Good evening. I'm calling to order the regular meeting of the Arlington School Committee on Thursday December 15th, 2022. I'm Liz Eckstin, the chair. Permit me to confirm that all members and persons anticipated on the agenda are present and can hear me. Dr. Allison Ampey. Tonight's meeting of the Arlington School Committee is being conducted in a hybrid model. Before we begin, permit me to offer a few notes. First, this meeting is being conducted via Zoom, is being recorded and is also being simultaneously broadcast on ACMI. Persons wishing to join the meeting by Zoom may find information on how to do so on the town's website. Persons participating by Zoom are reminded that they may be visible to others and that if you wish to participate, you are asked to provide your full name in the interests of developing a record of the meeting. All participants are advised that people may be listening who do not provide comment and those persons are not required to identify themselves. Both Zoom participants and persons watching on ACMI can follow the posted agenda materials also found on the town's website using the Novus Agenda platform. And finally, each vote tonight will be taken by roll call. Our first agenda item this evening is the Performing Arts program is going to give us a brief musical performance. Welcome and thank you very much for coming. Thank you very much. On our agenda is public comment. Before I call our first speaker, I have a few ground rules. For members of the public who wish to address the committee, there will be 20 minutes of public comment. Depending on the number of people who sign up, time allotments may be reduced but will not exceed three minutes each. I will let the speakers know when they have 30 seconds left. If the number of people who sign up exceeds what can be done in 20 minutes, the number of speakers may be capped and will be invited to speak based on the time stamp of their email to Ms. Diggins. The school committee respectfully requests participants of the public to utilize their camera if possible while speaking and to adhere to the public comment policy BEDH that requires participants to provide their name and address. Speakers may offer such objective criticisms of the school operations and programs as concern them. But in public session, the committee will not hear personal complaints about school personnel nor against any member of the school community, except for the school committee or the superintendent in their capacity as the operational leader of Arlington Public Schools. The public is reminded that the school committee does not hold jurisdiction over the performance of school personnel other than the superintendent. Additionally, the committee will not hear anything that might identify and or infringe upon a student's privacy by name or incident. If you would like to sign up to speak, please email Ed Diggins at Arlington.k12.ma.us by 3 p.m. on the date of the meeting. We have one person signed up for public comment. Michael Crosby is on Zoom, I believe. Mr. Crosby, you have 3 minutes. Go ahead. All right. Well, first of all, thank you for having me. I'm kind of new to this. Can we make hold? Can you wait just a second? We need to make the volume louder. I can adjust it on my end. Is that better? Hold on one second. Try again. Just say hello. Yes. Yeah, that's better. Thank you. Okay, go ahead. Okay. My reason for wanting to join this is because I've been undergoing some difficult back and forth with the superintendent's office recently underwent a divorce. I have three children that attend the Arlington Public Schools, two of which have been unschooled, which is a term that is new to the school committee apparently. It is not home school. It is where the parent provides a fabricated agenda for the student's education. That isn't actually taking place. And they don't actually attend the school. They don't attend the hours. But prior to that, my son, which I will not state his name, but you know, for privacy. Last year, he had missed over 70 days of school, 70 absences. And his grade point average, I don't know, wasn't wasn't the worst, but it wasn't the best. You know, you know, according to his transcript, student did not attend a single class in Q4. Student attendance was very limited in Q4. But yet they allowed him to be promoted to the next grade, which was concerning to me and in the middle of going through a divorce where there's already high tensions. And my concern is for my children's well being and he had aspirations of going to Minuteman Tech. Because you know, he's interested in automotive and welding and such. But right now, he's involved in a program that's known as Pathfinder Learning Centers, which is not accredited, that not licensed by the Arlington Small Business Association and not accredited by anybody. They're just a woman who had an idea during COVID. She started as a cook, Julia cooks. And she operates out of the church on the corner of Mass Ave. And what is it? Linwood, the one that goes down to the spypond. They have four days a week. I have, I have, and I've been speaking to Cindy Sheridan-Carran quite frequently about this. Because by the Arlington by-law- Mr. Crosby, you have, you have 30 seconds left. Okay, by the Arlington by-law is a state that if you have probable cause that the educational program that was submitted as a homeschooling program did not meet the criteria for the child's betterment, my son is also considered to have special needs and he's in the IEP program, which they removed him from an IEP. Mr. Crosby, your, your three minutes are finished and you're starting to push the limits of identifying people. I mean, I have the time around, but that wasn't 30 seconds, but I'm just curious how this can happen. And this isn't going to stop here. Because when people realize that they could just remove their children from school, and that the school committee and, and Dr. Roderick McNeil is not going to reply to your emails. Mr. Crosby, you cannot name people other than the superintendent and the school committee and your I'm sorry, I apologize. I apologize. I thought he was the assistant superintendent. But I'm just looking for an answer as to how this could happen. And I don't get it. I don't get the answer. Nobody is willing to give the answer. This, this education is not happening. As far as, you know, Obama's plan with nobody left behind, no student left behind and then the subsequent renaming of it. My son is 14. Mr. Crosby, I'm going to ask you to stop now. Your time is up and you are providing more identifying information about your family. Thank you for your comments. The committee has heard you find information about my family that he wanted to go to Minuteman. His age, his current school. His current school didn't go to school. Mr. Crosby, your time is finished. Thank you. So what now? We move on to our next agenda item. So you don't comment on anything I said that just as if it happened. The next item on our agenda is student representatives to the school committee. You can read it on channel five. But they are not here. They must be at sports or performances or playing the pilot. So our next item on the agenda is the school committee appointment to the Arlington Human Rights Commission. Lori Key is here. If you don't mind stepping up to the table and you'll want to make sure you're talking into that microphone, please. Lori Key has come to the school committee on the recommendation of the Community Relations Subcommittee to be appointed to the Arlington Human Rights Commission. Welcome. Thank you for coming. If you can just share a few words about who you are and why you're interested in being on the Arlington Human Rights Commission. Yes. So I'm Lori Key and I'm applying for the commissioner position and I believe I can contribute to the commission due to my passion for equity in human rights, which has been the foundation of my work as a social worker for over 20 years. I've worked in Arlington for much of my career, starting as a residential counselor at Jermaine Lawrence before and through graduate school and as a social work intern at the Dallin School. After working as an intensive home-based family therapist in Boston and as a social worker in the Boston and Randolph Public Schools, I returned to work in Arlington at Arlington High through the Brighton Alston Mental Health Clinic. I was then hired at Otterson in 2008 where I worked up until a year ago with my last three plus years as lead counselor. Wanting to do more work directly in the area of equity in human rights, I've been consistently attending the Arlington Diversity Task Group and the Arlington Human Rights Commission meetings for the past eight months. I joined the Arlington Human Rights Commission events and outreach working group. I'm currently helping a plan and event we hope to hold here in March at Arlington High for community members to examine the impact of words, actions and microaggressions and to discuss how we can work together to make Arlington an even more supportive community for all. I'd now like to take on an even more active role with the Human Rights Commission as a commissioner. Part of the role involves addressing human rights complaints made to the commission. And in my role as school counselor in Arlington for many years, I'm knowledgeable about the school department's policies and procedures with these types of issues. And when appropriate, when appropriate, I frequently run mediations between students, between students and staff to help address these issues. So I hope to bring these skills along with my passion for equity and human rights to the commission. So thank you for your consideration. Thank you. Mr. Heiner. I move that Laura Key be appointed to the Arlington Human Rights Commission as representative of the Arlington School Committee. Second. Thank we have a motion by Mr. Heiner seconded by Mr. Thielman. Any discussion? All right, roll call vote. Mr. Heiner. Yes, Mr. Cardin. Yes, Ms. Morgan. Yes, Mr. Schlickman. Yes, Mr. Thielman. Yes, Dr. Allison Ampe. Yes. And I vote yes. That's unanimous. Congratulations. And thank you very much. Thank you for serving. Right. Next, we have our performing arts report. This way and her. So you'll just want to make sure if you're the person speaking that you're speaking into the microphone, whoever's Yep, you well move chairs up to the move chairs. Yeah, I was feel very lonely. Come on. We have a whole team here. Good evening. Thank you for having me here. The performing arts department service Arlington public students K to 12 with education on general music, instrumental music, choral music, music technology and theater. Today, our agenda will first you have heard our opening music. And I'm very proud to bring this group of young musicians with me. We have violin, shillu, astra, come on in grid. And I play the viola, which is larger than violin. And then we have Lorenzo, Hammer, Montello, and Mr. Michael Simon on the base. And the piece is really meaningful to me because I actually we I let my string team did a PD presentation on Florence Price's piece on November 8. And I follow the mission should continue to promote musician musician composers, modernize musician composers. So we'll try our best to find more of her music. Our next agenda is going to be I'm