Good evening, this open meeting of the Arlington School Committee is being conducted remotely consistent with Governor Baker's executive order of March 12th. Do the current state of emergency in order to mitigate the transmission of the virus. The governor's order suspends, excuse me, the requirement of the open meeting law to have all meetings in a publicly accessible physical location. Further, all members of public bodies are allowed and encouraged to participate remotely. The order which you can find posted with the agenda materials for this meeting allows public bodies to meet entirely remotely so long as reasonable public access is afforded. The public can follow along with the deliberations of the meeting. Ensuring public access does not ensure public participation in such unless such participation is required by law. This meeting will feature public comment for this meeting. The Arlington School Committee is convening by Zoom as posted on the town's website identifying how the public may join. Please note this meeting is being recorded. Some attendees are participating by video conference. I lost my spot. Please be aware that others may be able to see you and take care not to screen share your computer. Anything you broadcast may be captured by the recording all of the materials for this meeting except for executive session materials are available on the Novus agenda dashboard. We recommend members and the public follow along with the agenda unless I note otherwise. Please note that please remember to mute your phone or computer. Please wait for the chair to yield the floor to you. After people have spoken, the chair will afford public comment. We will not be doing public comment. Finally, each vote taken in this meeting will be conducted by roll call vote. So let's do some roll call now. Ms. Eksten here, Mr. Cardin, Dr. Allison Ampe here, Mr. Thielman, Mr. Schlickman, Mr. Hainer here. I am also here. We'll come back for Mr. Cardin and Mr. Schlickman, Dr. Bodie. I'm here. Dr. McNeil. I don't see him yet. Mr. Spiegel. Man, we just saw you guys. Ah, Ms. Elmer here. Dr. Janger. I see Mr. McCarthy, Ms. Keys here. I'm looking on the agenda. Mr. Mistler. Oh, Rob's stuck in the attendees. Okay, sorry. Here. All right. Thank you. And all kinds of people on here. Let's see. Mr. Mason. Here. All right. And lots of other folks. All right. Let's get Mr. Spiegel in. Mr. Spiegel, can you raise your hand so that, because there's a lot of people in this meeting. Okay. So we are going to start with the first item on the agenda, which is public comment. Public comment is limited to three minutes. The school committee, as a matter of policy, does not respond directly to and often the sometimes what is brought up during public comment comes up during the meeting. There are five people signed up for public comment. If you are somebody who is signed up for public comment, can you go ahead and raise your hand? Because there are a lot of attendees. And so that we can promote you. So the first person for public comment is Ms. Sarah Amiko. Sarah, I'm going to promote you. And when, yeah. Ms. Amiko, can you hear us? Len's in that group too. Hi, everyone. Can you hear me? Go ahead. You have three minutes. Thank you. My name is Sarah. I wanted to thank you for the opportunity to speak this evening. I just, I feel it's important for everybody to hear everyone's perspective. I want to start by saying the teachers have done an amazing job this year. They were given an impossible task and have done all they can do given the circumstances as has all the faculty and staff. It's definitely not easy to deal with what's going on. And I want to make sure they know how much their hard work and dedication is appreciated. So thank you very much. I do have questions, I guess, about next steps. What, if anything, is going to be done to get our children into school on a full-time basis at the beginning of the school year? Excuse me. We can all understand and appreciate the approach that was taken. There were lots of unknowns as to what the virus would look like. Once these kids returned to school in the hybrid program was a great option. The kids have now been in school for over five months into the credit of all faculty and staff without any transmissions within the school. But where do we go from here? The CDC recently released information stating kids should be back in school. Other towns nearby are proactively moving forward to a four to five day school week if they haven't already done so. Two in-person days a week I don't feel is sufficient, especially for children at the elementary level. It's a disservice to our kids to not be back in school on a full-time basis. By the time the kids are in school for two days or a day, a holiday comes up, a snow day hits. On top of it, the days that they are in school is very minimal with interaction from the teachers. Aside from Wednesday, half-days children are left on their own unable to ask questions when issues arise. These kids are suffering. They're suffering socially, emotionally, physically at a time when there's so much uncertainty, at a time when kids need the stability of school more than ever. The doors have been closed on them. Parents aren't able to take their kids out of state during school vacation weeks to do something fun to help the state of kids' mental health without them having more school days missed when they return home. Which would be okay if it was getting us to a point where the children would be in school full-time, but that's not currently the case. So I'm curious with the statement that was made this week by Desi and Governor Baker regarding the removal of hyperprograms and having the kids in full-time come April has the perspective on how to proceed for the rest of the school year changed. The union has had the teachers back and I feel like it's time for the school committee to have the kids backs and make their social and emotional well-being a priority. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Amiko. The next person is Mr. Chris Holler. Mr. Holler, when we can hear you, you can go ahead and start. Great. Thank you. Can you hear me? Yes. Go ahead. Good evening, Dr. Bodie and the school committee members. My name is Chris Holler and I'm the father of first grader Thompson in the hybrid program and I first want to thank the school committee for all their hard work for pushing forward with this planning process to get our youngest learners back in school full-time starting the spring. I along with many other Arlington parents are anxiously awaiting to hear the plans that the superintendent's office is laying out by the March 11 deadline. As we approach the milestone of one year since schools were first closed, the combination of decreasing COVID cases expanded vaccine rollout and evidence from a zero in-school transmission has fueled the momentum to increase in-person learning. Just this week, the Baker administration proposed a plan to have all elementary-aged children in school five days a week by April. And for the first time in a long time, I'm feeling really hopeful for my son. As we know, one of the major hurdles for returning in the full-time is the distancing requirements of six-foot desk spacing. And at Thompson, as well as other Arlington elementary schools, I assume, it's physically impossible to have full classroom capacity unless that distancing is relaxed to a three-foot minimum. Now this past December, a local group of leading scientists, physicians, and public health experts outlined a roadmap for safely reopening schools based on increased understanding of COVID-19 signs and degree of risk in schools. In this document called schools in the path to zero, they recommend three-foot spacing for young learners when used in conjunction with other layering mitigation strategies such as masking, hand-washing, adequate airflow, contact tracing, and surveillance pool testing. All of these things are established and are working really well by our students, staff, and teachers. They're doing a brilliant job. Now this reduction in the six-foot spacing based on the scientific consensus was also endorsed just this past week by Brookline Public Schools, as well as a letter to Commissioner Riley from a group of 60 local physicians and scientists. So as long as our other established layering mitigation strategies remain in place and followed, relaxing the spacing requirements is the easiest and quickest path to getting kids back in school full-time. And there's really no time to waste on this. So once again, I just want to thank you all for all of your hard work in this planning process. We really appreciate it, and I'm happy to help in any way possible moving forward. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Holler. Ms. Christina Falcone. Hi, can you hear me? Yes. So my name is Christina Falcone, and I have three children in the hybrid program at Stratton. Thank you for the chance to speak and also taking the chance in the fall at having a hybrid program. Like most children in their classes, my children are thrilled to be in school with their friends and their amazing teachers on the two days that they're there. I wanted to speak tonight to ask you to look deeply into having students come back to school five days a week. Our students are suffering, our teachers are effectively teaching two separate classes and are really overworked. Having students back five days is in the best interest for our students and our teachers. Going along with the recent recommendations from the Education Commissioner Riley, many towns are going back for more in-person learning. Sounds like Beverly and Cambridge, Duxbury and Needham, as well as lots of private and Catholic schools around town. Arlington students and teachers deserve a chance to get back into the classroom five days. Back in the summer when conversations were happening about the fall reopening, no one knew if hybrid would work. And here we are proving it is working. Thanks to the dedication of teachers and pool testing and teacher testings, our schools are safe and not a place for COVID to spreading. Now we need to take another move to full in-person learning. I ask you to give full in-person learning a chance now because we don't want to be having these same conversations over the summer about what will happen in the fall. Let's figure this out now for our students and our wonderful teachers. Thanks so much. Thank you. Ms. Stephanie Trinkel. Hi, good evening, everyone. Thank you for providing me the opportunity to speak. I truly appreciate all the hard work that the teachers, administration and school committee have been doing during this difficult time. I'm the parent of a first grader and another son who will be entering kindergarten in the fall at Brackett Elementary. Sadly, we had to step away from Brackett this year and put our older son in a private program that was offering full-time in-person instruction. This was not our preference. However, during last spring, he was not able to appropriately participate in remote classrooms and have massive anxiety and sensory meltdowns. We tried everything to support him, but for the short short term, we realized that remote classrooms were not a viable learning option for him. He's having a great year at his private school, but he misses recess with his neighborhood friends, Mrs. Perry's classroom rugged story time, and much more. With his specific circumstances, we just couldn't risk a year of his life in an untested model, and thankfully we had the resources and opportunity to put him in a private school. I asked to make a public comment tonight because all parents deserve to know what the plan is for a full return to school and when it will happen. We deserve to know this because it's changing our children's trajectory, wasting precious time when their brains are most plastic, causing families to make impossibly difficult decisions like leaving their jobs, moving away from their beloved community, and so on. I'm worried because so far, I haven't seen any movement from our districts where it's getting the kids back in person more. For example, when it became generally understood that COVID is not transmitted via surfaces, I thought that maybe we'd pivot and begin alternating Wednesdays as in-person days, maybe cohort A one week then cohort B the next week, and so on. I've heard some other districts are doing this, among other things, to give kids more in-person learning time. As parents, we need to know with relative certainty when a full return will happen and what the plan is for getting there. So when will this plan be presented? Are we waiting for the teachers to be vaccinated in a full return is certain for the fall? Or is there something else that will need to happen? I respectfully ask for a deadline for the plan to be presented to parents so that each family can decide whether the plan will work or if they need to see private placement, homeschool, or even maybe move to another town. Our town's children all deserve a consistent quality education complete with regular social and emotional growth opportunities and space to collaborate with and learn from their peers. Thank you very much. Thank you. The final person for public comment is Ms. Shana Palauer. Yes, hi. Can you? Yes, sorry about the hand-raising. Okay, thank you. Dr. Bodie and members of the school committee, thank you for this opportunity. My name is Shana Palauer. I taught high school English for 11 years in Newton and am a parent to a Thompson fourth grader. Tonight I'm asking the school committee to vote to support resolution number one, MCAS and high stakes testing, which was approved by the Massachusetts Association of School Committees by a vote of 112-9 last November. Somerville, Cambridge, Concord, and Winchester have already passed this resolution. Arlington educators should not be required to administer the MCAS on-site during a pandemic. Here are my concerns for what happens if MCAS moves forward. Many families who are remote opt out because they do not want to be in school buildings. Well, that's going to invalidate district-wide results. So now we have individual schools having to allocate their already minimal staff time, space, and resources to ensuring that hybrid and remote students don't mix. And they have to do this for the multiple sessions of the multiple grade-level tests and subjects that are given in a year. Children like my daughter lose instructional time from their teacher on in-person days, of which she only gets 66 this academic year. I don't want her to lose any and certainly not one for MCAS. And let's just say, for example, that all remote families choose to have their children take the test, all hybrid families do too. I used to teach sophomore English. I've had years of experience with my kids taking the MCAS. And as an experienced educator, I can tell you that the MCAS is not going to be useful this year. Even an abridged one with no high-stakes consequences, they're not going to measure what you're looking for. The pandemic has changed everything and these old standards don't apply. I really feel that instead of relying on old ways of assessment, we can approach this topic with the same creativity, the same flexibility, and the same generosity of spirit that our teachers have shown every day in these unprecedented times. There are 438 of them who respond to student needs daily, and they measure our students' growth in real time. They, not the test, can tell us more than MCAS ever will. Let's just ask them. So please, support resolution number one and cancel MCAS this year. Thank you for your time. Thank you. All right. So that's everybody for public comment. Thank you so much for coming. So we turn to the first item on the agenda, which is the Arlington Education Association, AEA contract vote. So this evening, we have before us a contract with our teachers union. It will be public at the end of this meeting and can be requested from our administrative assistant and will also be posted in Novus with the materials from this meeting. It is a one-year contract for the 2021-2022 school year, and this was a process that we started back in November, December, and I have come here at the end of February ready to vote on it. So I, you know, it's usually we do three-year contracts with our teachers, and given the amount of uncertainty around, you know, frankly, financial and budgetary concerns moving beyond, you know, moving through and past FY22, this was where we're at for right now, and this was what this is what we have. And I'm, you know, I'm proud that this is where we've ended up at the, you know, after during a really challenging year. So I'd like to thank Mr. Cardin and Mr. Heiner from the school committee who were on our negotiating team, Ms. Keys, and her colleagues from the AEA, Dr. Bodie, Dr. McNeil, Mr. Mason, Mr. Spiegel, and I'm, so I'm glad to be here to do that. Dr. Bodie, did you want to say anything about this? I realize it's your name next to it, not mine actually, so. Did you want to share anything about this? You're talking, sorry, yeah, I was talking to you. Yeah, it has your name next to it. That's why. So it's fine. Sorry, I have a phone in the background here. I want to echo your thank you to everyone. It was a challenging year for everyone as we've also have heard our speakers beforehand talk about. We negotiated, as we always have, with a lot of the will and trust and I'm very pleased that this contract can come before the school committee this evening. And Ms. Keys is also here who is president of the AEA. Thank you. So is there a motion to approve the Arlington Education Association AEA contract? Any discussion? Actually, you guys are not all on my screen. Well, maybe you are. Okay, seeing none, let's go ahead and vote. So Ms. Exton. Yes. Mr. Cardin. Yes. Dr. Allison Ampe. