Mr. Schlickman, it is 6, 7 o'clock, excuse me, good evening, welcome to the Arlington School Committee meeting for October 9, 2014. This time I'd like to welcome Valerie Sarison, the AE representative. I would like to take a moment to remind all of you, spectators and members of the committee that there will be a state election for all administrative offices, our state senator and representatives. There are six questions, four statewide and two related to Arlington. It's important that you make yourself aware of who to vote for and educate yourself on whether you want to vote yes or no on each question. Each household received a red voter information booklet from the state last month. It only addressed the individual people running for office and the four state questions. I have asked the town clerk to post the town question number five so that you can become familiar with it. You go to the Arlington town website, then click on calendar, then events, and then elections, you should find the question. I believe in a strong democracy and that can only be maintained with an informed electorate. Thank you. At this time I would address the members and the audience to the artwork we have in the room. Right on this side is paper weaving. Mrs. Muses art second class created this display of artwork. Various types of paper were collected and used. Recycled calendars, magazines, maps and discarded art. Weft, warp, loom, mesh, patent, shuttle, rhythm, center of interest and balance and undulation and repetition. In the back of the room is a study of skeletons. Students painted with tempera paint on brown craft paper which is a medium ground of value. Plastic, lice, replica of human skeleton was the source of observation. Value, range of value, wet on wet, dry brush, ground, proportion, observe, shade, highlight and define. And on this side, right over here, digital photography one and two. Students in the visual arts department at Arlington High School are encouraged to explore multiple aspects of each discipline. All are expected to develop a personal voice with thoughtful and meaningful expression. In digital photography students apply the knowledge of elements of art and principles of design through a variety of subject matter and techniques. Nature, film noir in the style of portraiture, photojournalism, corporate branding and the history of photography. Using scanned film, digital imaging, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, students create a portfolio of work as part of their applications to college and learn about careers in commercial and fine arts photography. Please go to our class website ponderimage.com to see the variety of work. All I ever had was a Crayola Crayons in school and a piece of art paper, 15 minutes a week. I envy these students. Okay, at this time, the next item on the agenda is, let me try to get it right, sorry, is the poet Laureate. Please bear with me. I am still learning how to do my part. The, let's see, last spring the Allington Town meeting established the position of honorary poet Laureate of Allington. Appointment of a poet laureate shall be for a term of one year, annually renewable for a total of three years based on the recommendation of the screening committee of five persons consisting of one person from each group. The school committee by a majority vote gets to appoint a member of the screening committee. If there is a member of the current committee that would like to be that appointee, we can appoint that person tonight. Do I have any volunteers from the committee that would like to be this? Okay, saying none, then I would ask Mr. Schlickman, chairman of the community relations committee to seek out a person that you can bring forward hopefully on the 23rd for us to vote on. Okay. Thank you. At this time, we'll move on to public participation. Mr. Foskett, come up to the table, please. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Honorable members of the school committee, my name is Charlie Foskett. I'm a town meeting member from Precinct 8 and vice chairman of the finance committee. In 1991 with John Billifer, I launched the rebuilding of our school system infrastructure. In 2000 with school committee and Dennis Sullivan, selectman Jack Hurd and I, we secured your support for the rebuild debt exclusion. In 2005, Jeff Thielman, Diane Mahon and I secured your support for the largest override in the state history at the time. All because we supported the education of Arlington's children. Chairman Bill Hainer, Treasurer Steve Gilligan and I now ask for your support for no CPA tax on the ballot question number five in November because we support the education of Arlington's children. The CPA tax is a massive slush fund with no identified line item purpose serving third parties, not Arlington's community safety, education, public works and social services. Its alleged reimbursement scheme is an underfunded doomed Ponzi scheme that has woefully missed its targets in the last six years. The minimum cost to taxpayers is $8 million in the first five years devoted to this slush fund. Over a 30-year period for amortizing the bonds for new Arlington High School, this diversion will be $88 million, $88 million taken from voters that could be used for living expenses, college education or 401K plans. This tax is fiscal irresponsibility on a scale unknown in the history of Arlington and it may well cause the Arlington High School project to fail. Supporting this reckless referendum jeopardizes the rebuilding of Arlington High School and the operating override that you and I know the school and town will require within five years. Taxpayers defeated two Arlington High School referenda in 1975, overrides in 1987 and 1989 and again in 1997, the first $50 million debt exclusion for our elementary schools was defeated. The 2004 override was defeated. My message is that Arlington voters will not be happy with this $88 million slush fund diversion that threatens their core services and the education of their children. I ask each of you to vote no on the CPA tax and to take a committee vote recommending the same to Arlington taxpayers. Your charge, the education of our children is now at risk. If this $88 million slush fund passes, what will you tell the parents of our students when an override fails and you have to cut services? What will you say when a voter asks you why you supported this travesty? What will you say to an eighth grader looking at an aged high school that has lost its accreditation? What will you tell her? That's my question. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Harrington. Good evening. My name is Stephen Harrington. I'm a town meeting member from Precinct 13. I haven't been here for almost three years.  After 10 months of fighting me on it, our free full-day kindergarten became a reality and it saved Arlington parents more than $1 million a year from a needless tax. The reason I'm here tonight is to try to save Arlington's taxpayers from spending another $1 million a year needlessly on the Community Preservation Act. Another unnecessary tax that the members of this committee want to foist on Arlington's parents. Let's face it. Arlington's school committee has a history of making financial blunders with taxpayer money. Your unbridled support for this partisan effort shows that, well, some things haven't changed in three years. The message that you're sending to the community is that the passage of this unnecessary tax is your highest priority. Most of you voted last spring to replace the CPA tax on this fall's ballot, ahead of asking taxpayers to rebuild the Stratton Elementary School, ahead of asking taxpayers of upwards of $100 million to rebuild the Arlington High School, ahead of being compelled to rebuild the Minuteman Regional Technical High School for tens of millions more dollars. How do you explain to the Stratton school parents that your priorities are with buying swampland in East Arlington and not building 21st century schools? How do you explain to a high school parent that their children will be forced to try to learn in an antiquated facility that you drain the well of public generosity and raise rents all over town to provide housing for unregistered sex offenders? Seeing your partisan non-education-related efforts and your liberal use of Arlington School Committee designation on a partisan website would make Horace Mann turn over in his grave. This school committee runs the real risk that CPA will be interpreted by Arlington's parents as this committee can't prioritize appropriately. Furthermore, the unhanded tactics of some committee members to bully others who wanted a fair, open, and public discussion of this committee's involvement in the ballot question, bullying conducted behind closed doors and far away from public scrutiny, is reprehensible. I'm making a formal request from this committee tonight for a written explanation of your actions in this regard. You have 14 days to comply. Good night. There's no one else on the public speaking time, so we will move on to the next item on the agenda. Youth risk behavior survey. Ms. Parvieu, come forward, please. So Colleen and Jay will be joining me in just one minute. We had a parent forum evening that she went to go introduce the speaker to, but she'll be joining me as well. So I believe that you all have the Youth Risk Behavior Survey and have seen it. So just briefly, we started the Youth Risk Behavior Surveys in 1990, early 1990s. And depending on what year it was, we were trying to do it every other year and we lost funding for a little bit there, so it was stretched out a little bit. But for the past five to seven years, we've been doing it every other year at the Audison and at the high school. And last year, the high school was administered and the survey results are in. And it takes a look at what the risks are that our students are engaging in. And we'd like to then move this on to not only the school committee, but the parents and the staff and have the students talk about it in advisories as well. So it was originally funded by the tax grant. And when Colleen comes, she'll talk a little bit about the grant that she has. It's helping to support that at this point. And in off years, we found various ways in order to support this survey. And this survey is measured up against what the state actually administers as well. The state does a sampling from different communities across Massachusetts. All in all, we feel pretty encouraged by what was on the survey this year. We feel that all areas have improved, although we are very cautious to say that some are still in the forefront of our minds. So we do have priorities as well that include a lot of social-emotional health, self-harm and suicide. There's some in the substance use area that we'd like to talk about. But we also are very encouraged by our students' physical activity, how they're feeling pretty much about themselves, how many students are involved in sports, either in Allenton or outside of Allenton, and the number of hours of physical activity that they're getting outside of school, the high school students. So I'm sure when Colleen comes, she would like to talk a little bit about the grant that supports this and reapplying for the grant. But I guess I would open it up for questions and dialogue with you if you would like to meet a focus on one area or another. The suit. Yeah, I mean, what I see as the most scary aspect of the study is certainly the issues about self-harm and suicide. And I see that it's not that different from other districts in the state, is from what I saw right from the comparison. So, and yet the numbers feel like they're crisis level. If 20% of all females are self-harming or cutting, it just feels like that's a crisis situation. And I wonder, I know that the gun bill that Governor Patrick signed requires us to do suicide prevention and issues around mental health. And I just wonder, you know, what are we doing? What are we doing? Yeah. Right, and so that's a very good question. So some of the areas that address this topic specifically, if, and there are probably many others as well, that I'm not even aware of that address this, but the areas that I'm directly involved in, we have health classes in grades nine and grades 10. Our physical education teachers are teaching health and they're directly speaking to students about stress, about the impact of stress about self-harm and about resources that we have within the community and within the school that can address some of these. Last year, our health and safety day was completely dedicated to suicide prevention. We had an evening for parents. We plan on doing more this year as well, but that day was dedicated to that. We have instituted a critical care supervisor at the high school now that's dealing directly with these. Our school nurse and our social workers are very involved in most of these things. We have individual counseling, like I said, we have parent forums. This coming month, AYCC is actually going to run a training again on just this topic and has invited all of our social workers and our counselors to come to that as well. We have a really open guidance department and a very supportive mental health program here at Ellington High and we do do our best. Ms. Starks. That was my question. Mr. Pierce. One question I had regarding use of electronic devices. I had heard somewhere recently that there's a new firewall or something that can be put in place of a fence or something that would help protect against harmful texting or bullying through sending inappropriate messages. Do we have use of that yet here at the school or is that something that's being contemplated? Kathy. Let me talk to that. Thanks, Dr. Pruett. It's the fence you're referring to is very specific to one form of social media. It's called Yikak. And actually I'm going to have a letter out to parents about this. It is a social media site where you can do anonymous postings which is what is very problematic. There was such an outcry about it that Yikak themselves offered to schools the ability to put a fence around. It's really just a firewall. And we have done that in all of our schools.  