of DEI, we needed a new Metro director, director of digital learning, director of nursing, a special education coordinator at the middle school and at the elementary school. A lot of new assistant principals in the district. So all of our, thanks to the school committee, all of our assistant principals at the elementary schools are full-time. Full-time, continuing full-time at Stratton, three half-time move to full-time at Bishop, Dallin and Hardy. Two new assistant principals to the district who move from teacher and social worker positions. One at Brackett, one at Thompson and Ms. Chevalier is here for the Thompson assistant principal. And a new assistant principal who is new to the district at Pierce. We have a new assistant principal at Gibbs who moved from the elementary school special ed coordinator position. For the new unit A, A unit A educators, as of this presentation, we had 66 new hires beginning on or after September 1st. We also had 13 educators who started last year after the beginning of the school year. So we're not in my report from last year, but we, because of COVID and some other reasons where we started to do some shifting, we had to hire educators last year. 13 of them are continuing. We have, you know, replace some educators who retired, some who resigned, some who moved to a different position, including the people who became assistant principals and others. Two, we have some educators on full-year leaves of absence and some additional positions new to the budget or because of the needs of the system. And then some of the ads from last year that we added, again, are continuing when they moved into new open positions. They were in positions last year that didn't necessarily continue, but they were able to move into open positions this year. I'd like to, I've been doing exit interviews a couple of different ways. I give people a choice whether they want to do an online exit interview, just filling out a Google form with some questions or one-on-one conversations with me. You know, there are people who move away from the area. Sometimes the commuting time is a challenge for people. There are people who have had made professional career moves within education, including becoming administrators in other districts. And again, some people do leave for compensation reasons. We have had people leave because they're going back to graduate school and then there are other personal reasons. The hires by the school since last year, or yeah, I think, actually I think that's actually since the beginning of this year, the hires for the schools at the beginning of this current school year. A lot of our hires have master's degrees. We have a very well-educated staff in the district that are you know, day educators are highly educated. As we have done every year in this district, we have promoted people who have been teaching assistants or long-term substitutes or student teachers. We also have two of our new hires this year, our former teachers in the district who returned. They left for either other jobs or to take some time off and are now back in the district as a teacher. The paraprofessionals. The paraprofessionals is a broad unit of teaching assistants, behavioral support paraprofessionals, building substitutes. And there's a lot of new ones since last October. We're still looking for some paraprofessionals and teaching assistants in special education primarily. And that's still going on. We have quite a few new administrative assistants in the district, including your school committee and superintendent, Ms. Diggins. We have new building administrative assistants at Pierce, Bishop and Gibbs. We have a new, an ad that started last year in the HR payroll office who sits in our HR suite. We added a position, a curriculum director's administrative assistant, who's working with our curriculum directors to support them. And a person in the business office who replaced someone who moved to a different position. And other new employees include after school program, food service custodians, traffic, desktop support technicians and daycare substitutes. We had a lot of summer program teachers, community ed, athletic coaches. So we've still been doing all of the new hire meetings through virtually through Zoom. New hire forms are sent through DocuSign. And again, we're doing all the things we need to do, including Corey fingerprinting and now proof of COVID vaccination. And again, this is a lot of work for the HR office, for our IT department to both give people accounts and devices, central office staff in all of the central offices, especially payroll, which does a lot to get people on board and paid. And we had a successful new hire orientation this year. We were able to do it mostly in person with some virtual sessions. And, you know, we have a well developed and well run mentoring and induction program that will continue. So that's the new hire report. And I can stop the share there. I think then I can go to the diversity hiring report as well. So let me go to that share. And, okay. So again, we've been, we like to compare the student data to our staffing data. This student data is not complete. We are 2021 numbers are not final. And they do not include out of district students. So there are, there's a little bit of a discrepancy there that we will update when we get the final 20 October 1 this year numbers. But as you can see, I mean, our, you know, we have a, the numbers of students who identify as white, black or African American, Asian, Hispanic, Latino, native Hawaiian Pacific Island or two or more races, American Indian or Alaska native and white. You can see all the breakdown. All employees, again, there is, it's, we have not radically changed since last year in terms of the balance of employees compared to students are, we still have a lot more, the percentage of white employees is much higher than the percentage of white students. And the percentage of employees of color is lower than our percentage of students of color. And that's something that we are working on. And we'll get to that soon. But all the new hire since last October, you can see the numbers, it's quite a few. One of the issues we are working on in our district is that there are quite a few people who do not self-identify. It is a choice in the forms that they fill out, that they do not have to select a, identifying race or ethnicity. It's not something we can force people to do, but we're going to look at ways to encourage people to identify and see if we can kind of clean up this data and have a better idea. I think it's our biggest sort of gap in our data right now. The AA employees. Now, so again, this is all AA unit A, which is the certified educators. They, you can see the numbers there. I will say that one thing that is an issue is when you have some small changes in that are, to already small numbers, if we lose one or two employees, the percentages shift dramatically, as I think you can understand. For paraprofessionals, there's one thing that we're trying to, to figure out the, there is a main, the one thing that is kind of striking in this number is the number of Hispanic paraprofessionals is much lower than last year and it just, we had several resignations at the end of last year. And I need to delve into that more, but other than that, those numbers shift a little bit each year. The rest of the district in terms of administrators and central office and administrative assistants, you can see those numbers and the other employees, including a after school and daycare employees, maintenance, transportation and food service. And there's quite a few non identified in that group that we need to work on. And you can see the students and staff comparisons. So again, we are not reflective exactly to our student population. And that is our goal to become more reflective, have our staff become more reflective of our student population, especially the educators and student facing employees. And next steps. So we now have a director of DEI, which we haven't had before. And the Margaret will work with me with our whole administrative team on efforts to recruit and retain more staff of color. And I think having Margaret on this team specifically focused in this area, not just for staffing, obviously her position is focused on a lot of different areas in the district, but it is a part of her, her, her job that it will be great to have her to work with us and our whole administrative team. We applied for a state grant, which we don't know if it's awarded, if we'll get it or not. But if it is awarded, it would provide some assistance to paraprofessionals and provisionally licensed teachers to, for educator licensure programs and MTEL preparation. We continue to be involved in the mass partnership for diversity in education, which as you know, is a consortium of school districts with a common goal of increasing the number of educators of color in school districts. And Margaret and Dr. McNeil and others are working for developing affinity groups to support staff working in the district. So that is that report. And I'm happy to take questions about either or everything. So you're on mute. Thank you, Len. Go ahead, Len. Thank you. Mr. Spiegel. Just one question on the people who are not self identifying in the private sector under the EOC rules. Employers can do what's called a visual identification. Have we talked with our council about whether we could do that to get more data? Yeah, I think they don't necessarily recommend that. So I will, we'll look more into that with counsel, but it's. Yeah, we haven't, we haven't done that. For this report. We do, you know, we know, you know, by visual data, by other, other knowledge that we do have more staff of color in the district that are not self identified. Great. Thank you. Yeah. Okay. Happy. Thank you. Mr. Spiegel, going back to your first presentation. Looking at the reasons for resignations. I'm wondering if you're hearing more people resigning because of commuting time after, since we've changed the start time for middle school and high school, because I know that was a definite concern for staff when we were discussing this. It's, it's a few have raised that as a concern. I mean, less than five, but I mean, it's, you know, we don't, that hasn't been the primary concern raised, but I have heard that there were people who, you know, had to leave early because of the time, the commute time, the start times of school really changed their commute and they, it didn't make, and we heard this before we made the change that people wouldn't be able to leave their house later. They'd still have to leave at the same time and get to work early. And then at the end of the day is when they're kind of crunched that they're going really closer to the real rush hour at the end of the day traffic. And that was a concern for people. Okay. So it's been some, but not. Well, it hasn't been the dominant reason because it, there's a variety of reasons people leave, but it has been one reason that I've heard more than once, probably less, less than five times, but yeah. Okay. Thank you. Mr. Filman. I'm Mr. Cardin made my point. I think one of the things that happens when you do is, you know, self, you identify people by visual identification is then staff get back and say, well, why I identify, I didn't, I didn't give my identity. Why is not reflecting in the report? That's one of the problems that happens. I'd be curious to know, Mr. Spiegel, like what you come up with to motivate people to self identify. Yeah, I think we're going to change our form a little bit to make it. I mean, it still wouldn't be required. But it would be a field that they would have to complete something in that field. And I think right now it wasn't a required field to complete in the online form. Thank you. Mr. Morgan. I'm off that. I didn't have my hand up. Thank you. Anyone else from the committee? Is there anyone else that would like to ask any questions or any anything else? Thank you, Mr. Spiegel. Thank you. Thank you. I'll set the goal. Thank you. State outcomes accountability report. Dr. McNeil. Thank you very much. Do I have the ability to share my screen? I'm going to assume because Rob did. I can. See if I can do it.  You should be all set. Can everybody see my screen? Yep. Thank you. So this is our FY 21 outcomes report. And it consists of MCAS data. From last spring. And so I will go through the report and then at the end, I will take any questions or comments. So the objective for the report is I'm going to talk about the changes that were made to the 2021 spring MCAS. Share statewide trends and math and ELA. Here are district trends. Give some observations based upon the data that, you know, we've reviewed so far. And then review next steps to how we're going to respond to the data. And then I will take questions and comments. So, you know, what's new, what was new for the 2021. MCAS. One of the things I want to highlight is that. Students were randomly assigned one session. They were assigned a regular two session tests. And ELA math and science technology and engineering. And so they would be assigned either part one or part two. So that was a big change. The second big change I want to highlight is that students in grades three through eight could take the computer based test at home and that we were one of six states that allowed this to happen. And the way that the test was administrated. And so that was a big change. And so that was a big change. And so the administrators monitored the progress of students through our zoom platform. And in grade 10, however. The students took a two sessions test and they had to come in person in order to take that assessment. So here's a screen that highlights or chart that highlights the data and it's comparing it to 2019. And the reason why it's 2019 is that due to the pandemic and school closure. These 2020 spring MCAS was not offered. So I'm looking at the last time that students were in person was 2019 when they took the MCAS and you see some of the how the data that some of the trends from the state data. And I want to focus your attention on grades three through eight and grade 10, because that's what I'm going to focus on in my report. So I'm going to give you data from grace three through eight and 10. So you kind of look at that and you can compare to how we performed. Because that was the big question. How students were going to perform. In comparison to the last time they took the MCAS, which was 2019. So this is it for ELA. This is it for math. So again, I'm highlighting the