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Mr. Schlickman. Yes. Mr. Heiner. Yes. And I am also yes. Great. Thank you very much. All right. The next item on the agenda is the Arlington Rainbow Commission update. Mr. Mistler. Hello. Is it okay if I share my screen? Yes, please go ahead. Okay. Okay. Hello and welcome everybody. This is a presentation from the Arlington LGBTQIA Plus Rainbow Commission. My name is Keith March Mistler. I am a commissioner, a Burlington teacher, and an Arlington resident. And we have Molly Gillis. Would you want to introduce yourself, Molly? Hi, my name is Molly Gillis. I'm a parent and resident here in Arlington. And Anne, would you introduce yourself as well? I'm Anne Phillips. I'm a sophomore at AHS, and I'm the GSA's co-vice president. And I've been working with the Rainbow Commission with the middle school QSA and the high school GSA for the past few years. Thank you, Molly and Anne. If you don't know what the Rainbow Commission is, it is a voluntary group of people appointed by the town to promote full inclusion of LGBTQIA Plus individuals. I was actually appointed by the school committee and last year, well, it was during the pandemic, last year you asked me to come back and to give you a little bit of review of what we're doing. So that's why I'm here. Some of the things that we do in the Rainbow Commission is we have put up those happy pride banners that you see right under about us. We work with the library, the council on aging, and we're actually hoping to do more with the Arlington public school system, and that's why we are here today. So let me just go to the next thing. Our key takeaways of this presentation is three things. We've got collaboration. We're really hoping that we can work together, like I just said. The second thing is we're hoping that there's could be a school liaison that you could possibly name tonight that we could work with to make it a little bit easier to have that collaboration happen. And then thirdly, we're hoping for LGBTQIA Plus inclusivity in terms of hiring, curriculum review, and many other things that we'll talk about. So my first one is to talk about with some teen stats about LGBTQIA Plus students. This is from the 2017 Massachusetts Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which includes Arlington students. So it's sadly 22% of LGBTQ students attempted suicide because of their sexual orientation or gender identity compared to 4% of the straight peers. And 43% of LGBTQ Plus students, I'll just have to move you all, felt actually hurt themselves compared to 14% of their straight peers and 28% of LGBTQ Plus students experienced bullying compared to 13% of the straight peers. So what we're saying here is that we really need to do something about it and we really need to promote inclusivity and have training within the school systems. And I'm going to pass this off to Molly. Hi, everybody. I just wanted to express bread to this school committee for making time and space to hear us this evening. It's a privilege to be seen and heard by this group and we want to acknowledge that and say thank you. As I mentioned earlier, I am a proud almost 10 year resident of Arlington. My husband and I bought our first home here. We're raising our kids here. We love Arlington. And we've had an incredibly positive experience with Arlington public schools, largely through the lens of the peer school. We're both of our kids have attended school and our eldest is moving to the Gibbs and now the Odyssey. I'm here today to talk to you about safe schools, which is one of my most favorite topics. But in order to share with you how I got there, I'm going to share a little bit about our family. And in particular, my daughter who's in the second grade at the Pierce, she's eight years old and she happens to be transgender. Our daughter socially transitioned in her second year of kindergarten at the Pierce. She's a little on the young side. So she did kindergarten twice, which was actually a good thing because it enables her to enter her second year of kindergarten in her correct gender. For those of you who might not be familiar with what it means to transition socially, it means different things for different people. But I can share what it meant for our daughter. And that is she began to use she her first pronouns, she grew her hair out long. She started using the girl's bathroom at school. And she started wearing what she lovingly referred to at the time as girl clothes, the sparkly, the better. Again, her social transition was largely a positive experience for her and our family. And that was due to the partnership and communication with the peer school, the teachers and principals, then Karen Hartley, now Andrew Amati have made a huge difference in her happiness and well-being and in our family. I will say, you know, as we moved through kindergarten, it was it was a little bit simpler as we got into the back half of first grade. Things got a little more complicated. There were some kids who remembered her pre transition, who questioned her gender, who questioned why she was using the girl's bathroom.  And it was a difficult time. Teachers approached me right around that time and said, look, you know, we're having conversations with kids, we can do that. But we're starting to have to call parents at home. And we're not quite sure what to say. What do we say? And I said, you know what, I don't know. But I'll find out. So with Karen Hartley's support, I did some research, I reached out to the Gems program at Children's Hospital, which is a world-renowned program. And they highly recommended Jeff Parotti and Safe Schools, which is a free program offered through Dusty. Jeff and Safe Schools has been transformational for our family, for our community, and has made a huge impact at the Pierce. Before I hand it over to Keith to share a little bit about Safe Schools, which by the way, I know you're all familiar with. I know Safe Schools has been in and out of Arlington Public Schools over the years. I just want to say a few more things. First, as a parent and resident, I'm deeply committed to supporting and being a good partner for my kids principals, teachers in the district, each of you and your work to make our schools safe and successful for every child. I realize that is the collective goal, and it doesn't rest on your shoulders alone. We all have a role to play. I also know that my daughter will leave the Pierce School feeling confident and safe in her identity, largely in part due to the love and support of her family, her teachers and principals, her community, and Safe Schools training, which her teachers have all completed.  I'm here on behalf of the kids that will enter Arlington Public Schools after her, and those who are in our schools now who lack the support, the confidence, and the advocates to be who they are and be proud of it. My daughter's transition was not perfect. We weren't aiming for perfect. We were aiming for a happy kid and working in partnership with our school to create an environment that was a little more informed, a little more open, a little more inclusive, building on the goodness that was already there at the Pierce School and using a growth mindset. I realize some of our schools have done the training, but teachers and staff are asking for support to talk about these topics beyond the 101, moving to skill building and action, which is what we're moving into now at the Pierce School as well. One of our teachers when asking for my support to identify training said to me, you know, your daughter's lucky. She has parents who know her, who see her, who love her and encourage her to be who she is. Parents who advocate for her on her behalf. What happens when I get a student who has parents who are not supportive? Molly, what do I do? This is why I set out the training and this is why we're here today. I'm hopeful we can work together with the liaison and we're committed to doing the work and spending the time to build collaboration and partnership with each of you to keep the lines of communication open and to bring safe schools training to each school in the district on an annual basis, focused on that skill building and action, to keep the discussion and information alive and fresh for our teachers and staff across the district, to help ensure all LGBTQ students feel safe, supported and understood in Arlington Public Schools so that all of our teachers and staff members feel prepared and equipped to support these kids and their families. Thanks. And with that, I'll hand it over to Keith. Thank you, Molly, for sharing that story. As a teacher myself and Rainbow Commission member, I also attended the training and I just wanted to tell you a bit about safe schools. It was founded by Jeff in Arlington back in 1993 and is a joint program of the Massachusetts Commission on LGBTQ youth and DESI to address concerns of bullying and suicide risk that we talked about earlier that faces LGBTQ youth in Massachusetts public schools. And I just wanted to reiterate that it is a free training offered to all schools in Massachusetts. And Molly actually worked with Principal Andrew Amati to get the training on the books right before the holidays and I just wanted to share a 20-second brief thing. Keith, we can't hear him. We can't hear him. Oh, okay. Well, you know what? He just says it's great. So we'll move on. If you can forward that to you. When you're done, if you can send the link to the slides again to Karen so at least the committee can see it, I'm sure that we'd all like to watch that. Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you. And we also partnership with Arlington High School and with that I want to bring it over to Ann Phillips. Ann, do you want to go ahead? Yeah. Hi.  So I am sophomore. I just got elected to be the co-vice president of the GSA and I've been out since 2016. So it's been a rough beginning, but I feel very good. I have supportive parents and mostly supportive school environment. So this past summer we, some of the people from the GSA worked on a pronoun video to educate some of the teachers and some of our peers on the correct usage of certain pronouns and how to use more inclusive language when in the classroom. And I also shared my coming out story as part of this to just personalize it and make it really more impactful and really show that it's not like a faceless person. It's really a actual student that is struggling with these things. This last year we met with the health and history departments to talk about LGBTQ plus resources for their curriculum and classrooms. And though I, myself and here presenting in front of you as a non-binary individual and I feel very confident with my gender and sexuality, not every student is and it shouldn't be the GSA's responsibility to find resources to educate our teachers. It can turn into a very uncomfortable situation in conversations when a student is educating a teacher and when a student is put on the spot to answer questions and it's just not our responsibility, not our job in a school environment. Thank you so much, Em. And as a teacher myself and 10-year advisor to the GSA in Burlington, I can also attest to that and I can share that video with you later. So I just wanted to conclude our presentation with our three goals. And the first thing is that we hope that all future hiring committees include active recruitment of BIPOC, LGBTQIA plus, and differently abled people, safe schools trainings. You heard a lot about that from Molly. We want hope that you can bring in free safe schools training to all schools in Arlington every single year. And finally, we hope that there can be some kind of curriculum review in the 2021-2022 school year so we can come back and ask you what is being taught within the Arlington Public Schools. And finally, I'm really hoping that tonight we can get a liaison or you can think about giving us somebody to talk to so that we can continue this great partnership because this type of work, youth-centered advocacy beginning with Teacher PD is really, really important. So we're very excited to be here tonight and thank you all. If you need anything or if you have any questions or want resources, please reach out to the Rainbow Commission. You can reach out directly to Molly or myself or email this email on the slide. Thank you. Thank you. Great. Thank you guys so much for coming. If you don't mind. Oh, perfect. I'm sharing your screen. So I want to open it up to questions or comments from the committee. I see Mr. Schlickman. Yeah. Hi. Thank you very much. And thank you for the presentation. I think this is a partnership that the school committee and the school department needs to, excuse me, cherish and nurture going forward. When I worked as a principal, I had a trans third grader in my building and the caring and compassion that I saw led to a really happy school days for everybody in the class in that grade level. And that wouldn't have been the case 10, 15, 20 years ago, almost anywhere. It would have been much more of a struggle for the child. And, you know, there's a certain emotional feel for this is that a child who could have had a rough, rough run through school was supported both by the policies of the district of the actions of the staff and the students within that setting and anything we can do to make that happen. This is a genuine issue that some kids face and the more compassionate we are and ready to meet their needs, the better. So thank you for coming before us. Dr. Allison Ampe and then Mr. Heiner. Thank you. Thank you, all of you for coming and talking to us. It's been, this has been very interesting. I was wondering if the statistics that you showed at the very start of your presentation were those from Arlington High School or from Massachusetts in general? It's the Massachusetts Youth Risk Behavior Survey. So it includes Arlington students. But it's not just, yeah, it's