We initiated that. We do have firewalls. Now the thing in the school, to the extent that we can, I think that parents need to become aware of this because they need to see what's on their children's phone. One thing I would advise all parents to do is one, check their child's phone regularly. Do not let them have their phone in their bedroom overnight because some of the worst bullying goes on at night. And parents just really need to be very proactive about this because, and if you were talking to Chief Ryan here he would tell you the same thing. We're just always keeping up with it. Every time you see a new site like this that it can be very dangerous, other ones are appearing. So it is a very serious thing, the kind of cyberbullying, the sexting, all of that that's going on via the internet. And parents really need to be the, actually it's a very protective thing to do. We're doing the best we can here at school in that regard. Thank you. Mr. Schlugman? Yeah, two things. On the stress and depression number, we're reporting 44.6% of our young women at Arlington High feel they are under too much stress most of the time and it's very much a female issue here. What are our thoughts on that? Well, and I think that the majority are saying that they're under more stress due to academics and homework. And that percentage was a little higher than it was from parental pressure as a matter of fact. And so what we're doing is we're offering supports, we're offering as the learning center, we're offering a wide variety of courses. Always healthy to sign up for four or five AP classes. Our guidance counselors are talking to students all the time about balance and not thinking that they have to take five APs in order to get into the best college they could possibly can because not all students are built for that. So through our guidance counseling and through our health education classes, we're addressing that as much as we can. And the other number that worries me is on the suicide numbers. How are we working with students to prevent those kind of occurrences? So we have had stress groups. We have had groups where students can join but sometimes students who are under the greatest amount of stress don't join those types of groups. But we have had small groups. We offer individual counseling. Like I had mentioned before, the case worker, we have an at-risk case worker who's working with our students this year. And she has a background in psychology as well. We do a lot of sending students out for outside resources as well. We have a couple of social workers on staff that are working with students. We work with advocates, we work with AYCC, and we just try to support them as much as we possibly can. I hope our young people understand that high school isn't forever. And no matter what, there's help available if you're feeling overwhelmed by it and just make sure that message is out. And I think even yesterday we did our health and safety day yesterday was geared more towards technology and the use of technology and how it's changing culture. And our social worker, one of our social workers got up prior to the assembly just to introduce herself, just to be sure that all students had a face to what a social worker might look like and what they might do for students. So we constantly tried to remind them of the types of resources that are here. Yeah, thank you. I was also concerned as Mr. Schlickman was about the number of people who identified saying they had actually attempted suicide. And I'm wondering how good are we at identifying those students in the classroom, or I mean they're in the school as opposed to anonymous on the survey? Do we know all seven out of 100 or how many would you say we know? Well, I think that the implementation of the advisory program is helping a little bit to create just one more person that the student has. Now, of course, not 100% of students may click with their advisor, but it's an opportunity for a smaller group and it's an opportunity to gain a relationship with one more person in the school. And that's what it's all about, is gaining relationships with the one more person. It doesn't matter whether it's the person who works in the cafeteria or the person who is teaching AP English or a future advisor, whoever it is, as long as you have a relationship with them, those staff know where to go to if they're concerned about a student. Right, but I'm still wondering how many of these seven out of 100 do we know about? I don't have that statistic as to actually how many are reaching out for help within the school. I'm just wondering how many are just suffering in silence? I could gather that data for you that actually go to see one of our social workers and that being the main issue, is that they're stressed or they're suicidal. I can get that information for you because they have that at the end of every year that compile that data, but it certainly is not 7% that reach out to somebody within the school always. Yeah, thank you. So what I looked at, and I'm gonna make sure I get the numbers right, I look at the trend reports towards the end of the report and the attachment in the back. And it seems like there's some positive trends. The cyber bullying is down from 18% to 14% from the last time. Cyber bullying is down from 9% to 6%. Stress is actually down from 38% to 36%. Do you, I guess the question I have is just a general question. And it seems like some of the trends are going in the right direction. And so first of all, is that true? And secondly, what do we need to do to keep those trends going in the right direction? I do believe it's true. And I think that the validity of the survey, since we've been giving it for so many years and we haven't seen huge spikes and huge decreases which helps in knowing that it is valid. I believe it is valid. I think that it's surprising sometimes to see some things have decreased when we've changed on Massachusetts legislation on marijuana use and that has decreased as well. So that's encouraging that we're talking to our students constantly about these behaviors. We hope that we're doing a good job talking to the students and we hope that parents are doing a good job talking to their children. So one of the things that I would encourage you to think about is, you talked about the advisory system, you talked about, I mean really the key to, it seems to me, the key to decreasing these risky behaviors is developing deeper relationships between students and adults in the school. So what I would encourage the district to do is to keep thinking about how can we keep doing this? How can we be more intentional about developing positive, appropriate relationships between adults and students in the high school? And that I think is the point of reflection for the leadership of the school and the district to keep the trend going in the right direction. I completely agree and I think that through the extended amount of clubs that we have within the school with advisors, I think with the two deans that we have and the assistant principal that we have, they have phenomenal relationships with students. They're always in the middle of the student body. They're never sitting behind the desk in their office. They're either in the cafeteria, they're out in the hallways, or they're meeting with a student and I think that the resources within the building are plentiful. So I'm hoping that through those relationships, advisories, clubs, and so on and so forth that we'll meet the goal. Okay, thanks. All of my good questions have been asked. I'm down to the cigarette question. It's gone down 12. Pretty good, huh? Yeah, it's gone down 12% in Fuyus, which surprises me because I'm just type of sensitive. I thought this was gonna come out higher because I've seen, I just see a lot of kids teenagers smoking a lot and is it just the, I know it's hard to say one thing. I know we have a strong education program in place. Is this a result of the continuous education program in your mind? I think it's a combination of society and advertisement about the dangers of smoking and about education. And it's become really not cool to smoke as much anymore because if 90% of the kids don't smoke and 10% do, they really don't care to be around it as much. So I think Colleen could talk more to that. Colleen, I apologize. I explained where you were. Yeah, no problem. Colleen has been working with the Allington Youth Health and Safety Coalition on a lot of the substance use issues. So I told you to tell them about the grant too. Oh, that's great. I think with regard to the cigarette use, we're seeing decreases nationally and it really is, it's cultural. It's the anti-advertisement. It's the general awareness and the research that has come out. And even in Allington, it's the policies. So now that the age of purchase has increased first to 19 and then to age 20, the town is taking a strong stance on preventing young people from getting addicted in the first place. So policy is education. I think it all contributes to these decreases that we've seen over the past few years. A little bit about the Drug Feud Communities Grant which funds the Allington Youth Health and Safety Coalition. It was awarded initially in 2008, a five-year grant and then we were renewed this year. So the Coalition will have another five years of funding and it's significant funding. It's $125,000 a year. And the Coalition is represented by people from the public sectors, the community, private sectors, parents, youth. It's about getting everyone in the community involved in this effort which is really about preventing and reducing underage drinking and substance abuse. As you mentioned here in the schools that it's about building those positive relationships between students and staff here, but it's beyond the school's responsibility really to address these issues. It's the whole community that it will take to really continue to see these numbers decrease. And it's about all community members really forging these relationships with young people, being aware and feeling confident enough to address it within their homes and to communicate about some of these tough topics, substance use related and other risk behaviors. And it's about policy development. It's looking at sort of the attitudes, the practices here in town and sort of reflecting even within institutions what could be improved to restrict access and to change how we perceive young people and young people engaging in these types of behaviors. So I really see it as a community effort and I certainly don't think it really falls entirely on the schools. Thank you for that. Yes. Oh, just I think that things about cigarette and illicit drug use and alcohol, it is a real success theory. And as you point out, we've had a multifaceted approach. There's been a lot of money and a lot of people involved from the administration, the town, the kids. And I guess I just wish we had that around things like suicide and self-harm, which feel more hidden. And yet are in a crisis, it feels. And what we could do if we had that kind of multifaceted approach with grant money and so it could be quite positive. I completely agree with the tax to get the money. And with those types of issues and there's so much stigma still attached. So really, it would help to get a community approach to show that there's a lot of support and to communicate what the resources are to those young people who are experiencing those feelings and those behaviors. That's the school system we're really thankful to the health and safety coalition for applying for this grant because they provided us funding to be able to do these surveys for the past five years and will continue for the next five years if you were to do these. They really drive an awareness level within the student body. It helps to drive curriculum. It helps to drive the needs of the community and what needs to be implemented. So it is very helpful. I just want to acknowledge what a huge contribution both Cindy and Colleen have made in these efforts. Jeff asked, what are we doing to move forward? There is no single thing but I know that both of them as well as many people on staff in this building and in other buildings are always thinking about how can we improve what we're doing? How do we reach more children? How do we make those opportunities for adult contact? More available. And that is what is really the cornerstone of a lot of risky behaviors ending. It also is the source of great safety in a building because you know your students, you know what they may need. You can sort of be very proactive about that. And I think that they exemplify all of the great things that are going on. Particularly the strong town school connection that exists in this community. It's really quite exceptional, I have to say. Mr. Pierce. Real quick, just over the high holidays, my rabbi said that's the most amazing thing in a sermon which was essentially coming out and talking about the issues that you might be having which you think you're only having. And it's quite ironic because a lot of people around you are probably having them. And the whole motto of you are not alone is really what it would be great to see the schools continue to foster because I know they already are. But not only from the staff student bond, but the students themselves. And making sure that they know that their friends in their class are also having the same difficulties perhaps that they are. And to feel open about discussing them. So. Each one of us seems to spur another question. Do you use this as a teaching tool? The survey? Okay, thank you. I just wanted to follow up one other thing I'd forgotten to ask before. Looking at the alcohol use that has one other item that concerns me greatly which is the binge drinking which is a child having five or more drinks of alcohol in a row within a couple of hours on at least one occasion during the 30 days prior to the survey. And I'm looking especially at grades 11 which had 24.5% respondents reporting that and grade 12 had 23.9. And those are scary numbers. I mean all of them, the five drinks in a couple hours that's not so far from alcohol poisoning for a not so big child or adult. I mean adolescent. What are we doing about that? I mean that's what I would have highlighted tonight too. So you know while the numbers have come down both for current alcohol use and binge drinking what we know about especially among the juniors and seniors students who are drinking. So who have had a drink in the past 30 days. 50% of that is in the form of binge drinking. So what that really demonstrates is that young people they drink differently than adults. So there's the argument of maybe starting early letting them learn how to drink responsibly but what we're seeing is that those who are drinking tend to do it in binge form. And that's terribly concerning for various reasons. For injury and driving. So I think all of our efforts that really are targeting underage drinking are targeting binge drinking as well. They're binge drinking because of the poor for the parents. It starts. So that leads exactly to my question which is how and when do we let students and parents know the results of the survey? So now that this has been done we will post the report on the High School website. And depending on when the advisory is open we feel it's probably best to do this in advisory. I will give it up for the faculty as well. So it will go to the faculty immediately and it will go on to the website, the report. But as far as the dialogue between the students and the students can have access obviously through the front of our website but the actual dialogue will be dependent upon the next advisory that's available. Have we ever considered having like a forum where we just have parents and students who wanna talk about this and wanna talk about what they're seeing and what maybe have them come up with ideas of what to do or how to combat it? That's certainly something that the coalition has sponsored in the past. Typically once a year they try to host at least one community forum. And in 2011 we focused it on the YRBS and I think certainly the coalition could look into that for this year. Unfortunately it's sometimes hard to get parents and young people to come out around these topics. Tonight we have a parent forum on underage substance use and maybe they're 20, 25 parents. But it's important to get them out and certainly considering how can we try to encourage that is worth considering. Just a quick thought on that. As a, when I say former parent, I'm grandparent now but getting out to a lot of meetings and stuff is very difficult. I realize there's a degree of privacy especially in these kinds of meetings and stuff but with our technology today or something to engage these people possibly a discussion with minimal amount of disclosure and stuff. If it's videoed and made available might engage other people in the future. Just a thought. It's just difficult. A webinar. Right, exactly. A webinar would be phenomenal. People watching can't see each other that way. To be able to engage, it's very difficult to get especially the younger parents. Both parents working, come home, get the kids settled. You know, I don't have to tell you.  