gonna talk about our mission statement a little bit. So our mission statement focuses on educating all students in music and theater arts, and making a commitment to provide a safe, encouraging and engaging learning environment for all students. After Arlington public schools, establish the new vision statement, we continue to further align our mission with the APS vision statement by achieving a joyful learning environment, making sure students have a sense of belonging in our programs, and empowering all our students to contribute their artistic vision to the local and global communities. Today, I'm going to share with you the highlights of the programs, the wings. So first of all, I'd like to thank you all school committee members and administrators for your unprecedented work and support to eliminate the fees for students to participate in the in school instrumental classes. This incredible measure encouraged and allowed many more students to join this program. So let's take a look at the instrumental enrollment that on this slide, you can see a chart of grade four to 12 band program, which you can also see how many instruments we are offering in school will win instruments, brass instruments, percussion instruments. So the elementary band program went from 170 students to 276 students this year. And total of the band program students are 433 found all found grade four to 12. Next slide. So on this slide, you can see the enrollment for grade three to 12 string students. So last year elementary stream program had a 315 students. And this year we got 478 students enrolled in the stream program. Overall, we actually have 754 elementary band and orchestra students compared to 485 students last year. So after adding all the numbers, you can we I am very proud to offer you a number. It's all about data, right? We have 1112 instrumental students playing our band and orchestra program. And that's found grade three to 12. So with the girls, oh, actually, I want to offer your phone fact, because I have a core directors here. We also have almost 600 students singing the course. And I'll focus on that more in my next presentation. With the girls in the elementary instrumental program, we needed to have two teams of instructors to teach lessons. The lessons are taught homogeniously, such as brass instruments together, moving class and percussion class and string class. And the lessons are also taught during teachers classroom teachers come in meeting time, which means the students are not missing core subject instruction. So here you can see the chart of our wonderful instrumental teachers. Thank you. We all know the home practice and family engagement plays a very important role in contributing to the success of learning. Therefore, some high school students. And I started a practice buddy program this year. The students who performed with me with me today are all practice buddies. And I would like to invite our student leader, she the one to introduce me. So I was over in COVID thinking about how what can I do for my community? And the idea for this program started in the beginning of COVID. Many of students have helped with younger students previously with setting up playing with the elementary school orchestras and cleaning up in preparation for our annual all town concerts. Like our amazing string staff, I wanted a way to give back to my community that heavily influenced my love for playing violin. So I brought the idea of practice buddies up to our now director of performing arts, Miss Way. Miss Way was very supportive of this idea and thought it was a good way for students to personalize and learning for each individual student. So the two of us got to working and organizing over the summer. With the help of our amazing practice buddies, we made this idea possible with the program first running on November 14, 2022. Since the high school practice buddies are right now rehearsing for our up and coming winter concert, we have some eighth grader practice buddies here. You can learn more about each student and what they think about practice buddies on our website. Since I have a rehearsal that I should probably be in, I am going to hand the mic over to Azra, a representative of the eighth grader practice buddies. So hello, my name is Astro. Thank you very much. My name is Astro. I came to Arlington from Iran when I was in the fifth grade. And I always wanted to play the violin and was so glad to join the APS string program. A few eighth graders, including myself, really admired the practice buddies idea and asked to be part of this program. We hope to continue and run this program when we come to the high school next year. This program benefits both us and the young students. It helps us, the tutors, to learn how to teach and how to connect with different students and different levels of playing. The students learn more about their instruments and we also help them review and go over what they learned from their string classes and help parents to understand how to assist their children to practice at home. This program also helps new talent to be discovered and it's generally a great way for students to learn and to ask any questions they might have. And yeah, it's really great. People also have been very supportive of this and as of now we have 18 tutors and 106 elementary school students participating in the program. One more effort we're doing to further enhance our family engagement is we will be distributing progress report for all instrumental students. So family will understand students learning with detailed report card and I'm inviting our new grade three to eight orchestra director, Mr. Simon here to talk briefly about good evening. I'll be really quick. So as in with many facets of our students' education, one of the most important goals for the elementary string program is to make sure that we're not only providing parents with consistent and clear communication, but also educating our parents, our young musicians parents with the sense of promoting their growth and success outside of our classes in addition to in our classes of course. So many of the students similar to my own growing up as a musician come from homes that have parents that are non-musicians or parents or family members who have never played an instrument before so many of them truly just don't understand exactly what they're doing in school. So the progress reports are really have those two things in mind so educating our parents and also providing you know a clear and consistent message to them about what we're doing in our classes. So last year we pilot this program with just third graders. So the string team worked many hours to develop these progress reports that are consistent with what our students are regularly getting from their core classes. We worked directly with Dr. McNeil's office to make sure that our language was clear, easy to follow, I didn't have too much musical jargon within it so that our parents can understand. So we piloted it, we took a survey after and we got an overwhelming positive response from our families and from our students and so this year our mission as Ms. Jingwei mentioned we have nearly 800 students and so our goal is to provide all of those students with a progress report to a mid-year and an end of year that will have an accompanying rubric that will outline everything within that progress report with the hope to not only keep those students with us for many years to come but also to again help promote that communication with our parents. All right everybody starts as a beginner so I do I made a video for three minutes I don't know if we every have time for that to have to give you a virtual tour to our beginner elementary classrooms. You may want to hit play again. It's the audio. Yeah, I can't turn audio on my computer. Right, but I can't turn the audio on my computer because it'll feedback. Visual is still awesome. I can see it. Seriously, so our teachers actually use very interesting engaging songs for them to learn open streams so we act for example the first part of the session and song we sing and to the dirt dirt dirt. This is D all the way to ground ground ground all the way to China China. So we make up funny songs for them to remember the name of the open streams and then rest of the video when you have a chance I really encourage you to watch it because it's really fun to watch the trumpet players try to honk out the sound I often say when I enter the classroom okay happy new year. That's what it sounds like but without this groundwork it would not be able we not be able to have such wonderful musicians I brought today. Okay so next part this program highlights I want to focus is some music technology. We're in the digital age and music technology has become the new means of making music and communication on music. Multi-tools and function on music technology have provided our world with many possibilities. This past years of COVID certainly pushed the music technology into our music classroom starting at elementary level so I have a video made by our beloved Thompson school music teacher here so I'm not sure if the sound will work. So in this video he introduced how the students use Chrome Music Lab. They have all kinds of different sound files rhythm files and they can put together a composed music by themselves. Here Darryl. You're not going to be here. Yeah well you won't be here. You can only watch. Okay sorry. Yeah so you can see so this I'm going to explain so every student at elementary school has this Chromebook on their Chromebook they have all the apps and through clever and they can actually use for example this is that's like the music app they can use like what I described earlier the rhythm, the tune and the beats and they can do different trap. Here Darryl is talking about kids are learning different sound waves. This is such a tight right into our fix early fixes concept and then here the Chrome Music Lab those are tunes and they can pile those beautiful colorful dots together to make their own music and this is their Quaver Music which is a new very big part of our music education now so we because during COVID we incorporate this Quaver Education Music technology into our classrooms so students can continue to learn their the be an art and artful ideas and also concept of music and this is another another in credit box. Many teenagers love this too. You'll have this on there. Okay so we'll just we'll move forward so the middle school level we use something called Soundtrap so today I have Mr. Smith from Audison to talk about Soundtrap. Hi I'm Nathaniel Smith I teach the Audison. We use Soundtrap a lot it is a software where we get to record the kids get to record the things we work on in class so whenever we learn like different songs we have them record it and then they can listen back to it and modify and work on it whether it be using the auto tune function or adding in tracks like on their 12 we have also different projects we do so like our 12 bar blues project we have the kids add in like tracks they can add in like beats to it they can move around voices so like say one kid made a track where they were like I want to move the lyric over here they could like slide their lyric to the other side and move the other kid's lyric to the front of