not just Arlington statistics. Okay. And we don't have anything on Arlington. I guess we probably don't have that small. Okay. Thank you. Mr. Heiner. Just for clarification, the liaison you're looking for, are you looking for a member of the committee? We're looking for an administrator or somebody that can kind of be the go-to person that we can work with. So it doesn't have to be a school committee member. Thank you. Mr. Thielman, Dr. McNeil and Dr. Janger in that order. Only because that's how you are on my screen. Go ahead, Mr. Thielman. Thank you. So I thank you very much for this presentation and that was very brave of everyone to share a personal story. I guess what I was going to ask, Keith, you asked us to make a decision tonight on a liaison. So I didn't know if there was a non-... I don't know what we're... So I'm trying to figure out the next step in this process in naming liaisons. That was my question. So are we going to get any clarity from that? How about Jeff, I will email you in a week. How about that? How about you email me? Okay. I think we're going to get a... I think we're going to... We might get... Let's see what Dr. McNeil and Dr. Janger have to say because their hands are up right quick. Dr. McNeil, go ahead. I just want to make sure that I'm in the proper procedure with school committee rules, but I'd be proud to be a liaison to this, to your organization. So a lot of things that you are pursuing, the goals that you have align with what we're trying to do within the school district, especially in it falls within my responsibilities as teacher education, professional development, and curriculum. So I'd be more than happy to partner with you and we can email each other, exchange our contacts, and then we can get the ball rolling and we can have an initial meeting as soon as possible. That would be great. Thank you so much. Dr. Janger, you're on mute, sir. So as I was saying, I mean, first, I just want to say how proud we are of our students. M has done a great job. The GSA has done a great job. I did want to clarify one thing because I want to say this to M, that the students should not feel that in any way we expect them to carry the load of training our teachers or working with our teachers or supervising our teachers. In the conversation about pronouns, it was something I think that initially came out of conversations, the anti-racism working group. We've done lots of training with staff. We've done lots of training. We bring in professionals. We also, though, really want the students to feel like they have a voice and that their own voices are, which is why, you know, professional videos are great. I think we, I think we maybe use one, it was you, Keith, or it might have been the other folks. We use one of the videos that you showed there. But also, at the same time as seeing experts from outside, seeing students in our own school is something that's really powerful in hearing their own stories. So we really want to do both. Second piece on that is, I think in terms of thinking about liaisons, I mean, I would offer myself as a liaison at the high school, but I can think of three people at the high school who would do a better job. And so I'd like to talk to all of them in terms of being a high school liaison. But I also think given the conversation that you were talking about, much of which is not just at the high school, which we'd be happy to partner with you on. I think working with Dr. McNeil as well, you know, because I'm, I don't think the high school GSA advisor or Mr. maybe Mr. Conklin or Ms. Rossi, but would want to be going and to the elementary principles necessarily in terms of talking about training they do at the elementary school. So maybe it would be a team, not just one point of contact, but maybe some points of contact at different levels. But I'd be happy to speak to a few folks and give you some names from the high school as well. Thank you. I'm actually in contact with David Cannelly. So I would hope that we cannot get a teacher just because teachers are very swamped. No, I think it would be Mr. Cannelly, Mr. Rossi or Mr. Conklin who's the history teacher history department chair would be the three folks to talk to. And if not them, if they're all too busy, you can always call me. So I'll talk to I'll talk to them and see how they'd like to handle. We've also worked with the Massachusetts partnership for youth. We've they have various training modules that we've bought in speakers from that organization and they've been very effective. And so I mean, I have a lot of ideas of things that we're doing right now. And so I just I think it's, you know, the synergy is there and I'm looking forward to it. Great. Thank you. Anybody else on the dexon? I want to echo the thanks to all of you for sharing your stories. And I as a as an elementary school teacher myself, I want to just advocate that we support this in all of the elementary schools and not just in classrooms where a student happens to be, you know, gender queer or non-binary or questioning who they are. I think these conversations need to happen in all of the classrooms so that all all students and teachers know how to have these conversations when a student might end up in their classroom. I also just wanted to ask if there's a way for your presentation. I know Ms. Morgan said to send it to her to share with the school committee, but I think it should be added to the to the novice agenda so that the public can also have an opportunity to see it because these these conversations are really important. And I think the community needs to know that we're having them. Great. Great. Thank you. Anybody else? Mr. Schlickman? I move we designate Dr. McNeil as the district is on. Second. Any discussion? Great. So Ms. Extin. Wait, I was going to discuss. I'm sorry. No, please go ahead. I was just going to say thank you very much, Mr. Dr. McNeil for offering and it sounds like it's a really good fit. Absolutely. Great. Thank you very much. Thank you for the details that I missed. Okay. Ms. Extin. Yes. Mr. Cardin. Yes. Dr. Allison Ampe. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Mr. Schlickman. Yes. Mr. Heiner. Yes. And I am also yes. So thank you so much for coming this evening. We actually have a lot of appointing authority. The school committee does we appoint people all over town and and we and I remember when we appointed you, Mr. Missler and and I we tell a lot of people to come back and report to us on what they're doing and it doesn't happen very often. And I'm particularly impressed by the three of you who came back to tell us what's going on, but also to ask things from us and and get us to do things, which I'm really grateful that you did that this evening. And thank you for your thoughtful presentation and your very reasonable requests. And we look forward to continuing to partner with you. Thank you so much. Thank you all. Thank you so much. All right. The next item on the agenda is the Arlington Haysville FY 22 program of studies second read. This is something that we talked about. We did a first read two weeks ago. And you know, I'm happy to have discussion about this. I do want to be clear that in voting to approve the program of studies as we discussed yesterday in the CIAA subcommittee meeting, this is not a decision point on leveling for courses for any grade for the 2021-22 school year or beyond. All we are doing this evening is approving the course offerings so that it can be available to our high school administrative team to begin soliciting beginning to work with students on course selections. So Dr. Janger and Mr. McCarthy, did you have anything that you wanted to share on this that hasn't already been said? Dr. Janger? Not really. I think Mr. McCarthy, did you want to speak to the specific edits that you made in the document that you resubmitted? The specific edits were removal of the heterogeneous courses ninth grade in modern world history, physical science, and ninth grade English foundations of English. We are looking to have conversations about that process in the coming weeks and months to discuss what that looks like, what the curriculum would look like, what differentiation looks like, and we're really looking forward to having those conversations with the community, the students, and the staff as we process through this conversation. Right, and then just to clarify, part of the we got a little ahead of ourselves in trying to get the program of studies out, but there's a conversation, a short-term conversation that we plan to have in the next month in terms of looking at things that were tried this year that now folks have come back and given feedback on sort of informally a lot of questions about things like 60 versus 80 minute periods, semesterized schedules, the way we've used remote classes, and heterogeneous grouping being one of those, where we wanted to go through some reflection and gathering people's experiences and ideas around those, and heterogeneous grouping is one of those things. I'll be meeting with the faculty senate in the next few days to talk about the faculty process. We'll also have conversations with students and staff, but we do understand that in particular heterogeneous grouping, which is part of a long effort, I think we've made in terms of increasing student participation in higher level classes and really increasing the equity in terms of our offerings and expectations and opportunity for all students and going more towards inclusion. So that's been a long-term effort, but this was a bit of a jump in terms of where people were with expectations. We want to go through both listening to folks about it, educating the community and deciding where we are on that in the next month. So I look forward to that conversation and for folks out there watching, you know, look for opportunities to provide feedback. We'll probably process in small groups and then put together some sort of survey to get a lot of your impact. That is all. Thank you. So I'm looking for a motion to approve the HHS FY 22 program of studies on second read. So moved. Any discussion? Mr. Thielman. Yeah, thank you. I'm going to vote in favor of this. My question is just our timeline for any amendment to what we're voting on tonight. So are we going to, Dr. Janger said we're going to have a over the next month. There's going to be a research conversation surveys. Are we then going to, are you then going to come back with Dr. Janger in March or April and ask for an amendment to tonight's forum? I just want to understand the time. Well, I guess what I would say is I would expect to hear from the end of March beginning of April with some presentation, just on what we've learned and heard from folks and then a summative statement about what we think the fall that we are proposing to, whether that means, yes, we really think ninth grade English should be heterogeneous. And this is the process for that or whether we say, because that we don't have a, we don't have a current schedule that we would use in September. Right. We would either go back to last September's a year ago, September schedule, or we do a modification of what we're doing. But none of the schedules that we currently have are just the automatic roll forward. So I think that whole conversation to try to get a sense of the direction that we're heading so that we can start letting teachers plan and letting us build this, not just build the schedule really think through the impact to the schedule because as we discussed yesterday, Mr. McCarthy can make the schedule. You know, once we know where things are, but simply building it into the thing doesn't capture all the conversations in terms of how that impacts teachers lives, how that impacts specific kids schedules, how we then hand put through, I mean, special ed students are usually hand scheduled into those programs. And so we really want to start doing that as quickly as possible already, you know, a month and a half behind where we would normally be on that process. So, so I will give you a report at the end of March at the beginning of April. And in that report, I will either make a proposal or simply kind of inform you about the things that we are thinking we're going to do. Thank you. Mr. Heiner. Through the chair, I would like to ask Dr. Jenga to provide members of the committee with just a copy of the surveys or whatever communication you add to get information back from parents and students. Thank you.  No. Okay. All right. Any more discussion on the program of studies? Dr. Allison Ampe. Thank you. I just wanted to reiterate just for clarification that when Mr. McCarthy said he removed the heterogeneous courses that that doesn't mean that we will not necessarily offer them, it's that we're not making that decision now. It's not that they're taken totally off the plate. That's correct. In my understanding, that is correct. And it would be an amendment to the program of studies if we were to add them in. But we would make a proposal about that at the end of March or early April. Mr. Heiner. Would that be part of the survey or getting information, soliciting information from the parents and students? Absolutely. I mean, either way, so there's going to be a, let's be realistic, there's going to be a short-term conversation we're going to get as much as we can and sort of figure out a direction we're going. If heterogeneous grouping is a direction we're going, I think there's probably going to be some subsequent conversations as well. But the first process on that, these sorts of things are hard to answer a survey about if you don't have context and they're hard to trust a structural survey about if we don't understand even how the community is framing the conversation. So the plan first is to have some small, some focus group conversations with representative groups of parents, representative groups of students, clearly some eighth graders who want to talk to me about heterogeneous grouping, but also really finding out like what was the experience of ninth graders, what was the experience with 10th graders, what was people's experience with semesterized classes. There's a lot of positive feedback we've gotten about a lot of these practices, but do you like remote instruction is not a good question. However, I know that there are people who've come to me and said there's a lot of really good things we could do with remote instruction, even if we weren't in COVID anymore in terms of increasing opportunities for kids, in terms of allowing students who are homebound or going through mental or medical health issues to be more engaged with school. And so listening to sort of what those things are to frame them up and then getting feedback, sort of structure questions around those is what we'll try to do. Anybody else? Mr. Kimman. One brief point. I appreciate Mr. Hanner's position, but a subcommittee like the Crickland committee could look at a survey and give you feedback. So it's not out of the question. Many eyes make good surveys, so I'd be perfectly happy if the time allows it to give you guys as much time to look at it. You're just going to have to give me some fast turnaround. Mr. Cardin. Yeah, I just wanted to add as a committee chair that we're always welcome to assist in any way possible. We can schedule meetings in between the regular school committee meetings, so we have more flexibility. As you're having the focus groups and you're heading towards a certain direction, it might be good to talk to us about where you're headed before you come to us with a formal proposal in April.  