bottom two roles where you see grace three through eight and grade 10. And I'm going to switch back to ELA because you'll be able to tell that there was a more of a decrease. And the students who achieve meeting and exceeding the standards. And math. You can see that big change. So getting into our district results. Again, you're looking at a chart. I kind of, I took what the state did. And I thought that this would be the best way to present the information this year because. To me, this is what this is the question I kept hearing from only within the district, but also from outside of the district, how much of a change would it be for our students? You know, due to the learning platforms that we had to implement, which was remote hybrid and in person. So how was, how are students going to perform on the MCAS? In comparison to the last time they took it in 2019. So I will just talk about how each one of these charts are organized. So you'll see at the top, you know, some comparison. This is race, ethnicity and gender. And then in, in means not meeting. PM means partially meeting. Me is meeting or exceeding standards. Together. And then you have meeting and you see exceeding. And so looking at the different changes, I went back and I looked at how each one of the groups performed on 2019. And then I, you know, no document at the difference. So you see some of the highlights of this. You'll see that. You know, there's not that much of a difference there. You're going to see that. So the headline for the report for me is that you're going to see some increases and decreases in the percentage of students who are meeting and exceeding standards. So some of the observations that, that I've made, as well as other people who have also looked at the data within the district have made is that students who are English learners, high needs, Hispanic, Latino, male students who have disabilities in our white exhibited a one to 5% increase with meeting or exceeding standards for grace, three through eight and ELA. And then also on the right hand side, you will see that the scale score, the average scale score and the difference between 2019 and 2021. So you'll see the average scale score for each one of the groups. And you'll be able to see like what is the difference in performance. So this is grace three through eight for race, ethnicity and gender. And then other groups. You'll see here it is for students with disabilities, gender, disability, and gender disavantage, high needs in former ELs. And so some of the big highlights I will go over at the end. So right now I'm just going to show you the data. And then here it is for 10th grade. ELA, the changes. And as you can see here at 10th grade, there are different groups like Hispanic and Latino and multi ratio that had, you know, double digit increases of 15%. effectively, but you'll see here with African American black students, there was a huge decrease in the percentage of students meeting or exceeding standards. Then the second biggest decrease with 10th grade students were students from economically disadvantaged or just economically disadvantaged. So here's some of the, some of the observations I remain based upon those, the charts I just exhibited. I just want to highlight that a higher percentage of students who took the assessment remotely achieve meeting exceeding when compared to students who took the assessment in person. I know that wasn't reflected on the charts, but I just wanted to put that in there because that was another question that I heard how students were going to perform in comparison to students who took the test in person. Those students who are in a remote program, how are they going to perform and in comparison to those students who took the test in person. I just want to highlight a students in the following groups African American black economically disadvantaged students with disabilities, English learners and high needs perform significantly lower than all the groups. And then for 10th grade, many groups exhibited an increase in the percentage of students who achieved meeting exceeding when compared to 2019. Students in the following groups African American black economically disadvantaged students with disabilities high needs and former English learners perform significantly lower than their peers. So going into our district math results and observations. You'll see again we're looking at grace three through eight is broken down to segregated by the different groups. You'll see that there's a morbid, you know, in line with state trends across the across the state you'll see that there's more of a dramatic decrease for how students, the percentage of students meeting exceeding standards. And then as you look at students with who are economically disadvantaged students with disabilities, English learners high needs and former English learners you'll see. Again, there is a morbid dramatic decrease. And this is 10th grade. There are Asian students and multi students who identify as multi ratio there was a double digit increase, as well as a significant increase with Hispanic Latino. But again you'll see here we have African American black students. There's 25% decrease. And then here's the data for economically disadvantaged students with disabilities English learners high needs and former English learners.  So I put just no data there. That's for those students. There's nothing to compare. But I still, I still listed the average scale score for those groups, even though we could not make a comparison. So some of the highlights for our math data. Looking, and this is still in comparison to 2019. All groups had a higher percentage of students will achieve media exceeding with compared to the state. All groups exhibited a consistent decrease in the percentage of students who achieved media exceeding with compared to 2019. So looking at our district results for science, technology, engineering, technology and engineering, here are the results and observations. Here's the data for grades five and eight. I would like to highlight the students in the following groups, African American black economically disadvantaged students with disabilities, English learners and high needs perform significantly lower than all other groups. And then African American black students perform more than all of their peers. Here's the data for grades five and eight. So grades five and eight and 10, nine and 10 take the science MCAS. So again I looked at that cohort in order to compare to the performance for the same cohort for 2019. Again, just hopefully I didn't say this earlier but I should have said I'm focusing on the column for meeting exceeding trends, also looking at the other achievement levels but mainly focus for this presentation I just want to see the overall percentage of students look who are meeting and exceeding standards, and then the average scale score. Then here for grades five and eight. Again, economically disadvantaged students with disabilities. There are some increases. So you'll see there's a mix of increase and decrease for science, technology and engineering assessment. And then for ninth and 10th grade. What was reported was for introductory physics. This is the legacy MCAS so that's why the achievement levels will look differently. So learning needs improvement, proficient or higher advanced is the higher, and then you'll see that proficient and advanced is a more of a dramatic decrease for those groups. I'm sorry. So some of the things I like to highlight for our science, technology, engineering students in the following groups, African American black, Hispanic Latino economically disadvantaged students with disabilities English learners performance significantly lower than all other groups. And then again African American black students perform more than all of their peers. And I talked about how this is for introductory physics. And there was a significant decrease in the percentage of students achieving proficient or higher for all groups when compared to 2019. So some of our next steps is, you know, looking at the data we definitely want to triangulate the results with other data sources. Which can include student work, local assessments, instructional rounds. And other data, you know, there's many other data sources that are like, you know, various data sources that just so many I can't mention them all here. We definitely want to disaggregate the data during ace block and utilize these times that and think, you know, scoop committee for giving us the capacity to have ace block meeting so we have those now integrated to the elementary school, looking at the department meetings common planning time. We definitely want to continue to look at the data conduct an item analysis and use the data to assist with creating goals for school improvement plans individual teacher student learning and professional practice goals, use data to inform instruction identify topics for professional development, provide professional development that focuses on anti basis, anti bias and anti racist teaching and we are adopting a multi tier system support as a framework to address the individual needs of students. And I just want to highlight that we are committed to doing that work around anti bias and anti racist teaching by using our American rescue plan, that's your three funds to accelerate that work. As we know from both experience and extensive educational research that attention to these efforts will improve instruction for all students from diverse backgrounds and with diverse learning needs. So one of the biggest takeaways is that we have an, you know, a mix of increase and decrease in student achievement, but the one consistent thing that, you know, that continues to be revealed and our data is that there is definitely an opportunity amongst our groups of students. So I'll open it up now I'll stop sharing for questions and comments. Thank you Dr McNeil members of the committee, Miss Morgan. Thank you Dr McNeil for your presentation I thought it was really helpful. And it was it was helpful to read the press release in advance to that Dr Holman wrote so I could kind of grab my head around it. I have a couple of comments I think they're more comments than questions but we'll see how it goes because I often come up with a question as I'm talking. I, you know, I'm fine with talking about the difference between students who took the assessment remotely and who took it in person. I'm a little disappointed that it was the top bullet point because students who are all remote are going to be generally taking higher socioeconomic they're there they have parents who can stay home with them and make sure that they're, you know, in an all remote setting so I don't, I don't give that a whole lot of weight, to be honest. So I hope we don't spend a whole lot of time on that because they're certainly not comparable groups that kids who took the assessment remotely and the kids who took the assessment in person or not. They're not their diversity is not not similar and the subgroups are not equally represented among those two cohorts so moving on beyond that. I think the part that you know as a as a math educator that you know the math results are obviously really concerning they're concerning across the state so I don't think that you know where we didn't do anything worse or necessarily that much than other districts teaching math to students who are only in school two days a week, or who are in a remote platform for five days a week having math, you know, having math instruction it just doesn't it doesn't work right me, it's just is not enough instruction for those schools based at this point that they just there just was not enough time for them to cover the material. I think the piece that is really concerning and I appreciate the way that this was presented the comparison between one is what we needed to talk about absolutely and I think it's really helpful to compare how Arlington did with the state, but you know the piece that is even worse is that these these students who had lower who had more significant decreases performed worse to begin with right so they did, they did worse so African American students in Arlington did worse than their black peers to begin with, and between 2019 and 2021, they dropped more. Right so so they it wasn't as though everybody started at an equal playing field to begin with right there were already striations in performance and variability and so we saw those that we saw those gaps exacerbated as did I suspect you know many districts. So I just I really appreciate Dr. McNeil the candor in addressing this I think that you know I'm glad that this is being talked about, we need to you know this is the idea of the achievement gap in general right this difference between all students and then our various students is something that that we went to the voters about a few years ago and you know told them we were going to spend their millions of dollars on on working to close that and. So you know at that time obviously we didn't see coven coming and it has done us, you know it certainly hasn't helped. We just, you know we have so much work to do and it sounds like you know it sounds like you guys have. You know that you guys have a plan to work on addressing it and I'll be interested to see how that, you know, how that comes into play as we look at at the budget for for the next fiscal year, so I think that it doesn't sound like I actually had a question at all. So, thank you guys thank you so much. Thank you for your comments. Thank you Dr. Anthony. Thank you. Dr. McNeil. I'm sorry, I'm confused about one thing on all the graphs for the Arlington results are the percentiles that you're showing are those absolute percentiles like when it says minus 24 it's as though 64% went down to 40%. I think it 20 minus 24% of the actual number. Do you understand what I'm saying microphones off Dr McNeil. Yes, I'm trying to do too many things at the same time so let me, I was trying to. All right. I'm going to go back to a chart so I can talk about it and address Dr Allison ampiece question. So, when I look at 2019. It would have an absolute percentage for how many students for for instance the ninth and 10th grade, I looked at introductory physics and and they have reports within Edwin analytics, where they break it down by each group. And look at their percentage for that particular achievement levels so for instance I go back and look at 2019 how to all students. How many was the percentage of students that have proficient and advanced and then they