There's no limit on that other than controlling who's speaking. I think that's a great idea. I don't know that we've explored. I think we've done it through ACMI but I think getting it online and promoting it that way I think it's certainly reach more families. I know the one or two webinars that I got involved eventually I ended up going. I needed more because I needed to see the other people. So it helped. And the coalition has its own web sources on it as well and has great news letters. I think as Mr. Pierce said that sometimes people, parents too think they're the only ones in the world and their child is the only child in the world and knowing, I mean it's still your child it's still your issue but there is help out there. It's important. And to get through it. Anyone else? Thank you so much for all the work you've done and all the people involved in this and this is exciting. I like to see the lines going down. It's great. Thank you again. Okay, moving on to state accountability. All right. Laura Cheson is going to give the overview oh they're gonna set this up. We're going to divide this report on MCAS performance essentially into two areas. One is looking at accountability tonight. We approached it this way last year. And then on the 23rd we're gonna have a complete overview of MCAS. But for those that are watching I have put on the district website the link to all of the state reports with the school profile. So you can certainly go in there and look at any of the data. You can look at the dark data which is a comparison of the data among similar school district based on a number of metrics. So anyway, I'm gonna turn this over to Dr. Cheson. Yeah, it's fine. Thank you. So as Dr. Bode has said, we're gonna split the report into two pieces because there's a lot of data that's available.  So tonight we're gonna focus on specifically on the accountability analysis and folks at home may recognize is that when we talk about it being a level one school or a level two school. And so we'll go over why each school has the level designation that it does. And we'll go into much more detail next week about what our response is gonna be and more information about the percentage of students scoring at each level on the MCAS test specifically in the areas of math, science and English language arts. So we'll talk a little bit about our overall accountability goals that the school committee has set. Talk about the overall PPI and the PPI over time. We'll remind everybody what those definitions, what those things stand for. Talk about overall growth and then a little bit about individual school results in terms of accountability. So the school committee has many goals, but two goals that specifically target accountability and the first one of those is to close the achievement gap by attaining an annual PPI of 75 or greater for high need students in every school and to improve student achievement by attaining a student growth percentile of 51 or greater at each grade level in ELA and math. And I'll review one more thing. High need students include those students who are on an IEP, those students who are limited English proficiency or formerly limited English proficiency and or students that are eligible for free and reduced lunch and students are only counted once. And again, our overarching student achievement target will be that all our level one schools will maintain the level one status and that level two schools will make progress towards level one status. So just to review a little bit about the definition of PPI or the progress and performance index, it combines two metrics or two measurements. One is how we're making progress, closing the proficiency gap and that's the gap between the percentage of students that are scoring in the warning and needs improvement on the MCAS and the percentage of students that are scoring in the proficient and advanced on the MCAS. We have two measurements that are around this metric. One is a cumulative PPI and that looks at how we did over the last four years and it's a weighted average so the most current year gets weighted the most and four years back gets weighted the least. And then we have an annual PPI which looks at how we did this year in comparison to last year. And this will determine what accountability level designation that the school is given and there are some school subgroup ratings that are given if there are more than 30 or more students that fall into that category. Sorry, question? Sure. Is it the cumulative or the annual PPI that determines the accountability level? It's the cumulative. It's the cumulative. Yes. Thank you, sorry. That's quite all right. So this year if we look at our accountability data, our PPI's for across the district, I'm sorry, the last science one should say on target. So we're on target for all of the three major areas in terms of our PPI points. This will show you the cumulative PPI by each school and their accountability level. I'm pleased to announce that the Arlington High School has moved from level two to level one. That was one of our big accomplishments for this year. Audison is very close to being a level one school had they had 75 for the left hand number is for all students and the right hand number is the PPI for high-need students. And again, those are students who are either low income on a special education plan or are limited English proficiency. Yes, sir. Why does it say not available for admission? They don't have enough students in those subgroups to provide a number in the high-need subgroup. Guess he doesn't have a trauma over that or anything. 40, isn't it? 30. 30. Yeah, that's 30. Do they have a trauma over that? I don't know. I'm sorry, I have a second answer. That's great. And the highest you can get is 100. The highest you can, actually, no, you can get. You can get credit points you can roll over. Yeah, you can roll over. We've had schools get 113 in the past. So you'll see the level for each of the schools and the PPI for both all students and the high-need students. And then if we look at our annual PPI over time, again, you'll see Bishop has not available for their high-need students. But you can see how over the time from 2011, which is the first year of the four-year weighted average to the 2014, how each school received what they've received for PPI for all needs or all students are high-needs. Any questions about these two slides before we go back forward? Because these are the two that determine the accountability level. Yeah, what happened? Yeah. Pierce fell off the map. Right, and as I said, we're going to more detail in just a moment and then talk about the action plans. The thing I would like to call to everyone's attention is that if you have one school that is a level two, then the entire district is a level two. And later I will show you the school districts that we compare ourselves to. And you'll see that most districts, I think if not all of the districts we compare ourselves to are in the same situation where they have at least one school that's a level two. Also looking at growth data, because that was another metric that the school committee had set a goal around. This is our famous bubble charts that folks like to look at. Again, what you're looking for is you would like all the bubbles to be in the upper right-hand quadrant or as close to that, which would indicate schools that have high growth and high achievement. And on the bottom right-hand corner would be schools that have high growth but low achievement. Just about all of the Arlington grades will show that they are in either medium or high growth and high achievement. There's one outlier there for ELA. And in Mac... What are the different dots? They represent different grades, I'm sorry. Each one of them represents a different grade. Hold on one second. And I will tell you. So the one dot that you see there over to the left, that's sixth grade for ELA. So that would indicate that while they have high achievement they had low growth this year. Or comparatively high achievement. And if we go to the next slide, that's the math and each of the grades. And the two dots that you see, the one that's green and the one that's sort of gold that's right underneath it, right above the X, those would be indicating seventh grade and sixth grade for math. So it isn't color-coded. You guys are key someplace? We'll get to the slide where it's easier to see in a second. Thank you. So just to go, this provides the information in a different format. So if we look at the medium SGP for ELA and math by grade, you'll see that in fourth and fifth grade, you'll see all the data there. Again, our target was a 51 for each grade in both subject areas. Just about every area except for English language arts at the sixth grade is either at 51 exceeding 51 or just about close to 51. We have 50.5 and 49.5 for math. That's some significant increases in math. Yes. So math has been on our radar screen in the sixth grade. What happened with ELA? Either I forgot that we had an issue there. No, that's the first time that that has showed up and we'll be discussing that next time because we're going to get into the detail. I mean, I'll talk a little bit about it today but more detail the next time we meet because that's a specific, because grade six is all in one school as opposed to grades four and five which is a combination of all the elementary schools. We have more detailed information about that. That's next. The next school committee meeting. Okay. Tonight's the next one. Will we be able to see a comparison of the growth from you? Or is that something we need to look on? That's something that we present when we present the next time. Fine, thank you. Oops, sorry. And then just looking at SGP by elementary school, you can see which of the elementary schools it's supposed to be in red. It's a little hard to see on this chart but which of the elementary schools that don't have a 51 in SGP in grades four and five because it's comparing one grade to the previous grade. That's why there's only for grade four and five at the elementary school level. That's next for grade three. You're going to do the drill done on that one too next week, so the next question. Yes. Okay. This is a little more detailed growth data and you can see the information on the color chart below, although I'm sorry, it's a little hard to read. But this is ELA and again the dot on the far left hand side would be grade six on the right hand side. The two smaller dots represent grade seven and eight and then the one dot in the center represents the entire middle school. And again in math at the middle school level, the dots are pretty much around the same area because the grade six has an SGP of 51, grade seven of 49 and grade eight of 60 for a median SGP of 53, so they're all about the same. And if I'm reading this right, the state average is 60 or is it 50? I'm confused there. To the right on. 50. 50. 50. So the number 50 represents 60%, am I correct? Yes. Yeah, I think that's right. And the bottom line of the graph is just a straight numeric number. Thank you. We compare ourselves to other districts and these are the districts that every year we compare ourselves to. And I just wanted to show you that every single one of the districts that we compare ourselves to is although they are high performing districts, they are all level two districts because they have at least one or more schools that are level two. Also if we look at the percentage, proficient in advance, these are the districts that we compare ourselves to. And I also wanted to call attention to the percent of high needs because that certainly the higher the percentage of high needs, the greater the challenge the district faces. Could you just do a similar comparison sometime next time of the high schools in this group as well? Just high schools? Just the high schools? Sure, absolutely. I can bring that to me next time. I want to talk the fact that we got a level one high school. Oh, and you want to look at what the levels are? Yes. Okay, I can certainly do that. I bet you a lot of those districts do as well. Well, it's possible, but I couldn't answer that question off the top of my head. Well, we're there. The other thing that's not visible from this chart, but as I was reviewing the data, you'll see the SGPs over to the right. And for the vast majority of schools with their one or two points of each other in terms of median SGPs, as I was preparing this chart, I noticed that within one or two points, school districts are pretty much where they were last year in terms of the percent proficient and advanced. Where within one or two points, school districts are pretty much where they were with median SGP, which basically says that the challenge that we're facing regarding student, population of students that are much more difficult to move forward in terms of increasing student achievement is not just our problem alone. And actually, there was an article in the Boston Globe about this when they had the results. And did you have a question? Sure. No, go ahead. No, I can go back. I noticed in Allington, we lost a student when they decided to take math. Some students may have come into the district between the time one test is, one test happens in March and the other test happens at the end of the school year or they may have left the district. So the numbers are not. Very rarely the same. We only lost one. Belmont lost 12. So again, for mathematics as we look at this, we see that our percent proficient and advanced compared to the other districts that we compare ourselves to and their SGPs. And the same thing I found in English language arts also exists in mathematics that every single district, I think three points was the biggest spread from one year to another. There's just had not been a lot of variation between last year and this year. So to take a look just briefly at our level two schools and we'll go into even more depth in this the last time but I wanted to let you know what pieces of the accountability designation caused each of these schools to be a level two. So if we look at Stratton, this is two graphs of their annual PPI over time separated the annual PPI for high need students as the annual PPI for all students. And again, the goal would be to be 75 or better because you're looking for a cumulative PPI of 75 or better. So you can see there's a lot of ups and downs here. But just a second. Sure. I see a dramatic drop in 13 from 13 to 14, am I correct? That's correct. Yes, but previous to that, if you look you also saw that there was prior to 13, it was low as well. So there's a lot of variability. All students, but the high need students were basically a growth thing up to 2013. They actually scored zero in 2011. And so there was progress through 12, 13 and then. Okay. Can I just ask? Sure. So SGP is growth. Yes. And PPI is what again? Closing the achievement gap between the students that. So it's about the gap between high needs and regular need students. PPI. It's about the gap between, it looks at two things. It looks at partially at growth. Okay, so there's two. So SGP is one thing, but it's also combined in the other thing. Okay. So it looks at basically at two measures. One is closing the achievement gap, which is the percentage difference between those students who score proficiently advanced and those students who score needs improvement and warning. Okay. Regardless of high need status. Mr. Schleckman, go right ahead. Essentially it works like this. And because we have all our elementary schools teach science, this is how it works. Each content area is folded into PPI. And for ELA you get a growth measure and an achievement measure. For math you get the growth and achievement. You don't have a growth score in science so you only work on achievement. What happens is the state sets a target CPI based on your baseline year of 2011 for both high need students and for the aggregate. And so you're being evaluated on that on whether or not you reach or approaching your CPI target. And that would be for the, that's the achievement portion. On the growth portion, you're being judged whether or not you hit 51 as a median growth score. So they're both coming to play. There's also graduation rates and dropout rates that fall into the high school, but that's how they get to the high school. There's bonus points. So if you're an original target, your baseline, I'm just gonna pick easy numbers for easy math was 50. And your target at the end is 100 just for easy numbers. And there were five years in between, they would expect you to eat off 10 points every year. So that's your target. So if you meet that, you get a certain amount of points. If you exceed that, you get a certain amount of points. If you make progress towards that, but you don't meet it, you get a certain amount of points. And then of course, if you don't make any progress, you don't get any points. So and that's what PPI is. PPI is measuring how much better we're improving each year. How much you're eating off of the deficit, the difference between, along with your growth. So to just stay even from where you were last time. You get some points.  