So we're available to help. Thanks. I appreciate that. Mr. Schlickman. Yeah, thank you very much for agreeing. You can't fix a survey in analysis where you don't have the proper design. And if we have a good design, good questions to capture the statements that are being made by the community and weigh them. And we're able to access the actual data and not just the presentation on it. But as the governing board for the district, I think we'll be able to make much stronger and more thoughtful decisions. So thank you for being willing to work with us. I'm going to have to answer your questions so I might as well ask them up front, right? So that I don't, you know, and I've done survey design professionally and spent months on surveys and sent them out and sometimes you get questions back and you look at them and go, that doesn't tell me anything. So the more eyes, the better. So absolutely. Great. Thank you. Anybody else? All right. So I can't remember who made the original motion nor who seconded it. But I'm sure that was great. And for the HS FY 22 program of studies, Ms. Exton. Yes. Mr. Curtin. Yes. Alison Ampe. Yes. Mr. Keelman. Yes. Mr. Schlickman. Yes. Mr. Heiner. Yes. And I am also yes. The next item on the agenda is the suspension and discipline report. And I do want to note that this is something that we do do on an annual basis annual the year, the months and the time it's all, you know, it's all very amorphous right now. We did do a discipline report with Dr. Jinger back in in June, I believe, or early July. But he's here on our sort of more regular schedule to give us an update. And so take it away. So let me find my little thing here. So I will share my screen in one second. But I just did have a question for you because I mean, the data is the data from last year. That's what we usually present in December. And then we talk about trends in the middle of the year. And I'm not sure how much detail you want me to go through in terms of the test time to work hang on in terms of how much detail you'd like me to go into and reviewing the material that we've already talked about. Would you like me to go quickly through that and then talk about current trends and activities? I'd like you to mostly focus on current trends and activities. Well, make for a much shorter presentation, but a very positive one. Yes. And while keeping within our our 15 minute presentation structure to the I think I could do this in three. So go ahead. So just to remind everybody of where we were, right? The death data that we talked about this summer and the data that I'm going to talk about today is our in school suspension out of school suspensions, in school suspensions, and then detention data. Now in school and out of school suspensions are tracked very carefully and rigorously because those are reported to the state and those are a metric that we follow. Detentions has been a little bit more of a logging activity. So not every single student who is called after school who may think they have a detention is automatically there. And some things that the student may not necessarily have experienced as punitive, like a conversation with a dean, are logged also as detention. Nonetheless, the trends that you'll see in detention data are helpful because our inconsistency in practice has been consistent across those three years. And so the other thing to note is I talked about three years because four years ago or three years ago is when we first piloted collaborative problem solving and then over the past three years, that has been something we've been phasing in training more and implementing more in our practice. So the four years ago data would be the baseline, but this only goes back to the first year. So that actually represents already a reduction. And the good news as we talked about is that all discipline, detentions in school suspensions and out of school suspensions has consistently gone down over that three-year implementation period. And as we've looked back at the data, what we'd find is that we are consistent in our application of data. There are issues around equity, which I'll talk about in a second, and disproportionality. But they're not disproportional in what activities get what, you know, if a student gets in a fight, they were suspended. If a student has drugs in school, they were suspended. We had a conversation about that this summer as to where we were going on those sorts of activities. But in some issues, disproportionality in districts, and I've seen this in the past, not in Arlington, came in part because students were getting different outcomes in terms of discipline for similar events. That's not the case. The disproportionality for us rose out of student behavior, which is still something we have control and responsibility for. So, you know, just as a quick reminder of what CPS works, CPS, the idea is that we function from the perspective that students succeed if they can. And so we move away from the idea of discipline where you want to make students want to, which is to say, do this or else, or where you drop the expectation. So the idea there's plan A, do this or else, that lets people know the expectation is real. And there are some things that are still plan A. Plan C is drop the expectation, which we sometimes do for students who are not able to meet a behavioral expectation that's not super disruptive. But plan B, which is to work with the student collaboratively to have a conversation that begins with empathy, really listening to and understanding the student's perspective, then raising your own concerns and non-confrontational ways that are around really problem solving, and then collaboratively problem solving to find a mutually acceptable solution. That builds relationships, it interrupts unconscious bias, and it develops new skills and resolves problems. That's the reason why we work on those things. So, as you can see, over the last three years, we've also had a steady decline in out-of-school suspensions, going from just under 50 down to about 19. So that was about a 55% drop over that three-year period. And then if you look, the proportionality in each of those has remained about the same, and this is something we still need to work on, because that leads to the disproportionality by race, out-of-school suspensions by race. So this is our student population, and this is our out-of-school suspensions. And so if you look at the out-of-school suspensions over time, over the last three years, there's a lot of variability in the disproportionality because the numbers are small, and one or two kids make a big difference. But if you look, going back to three years ago, we had 48 out-of-school suspensions, of which 13 were African-Americans.  Out-of-school suspensions the following year were dropped to 30. And so now you see that it's three and a half times more likely than an African-American student will be suspended out of school. But at that point, that number has dropped down to only four students. So it's a fairly small number overall, with a lot of, you'd have to essentially have only one case, and that's true as well. And the next year we'll remain at four students, but the number dropped. And so it was fine. Now, the really important trend that we saw in that data and that I was most proud of is that if you actually looked at what these suspensions were for, what kind of behavior it was, suspensions based on conflict, suspensions based on dropped far more than the overall suspensions, and suspensions based on conflict with teachers dropped to zero. And so that's a really positive outcome in terms of thinking about how we're handling behaviors. Because in every case where behavior had in the past four years, five years led to suspension when it was conflict with a teacher, that was always a case in which the behavior escalated. It was not a student running into the room and swearing at a teacher or running into the right. It was something that started at the level that might have been a detention or leave my class, but then it escalated to that behavior. So the fact that the teachers have now learned to have experiences and conversations with students that de-escalate, build a relationship, and resolve the problem with that significant discipline is really positive. So then we'll just quickly go through there. You'll see some more trends in in school suspensions. So that we've gone from 30 to 21, 26, that's dropped off a little bit less. One of the things we've been looking at is that in a lot of ways that nature of our in school suspensions have changed in that they focused a lot more on being more of an intervention, actually use the time to get the students connected to school. And that leads us to and then detention trends as you'll see dropped off in a similar way. I'm not going to go into a lot of detail on there. And then again, had very similar levels of disproportionality a little more consistently because the numbers aren't small. So what we talked about this summer were things that we were going to do to address this. One was to really have a centralized attendance office, but because that focuses on managing that challenging behavior, but also because it will give us more consistent data, particularly around things like the tensions that we were going to set metrics and really separate detentions versus things like interventions around apps or on absences or makeup work or other activities. And we were really going to try to target disproportionality. We've continued to work with think kids on those materials. So here's the funny punch line. We have had no suspensions, no in school suspensions and no detentions this year. Now, some of that, an awful lot of that is that because we've cut the number of students present in the building by about 90%. But I do want to be clear that that does not mean there has not been challenging behavior. We've had issues in terms of the students who are in the building, many of those students are populations that had in the past more experience of challenging behaviors. And we've had, you know, other sorts of issues of conflict among students that happen outside of school. So one, a lot of the challenging behavior has moved in terms of our work of the Deans, a lot of work around attendance and keeping students engaged. But I want to be clear, like the Dean started logging for the beginning of this year, every contact and they fell off a little, it's a lot to keep track. But they were logging contacts with students. And we logged over 4,000, 4,859 contacts with students by the Deans in the first semester. We're shifting how we're, what we're going to track in the second semester in order to, I think, get some more useful data. Of those 100, 1,111 were flagged as being CPS. Some of those were initiating a contact saying we have this concern, what's up with that? Some of those were spontaneous Plan B where you have an interaction with the student and you say, I see this is happening, what's up with that?  Those were more in the neighborhood of about 50 of those. Other things that we have done in terms of supporting students have been that COVID-19 mental health screen or something which we will present on at some point in the future. That involves screening every single student to look at stressors that they were experiencing and students who had elevated levels of stress were called by deans, counselors, or social workers. And then in the small number of cases where there was really elevated concern, there was some sort of referral made, but for the vast majority of cases, it was about levels of stress. So about 30 to 35% of our students reported those elevated levels of stress and they've been offered skills group and resiliency groups in terms of building coping skills and building support around navigating this pretty stressful time. And then last but not least, we had somewhat more grandiose plans for continuing our work with collaborative problem-solving. A lot of our PD time has been taken up with more short-term issues, but we have a leadership team that continues to meet for coaching twice a month. We review plans and proposals. We talk about specifically a lot of the students that we're talking about so that we can make sure that we are staying at the level of intervention and skill development and not finding ourselves in the plan A position of disciplinary responses. We've had really good success with that. We offer coaching support for teachers when they report to us that they have a student that they're finding challenging. We'll work with them to run a plan B or to have those conversations. We are scheduled on March 10th to do a training to think about specific challenging behaviors related to COVID, keeping your screen on, wearing your mask, and then engaging with stress students, which is something that the staff has asked for support with. New teachers have done a short-term review. They did not, a few of them were able to do tier one training in the summer, but most we were up and running and the idea of missing three and a half days of classes during a semester when we didn't start teaching until mid-September didn't go very well, so most of those students, those folks, will get there full training this summer or next fall and we're going on with training and support and data analysis. So thank you very much for the time to explain all of that. The good news is there's no disciplinary reasons. Great, thank you. Can you turn off your screen sharing so that we can get everybody back on the screen? Lovely. Thank you so much. Questions or comments from the committee? Mr. Cardin? Thank you for that presentation and for all the work you've done on this. I just want to note that this is one of the issues that the Human Rights Commission had raised with us in a letter over the summer. We are planning to meet with them again in March. I don't know if they'll want to talk to you about it since we don't have any, we don't have any incidents this year. So they're concerned with the disproportionality. We're making progress on that. Well, I should say when you're reducing the numbers of incidents, we still have the disproportionality problem. But that's very hard to tackle unless you get, you know, because the numbers are so small. But there's still a disproportionality that people are concerned about. So it might be helpful to have a more tailored presentation on just what you've been doing to address that issue for the Human Rights Commission if we are able to arrange that meeting. But I'll be in touch with that. Absolutely. And realistically, I mean, when disproportionality is three incidents, that can be changed literally by one or two students who come passing through town. I think Dr. Paul Schlickman did an analysis we sort of talked about. And often the more transient population, and this is not saying that, but often the small populations look more like the Boston area. And so it's not about, it's just more about sort of different demographics of different groups. But realistically, this is not an explaining it away. But realistically, we have that disproportionality in lots of our other data. We have that disproportionality in the representation of students in curriculum A classes. But we have that as one of the biggest issues that impacts students weighted GPA is so it impacts long term impacts. So there are a lot of areas in which we really have to look at our practices to think about how we are disproportionately treating our students of color. Great, thank you. Dr. Allison Abbey. Thank you. Thank you very much for this presentation, Dr. Jinger. I had a couple of questions. First, somewhere near the start, I think he said that the disproportion seen was from student behavior and not differential response. And I was wondering how you figured that out. So the question was what was the incident, right? Was it, you know, so I'm looking in, so we went through and looked, you know, was it the things for which one got suspended were fights, theft, drugs? I can't remember. I had the table before, but those are the only things that you were asked one of the deans that could probably rattle it off. Like they're the only things we suspend