also have a column where they do they combine the two proficient and higher. And so then I would compare that to the percentage of students that achieve those particular achievement levels in the 2021 reports. And then I would, you know, add or subtract, and then that's how I came up with the differences the percentages. Okay, so that answer your question that doesn't answer my question. It's something we should. To share out to parents and such. The methodology should probably be mentioned because it actually it. If it was the other way of doing it where it was just a drop of 24% instead of 24 percentile points that that be better. So this data looks even scarier that way. I see that in most there's big shifts to the left. And it's, it'd be nice to see the actual numbers to, but this is good in terms of isolating or identifying areas where there's been issues. Mainly I wanted to be sure they understood how the graph was made because I realized halfway through the presentation, but I wasn't really sure. Okay, thank you very much for this. Well, I also want to let everybody know I had to, you know, pare down the presentation and I, this was a lot of collaboration with Dr homin. So I do have those charts where I, where the way that I presented the information in the past where I'll show you a bar chart. And I'll show how show you how each group compared against the state. And I'll, it have graphed that short since 2017. I can provide those graphs for school committee members, if that if you would like me to provide that where you can see the actual percentage percentages for meeting exceeding and proficient or advanced. So I have those charts I also have charts that show our participation rates and what is the size of the cohort for each one of the groups. So I have the data in a lot of different ways I have our student growth percentile and charts I've charted. There's so much data that you receive and I couldn't, this could have been like, I've had 70 to 80 slides but I paired it down to what I thought that would be the, the burning question that I've received from the community and within the district is, how did we compare to 2019 Dr homin. I just wanted to note that Dr McNeil gets all of the credit for that press release he wrote it, and I sent it off to the media so that was definitely his doing. Thank you Dr McNeil. Thank you very much. Any other members have a question Mr Schleckman. Okay. Thank you for the presentation. This is really a tough one to talk about because for three to eight they took half the test and the test halves were not equivalent so that there were cases where some kids got literature and some kids got got informational text and the, the, all these numbers are performing a little strangely to begin with by virtue of the fact that we've taken less of a test. The state has changed their method for computing growth. So we can't look at that as comparison to other children, who are advancing within this cohort because they're baselining it back to 2019. So this, this was really, really challenging. There are a couple of questions that I'd like to ask for the future, because they're a little complicated and certainly not the kind of thing I'd have expected in October meeting when the results were released in September. The first thing that I think is really important is there's one factor which I think is critical to understanding the results, particularly as we're growing, going through to older students is the length of time a student's been in the district because their results count. If they were with us on October one. But there's certainly a difference between a student who's been an educated at Arlington since kindergarten, and a student transferred in from another district a year or two ago. And I suspect from looking at some of the high school data that I've seen in the past is that that factor sort of explained something. And not that I want to go and view this is a big deal. I think the question that I have relative to that is, should we be devoting resources for students who are transferring into the district and treating them at serving them a little differently than we do with kids who are continuing on from our kindergarten. The second thing is, again, this is not for now, but I can see where things have happened for us, comparing what happened to us compared to 2019. We're seeing the statewide we know that everybody's declining. And it was a pleasant surprise to see places where we actually had improvement. Comparing us to the town manager 12 at some point, and I'm not being critical now because it's too soon to go and assemble that. Currently, it's not in the mission of using this data first for the benefit of children who are in front of us but going forward at some point. I just sort of like to see a couple of graphs of how our experience over the past two years compares to other communities in the town manager 12. The other thing which I think is most important, the thing that we can't see from this vantage point are two things. If we're looking at individual students, what are we doing if we're identifying students who were of concern for us, because personally their scores dropped. I understand that we have a far different cohort two years worth of students dropped off from this, and we've added two years of new students so that the cohorts have changed. But for kids who are with us, how many kids who are with us have had a sharp drop. And what are we doing about that. And secondly, what have we learned from the way we're looking at kids both in terms of last year's MCAS and the kids who are showing up in front of us. As a policy question for what we need to be doing to add to the budget and to support the professionals in the schools to help kids who didn't make it through the pandemic as well as others did. So none of them are things that I could ask for right away. But those are my thoughts of things that I'm going to be looking for going forward in. And I hope we have some collaborative conversations about that. And I appreciate the candor and the thinking that is behind what we saw tonight. Thank you very much. I do want to make sure that I emphasize you're absolutely 100%. So the charts that I have for the student growth percentile is just in comparison to the state because they did use a different formula. So in those charts they're not compared to 2019 just, you know, us against the state where they use the same methodology for figuring out or, you know, calculating the student growth percentile. Well, they changed the methodology there and they've not really been up front about it. They're doing something now called and I've got to look this up. I'm sorry. And I may not be able to hit it right away, but they've changed the methodology for computing the student growth percentile. So that statewide normally you'd expect 20% in each of the categories, but you've got cases where they're 42% and very low growth, because they're using 2019 metrics and applying that to 2021, rather than looking at growth consistent across the cohort. Right. Yeah, absolutely. I went to a webinar where they explained the methodology and the reason for it and they felt like this was more of an accurate depiction of growth among students and you're right they're using more of a two to three year year historical context, rather than just doing it for the one year and comparing that student at a particular level against their peers. They're looking at how that particular student performed the historical performance and you're right there. There's so many different variants that might that impacted that particular students performance on last spring's MCAS that, yeah, that you bring up from very good points. So just the most important thing for this data right now is not not from us unless there's policy or support that we need to help the district the most important thing is to the folks to look at kids individually and look for the ones who didn't respond as well through the pandemic and get them moving and I'm sure that we'll see that when we look at the 2022 scores. Yeah, that's one thing we know how to do a spin spin your money so we'll be back during the budget season for those particular request. Mr. Thielman. Yeah, thank you, Mr. Heiner. When I look at the results, my, my high level conclusion and maybe maybe Dr. McNeil or Dr. Holman can tell me I'm wrong is that a higher percentage of students than we would have liked didn't make the academic progress, we would have wanted them to make last year. And that tells me that this last bullet you have on slide 24 is super important adopt a multi key I'm looking to my my left adopt a multi tiered system of support as a framework to address the individual needs of students. So I mean, is that I guess Dr. Holman, maybe I can start with you is when you look at these results which you're kind of like top three bullets if you were to if you were to answer questions that from a group of parents. What would you say the results tell you. I mean I think Dr. McNeil really hit on a lot of them which is that there is a persistent and in many cases growing gap, particularly for students of color. And we've heard from our teachers as a matter of fact I think Ms. Keith said it in one of our meetings here that they're aware that this gap is there. I mean we've had the meetings and I know Mr. And Mr. McNeil you're going to talk about some of this too but we've had the meetings where we dive into this and look at this with our staff they're aware that that gap exists and what they're hungry for our concrete mechanisms and moves they can make in the classroom will help them. Change it and turn it around. And so that's part of the goal behind Dr. McNeil mentioned instructional rounds and having us really think about what are our tiered systems. How are we building schedules for students. How are we, you know, shifting our systems and providing access to students who may not have it to some of the wonderful things that make Arlington, what it is for students you know do everybody have access to extracurricular activities everybody have access to, you know, instrumental music to all of the arts activities because those things enhance we're looking at math and ELA right now but math and ELA are one industry of a student's engagement with school. And so those would be sort of my high level things that we're all thinking about and talking about and that Dr. Neil highlighted. Okay. Okay, thank you. Also, Mr. Mr. Cardin. Thanks. The, you know, the to do list is great but but I do see some urgency now that we have this data and it's out there. And we have the students back full time, particularly in math. And you know you've had you've had the embargo data for quite some time so I'm wondering, you know, what are what are we doing can you talk about what we're doing now is it just the acceleration pathway that the state gave us are we have we done anything else in math to to sort of address address what we're seeing. Well I think the, you know, things that we've done over the summer so to answer your questions it's like we've looked at, you know the data and we, you know some of this is connected to what we were able to cover, you know with the standards and with the pacing guides last year so I think that's the first thing, like I said in our next steps is like looking at an item analysis and looking at the standards in those areas where students show the challenge with answering the questions, because the way that they'll in those reports they break it down by question the type of question, they also have released items, and then they have the standard that's next to it. So looking at our instructional practice, I mean, it's funny that you asked us because just the other day. We had two math coaches and I'm going to credit Dr homin for bringing to us. You know, this methodology of doing instructional rounds as an administrative team, and connecting it to the school improvement plan goals that a particular principal might might have in their building so the other day we went into Thompson. So we did our instructional rounds we had our math coaches, talk about what it looks like using the Turk and Turk math what it looks like for engagement, and identifying different strategies to make sure that students are highly engaged, and then really being able to hone into questions and activities. And so there's, there's lots of things that we can explore but we've begun to do that. So that's just an answer to your question right now is, you know, focusing on tier one instruction, looking at the curriculum standards that we were able to cover in all content areas and looking at those adjustments to make sure that we're, we're reviewing those content standards now the beginning of the year, and then also having progress monitoring tools in place so we can see how students are performing within the classroom. I think the one thing that I would like to let everybody know is that we're using the MCAS data as a way to frame probing questions so we can go deeper in the data so I mean those are some of the action steps that we've done just recently. And I'm looking forward to us really diving more into the data and connecting it to the local assessments that we actually have going on at the elementary level right now. Thank you. So, yeah, particularly with math I do look forward to hearing a little bit more about that I mean, at the elementary level I mean, you know, maybe it's adding a half hour additional math work week. But if that's harder at the secondary level where, and it's more dangerous at secondary level because we've got the graduation requirement that's still in place for MCAS. So I do look forward to hearing more about how we're going to solve this problem. Thanks. Absolutely. This action. Did you have anything. Dr McNeil, you talked about using other assessments and Mr, you alluded to it a second ago by taking looking at this as a direction and looking at other data and stuff. Can you can you get back to us at a later date and share with us what that other data has shown whether it validates and supports what you found in the MCAS or I we do a lot of public talking about MCAS and Mr. Cards right it is a requirement for graduation, but at the same time that we all know that there are some students that don't do well with that kind of a testing. And that's why we look at other assessment. So I guess what I'm asking for is, look at that other data and come back to us and tell us how it compares at some future date please. I'd love to thank you very much. Yes, absolutely. Thank you. Dr. Ampe. Thank you. Another question after hearing my peers. I'm wondering if you feel like you have enough resources this year to help move the needle on these results that we're seeing now I mean not not just move the needle up but we're kind of having to do catch up work so moving way up. You know I can always use more time Dr. Allison Ampe.  