it we also in the eighth grade we do a scene project where the kids create their own song so then they get to add use the tracks from the from Soundtrap and create like different songs like create things to add to their song they use the 12 bar blues the ukulele all the instruments we use get put onto Soundtrap it also makes it easier for grading and able to understand where their progress is on the instruments because as a group you know everyone's playing together but it's nice and easier and less stressful for the kids to like like oh you know right here you could just play this like this and they're like oh okay and they just go back and record yeah now high school level we have a new performing art wing we have a really nice music tech lab which offers students more opportunities to discover the world of music technology Mr. Dita Masal here is going to introduce some of the music technology programs we have at high school thank you so i do want to thank everybody for the beautiful facility that we have now it is loaded with potential into the next century for i think a level of learning in music and music production that is relatively unheard of in the area if we are able to maximize it and i think we can together the program to back up very quickly started in 2008 with some grant money some seed money that allowed us to buy some work stations in the old building and we quickly started making original music it is a student-centered class so we we will create our own music for the concert rather than me presenting them with music and us learning it in order to be able to do this as miss way had clearly demonstrated you know we have to have a similar kind of k through 12 version of music technology that feeds into a student's ability to imagine and realize music of their own and that involves and it is hand in hand with our with our upgrade ensemble programs but this affords access to music to people who would otherwise not have it who are not going to be a member of an orchestra or looking to play an instrument or perhaps sing but rather create produce record and all of these aspects are really how we experience music anytime that we are listening to a orchestra or our favorite artists those things are recorded in the studio and as you know their wonderful programs are in the boston area that are open to these students when they go onward into college and to prepare them for it better here i think we have a chance to really get a leg up on other students here in allington compared to any place else in the state perhaps most places in the country so we have a facility that is interconnected now all of our rehearsal spaces and all of our practice rooms can all be recorded from the studio so virtually speaking the music studio now expands to the entire wing that we have built which is a beautiful idea and in the real world that's how it would be done with folks recording in different places this is a level of learning that would not have been possible in the old building and it was very wise of us to take that step it was relatively not an expensive thing to do it's just a parallel network is really what we've done and some connectors and so because it's virtual we never have to buy more cables for it we never have to do any of that kind of stuff but what we do need to do is raise it up to the level where the students can maximize it so our design or a plan over the next year before we open up the facility to the public perhaps would be to have student led teams and teams of our instructors also helping with this facility not just me so that we have an adult presence and upperclassmen showing underclassmen how the whole idea of production works in a studio and in a live performance our programs that we're currently using a band in a box is a composition program generates backing tracks based on chords that students come up with they can mix and match things pull things out and then analyze it so it's a generative tool it allows us to fill in the gaps between our broad stroke ideas and generate something that is a really amazing professional piece of music our reaper license that you guys have continued to support for us we only need that usually every five years is a professional level DAW or digital audio workstation and this connects to sound trap in the middle school and elementary school levels which is kind of an introductory version of that so it's because of COVID we now have kind of a feeder program up to this production level students doing multi-track layer cakes of sound and balancing them and learning to listen and make those adjustments be critical listeners and music score a traditional composition tool notation generated for parts for our students who are not orchestra players to hand to orchestra players to perform and we do one of those concerts every year one in March and we do the same thing with the choral groups so that the music technology students are not unaware of choral repertoire or band repertoire or the great history of orchestral repertoire that we have again probably not going to be able to hear this I do encourage you to check this out and I can share it out to everybody's watch at their own time but I didn't want to point out the wonderful students that created this currently a sophomore Mazan Abukala found his voice in our music intro to music technology and particularly in the film scoring units and now he's one of the film scoring students which is one of our semesterized courses that we take so our curriculum starts with music technology and then it goes on for the rest of the four years where they can choose one or two compatible semesterized courses like film scoring and songwriting or mixing and mastering and sound design and then portfolio one and two for their senior year where they can prepare for entering into a college or perhaps the workforce going in to get a job in a studio or to get into a program like at Berkeley where we have the music engineering program for example or at UMass Lowell or any of the fantastic schools that we have in New England for that so we all know you have about three more minutes left okay excellent yeah we will do it in three minutes and so we will know that without the real foundation work students will not be able to achieve a higher level of performances and so the the tuneful idea the beatful or the artful work really starts with our young student the youngest student kindergarten so I'm going to invite Ms. Murray to just talk quickly give us a quick overview on what we we have in K-5 curriculum thank you hi I'm Megan I teach music at the bracket and I really love my job it's just fantastic so as Ms. Wei said we start with kindergarten teaching tuneful beatful artful what does that mean you say great question have you been in a restaurant and heard people attempting to sing happy birthday right so when you have a tuneful voice you are able to sing happy birthday in a way that doesn't make the people around you cry and when you're able to be beatful it means you can dance at a wedding whether it's your own wedding or your children's wedding or your green at Matilda and when you are artful you are able to participate and be in music in a way that is emotional and enjoyable and artistic and we start that curriculum in kindergarten over the course of our six years with elementary students we do an awful lot starting in the second and third grade we're introducing more traditional western classical music notation in the third grade we start recorders as a preparatory program for the woodwind breast and percussion program that will eventually lead them to band starting in the fifth grade we're now offering a ukulele program two things that I want to highlight for you specifically is that this is the first year that we have building-based elementary school choruses which are open to fourth and fifth graders choirs my team sport so this is it's just something that is bringing me so much joy and being able to sing and make music in community every week in an intentional and opt in way is such a beautiful opportunity for our students and the other thing that I wanted to highlight for you is a new curriculum that we have piloted piloted called musician of the month which is a curriculum that strives to be actively anti-racist in which our students are exposed to musicians who reflect their own identities and so over the course of a school year we select one musician every month and we seek diversity in a variety of categories including gender identity age cultural background whether or not they're alive which I guess is also age musical genre and where they're physically from in the world so we're really proud of what we're doing and we are so grateful to be able to provide this foundational experience for our students thank you my closing I would like to share a call from Leonard Bernstein music and named unnameable and communicate the unknowable so doing one of the practice body session one of the parents came up to me and said every time I come here I hear something amazing from the performing our wing and it really makes me very happy and personally I really want to say I have countless moments of joy by listening to our young musicians so it takes time it practice after practice to build our skills and technique for performances in addition it takes a lot of courage and confidence to perform in front of the audience the performing art program department strives to provide students with skills and empower them to share their achievement with their communities so we are doing that our students have been performing for our community actually we just did a remembers rememberance climate change future and was a really successful event our artist orchestra performed that and our intern first slide handling candlelight and this upcoming week students will be performing a housing authority dinner and in January performing our teams and students will be performing at the Martin Luther King celebration I do want to highlight one upcoming APS community event is our our first ever theater for the young audience program is going to be presented so our high school theater director Michael Byrne was awarded an EF grant to provide the opportunity for elementary students come to the new building new auditorium to watch the students musical Strega Nona in the spring so I hope you enjoy our presentation today I was going to leave you with a really nice recording that you didn't get to hear because you were here on December 1st I went to the first slide recorded the student performing so at your time please enjoy their performance thank you thank you questions or comments from the committee Mr. Carden so just just one comment so last year when we approved the elimination of the instrumental music fees I don't think we thought about we didn't hear about the possibility or the likelihood we should have thought about it that demand would go way through the roof so I we've seen the budget request for next year and we'll have to sort of sort through that but it sort of was an unexpected cost so that's just more of a comment my question is so at at Audison in the seventh grade for math we're looking at whether that's really the right age to separate students into advanced math and regular math I wonder if through a similar equity lens you've