for, period. And given that those are the only things they're suspended for, the question is to look and say, are there kids not getting suspended for those things? And is that disproportional? And we didn't see that. And the other question was, are there kids getting suspended for other things? And we don't see that. And just to be clear, the numbers are small enough. Every single suspension is discussed in the leadership team. The deans keep track of it somewhere else. And so every time we come in and say, okay, these two kids got into a pushing match. This kid threw a punch. This kid yelled the swear word. Like two days, three days, like we're going back through the last 10 incidents to say, like, let's make sure that these things are done in consistent ways. And then we're having the second conversation nowadays, which is, is there a more restorative, more collaborative problem solving approach that would be more effective? And what we see is that, you know, for the most part, when we find that change, we don't change it for just one kid. It changes for everybody going forward. And so that stayed pretty consistent going forward. But the thing we talked about last spring, last summer, the thing that we would have tracked if we had detentions this year is within detentions, there are still kids getting detentions for, you know, saying something disrespectful or yelling it in other kids, those sorts of incidents. And it's, we don't, to be able to sort of look at disproportionality there is something we don't have reliable enough data on. And so it was our intent this year to code that much more consistently. But you see disproportionality in detentions. It's comparable to the disproportionality elsewhere. The thing I'm really interested in is having consistent data if and when we continue with detentions next year and really monitoring whether students of color are getting detentions for the things I think they have listed them here, right, things that would be associated with bias, right. So discipline for behavior that's based on our attribution, right, you disrupted my class, you were disrespectful. If that's going more disproportionately towards students of color, that's a real red flag for me. But we don't have that data because we didn't track it in that way. We were starting at the higher level, we know we've cleaned it up there, and we need to push down to that lower level. That's great. I guess the one other thing I'd be interested in is it'd just be nice to see if I like that information you had about suspension data based on conflict and that the teacher conflict has gone away. And it'd just be nice to see that in its own graph somewhere because it's something that's nice to be able to communicate well to the public because this is an area that has been a great concern to people. So thank you very much. Anybody else? All right. Thank you so much, Dr. Jinger. The next item on the agenda is athlete pooled testing requirement. So there are a number of items on the agenda that I expect we'll be able to move through with some purpose, which is good given what we have to do. But there were a number of things that had come up in the interim between meetings that I was made aware of, and I just wanted to make sure that the committee knew about them and had an opportunity to ask questions if they had them. So Dr. Bodie, can you talk to us about pooled testing for athletes at the high school? We have decided for this upcoming season, if you recall, this year there's going to be four seasons in the athletic calendar. For this season, we have made a decision to have mandatory pool testing for our athletic teams. And since Dr. Jinger is here this evening and we scheduled on the agenda so that you would be adjacent to your other reports, it would be helpful if you could talk a little bit more about this. And we, a letter has, I think it's already gone out now to the parents of our student athletes. Dr. Jinger? Sure. And so first of all, I mean, we know that in terms of the behavior that we are engaging with students, athletics is the riskiest behavior. We think it's really important, especially because of the students limited opportunities for social interaction. And it's a really great protective factor for students. But we want to be able to continue doing athletics. We've talked a lot about not seeing in school transmission in schools of COVID, but that has not been true in athletics. In athletics around the county and in Arlington, we've had clusters of cases. And so if we don't want to be like some districts which have had to shut down their whole athletic project program, we need to do testing and surveillance testing. And one of the challenges with athletics when we understand the motivation is if you do voluntary testing, the incentives for individual students are not good. The students know that if one student tests positive, their team is going to miss 10 days. And so when we did the pilot project with athletic testing and Cindy can talk to this more if necessary, in a lot of the sports, a lot of kids did not opt in at all. And the result of that was unfortunately not in the positive direction. And I understand that because the student thinks if I opt in, we're going to miss 10 days. But if we have clusters in the sports, we're going to end up losing the whole season. So what we want to do is make sure that the sports and the coaches and the community are kept safe.  So and a lot of districts, we're not the only district doing this. A lot of districts are doing this. And it's relatively simple to do. Great. Thank you, Dr. Jangra. I do want to take a second. I know we can do questions about this. And I did also, I'm trying to be better about blessing and releasing our presenters. So to Mr. McCarthy, thank you so much for being here tonight to talk to us about the program of studies. And so if you want to leave us, I'm making it awkward for me, but I don't want it to be awkward for you. So thank you so much for coming. All right, so questions from the committee for Dr. Boody or Dr. Jinger about athletic testing. Mr. Schickman. I'd just like to know what's going on in the rest of the league. A mix.  We've pulled informally folks, do you know off the top of your head? I don't. As you said, a lot of the communities are doing this. We had a survey going, not all communities are up and running on pool testing also. So a number of districts would like to do it. They not may not have the infrastructure in place quite yet to do it. Not all districts in the states are doing this or took the state up on the offer of pool testing, which I'll talk a little bit more about on this next agenda item. So the answer is some are some would like to and I don't know about the remaining small numbers. Yeah, the question was just based on the fact that, you know, we're definitely controlling for possibility of infections and spread within our teams. But obviously when you're competing in certain sports, you're in close contact with another team. And, you know, it seems important to me to know if that other district has a problem as well. Dr. Yeah, I'm sorry. Go ahead, Dr. I was just to say it's been a universal issue throughout the league that there have been clusters, as Dr. Jango said, of athletes, other teams having COVID and then their their team is out for a period of time. For the most part, actually, our our athletic teams did well in that regard, if you're doing a comparison. What I think that your point is well taken, that's that is one of the risks that we have with athletic programs. And we're trying to minimize as best we can within our district to make sure that our students are safe. And I think that and I think that one of the things that we will do by having some regular pool testing is that we will know whether students have had exposure or not. I will also say that it's been quite a challenge for athletic directors to find out, you know, one one day and literally have to reschedule, you know, different games. So it's been challenging last season. One advantage as we are moving into the next two is that they're more outdoors. And that's going to be very helpful. Not that our winter ones were not. We had skiing, for example. So I so we're hoping that the whole league can remain pretty healthy as we go through these next two seasons. Thank you. Did you have something that I saw your hand up? Sure. I mean, so one of the ways to think about this is that there are three vectors by which COVID's coming onto a team. There's risky behavior or sort of a kid come bringing it in from outside behavior. There's a kid on the team who gets it from some other kid on the team or there's getting it from the other teams. So we don't control but we interact with a limited number of other teams. We don't control that last piece. But surveillance testing is a very strong motivator for engaging in safe behavior in the outside community. And it makes it much more likely that we're going to catch cases within the team before they spread to our own team and to other teams. And so I think it keeps us in the community safer. It keeps and it I think makes it much more likely that we don't have to shut down. There have been other on the one hand there's folks like Reading who are doing also mandatory testing on the other hopes and there are folks I believe it was Winchester who had to shut down because they had so many cases. So we don't want to be an either we'd rather be in the testing and have to go through a short period. Our hope was initially that we could actually test the students into the bubble, that we could try to do them before the season started so that the initial round of testing wouldn't be identifying close contacts. We could do it before the students have gotten together. But we just weren't able to do it in terms of time with the surveillance testing. But as we go into this season and then to the next season, we'll be able to do that better. Dr. Allison Ampe. Thank you. A couple of things. First, just Dr. Jane Green said that there were three ways that kids could get it and I would just add a fourth which is they just happened to get it either from a family member or someone you know it doesn't have to have been risky contact. It could have just been it just happened. But my question is I'm just wondering if there's any issues in terms of mandatory testing in a school setting for students whether there's any personal freedoms or anything that we're breaking. We can do it in athletics because that's a and Cindy or Dr. Boody we can do it in athletics. We cannot do it for students in general. Okay. Okay. Thank you. All right. Anybody else on this one? Seeing none. Thank you, Dr. Janger. Thank you, Mr. McCarthy. All right. So the next item on the agenda is pool testing update and COVID dashboard. Dr. Boody. All right. Thank you. Just to give a quick little history here to pool testing which I think this point everyone understands is a self-administered test, short navel swab. We have a group. We keep our groups fairly small for better accuracy, good accuracy, very good accuracy. We began this program back in January and Cindy Sheridan Curran who's with us this evening and I believe that she is here as a panelist. Yes. Okay. I thought I saw you. Has been the person who has been our coordinator of this program and so she's here this evening to not only give us the committee update on what we're doing but also to talk about something that we've decided this week in terms of the dashboard. As I said, we were doing a pilot and about already into the pilot, that's when the governor offered the possibility of having opting in, applying into a program where we could get six weeks of free pool testing for students and staff in our district. We applied for that program. We are in the program and so now we are at the point, post-vacation that we are going to be having a much more extensive pool testing program than we did before vacation. Before vacation was really more of a pilot and given that there's been a lot of requests for a dashboard and we agree that particularly now that we are going into a more an extended program that we are going to have a dashboard regarding the number of regarding public cases in the district. Before I was just really communicating to parents on a weekly or sometimes more than that basis in terms of what our cases were. So, Ms. Kern, Sheridan Kern, you're here. Would you like to give more information about where we are with pool testing and then you can talk about the dashboard? So this week we rolled out pool testing district-wide so all of our elementary schools and Hibbs and the Odyssey all participated in classroom pool testing today. So this is the first day that all of those buildings participated. We have 156 pools that we registered and sent to the lab today. We also tested, we also had 70 pools tested on Tuesday. Two of our elementary schools, Thompson and Bishop, tested the ACO Ford on Tuesday as well as staff and staff district-wide was also tested on Tuesday. Of those pools, one came back positive and today we'll probably get the results from today's pool testing sometime tomorrow evening or Saturday. So we're ready to roll it out. We had a visit with Fox 25 News today at Thompson who did a nice story tonight on the Thompson efforts who as you know has piloted for us and really helped us develop a strategy to roll it out district-wide. So we're in really good shape in terms of doing this kind of large-scale testing. We also started testing the athletes today for the fall two sports season and we are working with Dr. Janger and their nurses at the high school to kind of figure out how to manage anybody who wishes to participate in student pool testing at the high school with the departmental shift model and figuring out the best way to do that as well. So we're functioning at a pretty high level to be able to manage every single classroom in the district with the exception of the high school right now and monotony preschool. So we I think we're pretty successful with that. We're learning our lessons as we go along making it more efficient and spending less and less time in the classrooms. So I know our nurse at Thompson is able to kind of roll through that entire building in just about an hour and get it done and done well. So that is kind of where we are. We're still kind of looking at this as a pilot period trying to smooth over some of our protocols for this. The nurses have been absolutely wonderful in working with us to get this done. The principals have all been supportive and who have assigned extra TAs to assist in the effort to again make make the pool testing process during the school day least impactful in the classroom for our students. The students are all reacting really well to self-administering. So it's been I'd say hugely successful at this point for us knowing that so many districts are just still trying to figure out how to even begin. In terms of the dashboard we have that op Dr. Bodie is that live? It is. I believe we can screen share. Mr. Mason, Mr. Spiegel also have the link. Is that possible for you to screen share it? I'm not sure. Give me one second. Okay and while he's doing that I want to give kudos to Ms. Sheridan Curran and Julie Dunn and Claudia Bertoli and for really working on this quite a lot this week to make sure this could be ready to go. Once it's up what you'll see is the month of February is broken down into weeks. So at the top of the chart or the dashboard you'll see a weekly report of cases and then in the middle of the chart you'll see cases broken down by building for each month. So I'm just sorry that there is an error trying to access that page currently. Can you send me a different link? That is the link. I can see it on my computer so I don't do it. Should I Can you screen share it? I'll try. Oh thank you. You could perhaps click on where it