You know, their social emotional learning, you know the most, you know, emotional well being, and really for making sure that we're helping them to acclimate back into a structured setting. So it's a lot I mean it's not just looking at the assessments and looking at the academic portion it's being able to create a safe learning environment and we're supporting them social emotional. Their social emotional well being so they can access the curriculum so it's it's a very complex problem. I believe that, you know, all the comments today and basically around the, you know, our marginalized population of students and the pandemic kind of highlighted that so we have to really hone in on and get really specific and strategic about how we're going to support all of our students. And that's some of the work that we're looking to do. So I mean as we, as we talk about the next budget cycle. I think you'll see that represented in what our request will be based upon the data and based upon the school improvement plans, and our district goals that we set moving forward. You know the instructional rounds that Dr. Holman has brought to the district and that practice. So we'll be able to, you know, utilize all that information, and you'll see that reflected in our budget ask. Right. I guess I'm thinking, even of this year, not just next year. I'm thinking about the growth factor funds that were put aside because we didn't see the enrollment numbers that we expected to have, and whether some of those could be freed up, possibly for additional resources to address the learning loss or, I don't know what you call this but anyway, the gap and help move things forward. So, thank you. Yes, we have definitely confirmed with Dr. Holman as well as, you know, all the administrators and, you know, we can come back with the list. We can definitely take care of that. But thank you for your question. Dr. McNeil, thank you very much and thank all your staff for putting this presentation together for us. Thank you. Sure thing. Thank you. School improvement plans. I guess, Mr. Nato, you're on. Well, I was going to say, I think Mr. McEnany is going to go first. Oh, I'm sorry, I had a different one. I apologize, Mr. McEnany, go right ahead. I just want to have the ability to share. Okay, while they get this set up, I just want to say that this is the first round of school improvement plan presentations and that both Mr. McEnany and Ms. Thompson have not only done this work on their school improvement plans and submitted those to you for this week and they are the first ones to do so, but they've welcomed our all of our administrators into their buildings this week at Thompson and next week. Another round of administrators will go through at the Bishop and so they've been very willing to jump in head first on this and I'm proud of the work that they've done and they've been very thoughtful about their school improvement plans. So take it away. Awesome. Thank you, Superintendent Holman. Good evening, members of the school committee. Mr. Chair, Superintendent Holman. Before we get started, I just wanted to introduce or reintroduce my partner, my leadership partner, Eva Liner. Eva is Bishop's full-time assistant principal. Eva and I will share tonight's presentation as we are going to highlight Bishop's newly developed multi-year school improvement plan. So tonight we're going to be covering a short introduction to Bishop. We want to highlight specific data sets related to academic achievement. We want to let you in on the Bishop leadership team, on what the Bishop leadership team has observed when we looked at these data sets specifically related to a subgroup of students compared to the Bishop aggregate. So we also want to share the priorities as a response to the data that I just mentioned and will mention tonight along with planned action steps that we're going to address our problem practice. So we'll conclude by identifying resources that we currently have that keeps moving us forward and highlight a couple of needs that we would probably be asking for during the budget season. And we'll wrap up by taking any questions that you have. Thank you for talking about Bishop and how wonderful the community is. So, you know, school committee members, you're very familiar with the schools before our viewers tonight. I think Bishop is unique to the other schools in the district. Just do the fact that we're a smack dab in the middle of town. So if you take a look at this map on the right, you can't see the labeling or the letters or the words or anything. But Bishop is in the yellow right in the middle there. And we share four buffer zones with Brackett, Stratton, Thompson and Hardy. And we also have families all the way to the north to Winchester and all the way south to the border of Belmont. So you can get a good sense of the diverse district population we have here at the Bishop. We live by our core values. So at the Bishop, every community member lives by these three main core values of respect, responsibility and regard. Students and staff, they live up to this by showing respect to everyone they encounter and the materials that they use inside and outside of the school. The responsibility taken care of ourselves and others and the environment around us. And a big one that we have that we lean on a lot is having regard for others and their differences. The adults in the building reference these three core values whenever appropriate with students and amongst each other. And as you can see, our core values are posted in high visibility areas to include right at the entrance of the school right when you walk into lobby throughout the halls and school. So, as we get started, I thought it would be helpful to put our work into perspective related to COVID, and where we currently find ourselves as a nation and as a community. Our time leading up to this point, one of the main academic and social emotional concerns was how would these past 18 months of COVID really affect our students and adults. And the entry point into this discussion. This chart highlights the last grade, our students had a complete year in the classroom. So I think the question of whether or not these COVID years has had any effect on our students and adults is pretty clear. We've just completed first full month of school. And with this, you know, administrators and staff have realized that there's a, it's a different normal, if you will, that everyone's adjusting to. So there's a recalibration of sorts is our students re enter the classrooms and playgrounds full time. As part of the administrative work this summer, Eva and I, along with the district leadership team begin to look at specific data sets to confirm any assumptions. We had related to this topic to give you a little this data snapshot. And, you know, we like to celebrate small wins it's what keeps us moving forward motivated dedicated and passionate about the work that we do. This data set. Well, I want to just back up I just want to mention that the data sets that I'm going to use for this presentation are not exclusive to our district work and to our district leadership teams. There are other sources that teams use to disaggregate data. However, for tonight's presentation we're going to look at MCAS scores from spring 2021 as you see here, and a four year outlook over time 2017 2021. So this highlights this slide highlights Bishop strengths related to the spring 2001 MCAS compared to the district and state grades three through eight. It's represented in green district and orange status in blue. I say here tonight, proud of this accomplishment from last year's Bishop students performances in line with the district's average across the board three through eight, and noticeably higher than the state's average.  It's, it's important, like I said to celebrate these wins as we continue to move forward with our work. Now, as even I and district leadership started looking at the data this year, this summer, some priorities came to the top very quickly. So, looking at the combined Bishop aggregate that's, that's the easy work. When our teams and administration begin to dig in this aggregating this data by subgroups that the academic and social emotional disparities begin to surface as highlighted by these two graphs here. The asset that immediately came to the surface was the four year outlook over time, the 2017 2021 of our high needs subgroup of students compared to the Bishop aggregate so for the viewers out there for context. The high needs classification, or subgroup includes current English language learners, former English language learners, students who receive specialized instruction through individual education plans. Socially, economically, disadvantaged. So, as you can look, as you look at these comparative graphs, the one on the left is bishops ELA with the one on the right math. So both sets of data represent a clear academic achievement a gap between our high needs students and our Bishop aggregate. Again, going back to the question of whether or not these 18 months is out of effect on student achievement. It is clear that our high needs subgroup has been affected. The gap in math has relatively is relatively consistent. It's the ELA achievement gap that's widening so bishops problem of practice is obvious. Bishop's leadership team must do better. We must be do better to engage data teams and facilitating efforts specifically focused on our high needs students. So that begs the question of how we're going to do this. So within our school improvement plan, we have these four objectives we have two instructional objectives and we have the equity and school culture and management operation. So first, I want to start with key instructional objectives related to the problem of practice that I just mentioned. And then I want to highlight the two other objectives that can stand alone or be part of our efforts when we're looking at high needs, the high needs subgroup and academic academic achievement gap that currently exists. So our first instructional objective is focused on improving bishops data collection process through collaborative teaming. I'll get into the action steps here in a few. So while the instructional objective to is geared toward literacy and the use of assessments to inform instruction, best practices and interventions. It's directly tied to the collaborative data teamwork that we are engaging in this year and years to come. It makes sense to direct our early childhood grades, for example, toward early reading approaches, lesson delivery, best practice and using assessments to drive our instruction and interventions. And objective three is our equity and school culture goal that evil will speak to, and in a few, and the last objective found within the Bishop 2021-2024 school improvement plan focuses on just the administrative and assistant action that that Rob Spiegel just mentioned, as we had in a retirement in the front office, and a second initiative related to the management operations is dedicated as dedicated to maintaining brick and mortar assessments and remediation. So getting to our key initiatives and our action steps. I'm so grateful that our district administration, along with Dr. McNeil a few years ago, I remember sitting here, speaking to this group, as we were talking about bringing in full time specialists to drive administratively controlled data collection time within the school day. So we have, it's created a daily mass master schedule that allows for teams of teachers, administrators, coaches and interventionists, and specialists to me once a week during the school day. So it's an agenda driven data collection action oriented format. So the meetings are identified as ace blocks ace the terminology of the acronym ace comes from a book data wise that the assistant superintendent and the leadership group have dug into two summers ago and we continue to reference it reference it as we continue our work. So a standing for assessment collaborate and evidence. And this built in time. It's absolutely priceless having this built into the schedule. Historically and not held just to the schools. Time to work in teams, looking at student work and assessment data like we are doing now through our ace blocks was few and far between. I just have to say that you know having this time built into the daily schedule is a game changer. And I'm sure you're going to hear more about ace blocks in the coming weeks, as you hear from other building administrators just a really exciting time in our schools in the district as this time has been created. All right. So I'm going to talk about this slide. Thank you mark. So Bishop is in its second year of working with desks PBIS training along with some of the other schools in our district, who will probably speak to this initiative in their own presentations. PBIS stands for positive behavioral interventions and supports. And this is a research based social and emotional learning framework that has provided Bishop a structure to create school wide expectations. The first trick shown on this slide was created over the past year or so with feedback from students in grades three, four and five, and teachers, and ties directly into our three core values that Mr. Mackenany spoke about earlier about responsibility and regard for others. So as you can see if you can see it I know it maybe appear a little small. It's all worded in positive language, so that we're talking about the behaviors we want to see in our schools which is a big part of the PBIS framework. So instead of saying one in the hallways we would say walking shows respect in the hallways or when you keep your hands to yourself you're showing responsibility. So in Bishop, we have a number of teachers to use different SEL, social emotional learning practices in their classrooms, such as responsive classroom open circle mindfulness, second step, and growth mindset. So the PBIS framework which is really nice really it doesn't interfere with any of these other programs. And actually in a recent conversation I had earlier this week with our SEL coach, Laura Rodriguez. And she was actually complimenting the Bishop staff for using a variety of SEL programs within the school because there's not really one size fits all for SEL programming. So the school wide work we're doing through PBIS creates really common expectations in the shared spaces around the building, along with a common language for all of our staff and students and we're really looking forward to our work this year and in the coming years as well. Great. Thank you, Eva I really appreciate that. So we get to our final slide here, as we want to just kind of highlight the current resources that are available to sustain our efforts and the effectiveness that we strive for. I know I speak for the other six elementary building principle principles when I express sincere appreciation for school committee and the district support for full time assistant principles. I have to say personally having full time AP and Eva liner. It's allowed me and other principles to be the instructional leaders, we were hired to be without being pulled 20 different directions taking care of everyday life within the building and the playground. Huge, very, very grateful. Full time district and school specialists to support our ace blocks times we currently have this in place and we're hoping that it remains for our teams to make progress and all the areas identified within the school improvement plan.  