thought about looking at whether the Audison is the right place to start separating students into audition-based band and chorus and not audition-based band and chorus so we currently already have that so the seventh grade eighth grade band orchestra practice together but we do have efforts after school ensemble that's by audition only so there's a jazz band seventh eighth grade jazz band by audition and seventh eighth grade chamber orchestra by audition only yeah but we I one of our departments of policy is all students in honors groups need to be part of the large group because they bring up it's part of the leadership concept for them to be part of big community thanks may I respond to something you said sure just in terms of the budget request what a great problem to have I'm so proud to be part of a paid a district that's no longer pay to play and thank you for your support anybody else Dr. Allison Ampe thank you very much for the presentation I look forward to hearing the videos but wonder if you could send out the links because at least on my PDF the links didn't work so if we can just have an email with all the the links so that we could see the actual videos and hear them too thank you we'll do we'll do Mr. Schlickman thank you for your presentation I mean the thing that we've noticed all out before we built the new high school we had some of the best forming arts in the worst facility and look so forward to seeing what kind of really wonderful things you can do now that we've been able to find you a space that is worthy and the acoustics are wonderful in the new auditorium yeah yeah I want to add you know our joyful moments are now figuring out how to use acoustic piano the other day teachers and I we figured it out and turned on the light what a moment was it a matter of where you put the piano in on the stage we will figure it out yeah it's terrific and I think I'm really heartened by the increased participation in the program it shows that we had students who with their musical life unfulfilled because we had that barrier and I think it's just joyous for us to be able to to just open up the program and thank you for all the performances while I was here was the last Saturday a Saturday before for the environmental program and that little niche in there right at the entrance to the auditorium really makes some nice acoustics we could do great things in that little lobby too yes we found a good lobby music place thank you so much you're very welcome thank you thank you thank you awesome that's Morgan this was great I have two just two quick things the first one actually I learned a lot from this presentation one of which I'm going to take home because I've now learned why when my son told Ms. Demetrio that he was quitting oboe this year and focusing on saxophone and she said no sit down I understand why because you need people to play the oboe so we'll have a conversation about that tomorrow so I think so one thing on the elementary music piece for those of us and and Mr. D. Tomaso can attest to this because he teaches my son as parents who are helping our kids learn new instruments we need so much help right and so anything that you can because we want these all of these kids who have started we want them to persist right and we know there's going to be some attrition but I know I played the violin and my sons have all taken up these breath instruments that I don't know how to use or play and it's like kind of stressful and and I've sent Mr. I like send them screenshots and I'm like this is what it looks like how do I fix this you know so I think anything that you can do to help us as parents especially in grades three four and five to get us connected to the right person who can tell us like like my my fourth grader came home the other day and said can Santa bring me a snake for my trombone and I was like I have no idea what you're talking about right so like a Google like it all like worked out but like so we just we need we just need help because we want these kids to continue and it's it can be stressful when you're looking at this instrument and you don't know what to do that the other piece that I hope and it was great to hear about what you're doing at the oddison I hope that as a department you will continue to advocate strongly for choice for kids because we want them there are times like my kids because they do band they can't they don't take music at oddison right and we want to continue and it it becomes a problem at the high school too right you've got to really commit to it if you want to do it and just and I know that there are lots of ways that you've been able to be flexible and and as a department you're so strong so as you continue to just let give kids as many opportunities as they can to pick music like even if it's for a semester even if it's you know if there's some way that they can trade out one thing and and get into that music class at the oddison I I think it's just it's so important so thank you so much thank you thank you I just want to sort of follow up on Ms. Morgan's comments so my son has been participating in the practice buddies program and it has been a tremendous support to him and so perhaps moving forward it can be added some band instruments as well that's my plan that would be yes we'll be coming help soon yeah and I and piggybacking on that piece of it it has been such a nice opportunity for elementary school families to see this beautiful building and the performing arts wing and the practice rooms and all the opportunities that the high school has to offer so thank you very much for organizing that I know it's a lot for you and you're you're high school peer but yeah it's made a tremendous difference so thank you so much thank you all very much yes Dr. Hoeman one last thing the heart soul and time that Ms. Wei and her team puts into their work is evident in what we saw this evening in what you've shared about your programming today and I just want to say thank you we invested in many ways in the performing arts last year when we made this role full-time and your leadership has been very noticed very impactful very appreciated very nice job thank you thank you very much thank you I just add one thing Ms. Wei you know what my wife does for a living yeah pianist and you know what she does on Wednesdays and Sundays right please lead your staff through the break room we will do oh yes thank you thank you so much thank you everybody thank you thank you hey hi bye thank you nice job great all right next we have the Stratton School improvement plan Dr. Hannah Dr. O'Brien anybody else you have with you where are you guys as instruments what are you gonna perform for us we did see where we were on the agenda we're a tough act to follow quickly brainstorming something we could do with a slide deck but I will say that that the partnership with Ms. Wei as a elementary building leader is fantastic she's so thoughtful about her teachers coming in their itinerant teachers all around the district and it's been great working with her Michael Hannah principals Stratton School I want to reintroduce Dr. O'Brien our assistant principal we're just gonna split up our presentation in a moment but before we get started I just wanted to thank the people who are with me every single day at Stratton School the faculty and staff are I'm sorry Ms. Donato the best in the world and I just wanted to thank them for being a part of our growth this is my 10th year leading the school we've gone through leadership transition building project COVID crisis and they're just a remarkable group of people and I want to thank them all here tonight for working with me you see our agenda kind of breaks down into successes and challenges and then our priorities and initiatives so I'm just going to let Dr. O'Brien take that first part and I'll jump in on the second absolutely so I think everyone here is aware of the APS vision so I won't read that to you and our Stratton mission follows but on the next slide you will see our successes that we've had so far this year being new to not only Stratton but the Arlington community I have already experienced so many different initiatives that have led to student learning further student achievement we've been holding weekly grade level PMD meetings and those have been going really well for us during this time our grade level teams have been reviewing data with our coaches our coaches have been modeling lessons for them to reflect on as teams we've been monitoring and discussing student concerns ongoing challenges classroom teachers might be having that they want to bounce ideas off of each other and most recently some of our grade level teams have even created learning kits to share and use during their small group times we've also been deepening our culture of coaching and professional learning through our learning walks and our MCAS scores are a reflection of the work that we're doing so last year our fifth grade students actually scored the highest out of all the elementary schools in math and ELA sorry again and along the same lines we've seen an increase in early reading and writing achievement so in addition to all the learning and the growing that students are doing we are absolutely thrilled to have our new playground done students are so excited and it's great to see them out there we're really grateful to have that at our school and have that completed last year in the last full staff administration of the panorama survey we saw scores above the district average for learning model staff relationships and well-being we have also had a great time creating a partnership and working with Jean Thompson Grove if you don't know her she is a fantastic person to consult with she has a lot of great ideas and she's been a really knowledgeable and collaborative partner in designing meaningful professional learning opportunities with us that are really increasing our sense of belonging among our staff so the work that we've been doing on the next slide you'll see some of our challenges with Jean brings me to our first challenge as a school so based on that same panorama survey an area of relative weakness for us is our cultural awareness in action so in response to this and in addition to the consulting that we've been doing with Jean we're anchoring our faculty meetings and leadership meetings around this to cultivate a stronger sense of belonging not only just for our faculty and staff but our entire strutting community another challenge that we've had this year is the elimination of our point for reading specialists and this has really accelerated our urgency to address our more mid-level struggling readers and their need for targeted reading targeted reading intervention in their general education classroom so these challenges have led us to our goals that you're going to hear about today and I'll let Dr. Hannah speak to those but I did just want to say it's been really clear to me in the short time that I've spent here at Stratton and the Arlington community that we have a really strong foundation of our strengths to really go forward with and build on so you'll see a connection to the the district vision and strategic initiatives in all three of the Stratton goals for next year as a sort of deliverable or as an output of our focus on