Well, if you make no growth, you get zero. If you make some growth, but you don't hit your target, you get 25 up, you get, I'm sorry. Am I wrong in looking at this chart right now that we not only didn't meet it, we lost points? That's correct. So I'm gonna go in. So we had really good growth. Well, you could. Let's look at the next. Well, we did. I mean, our growth numbers are good. Across the board, but each school, we're talking about each school individually now. I apologize if I'm open to that. That's okay. No, I'm just trying to figure it out. I agree. It's two years and I still don't understand PPI. So if we look at our detail analysis of Stratton, be able to go to my notes, please ignore the last bullet. I didn't get deleted out of it. So they showed some good progress in student growth and I'm happy to give you the detailed number of reports and they're also available on the Department of Education website if you'd like, but just to summarize, we showed good progress in student growth, but we didn't make progress in closing the achievement gap. In the last bullet should have been deleted. I apologize in terms, and this is for all students. In math, we showed some progress in narrowing the achievement gap and we were above target and growth. So really the problem with ELA for all students would be that you showed good progress but you didn't show exceptional progress. The other problem in ELA would be that we didn't make any progress in closing the achievement gap. So we're looking at two things, growth and closing the achievement gap. When we look at math, we showed some progress in narrowing the achievement gap and we were above target and growth. However, if you look at high need students, we increased the percentage at advanced, remember that's bonus points, so we got some bonus points there. We did not make progress in closing the achievement gap and we did not show any improvements in student growth. Again, looking at achievement gap, closing the achievement gap, that's cutting down the number of the percentage of students who are at warning and needs improvement. And in math, we did not make progress in closing the achievement gap and we did not show any improvements in student growth. Yes, ma'am? So when Stratton was given the blue ribbon designation, was that as a result of the 2013? No, that was prior to 2011. But that was specifically about closing achievement gaps, is that right? So that's what that designation means. So it was because they'd made a little bit of progress in that direction in 2012 or is that what? For the blue ribbon, that came prior to any of these years that we're taking into consideration. Because it seems like previous years were even worse, is that? It was prior to 2011. They made progress in the previous two years, but in particular progress in the year that they were designated. And they had a metric for, you know, which schools had the highest, they had targets there, too. But as Laura said, it's before we actually are dealing with this particular data. Right, okay. Now I know we're going to go into this a lot more in great detail, but do we think we did something in 2013 that we then stopped doing or is it? I know that having talked to the literacy, and we're going to go in greater depth in two weeks, but having talked to both the literacy folks and the math folks, last year Stratton, first of all, we're starting to see the full impact of the Common Core. And I know there was a question last year about alignment with the Common Core. If there are 10 things that one would have to include in order to be in aligned with the Common Core, we have those 10 things in our curriculum. But there's a significant difference between saying these are the 10 things I need to cover, and this is how I need to cover those 10 things. And by the way, this is how I need to measure how, if my students are making progress towards those 10 things, and how do I assess whether my students have mastered those 10 standards? Now it's more than 10, but just to give you some more information. In terms of Stratton, last year, they only had a math coach for one day a week. So we're feeling the full brunt of the Common Core, and we only have a math coach in there one day a week, because we didn't have as many math coaches last year as we have now. This year, they have a math coach in there four days a week. In addition, we are really upping our professional development around Lucy Colkins, and we'll go into more detail, but I just wanted to give you some of the information. Thank you, thank you very much. So if we look at the next level two school, that would be Hardy. Hardy met its goal for all students, but it did not meet its goal for high-need students. Again, in terms of their high-need students, there was no progress narrowing in the achievement gap, and we were both below the target for student growth. In math, we made some progress in narrowing the achievement gap and student growth, and we did receive some bonus points for decreasing the percentage of students' warning level, at the warning level. Our next level two school would be Pierce. Again, it's primarily due to the high-need students. In ELA, they were below the target for narrowing the achievement gap and below the target for student growth. They made some progress in narrowing the achievement gap and student growth in math, and they did receive some bonus points for increasing the percentage of students at the advanced level, and you get those bonus points if you have an increase of 10% or more. And Thompson, over time, looking at both the high-needs and all students did not meet their targets for last year. Again, for all students, we saw some progress narrowing the achievement gap and some good progress on student growth. In math, some progress in narrowing the proficiency gap or the achievement gap and some good progress on student growth. With high-need students, we saw some progress in both areas. And in math, we saw some progress closing the achievement gap and good progress on student growth. One thing I'd like to call to attention with Thompson is in one of the subgroups, which is low income. They made some exceptional growth this year. Unfortunately, that was not mirrored all across all the subgroups. High-needs, again, takes into consideration not only students who are in low income, but also students who are on special education plans and ELL students. He had somewhat of a discussion on this topic last year. This grouping is a grouping designated by the state. Am I correct? That's correct. Thank you. There's one thing I want to interject. Because it's very good to see all this, but these have targets. I hope that that's the message that comes forward. So that there are targets. There are mathematical targets that we have to achieve each year. So you can still be making progress. And your scores can still be good. And you could be moving student, as you will see in the actual MCAS data. But unless you make those targets, this is almost like AYP, but a different kind of way that we are now measuring in. And this is the way the state was able to negotiate not having AYP by creating a whole new metric system. And that's what this metric system is. So it's important that you have that contextual understanding because it might seem like well aren't the schools doing well? Well actually they are doing pretty well. So that's a set of the disconnect. And that's actually what was talked about in the globe too. There's that disconnect between what's going on with the leveling in these metrics and actually how school districts and schools are performing. But if you're just looking at the graph, if it says that all the students in a particular school in 2013 are 119 and now this year they're at Flaughty. I understand that there are a lot of intricacies involved in it. But this is very stark. It begs questions that we're gonna add. They need to be answered and I expect them the next time. That's true. I just wanna bring you back to the two charts that I told you at the very beginning that were compared us to other school districts in terms of our percentage proficient advanced. And also wanna go back and talk about the globe article. Is that when you start having this, you've already got the low hanging fruit. You've already got the students that are just below a certain level and you've moved them up and then there becomes a point where it becomes very challenging. But the expectation in order to get to that level one, this is a prime factor in that. Yes, in order to get level one, you have to make those targets. That's where we're stuck with the rules. I appreciate what you just said and I think it's very important. Yes. I think it would help me a lot if we looked at these school by school and that we could look at PPI and growth and actual scores and where, what their target was and all of that on one page per school because I can't keep this straight. I have to go back and forth and the numbers, I know the numbers don't tell the story. And so what I need is kind of, I know that just because these numbers dropped, I mean, I know they indicate something but it's really hard for me to understand what it means because it's so individual. Each one of these is individual to the school, to their target, to what happened in the school as far as how many kids are in that, whatever. I don't know. So I'm just having a really hard time wrapping my head around these. I mean, I want to understand them but I keep going back and forth. I thought when I saw the growth numbers, I was really excited because I was like, wow, this is great. We really had some significant growth in a lot of places. And then the PPI numbers were like, what the heck? And so then, but then I can't quite figure out because I don't know the metrics that are even used to create them. So they don't mean anything, these numbers. It's like telling me, I don't know, pick a number. You've assigned to them and I'm like, great, I have no idea what it means. It looks bad, but I don't know how bad, I don't know what that means. No, I totally understand. So I will make sure that for next time when we have our next meeting that I will add charts that summarizes for each school the kinds of things that you're asking for before we go into the detail for that school so that perhaps on a one-page summary you can see, this was the target and this is what I did. That would be great, that would be great, because I do. I will organize it more by school. That would be easier for you to understand. I will do that. Thank you. Just talking about Audison, we showed growth in some of the narrowing of the achievement gap. It would have been higher I think without sixth grade in terms of what we did to still meet the target for growth. We got bonuses for increasing the proficient, sorry, increasing the advanced and decreasing the failing. And again on math, we were on target for narrowing the achievement gap, on target for student growth, and we received extra credit. In science we had good progress in narrowing the achievement gap. And so there was some significant, I know that that's been one of the committee's concerns and we saw some really good growth in math at Audison. So just at a very high level and we'll go into more detail in two weeks, plans to address the level two schools. We have a much deeper implementation of data teams. I believe the committee is aware that we now have data teams, particularly at the elementary schools that are meeting on a regular basis. Data teams would make it sound like that there's just one data team. What I should say is that we have building subs that rotate from each of the elementary schools so that they can cover the classrooms. They're all certified teachers. And those, while they're covering say first grade, first grade is in with the principal looking at the data for an hour every seven days. So they're looking at not only their MCAS data, but they're also looking at how are the DRA scores for the fall? How are the writing scores for the fall? How are the initial math scores for the fall? What are the students that need interventions? Are those interventions working? We come back and revisit that every eight weeks to see if those interventions are working. So that's a much deeper implementation than we have had in the past. We're now including math and writing in the review of these data teams. Originally they just looked at reading and reading intervention. We're formalizing the tracking of RTI which is response to intervention results. So if we do something for a student, are we actually getting some response for that intervention? We have regular data team and curriculum focus team meetings using those rotating subs as I talked about. So while some of the time maybe looking at the data, other times maybe the fourth grade is gonna start a new unit on some type of writing and they would meet together and talk about what they were gonna do and how they were gonna assess it and what would be the formative assessment as they go through this unit. We have our baseline edged student analytics system that allows those data teams to more quickly analyze the data and drill down and document interventions and track successive interventions as well as we're increasing the use of Edwin analytics that comes from the state which is a state data analysis tool. We're increasing the use of formative assessment. We're continuing to use either what's called the flex blocks in some schools or the wind block, what I need block. We have literacy coaches that are working on a much deeper level. And as I said, we increase the number of math coaches. Another thing that we're doing for literacy is that we've asked for volunteer teachers who want to really focus on a specific writing unit and those teachers will actually go into a teacher who is sort of like a mentor teacher in that area who really knows that unit, will go in and watch that teacher teach and then we'll actually split up and work with little groups in that classroom and then we'll get feedback from the literacy coaches and we'll be debriefing and then they will meet after school and then they also have a discussion group. So it's a very intensive professional development program around literacy to try to really ramp up teachers' expertise in Lucy Colkins and the Common Core as quickly as possible. And finally, we'll be continued focused on the teacher evaluation system with specific school and teacher goals that are targeted to student achievement. Yes. I mean, what I see, first of all, I think we should put this in context. We're a level two district with a level one high school and we're a pretty high performing district. Yes, that's correct. So I think we should just, we're having a conversation about a high performing district and not a district that's in a crisis. But when I see that, those are also things