I can't you know we were talking about Dr may be able to said more time. We've created time. And this is the time we must take advantage of this time. And we will be able to leverage this time. Our meetings. This month with our groups have yielded some really great just initial work. And I'm just looking forward to how that work is going to progress and evolve. The must haves. I want to highlight before my time is up and our needs and able to support Bishop school improvement goals so a comprehensive reliable data, data collection system and platform. So the district as we've rolled out a comprehensive data bank hub for all administrators and educators to access his teams. As we use the many sources of data that we use to inform and driver's instruction so this is actually going to be our first full year that the data bank is online and we're looking forward to this being up and running 100% you know in the near future so with any new software data dumps all that comes I don't want to say glitches but it comes that comes tweaks and adjustments that need to be made. We're in that process right now we've got a lot of information already downloaded in there and teams are already digging into the data bank. And so we're just looking to kind of strengthen that and to maintain and sustain, you know, that hub of data. And then, finally, as we look at our coaching model in the district. And, you know, there is, I am a strong believer, my colleagues might feel differently literacy coaches might feel differently. I feel strongly that literacy of coaches that who are assigned to each elementary public school in Arlington is a must. I think there would be a lot of value in having a literacy coach that's housed in one building full time. So, like I said kind of speaks to itself and the power of having a dedicated literacy coach in each building. At this time we have five district literacy coaches, there's seven elementary schools so we've got approximately 50 classroom teaching teams, and you can imagine how challenging sharing five literacy coaches and is and, you know, data teams must have this resource coaching available to them in order to strengthen their professional practice and collaboration within a data team setting within our ace blocks. So, this concludes tonight's look snapshot of Bishop School improvement plan and priorities. There are more objectives and action plans found within and I'm happy to take any questions related to those and what was presented just now. And I just want to thank you so much for the school committees continued support and commitment to the public schools. Thank you, Mr. American any members of the committee. I don't know if you have any questions this accident. Thank you. Thank you very much for this and the clear sort of outline of the goals and objectives. I have a quick question that I just get a nod 1920 was the first year that you had a box is that correct. It was, it was 19, and we lasted until March 12. So until March 12. Yeah. Okay, so I, I was in your pointing out sort of where students have the last time they had a full year of regular school I think it's also important for the committee to to consider that the first time you all had ace blocks, you didn't have a full school year so this is something that you all are getting back on on board with and I think it's important for the committee and the community to know that that that that that was interrupted for all of you as well. The other, the other question, two questions that I have and I'll say them both and then you can answer is, do you feel like the data coach position that was recently created will fulfill some of some or many of the needs that you're seeing in what you're sharing about what you need to have happen at the ace block. And then my other question is, what resources and supports do teachers need to collect and record all this data because this that's a lot of it's a big ask for classroom teachers to collect all that so what else did they need. Great. No. And Liz, I thank you for bringing that point up about the the ace blocks and our interruption and our first year of digging in so just a little follow up to that is, you know, our first month have been meeting with our teams to kind of to talk about how we're going to use ace blocks. We used a meeting talking about our student learning goal that we have here the Bishop related to the first instructional priority, academic achievement priority that I mentioned at the beginning of this presentation. And now we're looking at learning how to look at the data bank. So yeah, so we're re entering and re acquainting ourselves with the process and the early results is that you know this is going to evolve into a wonderful collaborative teaming process as we get moving forward. So the data coach. So the data coach position and and math and literacy coaches are I put in two different buckets, if you will. So I feel that the data coach. The administrators and teams work together. We identify their problem practice, a data set that we want to look at I envision using the data coach, approaching data coach, pulling the data from for us, and actually visiting one of our ace block meetings to help us and track the data is we have to be really careful when we, when we present data to teams want to make sure that it's not overwhelming, confusing will make sure that it's clear with, you know, a point in mind, and you know you kind of have to direct data teams in those directions so administration as an administrator is really important that we have someone that is an expert at collecting data and helping us interpret because principles don't know everything. And it's just even better having that additional data resource at our hands. Using literacy coaches and math coaches and social studies and science coaches to look at that data with us and then start working with teams as far as best practice interventions and and just looking at the data to inform our instruction so giving them the tools and the approaches that, you know, to strengthen their already best practice. And then what do teachers need teachers need time. They would, there has to be an understanding that I mean teachers are straight out. It's the first month of school and it, you know, and it feels like April, one of my colleagues mentioned that today and it's, you know, it's been very taxing. So understanding where the adults are, and providing them with time to actually do this work is extremely important so that time is going to come with ace meetings, common planning time, and building faculty meetings and district professional development to do that. When they give assessments to their classrooms, they are responsible to input that data into spreadsheets which then are dumped into our district data bank. So, you know the heavy lifting for the for the educators are finding the time to assess their students within a specific assessment window, and then recording that within the spreadsheets. We have some software, excuse me some software with some reading assessment. The Divils that we are working on it as a district to implement where teachers and specialists will be able to record the student assessment through a tablet, and that tablet automatically dumps that information into a spreadsheet so they don't have to manually data process and gives us really really nice visuals, and everything Again, I just think that it's really important that we value teachers time we acknowledge teachers time and when we do have their time, we make it meaningful. Thank you. Any other members. Jane. Thank you, Mr. Hanner. So, thank you. Thank you so much for coming. The presentation was really helpful. I also, you know, I'm, I'm glad that we're talking about ace block tonight. It was such a long time ago that some of us had some some challenging conversations with Dr McNeil about this it was a big investment of a lot of money and and I remember some, you know, some some strong conversations in budget some committee about whether or not this was what we wanted to do and and you know I I'm very confident that we made the right decision and and you know that Dr McNeil brought us the best plan and and it's it's hard sometimes to wait for that return on investment right because it's just it's been, it's been a while but I think that it's it's it's obviously critically important. And I think you know we just have to continue to remember that we didn't we, we were not able because of the challenges of the schedule last year to have to have this time so but you know I I see it as as beginning again but building on on on what was done in in 2018 and 2019 so I'm looking forward to hearing more about that. I'm also happy to see in this plan the emphasis on on early literacy, you know it's after the last presentation, it's, you know it's easy to say oh my gosh the math but the math but the math. You know the part that concerns me is that that the students who may have been more impacted in their literacy development skills by a, you know, a challenging school year last year are arguably the kids and K one and two. Right and we didn't see there they didn't take the MCAS we didn't see how they did so we're not going to know for a couple of years from, you know, as we compare to other districts, how you know how our how our youngest learners fair and so I'm really glad to see that that you know that you guys are are looking at that I'm not at all surprised, but I think that it is really important not to not to lose sight of that and then my final comment is one that I shared with miss Donato earlier I you know I I'm really glad that that we're doing these assessments and that we're looking at them I do hope that part of how you talk about it is how you work to be to better share the results of student performance with their families and with their caregivers because that is the place that, you know, my experience in this district is again that that information is not often shared readily and it takes a fair amount of effort on the part of a parent or a guardian to actually get their hands on it. And that's, I, you know, I think that as you as you work to use this more effectively and and and the educators and administrators hone the way that they talk about it I hope that part of what the outcome of that will be will be a way and a capacity to share that with families because this is data that we're taking on on kids right there there's somebody's kids. And at some point we need to engage them in the conversation as well. So, that's all I have but thank you thank you for coming I appreciate the two of you going, going first. I was on a school council I was on a school council for a couple of years seems like a lifetime ago, and looking at these school improvement plans and this is the first time that we've we've seen them as I've seen them as a school committee member so I think that that's, that's exciting and so thank you so much for being here. Yeah, thank you I really appreciate that Jane and yeah we're excited to be here tonight presenting our school improvement plans. This is committee. Mr Schlichman. Thank you, and thank you for going first that's the most difficult position, because everybody else is going to have the benefit of tonight's discussion. The one thing that I'd like to see that I really didn't get a sense of is measurable outcomes and specifically you'd have it presented in your, your plan, but sort of a, you know, there are a lot of action steps. And I'm not seeing the measurable outcomes that they connect to. So, so I would have a hard time picking this up and thinking about where we successful and did we make progress. I don't understand what I'm reading the document in and I don't want to argue the document I think is very thoughtful, but is a follow up at some point between now and the end of the year. And it could be just presented at the end of the year. I'd sort of like to see some sort of a response coming back that is self evaluative as to what you thought your measurable outcomes were. What progress you made, and even more interesting. Where did you make mid course corrections based on what you found to be the reality during the school year. So those are the things I'd like to see at the end, as we approach the end of the year. But I really do read into this a lot. I used to read these for a living for 30 schools and lol. What I've seen so far here is it's been very, very thoughtful, but I sort of like that to come to play as we approach the end of the school year. Thank you, Paul. And not, you're not arguing the school from plan I understand I appreciate the feedback. It's October. And so what what's happening is is that you did get an incomplete documents be honest, because it didn't have those measures. And, you know, since we're here tonight October 14. What's happening with our teams is that we provided even I provided a school student learning goal of improving our data practice in teams and so what's going to happen. And as a result of teams are going to start diving into the data here in the next month, and they're going to be choosing content areas that that team wants to work on. It can be because we didn't want to give them the full spectrum of, you know, content to, you know, start digging into this work so small steps at a time so