cultural awareness and action we intend to score higher on the favorable responses on the panorama survey in our spring 23 administration the instructional leadership team initiative that Dr. Homa and Dr. McNeil have been leading is fundamental to our ability to do this we have very deliberately teased apart the instructional leadership team from an operations leadership team they meet separately they're separate members and the former is focused very tightly on this kind of work so I think the superintendents for their support of that structure our work will be really twofold there is of course a great opportunity to work with our Stratton Dig group and the chair of that group and I are working closely together to develop grade level representatives parent representatives to connect with faculty around curriculum the scope and sequence and where there'd be some good spots to land for this work and to connect with the families who are in that grade level to be a part of those learning learning times you see some other ways that we feel we will be able to to bring all stakeholders to that result in the panorama survey later in the spring that will include and I'm going to talk to Doc McNeil about this see if we can launch an ideas course that might be just just for participants or members of the Stratton faculty and staff obviously we could open that for more folks too but a lot of people who had gone through that who are on the instructional leadership team point to it as a way to really accelerate their capacity around these issues and you'll see later there's a an ask for accelerating the funding of a 1.0 FTE library media specialist to support this work and then finally just a communication device of a monthly newsletter our second goal is connected closely because our work on growing reading achievement will be connected to the choosing and the implementation of a new tier one literacy program so we'll be working with the instructional leadership team on that I think I just want to highlight what was mentioned by Dr. O'Brien we lost that point for reading specialist simply because we no longer have the title one designation and so those resources were of title one funding were elsewhere now in the district but what that accelerated was our ability to do as Dr. O'Brien said the targeted reading instruction for our students who may be struggling but not needing a reading specialist getting that instruction going in the classroom so it's a little bit of a happy accident and so I just wanted to emphasize that that that has been a big part of our work during those PMD meetings and finally excuse me a third goal the particular questions around challenging feelings and cultural awareness and action for students we want to focus on and we're doing that by focusing on school language both the tech school talk by Pollock and Power of our Words by Paula Denton which is an anchoring book for a responsive classroom working on having students feel an even stronger sense of belonging by focusing on our teacher language again there were a couple of conversations we've had on the Stratton side with Dr. Homan and her cabinet about funding priorities and where Stratton would emphasize our asks and it would be talking about doing an ideas course where a lot of the Stratton faculty could participate continuing our consultation with Jean Thompson Grove which I can get into a little bit more if you'd like and finally to increase our full-time library and media specialists to 1.0 and with that we're happy to hear questions thank you questions or comments from the committee Mr. Schlickman okay I've said this before and I'm going to say it again a good school improvement plan presents a need statement with data in an outcome statement with data which is specific the action plan which you're full of is the bridge or the connection from the need statement to the outcome statement so next year when you come back to us I want to see both of those fully developed that's what I'm looking for that that's really the critical part in my mind now looking at your data you've done extraordinarily well in a lot of places the only place where I see a weakness as an outsider because I don't have the ability to look at the student data and aggregate it out the way I would if I was doing this for a living in my own district but looking at your data it's strong all over the place except you had a drop in your gross scores for ELA for high needs and students with disability that's that's the big picture that I'm seeing here which really should be the point that's generating your need statement something happened there could be a cohort effect could be something else that's the story behind the academic portion of your plan that I'd expect to see now the one thing that troubles me in the statement is that the MCAS runs on a scale from 440 to 560 with 500 being the benchmark for proficiency your literacy scores were 508 you're telling me in your plan on under strategic initiative 2 the spring assessment scores show a 10 percent increase in reading achievement over scores that would leave you with the average score of 558.8 which is not achievable your outcomes your measurable outcomes things that we're going to hold you accountable for in your plan need to be addressed more clearly so what is your vision for what you want your MCAS scores to look like this spring that's my question well clearly I'll have to revisit the statement of goals you can understand that that was a rather sweeping global statement about achievement increases that included things like double scores and but I'm happy to talk to Dr. Holman with what she'd held me accountable for as far as the drafting of this plan but this is a plan for us you understand under state law school improvement plans go through the school community that's why we're all here okay I will revisit that and redraft that thank you anybody else Ms. Morgan thank you for this I had so I had a general question and this may just be there's nothing in here that specifically speaks to SLCA which is a really you know a very high needs population and I I guess I'm curious if that was intentional if it was if if we're going to hear about that sort of separate like how I guess I it's hard for me to feel like some of the students who so desperately need access to initiative 1.2 right they need to feel that they belong in their school community the school community values and supports them it's hard for me to feel like they're that some of those students are gonna benefit from the same action steps that like a sort of a general education population would be and so I guess I'm curious in the conversations and I'm sure there were many that went into developing this if there was any discussion like was it intentional that that sort of programming isn't called out in this document well I guess in some ways I could imagine many you know sort of discrete groups being pulled out and and talking about like how specifically we we would work with that group and SLCA would would be one of them I suppose I think that maybe because our data sources aren't you know teased out like that as far as the panorama survey goes you know we're trying to do things that are addressing a sense of belonging and again the environment where we had the lowest score among all the stakeholders was around cultural awareness and action so over the August leadership workshop we ended up emphasizing that I will say that you know the the partnership or the inclusion of the SLCA program predates my tenure and I think that the the way that it is woven into the fabric of programming at Stratton is really pretty remarkable and not that that we don't have work to do we work on it every day in one way or another but I would say that the current faculty the service providers the paraprofessionals that is not the place that I would you know look to as a a place of urgent improvement or address when we were looking at the data over the summer there seemed to be you know really in many ways hotter fires but again I appreciate Jane the idea of of having sort of discreet plans for creating a sense of belonging for all students including that particular population and I'll remember that as we're kind of talking about actions anyway great and I think that and the other thing that I I wanted to say and this is maybe more general too for Dr. Homan because we've we've seen so obviously we're trying to get better at our at our you know specific data outcomes right and like using MCAS scores is something that it's one of the metrics that we have right and and looking at so and we've seen this in other SIPs too so that when we talk about increasing the average whether it's 10% or 2% or whatever it is right when you're when you're increasing that that score that mean score you can basically do that by just pushing your top kids to get more points on that test and do nothing about anybody who's who's not at standard right like if you're if you're trying to if you're saying well we want to go from whatever I don't know what you said it was 508 508 508 maybe your goal is to get to 520 but like you can actually do that with all of your exceeds expectations they could they could make that up for you right and so I guess what I would like us to think about when we're doing this is is that the right thing to be is that is that what that is that the number we want to focus on or is it around the sort of percentage of kids and various focus groups that are meeting expectations right and are those the percentages we're trying to like shove because we want to bring these kids up to meeting expectations as opposed to maybe moving that that score if that makes sense totally so that's just something that I think about because it well I I appreciate that everybody is working to move everybody to benchmark right like that's the goal but when that outcome can be achieved by just pushing the highest kids higher then maybe we just want to shape like tweak that sure so thank you anybody else thank you both very much for being here we appreciate can I really quick yes um I just want to commend the Stratton School some of the work that they've done to get in front of our work around ILTs and to collaborate with Gene Thompson Grove started last year and they were quick to jump on that and to think about what a really strong ILT would look like and the work they've done with their ILT is incredible and commendable I joined a faculty meeting that the entire ILT led with them that really helped the staff pull out those things that they thought that the school needed to work on and so the work that they're doing is truly coming from the staff and from the experiences that they have on the ground with students and is going to be really impactful to practice in the classroom so nice work Stratton and great to see you thanks so much Dr. Hoffman appreciate it thanks everybody thank you thank you thank you thank you all right Thompson School improvement plan Ms. Donato I was just laughing because nine years ago I didn't need glasses to read what I was going to be saying tonight but here we are you look distinguished I appreciate that I went old school and printed mine out too so always good to have a backup well good evening Dr. Holman school committee members and community members I think