you're doing at level one schools, right? I mean, there's the work. Oh, right, but we, the level two schools do not share math coach and the level one schools will share math. Oh, I see, okay, so that's a distinction. The level two schools, two of them, Pearson, Thompson, are also title one schools, particularly Thompson. So they get additional services based on the title one entitlement grant that you would not get at a non-title one school. Do you, in a level two school, are you trying to find ways to give teachers more time to, I don't know, more time for coaching and support of their practice? Yes, that's the professional development I just described. Okay, so that's across the district. That's more time than a level one district, level one school. They get more coaching time from the math coach and a level two school, yes. Okay, so it's actually a good thing to be in a level two school as a kind of an emerging teacher, right? You're getting more support in practice as you build your practice. Well, our new teachers get also that kind of support anyways, part of our mentoring program. They have the math mentoring program, the reading mentoring program. What we'll always describe it is actually really more targeted for our teachers with professional status. Right now, okay. Because they don't necessarily have those clinical models that we've embedded for our pre-professional teachers. Right. But one of the things that's not a really important initiative this year that we were talking about is that a lot of schools have been doing data teams, but one of the impediments have been that sub coverage is unreliable. You call for a sub and then you don't get enough subs that day so you have to cancel your data team. Because the bill goes to the district so they pay more. So what we've done this year is we've actually hired a team that is a team that goes around and we mentioned that, but it's really important to understand how important that is because then it's a reliable time. When they go to a particular school, the principal can have two-hour blocks, three-hour blocks, there's a lot of discretion how they use, they cover this. But it also provides a lot of common planning time, too, around the data and around planning, which honestly has been something that teachers want more of, but the day just doesn't necessarily provide. Yeah, no, that's... And as to the largest extent possible, this team of subs will be assigned to the same classrooms over and over again so they really get to know the students and where they are and the curriculum and so they're already establishing relationships with the students in the building because they've already been in most buildings at least twice. These people being paid substitute pays, pay, or are they being paid more of a permanent sub? They're being paid like a permanent sub loss a little bit. They're being paid at the level of a BSP. Okay, Mr. Director. Okay, I can attest that as Mr. Thelman said, in other school districts, there are times when I will be subbing with a team and I will go through four different classes during the day and that's exactly what those teachers are doing. They're meeting at a grade level for data team meetings and like that. And what you're doing, I get usually the same classes each time so that relationship is formed. Did you have a question? Oh yeah, I just had a question about teacher buy-in because I know that this is not brand new, but five years ago teachers weren't doing this kind of analytical data sort of delving into things. And I'm just wondering about, is this something teachers are excited about? Is there a lot buy-in? Is there controversy? Well, they've been having data team meetings regarding reading for probably since 2007. That's when we had the big push on literacy within the district. So that was already established and now we're adding math and writing on top of that. I think with the time that we're giving teachers, I think they feel comfortable that they now have the time. In addition, we have a math coach that's also a data specialist who used to work with DSAC for the state. So she's going into the buildings and she's working with teams. She provided the same training, has been providing training and will be providing ongoing training to all the reading teachers, to all the math coaches, to all the principals and assistant principals and deans so that we're really raising the capacity for folks to help facilitate these discussions. And I know already on our professional development day in November, she's also gonna be running some workshops that people can sign up for for even more and eventually we'll be running after school, a series of after school trainings for teachers on the analytical tools that we have. So the teachers will as much as support as they feel like they need. Because I really think that's the key. We want people to get comfortable with looking at the data and feel like they have the support and we just don't have them out there sort of hanging. So we have, we've provided a lot of support for them. Okay, I just wanna put some perspective here.  I think there was a drop from about 32% of the school statewide to about 26. And we actually gained, we now have four out of nine schools level one. So that's 44%. We're, the percentage of our schools that are level one are greater than the state. The reason why is that the target on the CPI increases every year and the target is designed to get more and more difficult. Our overall results have improved. Certainly for all our students, you can see that the district as a whole is above 75 and 75 is the threshold. 75 is the criteria for gaining 100 points in the PPI system and that's the target. We did have some declines among high need students and that's one thing that we're gonna need to address. But overall, I mean, when you take a look at the growth scores across the district, we've got a couple of places where we have issues. The movement of the high school into a level one status is a significant improvement. There are pluses and minuses in any school district's report at this time but I think that we've got more pluses this year than minuses. But it really is a complicated thing to explain because it operates on three different levels. There are three different criteria in terms of determining school levels and it's not easy to sort out. Thank you, Dr. Chesk. Thank you. Look forward to the part two. Two weeks. Oh, you need it, okay. We're now on to monthly financial report, Ms. Johnson. Good evening, I'm sorry I was late. There was a capital budget meeting. Now I know where the chairman of the capital budget committee went when he left the meeting early. I met him on the stairs on my way out. There isn't really much to report in terms of change from last month. We are still, I have to say, while I really like this paperless system in some ways, it's a little more difficult. There we go, there we go. No, I'm here, sorry, sorry for the delay. That we're pretty much in the same place that I reported last month. As I said before, we are projecting to be over budget that is well within the reach of coverage from our reserves because of additional positions we needed to do the staffing based on our summer enrollment, our summer enrollment projections. This month we've included the grant reports. The grants were not fully set up at the time that the reports came out. So in some of the grants, when you look at them, you see expenses, but not budget, that's just a matter of things turning through, getting set up, and they should be fine by next month. Any questions on the current fiscal year? Okay, the other part of my presentation today is about the, yay, last fiscal year. As we reported last year, we expected to be, we were over budget. We requested and received the $500,000 reserve that had been put aside on our behalf by town meeting for special education overage and we took that back from the town and that really went a long way. When we initially were projecting the deficit last year, I think my initial projection was around 1.2 million and I really need to give a shout out to the special ed department for really doing a lot of hard work in the spring to try to slow that trend. So we ended up ending in a better place than I anticipated. We ended up $838,000 above budget, 500 of which was covered by that reserve from the town. So we didn't have to dip into our own reserves very heavily to complete the fiscal year, which is good news. There were no real surprises and I did give you the detail in the packet to look at the principal areas were out of district tuition, one-to-one assistance, medical services and behavioral supports, all of which we discussed in prior meetings. So I didn't find anything in the final numbers that was really off track from everything we had seen the whole year. I was able to use the FY14 final numbers and compare them to FY11, 12, 13 final numbers and the FY15 working budget right now which has incorporated the staffing changes that we've been discussing. And just a couple of thoughts on the trends. Special education seems to be quite uniformly about a third of budget. Even though our budget's grown substantially over these five years, special ed is keeping pace. I'll show you that slide. That's an absolute dollars. The red is special ed, the blue, everything else. But that's when you make it 100% of budget, you can see that as a percentage of budget, it is right there that we are not seeing a lot of flutter from year to year which I found very interesting. I don't know if that means anything, I just found it interesting. The other new metric that I brought in this year is that teaching. We see that teaching as a percentage of total budget is creeping up. In this slide, the blue is the investment in teaching, the red is the investment in teaching assistance and the green is everything else. So teaching has grown from 47% of budget in FY11 to 51% of budget in FY15. Can you say everything else, those things that support the teachers in the classroom? Everything else that's in our operating budget. Thank you. So basically I'm just backing out the big pieces. And I think that's very interesting because of the educational research indicates that high quality teachers have the biggest bang for improvement in our test scores and we now have a level one high school so I think it would look like that the financial investment is bearing some fruit for us. Isn't that also tracking their increased enrollment? Yeah, that too. We're certainly trying to keep class sizes reasonable and obviously that's a key driver but I think it's more than that. I think it's beyond just keeping pace with enrollment growth. I think the investments that you've heard about in math coaches and literacy coaches are not new, the math coaches are new, but the investment in the special ed related service providers at the elementary school would create teams, the new investment in substitute support to allow the teams to meet and really delve into data. I mean those are all people intensive as opposed to thing intensive. People are very expensive and of course they grow and grow and grow with every contract cycle but that seems to be where you get the results. So if somebody could invent a piece of software that could replace all of that that wouldn't get a contract increase every year, that would be nifty but so far they haven't. So I think where we're putting our money is paying off well for us and we're doing it quite modestly. We're still below the average in the state for per pupil expenditures. So we're getting great results on a shoestring. I think as a district we need to be really proud of how we're doing that and that's it. Questions? Congratulations, free one tonight. Thank you. Well said, thank you. We're now diversity hiring report, Mr. Spiegel. Yes, so you have that in front of you and you do have the reports, the comparisons from previous years in terms of previous hires that are still here, new hires in this year and that is this year since October 1 of last year to September 30, basically of or mid-September of this year, who the new hires are and what they reported. We do have, I mean we do still struggle like other districts do and I've talked to other districts about the struggle to really diversify our staffs the way we would really like to. We've done well in certain areas in terms of getting some diversity. I think in some of our teaching assistant hires at some of the schools they've done very well in increasing the diversity among the staff. I will say that our after school programs, the district run after school programs through the Arlington after school programs have done pretty well in diversifying their staff. We still have a ways to go in some of the classroom teachers in the district in getting people of color into the classrooms and it's an ongoing effort. We're increasingly stressing the importance of this to the principals and curriculum directors and they're buying into it. We still do suffer like a lot of districts do in some, for some openings with the pool of candidates of color is very small in the state and for some of the positions we are hiring for. I mean, for example, we had a few elementary positions that we hired for this year, elementary classroom teachers. We received over 300 applications on school spring. A very, very small percentage were identified on school spring as people of color. And so that's a challenge in the state and we do wanna bring people in who are qualified applicants to interview, but it's a challenge that we face and that other districts face as well. We also, in terms of our total numbers, our total numbers of black employees who are identified as black or African-American has not really, it's gone up a little bit, but not much and there was some, you know, in some turnover because as we've had, the hires are usually, have been in teaching assistant positions or other positions that are not classroom teachers, there tends to be more turnover of teaching assistants. Teaching assistants throughout, in all of our LinkedIn schools, tend to move on from the teaching assistant role into teacher roles, whether here or in other districts than some of the people who we hired last year left for other districts this year. So that's one issue where we're not gaining as much as we would like and sort of staying basically steady. And we also have a lot of people who don't self-identify and the numbers there are a little confusing. I think what we've done, the reason there seems to be more now than in previous years is we've captured in the data more of the people who did not self-identify. I think we had to look in more than one place in our munis system to find, you know, to find that category of people. So there's still, it's a voluntary thing. We do not force people to identify their racial or ethnic identity, but most choose to do so, but again, it's voluntary. So two questions. One is, shouldn't there be a category of sort of multi-ethnic, multi-race, because people don't always neatly fit into categories? And then the second question is, it's hard to get a picture from this of how many people of color have direct contact with students versus somebody who's hired in the district has less contact with the students and it'd be great to get a sense of. So we don't, we have not moved to that check off box basically on our form for the multi-racial and multi-race category and I think that's something we need to look into for the future. For the people who don't have much, it's hard to say, you'd be surprised at how many, whether they're classroom teachers or teaching assistants, there's a lot of people who do have, are in the schools, we have our IT people are in the schools. Our IT department is a diverse department with Asian American, African American, white employees, and it's not a big department either, so