says click to expand. It might give a better shot. I think that made this it show up this as it was not. Oh okay yes do you see that? So we we do have the data each each week and each month in terms of the breakdown between student and staff. The numbers you see are by school community and we don't pull out and identify students and staff. It would be I think good data to have toward the end of the year where this data will not allow an opportunity to identify an individual who has been diagnosed with COVID. I think when we break it down to staff in a certain building I think it's you know if there's one staff member in a classroom who's been quarantined it's pretty easy to identify that person. So that's why many times when you see the principal send out their communications they refer to it as one of our community members school community members. We do have the data and and we'll certainly share that in a way that won't identify it and we won't break that down kind of publicly if that makes sense. I you know we we do have to respect people's rights to privacy and certainly especially around health issues. So we do have that data and we will share that at the end of the year to break it down if anybody's wondering about that. So what you see in front of you is our total case count through actually today. This will be updated on Fridays. I did update it for the sake of of this meeting to include everything up until this moment. So you have the very latest numbers in front of you and of course March will break that down. You know we'll remove the week ending February's from that view at the top and start with the first week in March. Are you ready for me to un-share Ms. Morgan? Please. Super. Thank you for doing that. Great. All right. Thank you Ms. Sheridan Curran and Dr. Bodie for that update. I'm really excited to see it. I think it's really important that we can be really transparent with our our staff and our teachers and our families. So questions or comments from the committee on this agenda item? All right. Great. I will I will thank thank you both for your commitment to continuing this this testing. It's really it's really important and as somebody who has been testing my kids a fair amount this year I'm really grateful that they can do it at school because it frees up some time for us on the weekend. So thank you. All right the next item on the agenda is the superintendent's proposed budget for FY 22. I will note that this is something that we did look at in a fair amount of detail two weeks ago under Mr. Mason's guidance but we wanted to make sure that all of the documentation was public in advance of the budget hearing. So Dr. Bodie I'm not sure what you want to tell us about your about your budget but we would love to hear it. Well thank you very much. The purpose of having this on the agenda tonight is that we're going to have a hearing on March 11th and its importance in fact is required that we have the entire budget detail available to the public at two weeks in advance. I know that Mr. Mason and Dr. Mcdale did a great job presenting the budget on February 11th. At that time you did not have the full detail of the budget and that's what you have tonight in Novus is the detail that you usually have called the budget book that's there and this after this evening this will now be posted on our website under budget and anyone in the community can take a look at this in preparation for the hearing. Again it's March 11th and it will be at the beginning of the school committee. So that's really it's really on the agenda today so that we can have a vehicle for putting this into the public domain and to make sure that people understand that that that is there. Great thank you very much. Questions or comments from the committee. Seeing none the next item on the agenda. Thank you Dr. Bodie. The next item on the agenda is the SLCC move to Hardy. This is on the agenda because it came up as part of the budget discussion last week and Ms. Elmer was not here with us two or sorry two weeks ago. Ms. Elmer was not here for that meeting so I wanted to give her an opportunity to share with the committee what the plans are for that move because we were hearing about it as part of a budget ask but I did want to just get some more information about that. So Ms. Elmer go ahead. Sure so the SLCC which is our program identified for students with intellectual disabilities who has been housed at the Brackett Elementary School for several years. However since I came into the district there you know the expanding enrollment and space constraints at Brackett it has been part of a planning conversation for at least seven years about where that space would exist as enrollment continued to increase and more and more classrooms at Brackett generally classrooms were needed at Brackett. So we have been looking at enrollment over the last few years and strategically looking at the enrollment specifically in the SLCC classrooms so that we could plan a move thoughtfully. If you'll recall last year we traditionally had a K2 class and a 35 class because of the demographics and the enrollment last year it dropped down to one class currently of six students in grades two through four in the program so we had one teacher for this current school year that was all prior to the pandemic and shutting down we have since had to have a remote teacher as well but the designation for the SLCC this year was one classroom. So going into next year we will have students who are currently at Brackett who will be in they are currently in second third and fourth so next year they'll be in third fourth and fifth that program will remain at Brackett but the K2 classroom which we would have to open again this year and we do not have room for at Brackett or rather we have room for it this year but then the following year we will not so we are going to open it up at Hardy there are currently no students in that program because as I just mentioned to you we have students in grades two three and four but as we have students enrolling in K in the K2 strand we will open that up over at Hardy. The three four three four five program will remain at Brackett until those students age out so to speak until the the grades move up as it moves to Gibbs and then the three five program will ultimately move over to Hardy as well. Great thank you Ms. Elmar questions or comments from the committee. Mr. Cardin. Thank you so I just wanted to thank the administration for you know thoughtfully creating this plan so that you know the the fear that I expressed at the last meeting that students would have to switch schools is is not not happening you know there was a unfortunate miscommunication with that being in the budget proposal and and being discussed here before the the families were told about that but that that was cleared up the next day by the principal at Brackett and Dr. and Ms. Elmar so the the one follow-up question that we got that that I think you may have seen Ms. Elmar was you know what happens if there is you know a student that transferred into the program you know for example those third graders are in fifth grade and the fourth grader comes in where does that fourth grader go? Yeah and so based on current enrollment that's not the case but you know there could always be a move in it's typically unlikely for that specific program that a student would so it was currently in the district would be identified at fourth grade as having intellectual disability so you know there is the possibility that that we wouldn't have previously identified but that a student could move in you know I think we'll have to look at both what we have at Hardy and the age span there so if folks understand under the regulations you can have up to a 48 month age span within a class so we would have to look at that you know if and when something like that happened I think we'll have to come back to the committee to make a decision about if that means additional staffing or whatnot but based on the current enrollment of the students and what we have as projections this if this plan works ideally you know we won't have to deal with that. Great thank you and then just the other comment I know Kate Peretz is up to the task but it does require you know professional development of the regular ed teachers who are going to have these SLC students in their class and I do hope we will be providing support for that thank you. Great anybody else? Good thank you thank you Mr. Carter you touched on the pieces that I wanted to to talk about too so the next thank you Ms. Elmer the next item on the agenda is the edco update Dr. Bodie. Thank you Ms. Barton well I'm sad to bring to the school committee this evening the the vote of the board of directors of the edco collaborative for its 10th to begin termination of edco. I say it was a lot of sadness because edco for 50 years has been a major source of professional development offering a wide range of learning opportunities for educators in our member districts and for that matter non-member districts. In fact our district has participated in a lot of their opportunities. Additionally the collaborative has provided networking and other collaboration opportunities for educators in particular it's very it's noted for its job alike groups and I know I participated in them as a director of math and assistant superintendent superintendent and I know that many of our directors that in our district also participate in job alike collaborative groups. There's also been a source of education around professional cultural competency proficiency, anti-bias, anti-racism. It has also been offered programs for students with disabilities and it's engaged students in remote education and particularly last summer offered an array of courses for students. Esco also provides special education alternative education programs for students with disability and at-risk youth and services paid through a variety of state and federally funded programs. Arlington has placed students in these programs and students have had very successful experiences in them. So I will say that the decision to terminate to begin the process of termination was not an easy one but the situation is financial hurdles that really make it come to a point where there is not really a good way forward out of these financial difficulties. Currently the collaborative will be a little over a million dollars in have definitely have a million over a million dollar deficit for FY21 which will result in member districts having another assessment this year. The process that we're in is that the board of directors which each of the 16 members has a representative to and I am the representative to the EDCO board of directors and that my position there is voted by the school committee annually. As I said the board of directors voted to begin the termination process but also voted that the process would also have to be affirmed by member school districts and while I did not put a vote on the agenda of the evening a vote can be taken this evening. It's important that all the member districts make this decision by the end of March because there are a number of things that need to be done as we move through that process. Now the actual vote to initiate termination to initiate termination is as you say it's to dissolve by June 30th 2022. According to the article's agreement among all the 16 districts once that once that vote has taken effect and by the majority of all the districts you still have another year before you actually dissolve and that process involved working with the Department of Education which has to approve the plan as we go through this. So there's a lot that needs to be initiated and probably most importantly what needs to be initiated is programs special education programs what will be what we will be doing going forward. So I have given you financial information several weeks ago and I have just received some additional updated information about our financials which I've included this evening and let me just tell you what the motion would be and we can have some discussion about this and you can we can make the motion this evening which by the way four other I think now three other school districts this week have already met and have affirmed the vote of the Board of Directors begin termination but we also have the March 11th meeting which would meet what is the window in which we we need to make this decision. So the motion would be that the Allington School Committee supports the termination of the Ecco Collaborative to Dissolve by June 30th 2022. I will tell you that it was a unanimous vote of the Board of Directors on February 10th and almost to a person they did that with a lot of sadness that this seems that after 50 after 50 some years in operation that there's not a clear financial road forward. So I open this up if anybody would like to ask some questions or make some comments about this. Thank you Dr. Bodie and I will note you know that this was something that because of that because of our rules around executive session that this is something that we have met about in executive session previous and prior to this evening. So it you know it doesn't there there have been questions that have been asked previous as well. So questions from the committee on this. Mr. Thielman followed by Mr. Schubert. Well first of all this is a sad day. Ecco has been doing a lot of good things for our district and for the school committee and school committee members for a long time and I know that Dr. Bodie has worked hard on trying to keep being part of a group of superintendents who tried to keep the district or Ecco going. I don't think we have any choice but to vote for the superintendent's resolution either tonight or whenever the committee is ready. I would say what I am curious about is what's going to be the plan to wind down. I mean they have therapeutic they have a therapeutic day school they have you know there's a bunch of programs that Ecco runs are they are you know I know there's a wind down all the way to June 22 June 30 2022. If there have been discussions about how to you know move these programs to other providers could you just kind of tell us a little bit about what what's what that discussion is like or been like. I can to some extent. First of all I want to make sure that everyone understands that we have a strong commitment to all of the students in the programs and so the programs that we have will remain operational until the end of this school year. One of the motions of the board is to give the executive director actually interim director executive director of the authority to notify directors of special education about the fact that the programs was likely ends in June and if there is a majority of the school to school committees that also firmness that is that is the likely outcome. Since we will not exactly dissolve until a year after the end of June, but we do not want to incur any costs or or perhaps even be in the building that the the programs in Bedford were a number of the programs in fact, but not all the programs are housed. We have programs in Newton and possible that the new public schools may incorporate that program. There's a program of Boston Boston public schools can decide if they want to continue the program as well and run it. So there are other programs but there's a process in which you have to go through in terms of notification and I don't think tonight would be the time to talk about what that would mean in terms of re-evaluations or replacements and the process that we go through with parents of the students in those programs but yes there is a process and because all of that takes time that's why we felt that was there any chance to wait until May and things could turn around and the answer is no. We've been looking at this for all year long and decided that it's important to move forward now so that we could have a very orderly process. And there's no program that you would recommend our district to absorb? The answer is no. No. No. There are two programs. These are not our student special education programs but one of them is ideas and the other one is our educator license program. Talking about the educator license program this is a very low cost way for teachers to go through a program to achieve a principal or administrative certification. Now we're thinking about that very carefully because we don't want that we want the program to exist but somewhere where the cost can be contained as we've been able to do that. We don't want it to move someplace where the costs are going to escalate and make this a more difficult financial aid for educators. Ideas which is a program that we have used a lot in fact we have they've been part of our professional development days. We have people in our district who actually presenters in ideas that that is something that is so essential to the work that districts are doing around anti-racism bias culturally proficient education that that program really needs to remain and we're working very hard to see where that program would reside. Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much. Yep. Thank you. Mr. Schlipman. I'd like to move the Superintendent's recommended motion. Second. Second. You know it has become obvious to us over the past couple of months as the news of the financial condition of this collaborative is unfolded that it is unsustainable in its present form and that we really don't have any choice but to go on this path and do what is necessary in order to transition the services out of the collaborative and either into a different collaborative or to be hosted by member districts. It's a very sad thing. There are a lot of people who work for the collaborative who have dedicated themselves to children for an awful long time and it's very disappointing that we're at this point but the point is here it's unmistakable the collaborative is unsustainable and it's very sad with regrets that I make the motion to support the Superintendent's recommendation. Dr. Allison Dippie. Thank you. Two things. First I would be in favor of postponing this motion until next until two weeks. I understand it's one that will take and that it will have to pass but I'm also concerned that although we have heard of this that it's the first time it's been discussed in the public and no one you know if there's anything the public wants to say to us about it they have just heard about it today and I would be happier giving them a little bit of time to get in touch. The second thing is I'm going to have to turn into a driving pumpkin in a few minutes and I will be off I mean I'll be listening in but I'm not going to be able to participate in discussions until I get to my destination so sorry. Mr. Cardin. Yeah I support postponing the vote. I don't know if there's a what the parliamentary procedure is but I think I mean just getting the data you know in Novus I mean the cost to close the EDCO could be as much as 8.6 million dollars right and the question I asked at the other meeting was is it really is it really so outrageous to continue to operate it at a million dollar deficit a year as opposed to incurring the cost the 8.6 million dollars right now and I still don't have an adequate answer to that I mean I think you know there was a management failure here there there were clearly COVID issues that that tripped up the collaborative but you know we had a board of directors that entered into this lease that now suddenly is so terrible and so you know I'm not convinced that this is the correct way to go and I'd like more time to look into it. The Madam Chair then I'll withdraw my motion. Okay all right so it it'll be Dr. Bode I'll get you in just a minute so we'll be on the March 11th agenda. Dr. Bode go ahead. The public is hearing about this that's also part of the process is that it has been part of the the board director means are open the agendas are open to people we've had a number of people participate in this and it's it has been the pandemic that has been the really the major precipitating event but there have been issues for the last couple of years in terms of meeting the expenses of the collaborative in part because there's a number of reasons one is that the EDCO is a professional development or professional development organization as well as a special education provider and the number of students that you have in these programs don't unevenly have for a number of years unevenly match the the number of students tuitions have matched the cost of the program so that has been an issue only exacerbated by the last year but the other issue is that as more and more districts are bringing professional development into their own districts the number of people choosing to participate in special ed programs for a fee has really gone down steadily over the last few years the the networking the job alike is all free as part of membership so it's been some trends over the last couple of years I don't think it was just this year just this year really made it much more difficult so I'm I'm fine if we want to put this off to the 11th but there until we have a majority of the school districts the the organizational form will reach out to program directors what cannot happen until that happens so but that's fine it's white Mr. Gellman my question is I just I agree with Dr. Christy Allison Ampe that we should you know wait two weeks let's see what if we what we hear from the public if they learn anything new but if we're also going to do some due diligence on you know any financial ramifications we should do that between now and two weeks so that's I just want to either the budget committee or another committee needs to meet or the superintendent or we need to direct or request information from the superintendent I'm not sure but something needs to happen so we don't just have a conversation two weeks hence without any more data yes I fully support the idea of having the budget subcommittee meet so I can you know discuss now more openly um what the numbers would be which by the way keep changing and will continue to change and I can talk more about that in the budget subcommittee okay thank you okay right now budget budget's happy to do that I'll talk to Dr. Buddy about timing okay right anybody else on this item uh Mr. Schlickman yeah I just want to note that there are a lot of things that have to happen from this point forward basically the vote that we need to take uh now postpone is basically issuing the death certificate uh so to speak uh metaphorically we we have an unsustainable program now how we deal with the issue going forward how we adjust the programs how do we finance the obligations of the collaborative going forward these are all things we're going to have to work out and some of that working out is going to extend uh into the next year and a half um but there's no no matter when we vote this this week two weeks from now uh the the bottom line is this is not a sustainable collaborative the model worked once upon a time but because of the geographic range of the uh of the collaborative the facilities and the needs of districts changing uh it just doesn't have a future the way it's currently comprised anybody else seeing none um so uh and Ms. Sheridan current I I didn't I'm again trying to be better about saying goodbye to people thank you so much for coming for your piece I don't know if you're staying for the next one but if you're not um we really appreciate you being here so thanks so much um so the next item on the agenda is a full return uh to school planning um and uh I know that Dr. Bodie has um some updates for us around this so let's start with her I do well I don't think if you live in Massachusetts you know that there was an announcement this week by the commissioner and the governor for a full return uh for students this school year uh before actually talking a little bit more about that I I do want to say that uh in response to some questions earlier this evening the district is planning for a full return fall um that that in my mind has not been in question I will also say that that we have been planning for a return of kindergarten in fact we're very close to actually you know you know giving you the plan for how that was going to happen in the next few weeks and we were also planning for a return this year for grades one and two but after our teachers had vaccinations uh whether we would have three to five later on that that that was a possibility but right we were making these plans so this week the commissioner said has it has announced that he is making a proposal to the board of education this month that schools elementary schools return in full time in person the first week of April I understand that the board of education is likely going to schedule a meeting sometime mid-march now it is not just the elementary the commissioner has said that they are also going to address possibly middle schools and even further along the line high schools this year but there at right now that is not the focus of the uh the department of education now even though the board will perhaps agree with this prospect of this proposal that the commissioner is going to present um and that was mid-march that's not something that a school system could easily move into in a couple weeks so I will say this so we've we've already started to take a look at what is going to be necessary to do that it's also important to understand the role that we all play potentially in this assuming the affirmation the board of education is that this is being done under student learning time and we've had some discussions this year about the student learning time whether it was whether it was in person or synchronous instruction and what would be the proposal is that the only time other than for remote academy and I will talk about that in a second but for in-person learning which would be our hybrid program going full full time that the only time that would count for structured learning time would be hours spent in person now that's the underlying idea of the proposal which is something that just like 180 days or 900 hours 990 for secondary is something that would be a regulation that we would have to comply with so we have already started looking at what would need to be involved in this beginning with actually looking at the capacities of all of our elementary classrooms in every school the capacity for three foot distancing which is the minimum that would be that we that would be approved for safety and health reasons and actually in our plan that we put forward on august 10th we had we had talked about the the the range of three to six feet now clearly we would like to have as much spacing as possible but we still need to know what is the baseline how many students can be in the each of our classrooms in the elementary so that analysis is going on right now we also recognize that there are a lot of issues we would have to look at one of which is no small issue is lunch under the guidance from the department of education you can be a minimum of three foot distancing in a classroom but if you're eating lunch with a mask off or having a mass break you need to be six feet apart and so right now in most of our elementary schools we we only have the number of students in a classroom that can be seated six feet apart so most students eat lunch right now during the winter months in the fall they were eating lunch outside but are eating in classrooms six feet apart with the mask off obviously so we're going to have to figure out how that would happen we also need to make sure that um you know we might have some classes where they would not fit in a given classroom maybe that means moving to a different space in the in the in the school or some other other possible remedy which we need to talk about another issue we have to look at are specials so presently because of the guidance from the department of education around music for example we do music for all students remotely whether they're whether they're in the hybrid program or in the remote academy and we would have to look at um uh our other specials as well so there are a lot of details that we need to look at and also staffing now it's important to know that the commissioner also said the parents who have opted into a remote program which we call remote academy in Arlington so that program will exist until the end of the school year and as has been the case all year movement between the hybrid program and the remote academy programs is done on a space available basis and there have been not many just a few instances where actually a student could not go to their home school that came to Arlington because there was no the capacity wasn't there so we have taken that that the plan that we've currently have a fixed distance for death quite seriously so um I would plan and I know there was a motion made on uh February 11th that a plan would be presented uh or the process plan development um on March 11th and I and I think that I have to assume for planning purposes that this is going to be the decision the board of education and plan for how um this could be implemented on the timeline that the commissioner has said because we have been as a district adhering to our time on learning standards so um that's why I'm pretty sure by March 11th I'll have some of the as you say the big rocks in the jar plot through there's certainly going to be a lot of details that will need to be made but we can't wait on planning until that board decision is made now the planning that we do certainly not go to waste in terms of what we were already thinking about in terms of some some of our earlier grades returning um this year so I think I um I've heard hit on the main points that um I wanted to to mention tonight and I'll see if there's any comments or questions um I expect that the plan that I would present where we are in the planning I should say and pretty much will be the key things should be already by March 11th and we also have a meeting on March 25th as well um which would give another chance for some more updates there is one last thing that's more and that is um I also know and totally from a couple principles that there's going to be some parents who may not want to return uh to that and to a minimum of three feet so that's something that you know we will be doing in our communication with parents um again it will be on a space available but I think that um it may be possible and likely possible to honor um requests where there is a serious concern. All right thank you Dr. Bodie um I want to call on Ms. Keys and then come to the committee. All right uh thanks Ms. Morgan um I usually try to come to you guys with like a very prepared thoughtful statement and I hope you'll give me some leeway tonight because I don't have that um I pretty much haven't slept in 48 hours because this is just blown up everything um this has been the hardest year any of us have ever done um I've changed grades I've changed schools I've changed districts I've changed curriculums I went through that first year teaching and this blows all of those out of the water how it's how difficult this year has been um and if we thought that we could fully return to normal school safely we would be the first ones banging down the door to make that happen um because my god that would be so much easier than what we are doing right now the mental gymnastics that it takes to teach this year are extraordinary um and I think that the the commissioner and the secretary of education the governor putting this out before teachers even get their first vaccine shot especially after they first moved us down in the line and we understood that because high-risk people should