my family is watching at home so hi family my name is Karen Donato and I am the appreciative proud and joy field principal of Thompson School I'm joined here tonight by amazing assistant principal Krisna Chivalier and our incredible math coach Sonia Connolly in thinking about tonight's update I reflected on the creation of last year's SIP as well as how these plans have evolved over my nine years serving the Thompson community when I began I remember looking at the school improvement plan and it was pages and pages and pages long and they were full of amazing initiatives and goals and at that time they were more about quantifying all the good work that we were doing and maybe a few initiatives that we were planning to do and I feel like for Thompson and other schools each grade would have a goal the departments would have goals so there was about 10 goals in those school improvement plans over the years we've had various iterations and I believe that our three year SIP that we developed last year is truly reflective of a data and of data informed goals and action steps that will be able to serve our entire student population with Dr. Homan's guidance and input from various stakeholders and I'd say most importantly our experiences from the pandemic we have been able to focus on fewer initiatives to be done well the old less as more adage as I like to say so in our actual SIP you will find that very little has been changed from the plan we presented last year as it was designed to be implemented and achieved over three years but what we have changed are the action steps for our instructional objective centered on implementing the practice of student discourse specifically we're focusing in math so that change was made to better represent the heart of what we want to achieve in creating an environment where all students have the opportunity to learn in an equitable environment so all that being said to my update here's kind of what we're going to go through I chose this picture these pictures because in our opening staff meeting this year we did some work with the new district vision statement and part of the activity was having staff seek out other members that they may not know and trying to build the world joy the word joy they had to take a letter when they came in they didn't know what they were spelling which was great because you know when you have a staff that's been together for a long time and this year we had a number of new staff it was nice to kind of force people in a way to find people that they weren't particularly that they didn't particularly know so the entire theme of our staff meeting was around joy what brings us joy personally and professionally and I just really like those little snapshots of some of our staff so by the numbers this is Thompson by the numbers this is a snapshot of who our 516 students are we have 24 class sections this year with four at most grade levels but we have bubbles of five sections in first grade and three sections in fifth grade and Thompson's diverse population consists of students who are 62.8 percent of students who identify as white 5.2 percent identify as African American 12.6 as Asian 9.1 as 9.1 percent as Hispanic Latino and 10.1 as multi-race and of our 516 students 23 percent of our population is considered socioeconomically disadvantaged we currently have 47 EL students 31 of whom are considered level one or two beginners and 16 who are considered level three and four intermediate students this is just a recap of what our initiatives were from last year that we're in the sip I'm going to go through each one our priorities okay this slide shows the updated data that informed our objective presented last year that objective objective is that if staff and teachers work to strengthen tier one instruction and improve the instructional practice of student discourse the percentage of all students meeting math assessment benchmarks across all grade levels will increase so as you can see our math MCAS scale score data and student growth percentile data increased across all race categories from 2021 to 2022 while that is certainly promising to see we continue to highlight that our black students and Hispanic students are not performing at a rate similar to that of their white peers we continue to work on elevating culturally responsive teaching practices such as student discourse to support our students to be seen and heard and have their voices heard in the classroom the 2022 data is similar to the data ranges of 2018 and 2019 and we anticipate that with this work we will see increased progress over the next two years you've got your golden pineapples this is related to that this slide is an example to support our work on on our objective number two by establishing a PBIS team to support staff and students we will further our commitment to providing an environment where all students feel safe physically and emotionally to learn and take risks and staff have the tools and strategies to support them over the past year we have established a PBIS team even solicited some additional members this year which is great we've completed a staff survey for input on the rollout and identified our core values of being safe be responsible and be respectful this visual is a small piece of our PBIS behavior matrix and that highlights each of these values and what they look like feel like and sound like in all areas of the building this example identifies the expectation that to be safe means to show safe bodies and use safe words that's what you see on the left across the top of the identified spaces of learning spaces the cafeteria bathrooms hallway and recess and in each box under the spaces are what it looks like feels like and sounds like to be safe the full matrix has additional sections for being respectful and being responsible this is just the be safe section I couldn't get it all on the same slide thank you so under the direction of miss Chevalier at the beginning of the year the students received explicit instruction in each area about what the expectations are and had the opportunity to see them modeled and to ask clarifying questions in addition to the matrix we have also been able to get our incentive system off the ground the golden pineapples one of which you each have I'll give you whether it was responsible respectful or safe at the end but the golden pineapples for class acknowledgement and then we have individual pineapple tickets for demonstrating the core values these tickets are accumulated by class grade level and ultimately by school and we have had many class level rewards already we recently had our first grade level rewards achieved in our first and fourth graders they are in the process of deciding what the grade level reward will be and that's chosen from a menu of options thank you so this is our the slide supports our equity and school culture objective and that reads if staff engage in professional learning opportunities that increase their understanding and awareness of bias identity development and emphasize data driven culturally responsive teaching practices student learning is measured by MCAS and benchmark math assessments will increase as you can see this data that I presented isn't actually related to math but this objective is connected to our first instructional objective where we showed that we are making some growth in our math MCAS but what informed this objective last year was our panorama data and specifically we honed in on two questions while this year's data isn't yet available this this snapshot from march on the left and fall of 2021 on the right demonstrates that there's work to be done if we are not actually explicitly encouraging our students to think more deeply about race related topics and facilitating in teaching them how to engage in developmentally appropriate conversations around race that we are truly not seeing and acknowledging who our students are and if our students don't see themselves represented in the curriculum don't feel seen or heard in the classroom then their learning is impacted and at the core of being able to do that work with our students is the work that we need to do as a staff we must first do it with ourselves and find ways to infuse that work into our planning and then into our instruction with our commitment to elevating the practice of student discourse continuing with our book study of culturally responsive teaching and the brain and the professional development opportunities with outside providers such as PFLAG and our internal PD opportunities we continue to toward our goal of providing an equitable learning environment for all of our students these last two slides are just a brief summary of what we use the term glows and grows so glows are things obviously that have gone well and grows are areas that were still growing on so some of our glows from the past year we've established our instruction leadership team which is guiding the work of the SIP our school improvement plan we are regularly using our ACE time to provide staff the opportunity for collaborative structures to analyze data and discuss instructional practices such as student discourse we've seen growth in our math MCAS scaled scores and growth percentiles across all identified races we've established our PBIS team implemented our school wide expectations matrix and implemented our behavior our recognition system of the pineapple tickets and the golden pineapples and we've had some building base PD with PFLAG and our gross we continue to have ongoing collaboration and coaching of staff to design and implement lessons with key practices for facilitating student discourse we are focusing on that we're implement we need to implement a tool to collect data regarding office referrals as a measure of the impact that PBIS is having we are we need to identify a staff survey to administer to assess the needs regarding bias and identity development increase our time dedicated to staff discussion of culturally responsive teaching in the brain chapters and purposeful discussion around cultural competency professional development to support implementation of culturally responsive teaching practices and our data shows that our students need thoughtful explicit instruction around discussing and naming of race related topics in closing I want to be sure to acknowledge how grateful we are Thompson for the ongoing support of the district administration this committee and our community at large and the families who support the work that we do each and every day we continue to be committed to meeting the needs of our students academically socially and emotionally and I also would like to highlight that recovering from the pandemic is going to take time even though this year is considered normal students didn't even more so our staff are feeling the cumulatively effect the cumulative effects of these pandemic years I hope that as we move forward as a district with our many valuable initiatives that we may also keep that less is more concept in mind when considering the demands that these will place on those at the building level thank you for your time this evening sorry about that thank you yes thank you questions or comments from the committee Mr. Slickman okay first of all 15% growth in your MCA score for your African American