it's a pretty, there's some diversity there and those employees are in the schools, they're in classrooms helping, kids see them all the time. And that's the goal, right? Cafeteria workers, there's some diversity there, kids see them, and in the cafeteria, obviously, teaching assistants are in the classroom, they're in the schools, they're helping out, so kids see them. I think where we do lack, and I think it's fair, especially in the black or African American, people who identify as black or African American, we don't have a very, very many people who are classroom teachers or AEA, uni day members, so we wanna increase that. Ms. Stax? What? I'm just going down the line for questions. Mr. Pierce. Quick question on that. How are we doing in terms of the recruiting, like being proactive about going to traditionally black colleges or writing those letters? We've written the letters in the past few years to the traditionally black colleges. The superintendent's diversity advisory committee has sent letters themselves to places of worship that are primarily in communities of color, and those have yielded some results. I don't think we've gotten a lot of results from there. We have not gone, we haven't sort of put the expense into making a trip down to, I know some of the historically black colleges have job fairs, that might be something to think about. That's an expense, but it would be something that could potentially yield results in the future. So we have been proactive in reaching out. We've maintained our, obviously we've maintained our membership in the MESS, the MPDE, the partners for diversity in education. And again, we met a few weeks ago, a lot of the districts are having similar issues, even in the MPDE of attracting and retaining and hiring the candidates that we want. And there's always things to do. There's always more that we can do. And I think a lot is the state, we need to really interact more with the colleges, the education prep programs here, the educator prep programs in Massachusetts. I think those, all of those programs are also have a responsibility as well. And I think have an interest in attracting and retaining qualified students of color who can become teachers in Massachusetts. Thank you. I just wanted to, for our viewing audience at home who don't have the report in front of them, I appreciate that we do want to continue to increase, but I wanted to point out that the total number of teachers of diverse backgrounds this year is 66. That's up from a total of 61 last year and 42 in 2012. The percentage is down a little bit this year compared to last year, just because we've got so many more teachers and other employees. But still, I think that is impressive and even in the difficult environment that you're talking about, I think that making any strides forward is good. Thank you. So we've made some strides and we've been tracking this data since 2009. Maybe we've been tracking it longer, but we have the data since 2009. And there's been some improvement. But I'm wondering if there's a, we should think a little bit differently about this. And I'm wondering, we have the same problem as all the districts in our region. Sure. So I'm wondering if there are conversations between the districts about this issue and if there are ways to combine forces to try to recruit more people of color to all the suburban districts? There are. I mean, there are conversations constantly among our groups. I mean, there's multiple groups involved. There's the MPDE, which is the group that we belong to. There's another HR group with some of the suburban districts that are no longer in MPDE have joined together to form a consortium. And we focused on this issue of recruiting applicants of color. They kind of, they have a job fair as well. The MASPA group, the HR directors throughout the state talk about this constantly. We talk about regularly in our meetings, we with people from the state, from the office of professional licensure to talk about how that's a bigger topic that the state is undergoing now anyway on licensure and whether, especially if we wanna recruit people from other states who may be licensed in another state, how do they get licensed in Massachusetts? There are some challenges for people to do that. So there are lots of conversations going on among our group and many other groups. Yeah, I mean, what I've learned over the years in recruiting is if you wanna recruit anybody really, you gotta go to them. Yeah. And so it doesn't make, I'm not sure it makes good sense for Arlington to think about making our own trip to traditionally black colleges and universities. But if we were to combine with other districts, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, I don't know. I've just thrown out the idea, but with a bunch of districts and there was a sharing of expenses or someone went to some of these colleges and represented a multiple districts, that might be a better approach. Because you can't, you really, unless you gotta go there to find this talent, you gotta actually go there, go on campus, talk to people, build relationships to find the kind of talent you want. Sure. And it's expensive to do it as one off district. Yeah. I don't know if it's practical. I would like to see in the report as far as TAs and classroom teachers. Okay. I appreciate the other exposure, but I think that's part of the main goal. The other thing I'd like to ask is to have a response from the principals of why they didn't hire anybody. It doesn't have to be in a diversity. Just to get an idea if there, what's going on. This is one area. We don't, we have a very small pool, but you did indicate there were some. We weren't successful for whatever reason. Maybe the salary wasn't there or the benefits and things of that nature. If it comes down to that, that's fine, but just feedback to you. Sure. Of why people aren't being hired across the board. Anyone else? Thank you very much, Mr. Beagle. You're welcome. Thank you. We are now into superintendent's report. Dr. Bode. Well, it's not a very long report this evening. What you had in your materials were two charts that you're very familiar with. One chart says the October 2014 and the other one says October 8th. The one that's October 2014 was the snapshot on October 1. Now, I'm going to be talking about some numbers and tonight, but one of the things I do want to caution you or to explain to you is that these numbers still have to be certified by the state. So even though you can see this snapshot of what we had in different classrooms in the elementary and the total numbers in the high school and the middle school, there's a certification process that will go on. So we probably won't have the certified number, which is the number that the state uses to determine chapter 70 money and the number that we in Arlington use to determine what the increase for enrollment number will be. All right, so I think that it's going to be very close to this number. It's not going to waver very much because we did a considerable amount of reconciling numbers over the last month. In fact, almost on a daily basis, we're always comparing class lists to what we had in power school. But what you will see, the number that we have is a total increase when we look at preschool, we look at out of district, we look at all of them, is we're going to be over 200. Right now the number we have is about 213. But it could, as I said, it could waver a little bit, but that gives you the magnitude of what the increase was this year. And you compare that to what it was over the previous two years. That in previous two years, we had an increase of 280 students. So we are now, after three years, getting very close to an increase in the school district of nearly 500. We're not there yet, but nearly so. We have an elementary school, which will at some point this year probably tip over 500. It's been over 500, under 500, as we've had students enter and leave. But we are definitely seeing a very big increase. And if you look at the other chart that I provided you at your request, it's in your packet, it gives you an idea of what the increases have been at different grade levels in different schools. And I think that you can see that it's not just a kindergarten phenomenon. It is really something that is across the board in different schools. So that gives you some idea in terms of what the kind of changes have been. So what will happen once we get the certified number, which will not probably happen until late in October. At that point, Ms. Johnson is going to use that number to do a projection in terms of what the next few years will be. But one of the things we're also doing is looking at different ways to perhaps look at that. Right now, you might wanna say a couple words about the way that you do it right now. And another aspect of this might be we will introduce some other databases that might give us some other ideas of what to expect. So Diane, you might wanna explain that. The way I've been doing the enrollment projections since I started here is based on a three year weighted average that looks at how many children move from say first grade to second grade. And so five years ago is five times less important than last year. And so I create a number and then I apply that to the number of students and then I shoot that forward five years. To get the kindergarten numbers, I take the live births from five years previously. As far as I have them, the fifth year out, obviously they're not all born yet. But I estimate that based on the way it looks. I have to say that what I've seen in the preliminary work on this, our number of live births in town is going up and that while in general over the last five years, the rate of live births to children in kindergarten has been 85, 87%. We're almost at 100% for this year. And so if in fact all the kids, not 85% of the kids live births in town show up in kindergarten, if all of them do, plus the fact that we see that we're having more babies in town for sure, I think it's gonna continue. This year I'm also going to present it not just with the five year weighted average but with a five year straight average. These two metrics were used by my mentor in Cambridge for many years to try to guess at what enrollment was gonna look like. But it is a guess. Selectman Dan Dunn works with me last spring or actually he did the work and I watched because it was way out of my league to really try to do the over and under on how good these numbers were and there's a pretty significant swing up or down. I mean in the truth of the matter as he said in long range planning, it's really hard to predict the future. So ideally, I mean in capital budget it came up tonight. One of them people said we should go out and hire a consultant who can do a study and tell us how many kids we're gonna have. I agree, if I thought there was somebody out there that we could buy that could tell us, I'd be happy. So I don't have any emotional investment in this metric of how I predict it. It's better than nothing, but as we know last year it was way off. I mean I was predicting mathematically we'd be up about 80 kids and we're more than double that. So is it better than nothing? Maybe not. I mean certainly we'll talk to some other towns, certainly we'll try to see what we can do to come up with some other way to predict this. But I think the thing, Nezdeck and MSBA use metrics really based on women of childbearing age, which I think falls down in this district because I think we're going through a cultural change where older families are moving out and younger families are moving in and I just don't have any, I mean I'm just, I'm not smart enough to figure out how to guess that. Mr. Schlickman. I'm just looking at the numbers and the comparison chart. I wish they went past grade five to your chart. But what I'm seeing is, is the cohorts themselves are fairly stable. For example last year's kindergarten was 471, this year's first grade is 479. And there's some erosion. I mean we went from 428 in our fourth grade last year to 423 in our fifth grade this year. So that's not, at least that part of the puzzle isn't difficult. The real difficult thing was predicting that kindergarten number which went up from 471 to 508 this year. Right. And that's the kicker. I think what's happening, you're right in terms of the real estate thing, but I think that what's happened is, is that people who are having children now don't want the two acres out on the other side of 495. They wanna be in, they're much more willing to live in smaller space to live in a community such as this. And that I think is the dynamic. We've become a very attractive family community and people are willing to live in smaller spaces to enjoy the amenities in this town. Which is great. I mean, obviously we're offering a great product here, but it brings its challenges. How do we think rationally about space needs, building needs, the future? How do we guess in five to 10 years in the long range plan? 20 years from now, what do we need for school space? Yeah. We cannot afford the school population of 50 years ago that this town had. Because we are offering so many diverse programs that require more staff and more spaces and stuff. We also don't have all the buildings that we had. And I'm not looking back on that, but I've said it before, two families, my age moved out down the street. For me, two families moved in, one had two, one had three. They're all going to Heidi this year. And that's becoming, as Mr. Schlickman said, more and more problem, talking at the end. I'm also looking at the comparison chart, as Mr. Schlickman said. What, I would like to see it follow cohorts as he said, but I'd also like to see both the ins and the outs. So how many students left that cohort and how many gained? Just to get it, you know, I don't want just the total. I want to know how much in and out, so I have an idea of the churn. It's churn. We've had that earlier, I think, Grape, and not this one, right? Yeah, I have an idea. In other words, the class of 2022 had this number of kids last year, an X number of kids left, an X number of kids came in. Yeah, right now we just- That's not data I've ever given you before. Yeah, I haven't, no. You've never had that data. What you see here, the churn in terms of a final resolved number. No, that's not the churn. That's the total. Yeah. That's the end result. And when I want the churn, I want to have some idea of what the churn is. That would take, I think, a significant amount of work. That wouldn't be easy to do. No, it would not. It would be very difficult. Very, very difficult to do. Yeah. And I'm not really sure what it tells you. I think it gives you, there's a big difference in trying to predict the future if you have 50 students and each year 10 are leaving and 11 are coming back in. And then all of a sudden, the number who are leaving drops a bunch. So all of a sudden, your numbers are gonna start spouting up instead of going up by one. I think it's something that, I think it is something that we need to be tracking. And I think it is something that factors into, it gives you an idea of how much change there is going on. And we know right now that there's a change come, that the net change is coming in. But, well the continuity rate captures, that in many of the grades, it's greater than 100%. We're seeing growth at multiple grades. We're not just seeing growth in kindergarten or first grade. We're seeing growth in second, third, fifth, high school. We're seeing growth all through. It does capture that. But I'm not sure the comings and goings of bodies, which is gonna be phenomenally difficult to get a handle on. You know, I think it's the overall numbers that are important. But each school, as soon as the student leaves, the school, the building itself knows that student's left. When a student comes into the building, that building knows a student has come in. Now, I'm not suggesting it's gonna show up in a report automatically, but we've had discussions about certain levels of keeping records. But we are required to take in new records. We're required to send out all records that is a plus and a minus right there. That's done on a regular basis in the school. You have to capture that to put it together with report. These are little singleton things that are happening in your data system in which you're recording an exit or recording an entrance. But those systems are designed to give you counts. And you probably don't have a plus, minus calculation coming out of it. At the end of a school year, someone in that building, you've kept a tally of negative and a tally of positive. Probably not. I'm saying you can.  