as that work evolves, I'm going to add to this document will be, you know, I'm thinking in another month or so. But thank you for that feedback very helpful. It's very difficult to do, especially this time of year that there are two purposes for this document. One is to sort of chart your progress through the rest of the year for what you need the measurable outcomes, and doing the data analysis and doing the date data teams and picking it out is all for a goal of improving student achievement down the line. And so that if you're looking at it in terms of improving student writing on open response quest as measured by open response questions or some measure of improving informational text, you know that that's cool. Okay. The other important point for this which is really critical in an early document is to identify things that we need to be thinking of as we're looking forward, looking toward the document of the budget document, starting in December, January, February, because the school improvement right and plan right now that is only focused on what's happening between now and the end of the year is merely rearranging the deck chairs of what you have already have in terms of staffing and resources. And the most leverage you have is in terms of reorganizing staffing, hiring thoughtfully reorganizing and reprioritizing your budget, which is sort of that that critical element, almost nobody seems to get right in this and so I view this is a very thoughtful kind of district with some great people which is why I'm really happy to see the process engaged right now and and I do appreciate the thoughtfulness of your document nearly response for anyone else at this time. Welcome. Thank you. Before I begin I wanted to say hi to Amy who's a former Thompson student. Looks like the other student rep showed up hey Amy nice to see you. Nice to see you too. Amy is going to be my Vanna white. Thank you, Mark. I appreciate he's going to take care of my slides for me. It's coming. Oh, so sorry. See what happens here. Vanna you're fired. No I'm kidding. I can just say good evening, everyone. Mr chair members of the school committee superintendent Holman assistant superintendent McNeil and members of the Arlington community. I'm happy to be here this evening when Mark said he's excited to be here to share and I mumbled to myself speak for yourself I am excited to share about the work we're doing. It's been great for us to be presenting like this to the school committee so I'm I'm happy to be here and kind of highlight what we're working on at Thompson and more importantly I'm thrilled to have my assistant principal prisoner Chevalier here with us and she and I work together on this plan and it's been great to have her along in this capacity. So, here is the agenda for the evening. Mark and I talked and we kind of kept our presentations in similar formats just to make it a little easier. I'm going to share about our community I'm going to take a look at where we are where we want to be and what our plan is on how to get there. These goals are looking to be achieved over the next three years, and we acknowledge that the effect of the pandemic won't fully be known immediately. And our goals are actually based on the work that we can begin now and build upon over the next few years. Thank you Mark. At the end of last year, when speaking with the PTO and the PTO presidents we spoke a lot about our excitement about our full return and what that would look like for this coming year. In my head, you know I pictured kind of a marching band but I wouldn't go that far but smiling faces balloons, the works. While we aren't quite there yet in terms of the pandemic. What I can tell you with great certainty is that our school community is thrilled to be back together. We're at 508 students now, and we are about 80 staff so there's a lot of us coming through these doors every day but it feels so good to be together. And, as you will see on the slides the pineapple has become a symbol that embodies Thompson, a school where all are welcome. Over the years we have what I called embrace the pineapple and incorporate it into our motto. We are be we say be a pineapple stand tall and this year we're saying be your best. This year we'll be working with our students to outline what this looks feels and sounds like across all areas of our school. Our culture prides itself on acceptance and growth, and we value our partnership with our families in the community at large. Here's our snapshot. For tonight's presentation we're going to look at an overview overview of MCAS scores from the spring of 2021. Let's see your look at math MCAS scaled scores and student growth percentiles and then I've pulled two responses from two student questions from the panorama survey from the fall of 2020 that I'd like to discuss this slide in particular highlights Thompson strengths related to the spring MCAS as compared to the district and state in grades three through eight Thompson is represented in green, the district in orange and the state in blue. You can see Thompson students performed in close closely in line with the district's average across the board and higher than the state's average in each area. We are within the meeting expectations range for both ELA and science, and we're just at the meeting expectations range for math. I truly believe that the work that we do is measured by so much more than test scores. With the challenges and successes we face this past year. I'm so proud to see that we still remain in line with where the district is. All right, now we start to talk about the priorities and things that we want to highlight and work on for the coming years. So these next two slides will highlight the data that informs their priorities for our school improvement plan. And during our summer work, our leadership team work together we had a workshop. And in addition to Krishna, we were joined by two curriculum leaders to assist with taking a deeper look at what date what the data is telling us. It was so helpful to have others perspectives to from the outside. So this is not Krishna and I taking a look and share and digging into our data. So when we dug into our MCAS data we noticed two specific points that we are going to highlight in our plan that our black and Hispanic students scores and math dropped from 2019 to 2021. And that over the last three years of MCAS scores the student growth percentiles have significantly declined for our black and brown students and our Hispanic students. I know some decline is present for most of our racial groups. However, you'll see as you can see in this slide it's most significant for our black and Hispanic students, and our focus is going to be on what we can do. That's okay. And what we can do to improve these data points specifically. This slide shows data from the fall 2020 panorama survey of students in grades three through five, and we've highlighted two student responses that to two questions. The first one says, at your school how often are you engaged to think more deeply about race related topics. And the second one in the bottom right says when there are major events news events related to race, how often do adults at your school talk about them with students. We had 202 students respond to those questions, 70 70% and 67% respectively answered sometimes once in a while and almost never combined. So at Thompson we pride ourselves on being one of the diverse most diverse schools in the district. So this data is certainly surprising, and an area in which we want to make tremendous growth. I do believe our staff takes cues from our students and we respond accordingly. However, how can we be more purposeful in our planning and intentional in our instructional practices, so that our students do see that we address such topics. Here are our focus areas for the year. Our first instructional objective is around math discourse. And our initiative is that we will establish a data team and increase collaborative structures to support student learning. Our second objective is around school climate and culture, and Thompson will establish a positive behavioral interventions and supports team. And our third objective is around equity in school culture, and Thompson School will engage in professional learning opportunities that promote culturally responsive teaching practices. Thanks Mark. So, our key initiatives and action steps are first instructional objective is around math discourse. So when we were talking about effective ways to increase student engagement, specifically in math student discourse rose to the top as a high leverage practice. Discourse is the mathematical communication that occurs in the classroom. It happens when students articulate their own ideas, seriously consider their peers mathematical ideas and perspectives, and then they construct mathematical understanding. We want to encourage students to construct their own understanding through discourse as a way to teach mathematics, especially since the role of the teacher has transformed from the person who just gives over information and knowledge to one who presents worthwhile and engaging mathematical tasks. We want our students to develop deeper understandings of mathematics, and they can do that when they engage in meaningful social interactions. We believe all students bring their own experiences school each day and contribute and can contribute in meaningful ways through those just through discourse around those experiences. So, in order to do this, we plan to establish a data team to determine protocols for consistently monitoring and looking at student data during ace time to establish structures that increase collaboration, and to provide support and professional learning around the strategy of student discourse. That's Miss Kaplan in the picture. Thanks for our next slide is around key initiatives and action steps for developing of the PBIS team. So Thompson also began the work of exploring PBIS before the pandemic. We had actually done some consultation with some people from PBIS around tracking office referrals and ways that we can improve our systems around that. And last year we had the opportunity to be a part of the desi PBIS Academy, and this year we'll be bringing a number of staff into the Academy to help support the work. Last year we did not have a large group participate so we have decided to do year one again in the PBS Academy so that we can bring all of our new team members along and up to speed. As you know from the Bishop presentation PBIS stands for positive behavioral interventions and supports, and this is a research based cell framework. Thompson has engaged in establishing schoolwide expectations and we did that a number of years ago using our responsive classroom model. We're still keeping in line with some of the responsive classroom practices and adding PBIS into how we operate at school. And we're seeking to revamp those schoolwide expectations and want to work with all our stakeholders to bring them back to life across all areas, all spaces in our building. The ultimate goal is to collaboratively create a map, a matrix of expectations so what do these expectations look like feel like sound like, and all over all over our building, whether in music whether it recess whether in the cafeteria whether in the classroom, and then have a consistent approach to how we support students when they struggle to meet those expectations. Similarly to Bishop, we have a number of teachers who use various cell practices in their classrooms, and I feel as though our toolboxes are deep and PBIS will provide us with some more consistent systems to support student behavior in a positive way. So in order to do sorry mark in order to do that we're going to continue in the PBIS Academy we're going to evaluate our current expectations procedures and behavior management practices to determine what needs we have. We're going to establish schoolwide behavior expectations and supports. And our last initiative is around culturally received culturally responsive teaching practices, our equity and culture objective focuses on culturally responsive teaching and the brain. As you saw in our panorama data many of our students out of the 202 who completed the survey do not feel that race and identity are explicitly discussed at Thompson. So through that for our students, we want our staff to feel empowered to engage in courageous conversations and discussions with students and families and with each other. So through our all staff read of culturally responsive teaching in the brain will discuss ways in which one's culture programs the brain to process data and affects learning relationships, as well as what are the key practices that we can focus on to build staff in the community for being intentional when planning their instruction and conversations on the pictures on the slide actually are from our last early release day. And staff worked in small groups to do a protocol where they each took a chapter of culturally responsive teaching in the brain, pulled out had time to review it discuss it pulled out salient points and then did a share out for each chapter for the entire staff. Our key action steps will include engaging in the staff book read of culturally response staff read of the book culturally responsive teaching in the brain. Practices where we will reflect on our own identity and awareness of our own biases and then examine current practices and evaluate their effectiveness toward creating an inclusive classroom environment. And we're asking staff to identify culturally responsive practice teach it practices that they would like to implement we're going to have them identify at least two up to four practices that they feel they want to specifically and mindfully incorporate into their teaching practices. Okay, so current resources and available that are available for sustainability and effectiveness. Yeah, Mark said it well our full time assistant principles. I can't tell you the prison has always been a support for me here when and my go to person, but having her in this capacity has really opened up other opportunities for me to be an instructional leader. And that's just beginning and I'm thrilled to that we have invested in that as a district. We have our ace times are key components for us to make progress. This is where we'll be able to look at assessment data will be able to collaborate with service providers and support staff. In addition to the classroom teachers to really get into what the data is telling us the early release schedule