population over three years no no no 15% that's what I'm saying go back to the metrics 500 it's a scale of 430 to 560 and so that if you were to 490 490 times 1.15 puts you where you're never going to get to it's not a realistic number it's not a good way to measure you got to you got to reframe that some other way okay the one thing I want to I appreciate the fact that you had the the data is a starting point in consideration of where you wanted to go so it enables me to ask the follow-up question you're looking at African American students but when I look at the the data that's publicly available on the desi website for school accountability the the real divide I'm seeing within the school is low income versus everybody else your thoughts on that yes I mean that that is that is a big piece of the struggle that we're facing and the need to address I believe that those two groups not mutually exclusive and I think that there's crossover amongst all of our high needs categories that contribute to that are you asking why are we not going to specifically focus on that population versus I won't do that because I don't want to put you that much on the spot because if I were look I analyzed school improvement plans for a living in Lowell, Massachusetts which was under state scrutiny which meant that every I had to be dotted every T had to be crossed and I'm happy to be a lot more relaxed about this than a disc in a high-performing district in looking at the data and looking at coming to us in terms of what we're thinking about as a school committee how do we help the Thompson School if the data is telling me we need to do something for low income kids and that's in the school improvement plan is that one of the things you're looking at are low income kids then that points us and you and the superintendent is a partnership in terms of looking for okay what do we do systemically as a district to assist the Thompson in terms of meeting the needs of high-income kids and and then able to go and take a look is this is this a district wide question in our elementary schools and if it is how do we go and find something in common Thompson to Bishop to Brackett that that that helps this cohort where there is a significant gap both in terms of achievement and growth you understand what I'm saying I do yeah I'll take a closer look at that yeah I want I want you know if if the data is similar next year I'm going to be looking for high for for the low-income versus not low-income kids on your school improvement plan okay thank you I would just like to comment because I think some of these are is feedback more for me than it is for our leaders and I also I'm wondering if that 15% increase is a reflection of the number of the percentage of students the percentage point increase of students who are meeting or exceeding standards as opposed to an percent increase in the actual scale score so I will go back with leaders and take a look at that and think about how we present some of that to be really clear about exactly what we mean when we're talking about an increase yeah you need to have specificity in that yeah this is something definitely an issue when we we saw that in the in the bracket plan a month ago and I was hoping that going forward that we'd be more have those eyes dotted when we came when we came forth yes I understand and the strategic plans going to do some work modeling exactly what we want that to look like so that we have something that we can build on as they're building their plans in future years and their deadline was to have this to us well before any of these came before the school committee so I will keep that in mind in providing feedback and making sure that that is clear in all we were very prescriptive about what we expected to see in terms of the structure of the plan and just making that bridge need statement desired outcome and making sure that the the action plan was a connection between the two and that I had schools that were doing wacky things by deciding oh we want to buy some program having that as their action step and then writing the whole plan about trying to justify that rather than doing a really good analysis of the need statement to the desired outcome and again I want to emphasize this is a high performing district and as I go through this data there's really a lot of very good things here a lot of good things happening but in terms for the for the improvement plans to be helpful the helpful tool that we need and to have it at this point in the process it's a guide to our budget process so that we that we have justification in terms of saying how are we going to reallocate our resources to bring ourselves to another level anybody else Mr. Thielman I just want to say all the all the presentations not even great and very informative and I appreciate all the work that everyone's put into it I would say in this conversation this conversation we've had we're having about what should or shouldn't be in a sip I think it might be a good discussion to take place at a curriculum meeting the superintendent and everyone else there to kind of what the school committee actually wants because I think it's a little of course always right Jane I can't see you I'm so sorry I'll see you Jen different meeting that's a great suggestion Mr. Thielman anybody else want to comment on the Thompson School improvement plan Miss Morgan I just I had a question about PBIS because last year I was really confused about PBIS and then you helped me a lot while we talked about the sip and then I was like I need to go read about this and so now I'm like oh now I could so I guess just so that I know where we're at this we're now in in year two of a three-year plan is that like kind of like is that your vision that was my thinking right so okay and so I'm assuming that you're already seeing a decrease in office referrals we're seeing definitely an increase in consistency across practice in all areas of the building so students are hearing the same language in music as they're hearing in the cafeteria as they're hearing in the classrooms which does actually lead to a decrease in office referrals we have to come up with a system to track them succinctly so that's the piece that's our next we've actually had a PBIS meeting today have a draft of a referral system that we're going to implement shortly after the break okay great I want to hear about that next year thank you chair Dr. Hammond every time I walk into Thompson is a joyful happy bustling very busy place with a whole lot of kids and every time you walk into a Thompson classroom students are talking using academic language very engaged by their teachers getting on a plane to travel somewhere I think in one of the place classes I visited that was social studies class and their steadfast focus on race and equity and culturally responsive teaching and reading a common text together to better understand who they are and what their identities that they bring into the work and how that impacts kids is really commendable so thank you very much I always love visiting and seeing all the pineapples and sorry getting to hearing that last statement I just we're working really hard and I want to make sure everyone knows that Mr. Nano actually want I wanted to thank you for your sort of honesty or vulnerability or getting emotional it has it has been a very challenging last three years in schools and I know that teachers at all of the schools and the administration are working incredibly hard to support students who have been through a lot and adults who have been through a lot so I appreciate the work that you have done and we as a committee would like to support all of you in continuing your great work so thank you I appreciate it thank you everybody thank you thank you all right budget requests report okay I am going to share my screen give me one moment you need to make sure I share the right thing I will get us started and then Mr. Mason can sort of walk you through how this is formatted and how to read it in case there are any questions about that we have been through a comprehensive budget process this is our second round doing the request process in the way that we are we tweaked a couple of things this year just to remind everybody of what this process looks like we have all of the managers of every cost center operational and instructional in the district including our schools department leads come before the cabinet team to talk about the additions asks efficiencies they can identify based in the needs of their building our presentations this year were very data driven which was great leaders brought evidence to support the things that they felt like they needed they were very thoughtful about what the needs were and we were able to have some really fantastic discussions with leaders and probe some of the asks and think about what alternatives might be and so even in this request report what we have given you is exactly what was requested but we had some conversations too about where we could combine what additional possibilities there may be on the high school counseling note because there's a couple of requests in there related to that I went and met with the high school guidance counselors and had a lengthy conversation with them about what some of the needs might be for their department as numbers continue to grow at the high school so we've really been able to have some rich conversations about each of these asks and hopefully can speak to any questions you have about them a couple of themes that are emerging this year one is that we have increasing enrollment at the secondary level into Addison as these larger class sizes move through Gibbs to Addison next year and then into the high school we've done a really nice job sort of making sure we have the core instructional staffing to support that at the Addison we've expanded the lc's but the surrounding staffing to support some of that is what is needed next some of we need a little more elective staffing at the high school level and at OMS to support some bigger class sizes in P.E. for example in fax classes some of those classes that surround the core areas another theme this year is some of the support that surrounds the people who are in the classroom so there are asks that will improve infrastructure support staff our ability to provide strong communications to families in the district to support the welcome center that will be part of the strategic plan additional supports at the high school that will be linked to the opening of the new building and that really go to support all of the new systems of the new building so you'll notice that there are a lot of oh also a lot of people were supporting the build out of the D.E.I. department so that we'd have additional professional development support in the district that could do some of the innovative professional learning work that we've been trying to do so it's not as because we've sort of built the student facing capacity of the district as enrollments have increased it's not as focused on direct enrollment support as it has been in previous years with the exception of the secondary level you'll see more asks that sort of surround that where we haven't built out as much capacity in previous years because we've been so focused on enrollment