I mean, I can tell you how to take two exports out of the system and do what you said, but it would be a labor-intensive thing because what you end up doing is matching local IDs against kids for two years and then counting the kids who weren't in both reports. Paul, all I'm suggesting is a little slip of paper. Minus plus, bank, bank, and every five you do it at the end of the year.  I certainly can inquire, but quite honestly, I want to put all of our efforts in the district to having accurate data. What I think is most important is to see that, I think it's interesting to see these trends in terms up and down, but if you had a profile sheet next month, it looked different than last year in each one of these grades. I'm not sure that it really helps advance the thinking in terms of the important things that we need to look at in the district, which are if we are looking at this kind of trend of a range of 150 to 200 students increasing over the next few years. Now, I think we need to look at it in terms of element, all the different levels. We've already begun, and we began this last year as really looking at our space issues. This is going to be a significant challenge to us on top of all the other things that are looking out there financially in the town. And there are going to be some hard decisions that are going to need to be made. How do we move students from schools that are maybe growing faster than other schools and move students to where there is space? Right now we have one tool, which is Buffer Zones, but it has its limitations. And if you have a school, for example, Stratton, which we could create additional classrooms up there, but that's not where the growth is. The growth is at Thompson and Hardy, and not to mention Dallin and Brackett. Dallin and Brackett are very high growth, what? You renovate Stratton, it could drama families. I don't think renovating the school drives the families, but. You have to think about these things because if you want to just create the space where the kids are coming, is that an efficient use of town resources? So there are a lot of issues, and we're going to be having to accelerate that thinking and those discussions over the next year in preparing. Just the most pressing one actually will be at Audison, not next year, but the following year. In fact, I had a meeting today about this very issue among many issues, but this was a very important one is we really do have to know what the plan will be in terms of space next year, and I've set a deadline by December one, actually, so we can really get a look at this in terms of budget. But the year after, when these classes start coming into Audison, what class size are we going to tolerate and where would we put them? And how is that going to be configured in an already existing building, which is pretty close to being maxed out right now? So I've actually received, as the chair of the facility subcommittee, which hasn't met yet, I've actually received some inquiries from parents who see these numbers and get alarmed because they're at Brackett and Dallin actually, because the building's gotten, one parent said to me, I don't remember the numbers 10 years ago, but that the Brackett has 100 more students in it than it had 10 years ago, maybe that's true. That's about right. So there's a desire on the part of some people to have a conversation about the process that we're gonna use to develop a strategy around space. And so there's a few people in my subcommittee to meet to talk about this. I would like your subcommittee. So, okay, so then I have a reason to, okay, so great. So I'll figure who's on it and then we'll get together. All right. Mr. Fitzgerald can help you with that. No, I know, I'm just kidding. Mr. Pierce. A couple of quick things. In looking at the monthly enrollment as of 10, 814, I'm looking just broadly at the numbers across and I'm feeling comfortable to say hopefully that the added tool in the toolbox, the redistricting in the buffer zones, he's looking like it's leveling. So certain grades that have more students are getting that extra classroom to keep the numbers even. And so I wanna commend and congratulate the administration for doing that because I think that was one of our hopes in terms of equity across the district. It's helping a lot. And we have a report coming what next meeting, right? Because that's the second meeting on October per hour policy about how it's been going this year with the redistricting efforts, what pitfalls, what advances you see. And I look forward to hearing that at the next meeting. The one thing else I wanted to point out and ask about was with regard to that interesting up and down chart at the totals at the bottom. So first grade last year was 472, which would translate into second grade this year at 458, right? So you wouldn't go grade to grade, they're not the same. No, you're going diagonal. So yeah. So they're going down, right? Did we touch on this yet? No. So do we have any sort of reason that that might be happening? And it's pretty consistent from one to two to two to three, it's going down. Yeah, they drop. And there'll be a much bigger drop between fifth and sixth. Historic? Not this year. Something like this happens every year? Not this year. Fifth and sixth, certainly. But I'm saying it's in the elementary grades. I see increases. Yeah. Not in a cohort effect. No, no, not in a cohort. If you start, if you look at a group in kindergarten, by the time they get to high school, we have lost a pretty good percentage. You get a big drop going into the sixth. Getting into the ninth, you get a bit of a kick up, which is interesting. You also lose a minute, man. But just hear me out. From first to second goes from 472 to 458. Right. From third to fourth goes from 458 to 449. I'm sorry, where are you looking? Totals at the very bottom with the up and down arrows. In other words, the third grade in last year to the fourth grade this year. Now is this, no, this is not capturing out-of-district placements, nor is it capturing SLCs. Right, but it's dealing with the buildings that we have in our classrooms. These are our classrooms in-house. Right, not necessarily. I mean, you could have had students in one year who are now out-of-district. Yeah. But they're not that many. I hope they're not that many going out-of-district. Well, not that many. We'll be broke. So that could be one of the reasons for this. There are muddying factors. Right. Yeah, I'm just wondering what the factors are, what we place this on. It seems to be pretty consistent. Do we have exit interviews for people leaving the district? Like, are you moving out of town? Are you sending to another school? I mean, is that possible to just inquire? Silence. Crickets? I think it's, I found it interesting. I would support that. Scary. I mean, if it's just a matter of being my father and my grandfather all went to this private school, that's one thing. If there's an issue with the programs that they're going into, I think we need to know that. It wouldn't hurt. I think sometimes people move for bigger spaces. Yeah. They need bigger houses and bigger, and they need a bigger space. Right. There are various. Right now, if the, in three years time, the top, I guess, third, fourth, and fifth, when they all hit the middle school, that will be a total, if they all go. Which they don't, they need to, okay. I'm just saying though, if they all went, there's 234 plus right there. Right. If 234 don't go, that would just break even. If 234 didn't go, that's something we need to find out on that exit interview or something. But that's just, no, that's a natural break. A lot of people send their kids to private schools for the upper classes. It's usually about 10%. Yeah, yeah. We lose a good chunk. And it's not just our religion. That fifth to sixth and eighth to ninth are huge for a lot of people. Eight to ninth, I, No, no, no. Fifth to sixth is especially. Fifth to sixth is a big one. Even bigger. Yeah. Fifth to sixth is the biggest. I thought, this year we got extra people coming in, right, this. Across the board. That the jump between fifth and sixth wasn't as, we didn't lose as many this year. Is that right? I thought that. I think GMI about the same percent. Okay. We actually had a bigger number.  You should be able to. It was down, it's like 397 now. Okay. But actually, aren't we able to get data on the number of students, number of residents in the town of Arlington under the age of, you know, at school age and how many are in public schools and how many are in non-public schools. So we can get that data. My guess is over the past decade, the percentages have not changed much. Right. That'd be good to know. Yeah. Well, don't we? It's normal. It isn't that part of, we track those people in. Yeah, we have to. You have that data someplace. Somebody, somebody has the data for every town, every city and town in the state. So you can get that data and I bet you over a 10 year period, I don't think it's probably been much change in the percentages. In fact, if I had to guess, it's probably the private school has dropped. Probably has, because of prices in the recession. Our percentage of private schools has remained very steady over 10 years. Yeah, so that would be a good thing for the whole committee to see because I saw something on that about a half a decade ago and there wasn't much change. Somebody brought it to the meeting and there wasn't much change. It's in the 12 to 15%. Yeah, there has not been much change. I just have a small question. So I was looking at your eight one numbers and then I was looking, actually I didn't do the analysis for October 1st but the nine 18 numbers. And most schools, what you thought you were gonna get an eight one on August 1st, the numbers dropped. Big exception being Thompson fifth grade. But I'm just wondering, do we know why? I mean, so I know my daughter knew about some kids who she knew weren't coming back but they weren't officially reflected as not coming back. So I'm wondering, is there? Yes, well, we're trying to improve that. So what can happen is, we were late this year in rolling over promotions. The way PowerSchool works, maybe getting way too in the weeds but PowerSchool works where you have to create your master's schedule before you promote. Not all data systems are like that. So what that means is that unless your master's schedule, you don't do promotions until that happens. So we have to look at ways that we can better utilize how we remove students from the system during this period of time. We didn't promote until early August. And then additionally, there's also a need to keep students that were in the district last year in PowerSchool sort of an active designation for the summer reports. So there's a lot of things going on but we're working on this so that doesn't happen as much. So it's a question of whether you're absolutely right. The schools may know that these students are on the list but they may not have reconciled them with what is actually appearing in PowerSchool and that's something we have to really work on that are getting better at. So that's really where more of the discrepancies are is just the comparison between what's on the school list versus what's in PowerSchool. Okay, but then you have more accurate numbers or you don't, you just have what's on PowerSchool when you're deciding say to add a teacher or not to add a teacher. That was actually the part that was very, before we've had these big increases, the need for accuracy, there was a margin where you could operate in because it wasn't that big a change. But when you have these massive changes every year and then most of them is happening in the summer, it is extremely important to have accurate numbers. So that is the big push this year in terms of our data to get the system in place where we have a way to actively reconcile throughout the summer even though we have this constraint of promotions and even though we have this constraint of keeping last year's data alive and we're working on how to do that. Yes. I just wanted to follow up on what Jed said about the class sizes. And I agree that in general they look very good. My concern though is with Thompson in grades four and five. And my understanding is that the kids in grade, I remember for grade five that last year they were high in grade four and for grade three they were, for grade four they were high in grade three last year. And I'm just concerned that we've again created a small cohort which is going through a good chunk of their schooling in really high classroom, high numbers. And I am concerned about this. We are too. We have right now a large class TA and we've just hired in a building sub which will be, we're looking at it over the next week to decide if we actually need more support. But right now we're gonna have a TA at the fifth grade and the fourth grade. Oh. Full time? It's new. Pardon? Full time? Oh yeah, full time TA. In both classrooms. Not in each classroom at that grade level. Okay, so a half time TA. I'm just also concerned in the setting of the MCAS scores that we just looked at at Thompson. That this doesn't seem like a good setup. We've had, we're really looking at this. And in fact I just met with the principal Thompson about that, this very issue this week. So we are, we're having a, we had one TA for both grades which was not sustainable. But here's another issue with TAs. You know our number of TAs are going up. We're also facing a situation, we started to see it last year with our, at our secondary level. But it's now into the elementary. It is very hard and we're to, we've had a lot of people we've hired as TAs and then have left for another position in the TA and another district because our TA salaries are too low. There's something we have to talk about at budget time. And it's really becoming an issue this year. So even though we have in the budget for some TA positions, we've had, we've been challenged to fill them. We are very fortunate that some of the people we have because we have a lot of certified teachers and they do a fabulous job. But this is, this is, just like we saw the issue with sub salaries last year, we're now seeing the issue with TA salaries. And it's a, in some ways it's a, actually it's sort of a good sign for us as a state because it means that the economy is improving. And so there are many more, many more opportunities for people. And so the pool is down and people, with the pools down, then there's much more of a market for the person looking for the job. They have the upper hand in the situation. Yes, Mr. I just also want to say that my son was in a cohort that was 27 or 28 for third, fourth and fifth grade. He's gonna graduate high school this fine this year. Might up at that time. They were fine. I know it's not ideal, but it does work and they did a great job at making it work. And I know that these teachers are also gonna make it work. And I'm actually proud at the number of classrooms that we have that are not that big. I was actually really