has been. I'd say a real part of how we're doing some learning this year, teachers and staff, as Mark had mentioned, are tired and we are bringing a lot to the table every day and finding time to engage in some of the things that we used to maybe do outside of school or volunteer to do and in book groups and things a couple of years ago before the pandemic started, we are using our early release time to learn together. And it has really been a great way for us to begin and plan for the year. Building based math coach that is has been a huge component to the work that we intend to do and that we have done. I do believe similarly to Mark and even talking about literacy coaches as well but having coaches in our buildings is so important for our teachers to be successful and then that in turn will help our students be successful. Our math coach Sonia Conley is a part of our school community, she's built relationships with people over time with our staff. She is really seen as a valuable resource because she is present in our building and is available. If a teacher wants to run something by her or to get some feedback or just yesterday. In the last week she did this amazing work pulling a presentation together for our lead learner workshop that we hosted at Thompson so. Because our staff recognize that Sonia was going to be a part of this and that we were hosting, they were more eager to offer their classrooms for us to visit and to kind of show what we do here at Thompson so I do believe that's a big piece of our success. And of course ongoing collaboration with particularly related to our school improvement plan our math coach our cell coach and our director. Alright, some of our needs to support Thompson school improvement goals. I think continuing our participation in the desi PBS Academy is big. I also, along with that comes the need for substitute coverage for teachers as we are asking them to be a part of this team and step out of their classrooms during the day to attend the training sessions. And a number of staff take the ideas course and that's the initiatives for developing equity and achievement for students. And I would say it's had a profound impact on the way that they approach their planning and their thoughts around how to deliver equitable instruction for students. I would love more have more staff have the opportunity to participate in that. We would like to continue ongoing professional development in the areas of culturally responsive teaching and of course with our goal on student discourse continue to continue to support teachers with understanding recognizing and practicing that we're focusing on the areas of the day but we're focusing on math. And I imagine there'll be a need for some funding to support some stipends for staff, as we look to create data teams and lead in certain areas that would happen outside of their contractual school day. I breathed through that sorry. I made my notes and I was trying not to be too verbatim. So that concludes my presentation for tonight. And there are additional items obviously in our school improvement plan and I'm happy to take any questions. I continue to thank everyone for their time and support and it's, I continue to love living in the town where I work and serving the Thompson community so thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. I got a nice sense of where the Thompson school is and who you are from both reading your school improvement plan and listening to you talk about it. In terms of the data teams. One thing I liked that I saw that you really were pointing to mathematical discourse. And I'm interested in seeing how you're going to document or measure that is an outcome of the work you're doing because I think that's, I think it's very valuable I think it's really an interesting thing to do. Another thing I was happy to see was that you quantified your PBIS in terms of reduction in office referrals in that I my assumption is if you're saying that you're going to reduce it by 5%. You've been tracking this and you're going to show that data, and I'm looking forward to seeing how you do that, both in terms of the, the type of referrals that you're not getting any more and and how you think that's improving the climate in school. So this this is really interesting. I thought you did a good job for the first time doing a school improvement plan to the school committee. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. So first I wanted to mention that don't give them much credit US News and World Report ranked Thompson number one in the district. So congratulations. Thank you. You're actually out of this out of the state rankings, you're 123 out of 900 and some things that's pretty good as well. So, so congratulations. So I think, as I understood it, I think Thompson was deeper into responsive classroom than maybe Bishop was and maybe I didn't get that right but I, I would never it was never quite clear to us beyond Hardy how far responsive classroom was was implemented and was was fully in. And I wonder how what made you decide that that wasn't enough that you need to go to PB via PBIS and how you think those will work together. Sure. We actually have been talking a little bit about this because there there has been some resistance I would say around PBIS but only, and that's pre pandemic so it's so hard to almost remember where we were now where we are. However, I will say what we're looking for they can coexist. The frameworks I think are similar. What we are looking for is more of a direct. Well system for tracking student behavior data that was a big piece they have a suite. That's part of their program that we can be a part of and pilot that helps track student behavior data. And what we are seeing is that we with responsive classroom we've implemented practices of morning meeting consistently we practices of students take a break. You break it fix it repair when things happen. What we are looking for is ways to engage in motivating students more consistently across all areas of the building. A few years ago we did create our school wide expectations and we went through the responsive classroom process to do that. And I would say we met and we did presentation around what that looks like and sounds like in different areas in the building, but the practice of teachers and specialists still creating their classroom rules. It still existed and still exists today what we're looking to do is have the school wide expectations that mesh with what we want to see in the classroom what we want to see in the hallway what we want to see in the calf what we want to see in music. It's it's really a hybrid of bringing the two together, and hopefully having the matrix and the expectations and outlining it and bringing it into one set of expectations regardless of where you are, including your own classroom will help with consistently approaching students when they are struggling and what we do when that happens. I hope that makes sense. Yep. Great. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I'm going to try and ask this question I'm not. It's a little hard. So my sense from hearing your presentation and listening to reading your school improvement plan is that the culturally responsive teaching practice is intended to increase achievement. And first, I don't want to disagree that culturally responsive teaching practices are very important. But because we haven't seen lots of the MCAS data and stuff. I wonder what the role is of lower socio economic living situations in terms of the wide gap that we saw with in achievement. And it seems like if that was also, I mean, if there is a gap, I'm assuming there, there is a gap, but that that would suggest a different sort of possibility. Like trying to do more enrichment activities over the summer or more additional schooling or something to bolster the, again, I'm kind of jumping ahead to guess what the reasons are for lower achievement, but something to bolster the lesser exposure to educational activities outside of the school year. And so I'm just wondering, have you looked at the data with that, you know, in that aspect and what did it look like, and how did you decide that it was the culturally responsive teaching that was the most important thing to focus on. Sure. I don't, I don't have that data readily available I know we did look at it and that once we pulled out what our problem of practice was going to be I specifically honed in on those but I can certainly take a look at both and how they relate and report back I don't mind doing that at all. But what what we do see is our teachers, when I when we, the cultural responsive teaching in the brain is really the anchor for what we want to do we want our staff to have an understanding of how student relationships, how students of color and the what they bring to the table, what they bring to school each morning, how that and their relationship has an effect on them. And what are the practices that we I'd say we are doing a lot of things to try to engage all of our students. And what are the practices that we can specifically focus on that we know are going to do be responsive to those students that we know we see a lack of engagement from as, as proven in the data that we see. We want to amplify some of our practices that we're already doing, but making sure that we're intentional in the way that we are approaching conversations with students that we are actually highlighting who they are and what they bring with them each day. I always say I feel like we're an inclusive community, but I also feel like we're inclusive because we don't always name everything we don't always. I don't know how else to better word it but I want us to get better at naming who we are what we what we bring to the table. Those experiences and how those can be honored through our instruction through our conversations through the work that we do day in and day out. I hope that makes sense that the book itself is more of an anchor and a way to help have these conversations and to focus the staff on meaningful ways that we can engage in those practices. Okay, thank you very much. Sure. Yeah, I just I wanted to say thank you, Mr. Nato for being here. It's great to see the things that that you feel like you need for for your school improvement plan to be implemented at Thompson. I think the piece that I am a little bit challenged by, and I guess this connects a little bit to what Mr. Curtin said that, you know, the idea that that, while responsive classroom and PBIS are certainly not mutually exclusive or in partnership with each other necessarily. The district sort of made a pretty significant move towards RC, I think it's what they use at the Gibbs, and it didn't permeate through all of our schools. And so now it, I'm trying to sort of understand what this, you know, we heard from Mark at Bishop about PBIS and, you know, we're hearing about it at Thompson and, you know, I, I'm all for, you know, continuing professional learning for our teachers obviously around these kind of practices I think it's really important I just, I'm, I'm a little confused that we're sort of it feels to me like we're sort of, I need help understanding that this is a progression, as opposed to like a pivot. And, and if it's a pivot, I mean that's okay to right like we can we can pivot. I'm just, I guess I'm a little confused. So I'm trying to understand and maybe this is a question for Mark as well since he's here I don't know I just, I thought we were doing responsive classroom. And we've spent, we know we've invested heavily in the training and the time to your point that we need, we need to provide our staff and educators time to do this during the day and so we've done a lot of that and and so now I guess now what so I guess that's my question is sort of tell me more about I do think I do think we are still committed to responsive classroom and and the structures that that has given us and the practices that we regularly incorporated Thompson and I think probably similarly to Bishop. I think what we were still finding is that we, we are still seeing some challenging behaviors, and we are looking for additional to tools on how to respond to those and respond to them consistently. And I think this is a vehicle to help us and our staff go through the process of taking a look at what we're seeing, why we're seeing it, and then systematic ways that we can approach what we're seeing. I mean, I will say, right, we, we, even though we've done some real work around responsive classroom and have specific pieces of it that we consistently implement. I would say that hasn't necessarily changed some of the challenges that we continue to face with some of our students and I think like with anything the more resources we have and the more tools we have in our toolbox, the better we'll be able to respond. And my hope is that by engaging in the academy it also educates the team that we bring there to hone in and like I said kind of take a look at what we're seeing why we're seeing it and how can we collaboratively work together to improve that for all, all students. So I don't, I don't think it's a pivot. I think it's in addition to, and I think responsive classroom is still very much alive in what we're doing and this is an addition to that. Mark, do you want to add anything or No, that was well said Karen and just, you know quickly is like you know responsive classroom is is an approach. It's not a program. It's not a curriculum where PBIS provides a finite schedule structure, a building and community structure that's visible that where everyone's working together for you know with consistent language and expectations. In the community. Thank you. Any other members. I'd like to thank both the principles, your days along your weeks along and thank you for taking the time to spend it with a bunch of old grumpy people. That's me, not the rest of the committee. Thank you. Thank you very much. Have a good night. You too. Okay. Thank you. All right. Hold on one second while I share my screen. I don't have slides to go with the buffer zone report for tonight, but you have the memo that I provided to you in your packet for this evening. And I'm going to share a little bit of additional information about sort of how things worked out with buffer zones this year, obviously, I was in a position of beginning to assign buffer zones as I came on board on July 1. And then Dr. Bode assigned a lot of buffer zone families who live in buffer zones to their respective schools. Before I arrived and so I was sort of coming on board and beginning to understand the buffer zone process while also doing it and finding out where the hotspots are throughout the district in terms of enrollment and average class size so a little breakdown of buffer zone choice assignments by school and I'll blow this up a bit so it's a little easier to see. Can everybody see this okay. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I called the screen that's all. Oh, hold on. Big one. Okay, I see why. Sorry. Technical difficulties. How about now. Thank you. So this table shows the buffer zone choice assignments by school. So we have a number of schools assigned to the school. So we have a number of school families who are in the buffer zone were assigned their first choice at each school or to that school as potentially their second choice as well as the total for each of those schools. So in the first column, for example, you will see that 34 students were assigned Bishop as their first choice to were assigned to Bishop with their second choice. So we have a number of schools assigned to the school. And the total 16 were assigned to their second choice school 153 we were able to assign to their first choice school. Where possible we try to give families their first choice school where it doesn't disrupts balances in certain areas. But what I will also say is that the enrollment balances are not the primary or first consideration siblings really are the first consideration we don't want to break a family up across multiple schools. And those are the BPs that could be best serviced at a preferred school for example, related to a specific program, or the average class size for the student's grade level or also the things that we look at you receive my enrollment reports at each of our meetings and that is the report that I use every time a new buffer zone assignment comes through. I take a look at whether or not there's a sibling in the preferred school and then I take a look at how what size the classrooms are on average at that school at that grade level. that grade level. So that's sort of the process for assignment. I also included buffer zone assignments by grade level and school at each of the schools so that you could see across the schools and in each of the grade levels how students were assigned and allocated at each of the schools. I also have a little bit more information and I'll stop sharing I can bring this back if you want to see it. There we go. I'll also share that there wasn't it was pretty evenly distributed. There were some instances where one school was pretty more preferred over another school in a particular buffer zone but for the most part families split across the buffer zone areas. There is a preference for the school where that family would have been originally restricted before we had the buffer zone so for example if the original zone was Bishop then there are more families in that area or that immediate neighborhood that would choose Bishop for example but that's not unilateral or across the board. There and there really wasn't a very strong preference for any one school. It kind of varied based on where you were in town and this is a very useful tool for balancing out grade levels. I obviously had areas where for example it's drought and in fourth grade I was very careful about assigning students there and I know that Dr. Bodie was before me and so this does give us the flexibility to sort of balance out class sizes where we need to. I think we were lucky this year that we were able to give most families their first choice but in certain instances we obviously needed to balance things out by giving families their second choice. So I'm happy to take any questions about the buffer zone process or report. Mr. Schlesman. Thank you. I think that you've hit the major points. The only thing that I ask going forward is because you're new to this I don't expect an answer tonight but that you'd be thinking about between now and say January or February if there are any changes we should be making to our policy going forward. But thank you for the report. I've got a good sense of where we are and that over 90% of the people getting their first choice. I think that we're doing pretty well. Mr. Carden. Thanks. So under the policy you actually can't assign siblings to a different school. You have to assign them to the same school. So typically what we see as far as getting the first preference is we take out the sibling assignments. And so let's say there were 50 sibling assignments out of the 150. Then you get 100 that got their first choice and 16 that didn't. So that just puts it in a better context for us because those 50 assignments aren't discretionary. So I think going forward we'd like to see that reported that way I think. Thanks. Ms. Morgan are we waving at me or did you want to ask something or say something? No. Just my only comment about the buffer zones. I mean that report's really helpful. We pretty pandemic we had sort of begun very early conversations about looking at buffer zones and what they look like. And we spent a lot of time not a lot of time but we spent some time with the GIS guy from the town and with the dots and things and stuff. And anyway it may be a conversation that at some point we need to reopen and see if we need to you know and a lot of it's driven by you Dr. Homan because you're sort of the wizard behind it all right to some extent right you're given broad latitude and in how you utilize the buffers to sort your class sizes out. But I think you know I think at some point and it's maybe not this school year but coming you know it's definitely something that we started to look at before COVID. And obviously it took a back seat but I think we probably do at some point you know this year or next year need to take a look at the the buffer zones and decide if we need to make any adjustments or create you know a three school buffer. There were there were various scenarios that were floated. So I can't even remember where we did that in what subcommittee that was even I don't remember where we did it but I know I was there so well I got. Anyone else. Okay. Dr. Ampe. Thank you. First thank you for giving us the information. I actually think the graph the table that I'm looking at right now is the buffer zone by grade level one school partly because it gives me a sense of how many students have transferred into the Arlington public schools. I mean now it's only the ones who landed in the buffer zones but the numbers are actually higher than I would have guessed. Outside of kindergarten. But the other question or a couple other comments. So one thing that has come up in the past and this is before your time is that there was some confusion between whether someone was whether you consider the first choice the actual first choice that they put down on their paperwork or whether you consider the first choice later because sometimes the students were given given an opportunity to switch later and I mean before school started but but sometime over the summer that things would open up and at that point they chose to stay with the the thing which had been their second choice. So that's one question that has come up before and then another thing we have seen is a table where it's crisscrossed with the buffer zone that the two schools and which way students have have requested or gone and to some extent that's helpful data to us just to get a sense of whether there's any trends and if we're looking at various increasing buffer zones or something just where we might have whether might be more pushback or not. I know that you made an illusion in your comments about that the things are pretty even but the numbers were kind of nice with that and then finally I didn't pull the policy information up in front of me but my recollection is that the policy actually asks us to find out what kind of effect the using the buffer zones is making on the class size amounts. So what would classes have looked like if we didn't have buffer zones and what do they look like with buffer zones and we haven't seen that information very much if at all but it is something that's in there and it's helpful when we either have to explain to parents why buffer zones exist and why they're useful and why don't we just get rid of them things like that. So but thank you and these are all more for going forward because this is the first time you've seen this data and stuff. So thank you. Mr. Slickman. I just want to thank Ms. Morgan for the point that she raised that we were looking at a more thoughtful look of adjusting the boundaries. I believe that was going on in the community relations subcommittee. I think we should be doing that but I'd like to see us wait a year and let the superintendent go through a year of assigning under the buffer zones before we dance on that third rail. Is there anyone else? Thank you. Superintendent's report. Give me one moment. Hopefully I'll do this right this time. Do you see my slides? Yes. Good. Okay. I will start with an update on the state of the schools as we move through another year of pandemic schooling with just a really quick COVID-19 update. This week we are seeing a decrease in school based cases. We have only had three so far this week and that is trending down from every previous week of the school year, which is fantastic news. This week we just got the town data in actually earlier this afternoon. And so I've included that on the graph on the right. We are seeing a slight uptick this week in both the percent positivity rate in Arlington as well as the average daily case rate. And that average daily case rate I show you on purpose because it's one of the signals that the town is using to determine or think about things like mask mandates. It's also a determinant for county wide data whether or not we are considered as being in a high substantial, high moderate substantial or low spread area. And those things all have implications for masking, which I wanted to talk to everybody about next. So as members of the community know we've received questions about the commissioner recently released information that said that he was going to allow for a waiver for dropping mask mandates in schools where vaccination rates were over 80% starting on October 15. And that the mask mandate that's been instituted by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education was going to drop on November 1. So with that new guideline came a lot of questions from families about whether and when Arlington would consider their masking requirement. The and one thing that I want to make sure I emphasize is that we are working very collaboratively with the town and we are still falling under the town's mask mandate. So that mandate is in effect until Middlesex County gets categorized as a county with moderate or low spread for at least two consecutive weeks. Currently we are considered as being in a substantial spread county and we were in high spread before this past week. So we just dropped down into substantial. And once that mandate is lifted, so at least two weeks after we drop down into substantial being substantial spread, which likely won't happen this week because we just saw a slight uptick in town this week. Then we can consider multiple factors before we start to make masks optional. Some of those factors include whatever the current rate of participation in COVID-19 pool testing is at each school and currently at AHS and at the Odyssey and the two schools where students are eligible to be vaccinated. That rate is below 80% if you include staff and students. So we're working on that. We are I was actively planning with Dr. Janger earlier today on how to increase access to the pool testing at the high school and we'll be doing the same at the Odyssey so that we can ramp that up a little bit. We would love to have a little bit more participation than we have right now. Odyssey is very close to 80% participation in pool testing. And it is also worth noting that the state does not require this. This is something that's a priority for Arlington. The state does not necessarily even recommend comprehensive COVID pool testing of students who are vaccinated. But we have found that we've had a lot of breakthrough cases and so this is very important to us. We want to make sure that it's not spreading in schools amongst our vaccinated students just as much as we want to make sure it's not spreading amongst our unvaccinated students because those vaccinated students go home to younger siblings. The current vaccination rate of students and staff will also be a major consideration. As you know, the state set their limit at 80% earlier in the year. Our committee that worked on our pandemic recovery plan had set a level or a limit of sorts in collaboration with the town around 90%. So our bar was pretty high for vaccination rates of students and staff at each school. We are currently above 80% at Audison and AHS. So we are meeting the state's standard. I haven't, we haven't run the numbers super recently on vaccination status, but we're going to do that very soon. It's a little bit cumbersome and tedious because you have to sync up with a state database in order to get the students vaccination rates. We have to count that manually. So we are in the process of doing that to see what our vaccination rates are at Audison and the high school. Most recently they were in the upper 80%. Vaccination eligibility and rates for all students across the system is also a consideration. So yes, we're glad that our students at Audison and the high school are eligible for vaccination. However, we're also recognized that they exist in households that might have younger siblings. And so unmasking those students could pose risks to other members of our community, particularly to our schools that are full of students who are not eligible for vaccination yet. And so to remove masks at this time feels like it wouldn't be prudent both because of the town mandate and also because we don't have all of our students even eligible for vaccination, though we're really looking forward to news very soon that they will be eligible for it. So any and as we know, we've said multiple times if we're going to make determinations about mask requirements, we're going to do that in consultation and collaboration with the Department of Health and Human Services, as well as the Board of Health and our own nursing department. So at the moment, we don't have updates on this topic. I know that it's been on family's minds. We will continue to be fully masked at least for the t