come first and we get it but then they also took the vaccines away from the towns so we can't even expect to like go to work and get our shot and like keep going we have to go into the state scramble and that means we're going to be missing work to do that and we're already short staffed and then say oh but put 25 to 30 kids back in a room anyways it's fine um I you know I said in our meeting today when we're ratifying the contract and people were asking about this I feel like we're playing a game of Jenga and we just keep pulling out the supports at the bottom and piling more things on top and we all know that eventually that tower is going to fall right and I am really really worried about our teachers right now who are now being asked to reinvent everything all over again um and are very worried about their safety in many cases in doing that um so I understand the state may demand something of us and you know we we have to do what we can I understand there are a lot of parents who really want their kid back in and they are comfortable with their kid being in that circumstances and I we have some staff who are fine with it too we have I we have a lot who are not and we have a lot of students who are not and we're thinking about them and that they're going to lose their in-person days and have to go remote because they're not comfortable with three feedback um and we're really concerned that you know the CDC just put out some really great comprehensive guidance and then the state comes and says ignore it like that it doesn't make any sense so we want to go back to school full time like that is the goal of everybody because like we think it's good for the kids it's going to make things easier for us um as a parent pointed out earlier today I'm glad they're recognizing that but I it really needs to be done with an eye on safety and you know the more advocacy we can get to get vaccines to teachers um I think the better we'll all be and we do appreciate that you made that motion was it two weeks ago three weeks ago four weeks ago at some point um to send a letter advocating for that but I think that that needs to be part of this conversation about bringing kids back in um I'm worried about our staff right now like we are not okay thank you thank you miss keys um so when I open it up to the committee for questions um or um or comments on this I'll I'll wait until the end for mine um Mr. Heiner followed by Mr. Schickman. Dr. Barty I just want to make it clear did I misunderstand you or did did you say that you'd have the outlines of a plan on the 11th? I would have to have the outlines of the plan on the 11th and I will tell you that um the plan will be involving teachers I I understand exactly what miss keys is saying this has been a hard year on everybody and this it really isn't much time to make these plans we've been we've been planning the kindergarten for two months I mean it's it's um it's a lot and but um the answer is I I don't think that I have an option to be perfectly honest if the if the board of the board of education votes this I need to be able to have a plan in ready for being in compliance with that regulation so that's only five weeks from now and that is not a lot of time and there's a lot that we need to do also teachers need to feel safe in the building and I know that through all the work we've done this year right now the feedback I've had from teachers is that they do feel safe and I think that this is really sort of rock to that a lot and we need to make sure that that we maintain that um and one you know just the things that we have done and will continue to do to make sure that that we continue that um effort but yes if I wait until the board directors I'm sorry the board of education makes this decision then I have only three weeks to plan that's the issue uh mr schlickman yeah this is most disturbing uh right now we're facing government by press release and that's what we're responding to nothing more than the press release we don't know what is coming down the pike except for the press release was put out by the governor's office now one of two things could be happening here best case scenario the state is looking to be a wonderful partner with us and they will provide a thousand uh doses of Moderna vaccine by March 15th or Pfizer by March 22nd so our teachers can be fully vaccinated by April 25th which would be the week after April vacation and a wonderful time to come back to school let's celebrate or the state is bullying us demanding a full opening without vaccinating the staff and I fear it's the bottom particularly because the governor has not been a very uh good administrator in terms of either getting the vaccine out or providing a mechanism for registration he's he has taken the vaccine away from the towns and if we had a thousand doses of vaccine available to the town health department they could just set up a clinic one day Arlington high school all the teachers blast through the way we did our public safety folks let's look at the perspective of who we're dealing with in what's going on here charlie baker and many politicians are going to war against teachers union and blaming the fact that the schools aren't reopening it's all the teachers unions faults well look first of all teachers unions these are kindergarten teachers not teamsters secondly the decision is ours not the union and I think we share a concern of the union for the health and safety and welfare of the teachers who work for us there they are employees of the district they are members of our community and we value their health and safety and if the means for ensuring their safety is available to us and the state is refusing to give it to us I think it's unconscionable that in the same uh breath that they are coming to us and saying forget about it just force them to go back to work this is this is disgraceful or wonderful depending on what the next steps of the state are if the state is truly looking to get schools open send us the vaccine and we'll get it open six weeks after the first shot we'll have our schools open and and we'll celebrate this but do it without providing the safety that is available to our professional staff and our other workers in our schools that's not right and it's within their control to make this happen thank you Mr. Cardin hi thank you I have a motion that I believe is a novice that people hopefully saw I will read it um as part of the report on options and planning taking place to expand in-person instruction during the current 2020-21 school year which is to be provided to by the to the school committee by March 11th 2021 the superintendent is directed to include an option with plans to implement full in-person learning at grades k through eight with desks no less and three feet apart including maintaining the option for full remote learning for families who want it do you want to get a second or I'll second sorry mr. Cardin you want to speak to it yes thank you so I actually wrote this motion um before uh the the bombshell from commissioner Riley um you know we we have other districts Cambridge in particular moving to full in person for elementary schools March 1st we have the CDC guidelines which say when we go to yellow we're currently orange we should be full in person so I want a plan put together so we can do that I know you've been working on a plan for kindergarten but that you know for a long time but that we haven't heard much about it where you know how are we going to address lunch how are we going to address the issues that you raise there's a lot that we should be working on so that we can have this option I'm not saying we should elect this option I do agree that we need to get a better picture on uh when the vaccinations will begin for our staff we need to find out if the the community can the community transmission rate continues to decline or not um if we don't go into yellow then then maybe we won't be able to implement this um so that was my thinking before commissioner Riley came out with his um his plan now we have his requirements as well so that just makes this all the more important that as Dr. Buddy said that we need to get the plan in place um to be able to do this and that will give us the ability as a committee on March 11th or March 25th to make a decision to implement this if we wait until March 11th to hear about all of the hurdles that the you know that the administration has come up with um without a plan in place um that's going to be too late so again we we did have Mr. Thielman's motion from from last time I thought it was a little bit too vague um Dr. Buddy tonight for the first time is shared where she plans to go on March 11th I still think that it doesn't quite get us where we need to be um so I'm hoping that there will be support for this more specific requirement um for a plan to to come before us thank you all right discussion on uh Mr. Cardin's motion uh Mr. Thielman followed by Mr. Schlickman so I'm going to support Mr. Cardin's motion I uh I appreciate his critique of my motion from two weeks ago uh and take it well um I would uh say this um you know the district has to do the planning that Mr. Cardin has outlined this motion it sounds like from what Dr. Buddy said at the beginning the district is doing this planning and so we have to do this planning in order to open I will also say that we have to do the planning um and prepare to open uh and whether and all of us I I would love to see teachers vaccinated first I voted for the motion um I am appalled the teachers are not high on the list to be vaccinated it doesn't say much about the priorities of our state or a national leadership that this hasn't happened yet so I'm not happy about the delay in uh vaccinating our teachers I will tell you um that one the planning has to take place the superintendent has already said she's going to do the planning so I am going to vote for Mr. Cardin's motion and aligns with Dr. Buddy's doing uh right as what she said she's doing and secondly um there there we have to do the planning because there will be people in the district who will not be comfortable with their children back in the school even when the teachers are vaccinated so the plan needs to be seen by the public soon the plan needs to be understood by the public the plan needs to be digested by the public and the more detail the public can get on March 11th the better so I I support the motion I will say there was a lot of um anxiety and opposition when this committee voted for the hybrid model back in August there were a lot of people that pushed back uh and told us we were making a mistake I think the teachers and the administrators and the students and parents have done a good job I do think people will do a good job should we be able to go back at some point later in the spring and secondly um I want to point out for next I want to point out that the we have been very good in this district about doing a lot of things that other districts aren't doing we test teachers and staff we have pool testing not a lot of districts have that um we have a very I think prudent maybe conservative approach to contact tracing then closing cohorts in schools if we have to Dr. Bodie's shown good judgment and wisdom in those calls that doesn't stop if we go back to school the testing doesn't stop the pool the pool testing doesn't stop the prudence and leadership of Dr. Bodie in terms of deciding to close a cohort or a school or a group or keep them home doesn't stop the protocols don't stop it's just that we're trying to get more kids back in the school so I look I think the motion makes good sense I think it's consistent with the superintendent's doing and I think it gives more clarity and direction to the superintendent and her staff so I'm going to vote for this and I look forward to receiving the plans on March 11th and then we have to have a really robust debate because we'll have specifics and maybe a timeline shortly thereafter and that's the real debate that we're going to have to have. Ms. Eksten? Okay so um if through Ms. Morgan if does this um plan depend on vaccines or this motion by um Mr. Cardin is it's irrelevant whether or not teachers are vaccinated? Mr. Cardin do you want to address that I mean the motion doesn't speak to vaccinations as a as a condition um I mean yeah no I mean I think the administration can put whatever conditions they want in the plan um you know I think then as a committee we we would once we get the plan we can determine if it's sufficient or not if it doesn't have a vaccination requirement and we want it to have a vaccination requirement then we can we can do that if uh if it has um something that's you know let's say for example they they don't solve the lunch issue so they have half days instead of full days um if that's not what we we want then as a committee we can say this this isn't the right plan um so that that discretion is there um but I'm looking for a plan to to move towards full return. Okay I mean so I will support the motion um um with the understanding that we're just looking for more clarification about bringing K-8 students um into the schools in person but I share a lot of the frustration um that's really other that Ms. Keys and Mr. Slickman have um expressed about the vaccines it's incredibly frustrating to continually be pushed down the list and then to be left out of municipalities being offered the vaccine so that teachers can be vaccinated you know right where they're working um and it's it's incredibly disrespectful to teachers after the amount of work that they have all done this year. Mr. Slickman. Thank you two weeks ago I would have voted no on this motion I will vote yes for it tonight because I think we need to know what the parameters are and what this will look like uh Mr. Cardin mentioned uh whether we're orange or yellow in terms of total case counts but there is variance within the population in the town of Irlington in terms of COVID cases there has not been one single new case of COVID in the 80 plus age group since the 30th of January the biggest growth in uh COVID cases because we have not leveled off as a town has been in the zero through nineteen age group so I don't know what that means for us as a school district I would love to see the health department come and talk to us like we've been asking for since December because listening to them and talking to them and asking questions of them is very important and to get a half an hour of them locking on to zoom to talk to us I think is really urgent and that needs to happen and I hope that gets on the agenda for the next meeting before we go further in these considerations but we do need to know what this will look like going forward in Irlington if we're forced to do it or if we choose to do it this plan is something we have to have as a is a document to work from as we're evaluating what our choices are going forward so that's why I'm going to vote yes I'm Mr. Cardin's motion. All right anybody else um Dr. Allison Ampe followed by Mr. Haynes. Hi sorry um I missed just a little bit when I came into the house um but a few things and I'm going to have to organize my thoughts I've been driving and confused um I share Ms. Key's concerns greatly um and her frustration which I could hear um I think this is incredible and not in a good way that the commissioner feels that this is acceptable um I feel the fact that we have heard nothing that the state of public health whether on a county level on a town level um is not part of this discussion is amazing to me also not in a good way um um and I too am very concerned about the economy between what the CDC guidelines say and what the commissioner wants us to do um I understand there's other reports and people believe these other reports and stuff and I have to sit down and really compare them well um but the other thing that hasn't be