happy when I saw these numbers to say, wow, when I look at it, there were only like, I don't know, maybe five or six out of all of these classrooms that really stood out as high. And yes, they're high, but we don't have any in the 30s. I mean, I hear of some districts where there are 35, 36 kids in a classroom and we're not close to that. And so, you know, I know that they do look high and they are high for our district, but they are, they are dealable. Just want to make one quick comment. I think the benefit that your child had in a class that size, we had active parents involved. Class sizes of 28, the reality of public education sometimes acts as the parent that isn't at home. And teachers get really not able to identify and deal with issues that are not supported at home sometimes as the class size gets bigger. I think 20, I think those other fifth grade classes are phenomenal. I think that's really great. But I think 28 in a classroom, even with a full-time aid might mitigate it, but we're dealing with a half-time aid. And I understand budget restraints. We can't have everything that we want, but this is, 28 is really, really high at that age level. I just wanted to respond. I also had a child who was in a class size of 29 and 30 from third grade, fourth grade, and fifth grade. And yes, they did okay, but they didn't have the significant high-needs population that exists in Thompson. They didn't have the poor MCAS scores that we just saw this year. And to just dismiss it that the teachers work hard, I agree they work hard. We lost one of our really great fourth grade teachers the year after my daughter had the class of 30. And I'm sure that was a contributor, not the children themselves, but wouldn't you wanna go to a district where you have a class size of 20 or 25 rather than 30? And I think, and it also concerns me that we have certain silos that get created where kids go in third grade, they're in a big class, and they just continue. And that's not fair compared to the kids in Dalton who have class size of 22 at that time, or in fifth grade they have 23, or Bishop has 20 and 19. And it's just, we're talking parity here too, not just getting by, not just succeed, not just being okay. So yes, I'm not saying people should be panicking, but I do think it's something we should be looking at. It is an issue, and of course, Diane has, she has her children in Cambridge schools, in some districts the only way you're gonna get parity is to assign children to the school in town where there's an opening. So we still have a high value in Arlington for neighborhood schools, but neighborhood schools come with this risk of having unevenness. I think the buffer zones have helped a bit, actually more than a bit. I will also say buffer zones exceeded my expectation in terms of time spent on it too. That's another issue. But if it achieves the leveling a little bit more, that's really important. I don't disagree. I don't like to see classes 28. And it was, it maintains sort of a high number through the summer, but if you take that and then divide it into three classes, you're looking at class sizes that are significantly less than the other fifth grades in town. So I think what looking to this year, what I wanna do is to make sure that they have adequate support so they can do some small group. They also have a, Thompson's one of the schools that has the full-time math coach. We also have done some very good intervention work. And in fact, that might be something for, you might like to hear about it some point this year when we do sort of a math, we have Matt Coleman come in. We can't do everything, but we can talk about certain things. But there's been some wonderful interventions that have been put in our two Title I schools, particularly at Thompson in mathematics for supporting the students. So it's not as though we're ignoring it. We're really trying to put the resources that we can in there. When we change the rule in a minute, go ahead. So just specifically about Thompson, and I've urged this point earlier, a few sessions earlier, partly reason that Thompson's numbers are so high is because of new people in who have moved in. So last year's fourth grade at Thompson had classes of 24 and 25, right? So they're high-ish, but not 28, right? And just to urge that when new people move in, especially at the fifth grade level, and there's a school right nearby, Hardy that has smaller classrooms, you could gently nudge, I know you can't force them to say, you know, walk in extra five blocks and maybe you could go to a school with smaller classrooms. But Hardy's number, well, first of all, the decision on Hardy didn't come until later. Right. As the numbers creeped up there too, but yes. But there were several people who moved in after that decision was made into the fifth grade. It's very interesting how much people want to be in the district they move to. That is a- No, I understand. Yeah. I understand. Okay. Okay. Anything else? Well, yes, I was gonna talk a little bit about school safety, because this is something that I want you to be aware of that this is certainly a big focus this year at the administrative level and will be at the school level, we'll talk more about this at the next meeting as well, talking about some of the conversation we had earlier. But this is something that's been on the agenda for administrative means from the summer through now.  Back in, I think it was 2009, because we actually got the report finished in 10. We received, it was a $99,000 federal REMS grant. And when we had that grant, we looked at lots of things. First of all, we wanted to get all of our procedures, protocols, standardized, clarified, codified, and do a lot of professional development in terms of how you do crisis managing. That's about the time when we also started to begin doing lockdowns and expanding the different ways that we did evacuations. But for example, one of the things that happened in the REMS grant was we had these emergency booklets that are in every single classroom. We've actually taken an inventory this fall to see which classrooms, because we've had more classrooms since then, to make sure that they are in every classroom and that teachers go over these booklets so they understand all the different kinds. Because it's not just evacuation, there's issues here around hazardous materials bills, suspicious package, bomb threats. There's a whole, there's a lot of medical explosion, medical emergencies, shelter in place. All of these different things are in this. Administrators, the principals have a much larger crisis book. And one of the things that is in that crisis book is actually about communication in crises. And of course that was one of the issues we had leaving last year was the issue around communication with respect to that incident that's threatened. So we have been talking about that. This summer we wrote, I got a lot of input from some support from the police department spokesperson and we did some research at other districts. And compared to what we already had in place in our crisis book, we're developing a more clarified communications crisis protocols that was completed over the summer. The first draft went to the administrative team. A lot of suggestions, another draft will go back. So at some point you'll, in the next few weeks, you'll have a copy of this. It's really basically not that much different than we've had in place, but it just is much more specific about what needs to be done. So ever since we all experienced a tragedy in Connecticut at Sandy Hook, we have really doubled down on making sure the doors are locked. And even when teachers go off for recess, they come back through, they have a key lock to come back through. And so there's all the physical parts. We've put more cameras, there's in the different school in the elementary. Certainly at the high school, you'll see a big difference in terms of the kind of vigilance that goes into people coming into the high school during the school day, the procedure they have to go through to get to sign in, get a badge. And that was something that just simply did not exist in the high school a couple of years ago. And we learn, we're basically improving that all the time in terms of what we're doing. But I think one of the things that's really important and to mention is, and it actually goes back to our earlier conversation with Cindy Boubier and Colleen Ledger. And that is we can do all the physical safety but what really is important is in terms of what we do to outreach to students. And in any of these incidents where there's been shootings in school, something like 80% of the shooters had been students in that school or were currently students in that school. So that says a lot in terms of identification and creating opportunities for students to feel they belong there that there's someone that they can go to in the schools. And I think we've put a lot of effort in Arlington into doing that in terms of social workers in our schools, advisory programs, our transition programs, the diversion programs. We have lots of ways that we try to make sure that every student has an adult that they could go to. And even a survey last year that confirms that that, at least in the high school, we haven't done one of the other schools, but confirms that that is actually how the students feel. So I do want parents to understand that it's not just about making sure every door is locked but it's really in terms of how do we help those students that we think that may be needing some, that may be at risk or may be feeling isolated in a school. How do we reach out to that student? And there is a lot of communication between AYCC, Substance Abuse Council, the police department in terms of sort of holding hands and trying to support these students and not have students feel isolated in the school. And that is really where the real work has to happen. I'm not saying the other is not important, it is important, it's not in either or a situation. It is, all of these things have to be happening at the same time. So I just want you to be aware that, and the community be aware, so they're listening, that we really have this year been focusing on really showing up our protocols, making sure the people who are new to the system, who may not have gotten our initial trainings, are very aware of the protocols that go on in our different schools. And this year we're also going to, we haven't done this in a couple of years, we're gonna actually do some, we certainly have fire drills, but this year we practice every school where you go to your staging, your evacuation site. So just wanted to give you an update on that and some more to come as we go through the year. So that's it. Thank you. Moving on to the consent agenda. All items listed with an asterisk are considered to be routine and will be enacted by one motion. There will be no separate discussion of these items unless a member of the committee so request. In which event the item will be considered in its normal sequence. Approval of warrant, warrant number 15035 dated 918 2014 in the amount of $623,551.78. Approval of draft minutes, May 22nd, 2014, September 4th, 2014 and September 18th, 2014. Approval of New York City trip for Arlington High School FE students, December 5th through the 7th, 2014 with Mary Valano. Approval of Florida trip for Audison students from April 18th to April 22nd, 2015, Jay Crafts, approval of Philadelphia for an annual Penn State Model Congress Conference on March 26th through the 29th, 2015, our Hale and our Bradley. So moved. I'd like to pull all the trips out, please. I'd like to pull all the trips out. Hold 918, 14 minutes. Okay, just as at 9, 18, just that one, September 18th. Yep. And you want the three trips pulled, okay? Those that have not been removed, the motion has been made, has there been second to approve them? Okay. All those in favor? Aye. Okay, let's pick up with September 18th, 2014 minutes. Mr. Pierce? I'd just like to abstain. Okay. Would like what? Tease abstain. Okay, so move to approve minutes for September 18th, 2014. All those in favor? Aye. All those opposed? Abstentions? Aye. Thank you. One minute. Yes, sorry. It's created. You want to take each one separate? No. Okay. We did not get a copy of the September 4th. No, you didn't. I'm nodding. Okay. So we're not approving those. Okay, September 4th, 2014 minutes will not be approved because the members did not get a copy. All right, so we approve the warrant in one minutes. No, two minutes. One in one, two with one in two. Two, yeah, two, okay, all right. As soon as Karen tells me we were ready to go, we'll... Okay. Okay. Dr. Campy? I don't have a problem with these trips specifically. What I wanted to know is who is vetting the trips from the administration? That they're considered reasonably safe for our students and besides the teachers who are proposing them? Well, all of the trip come to my office. But I think one of the new ones we have this year is the one that's going to be the Florida Adventure. So not only do I see it, but the principal of the school sees it as well. Okay, so if it comes to us, it's been seen by at least the principal of the school and you, okay, that's, I just wanted to know that it was... It doesn't just go to Karen. Right, right, we don't have, you know, it never says it's not like stamped or approved. Right, right, right, right. And I just realized I wanted to be sure. Okay, that's all. I entertain a motion to approve the three trips as stated before. So moved. Second. Third. All those in favor? Aye. All those opposed? Unanimous. Committee reports. Okay, I'm just waiting for the nod to go forward. We're going into committee reports. Is that okay with you? Okay. Okay, policy procedure, Mr. Pierce. Thank you, Mr. Chair. We will be meeting as a subcommittee on October 28th. It's a Tuesday at 5.30 to discuss file E, specifically EBC with emergency plans, to discuss school committee meetings with regard to electronic submissions of documents, to discuss entrance age, J-E-B. Those are the three things I think we're going to focus on that night. Okay. There could be some modifications between now and then. Are you aware that Adam is working on a policy for the agenda and stuff? Good. I'll be happy to talk to him. Yep, thanks. Thank you. Ms. Starks. Budget met on September 30th. And you all have, as one of your attachments, the yearly budget calendar. I'm just going to walk you through it tonight. We will approve it next meeting. And the budget calendar, kind of the way I laid it out, was starting in September, for each meeting, what I tried to do was show you in bold things that are the job of the school committee. And I tried to left align those. And then I right aligned things that come to us. And we see in our meetings, but don't necessarily require any, they're mostly informational for us. So you can see that the first meeting in October today, we are going to introduce the first draft of the budget calendar, that's what we're going through right now. And next week, hopefully we will approve it. So if anybody has any changes to this while we're going, just let me know. Then we will get final enrollment numbers in October. Then in November, our two meetings, the first meeting, we should have projections for the town on our enrollment impact, so that we can talk to them about funding numbers. And then at the second meeting, we should start, we'll start to hear from the principals. So on November 20th, we will hear from elementary and special education about their needs and priorities for next year. And then we get the other half on December, our first meeting in December, which will be December 4th. I am also working on, in November, setting up a meeting. We did this last year with FINCOM for the end of year report for last year and then kind of giving them a first blush at k