growth so that those are sort of some trends that you might notice as you look through some of the requests there's been a lot of discussion about our librarian staffing and building that out about continuing to work on building our technology teaching capacity at the elementary level as well a couple of requests that are directly linked to increases in special education student enrollment and English learner in our schools a couple of these were even considering fast tracking this year and going ahead and posting for soon because we have a little bit of buffer because we haven't been able to hire and the need is present now so those are some possibilities depending on how conversations go over the next few weeks we might be preemptively posting and as a matter of fact already preemptively posted the EL position appears for example that was requested by three different groups and is a present need so that's a quick overview it's a long report I'm happy to or Mr. Mason is happy to answer any questions and if there are questions that we can't answer because we need to go back to our leaders for more clarity we can always bring those back to budget subcommittee Mr. Carter just a big piece what's your next steps so we have a budget subcommittee Ms. Dr. Allison Ampe do you know when it is I think I'm trying to schedule it right now I'm hoping next week okay so talk today begin to rank these so you'll see that there's a priority ranking in here and that's helping us think through where we want to sort of draw an initial line and say everything above this we know we absolutely need to fund everything below it is sort of up for discussion have that conversation in budget subcommittee hopefully next week and then we have a follow-up meeting with the full administrative team on January 3rd where we're hoping to give them an update show them what all of the requests are have them have some discussion about that see if any prioritization emerges from those conversations that will help us begin to create sort of priority buckets one analysis that needs to happen next is for us to analyze what our contractual obligations are going to be and therefore how much room we have to maneuver within but that's sort of projecting what long-range planning is going to do and what our final number is going to be we're in a bit of a guessing game right now we need that final number from the town but we're going to operate probably conservatively and determining what we put into an initial draft of the budget and then we'll be looking at drafts with a budget subcommittee over the course of January I'm sure did you want to add anything I think you stated it very well I think that yeah I think the the key thing is you know look at the salary obligations that we have for next year or any other contracts that are beyond salary that are obligations that were contractually tied to like for example where we park our buses and whatnot there's certain contracts that we have in place so to ensure that those are going to remain the same level or not whatnot so um and then yeah to decide what that actual the space for us to move in between will actually be there's a little less guesswork this year too because we will not be negotiating seven contracts in between when we build a budget and when the year actually starts anybody else Mr. Slickman okay it's a lot of stuff on this and it appears to be very thoughtful and I'm really appreciative of the fact that there are reductions as well as additions that that you're going and taking a look at how we can sort of readjust our priorities on items in the bubble in the bubble so this is a good thing uh my two questions one on the far right of this thing says number of requests is that sort of account of how many people within the district have sort of asked for that yeah let me can I take a second to just explain an overview of what people are seeing because I that was what I was going to do and so you'll see that yes the priority is what the department or the average of what the requests are so every all administrative leaders were giving a form to complete this year and on that form request they had a priority rating of from one to five one being the highest five being the lowest and then so the number of requests would follow through with what other like how many people had a similar request or if they brought it up in our actual discussion in our meetings so we had cabinet meetings where department heads came presented on their requests as well as any other thing that they were in favor of this is due to increased collaboration throughout the district and so that's what also the number of requests is tabulating so when you're seeing the format of this this is separated into three different parts you're you're seeing the top part of the first seven pages is just a personnel recurrent request that we if we add these these would be ongoing and add to the base you'll have non-personnel that's similar that's going to be recurring and then the last is one-time costs which will speak about which could possibly be covered with maybe current year funds or if we we can defer and put it into next year's budget each section is sorted by school or location and then based on prior a scoring system of our calculation a calculated score that looks at the priority and number of requests so obviously the more requests and the higher the priority gets pushed up further to the top if there are there are requests that do not have scores they we were still circling back with them those were brought up to us in the actual budget meeting and a priority wasn't easily identified and so those will be lower on the list does not mean that is not prioritized okay so I I just wanted to get clarity because you know I'm taking a look at say for example and I know this is silly because I think I can logic it out if I take a look at the theater manager at Arlington High School it's priority one number of requests three so basically I'm not multiplying that 60,000 by three because we don't want three theater managers so I can just sort of look upon that is a sub priority of three people within the team are saying that but it is a number one priority is it possible to get us this in an excel sheet that we can sort because I mean it's a comprehensive list but it's a list and to be able to sort this and sort of think about the priorities on our own I think would be really really really helpful I can give you the raw data of the forms if that's helpful but it may not include every single request I'm sure that what you've got here is is perfectly fine but right now it's a PDF and you've got and if I could just get the line item the description location program FTE amount priority and number of requests that line for each thing here in an excel sheet because and I can support sort by priority I can sort by category I can have a good time sorting you know what I mean got it doing it right now yeah thanks nice working who who picked the priority who put in the ones and the twos and the threes the oh and then somebody somebody did it 1.5 I love it with love it when people do that oh that's that's so the priority is an average of the request so if two people put in a request so that 1.5 is one person put a one another person put a two average of the two is 1.5 so they had to prioritize it was whole numbers it wasn't a 1.5 so with a they selected one so two people put in two different requests for the put two different forms for the same request okay so like Spanish teacher 307 kids taking Spanish and Gibbs right so that's going to cost a 70 grand and it's priority 1.5 and there were two requests so somebody put in a one and somebody put in a two okay so the prioritization if if stated is the level of priority of the submitor yes I with you now okay sorry that wasn't clear I mean it take well I mean I'm kind of impressed that we have people who go to the trouble of submitting something and they're like well but this is really priority three I mean well one of that and that was actually a really we didn't ask them to do that last year and it was a good exercise because it helps us understand like of these things which of these things are things that you feel like are an urgent need right now what was the percentage breakdown of like number of priority one requests versus it was about 50% I mean there are a lot of ones on here yes what there should be right I actually thought it would be more than it was so no I think this is really important and I I this is the this is the list that I'm like this is like the happy list look at all these like five million dollars worth of things that we want and this is like so great and then eventually like it gets sort of sad because things go above the line and things go below the line but for right now I just I like having this nice big list so thank you this was no small feat because we saw this in budget like a week ago and it was rougher that like it was rough and so it's come a long way since then so this is a ton of work thank you very much Mr. Thielen so my question I guess is for Dr. Holman the process by which you're going to whittle down this list and make your recommendations that's going to happen internally you're going to be in dialogue with our budget subcommittee and the school committee and then at some point what are we going to get as a collective as a committee so we're a little hesitant to start really doing above and below the line until we've heard from you all what your priorities are but I think we can begin the exercise because we know like again we we know that urgently we need an EL teacher appears so there are some things that we can go ahead and say we know we want to prioritize this we can share that with all of you if your priorities differ from those things then certainly you should let us know that and that'll be part of the conversation with budget subcommittee and once we've heard the school committee's priorities we can start to really narrow down what would be in the proposed budget okay so maybe for I'm just trying to get a sense of what our time what the time went when are we when is the school committee going to I'm sorry it was to be a proposed budget trying to open the documents early February first meeting of February so I the school committee priorities are we present our priorities at the next school committee in January in January I think it's January I couldn't get the document so at the January event and our prep for you then at the next meeting in January is to go through this and be prepared to kind of say where do we think our priorities based on whatever we want to base it on got it yeah so January 12th we present our committee members present their budget priorities the 9th currently is the proposed date for the superintendent to present her proposed budget to us the 2nd of March will be the public hearing and then we would hopefully be able to approve it all right thank you very much anybody else I have a Dr. Allison Ampe thank you in my journey from one place to the other I left my questions up in my home office so I can't ask them but I was thinking I'll just send Mr. Mason an email with some of my specific questions about things and he can either respond or we can discuss it at our budget I can't hear any I no one's saying anything yes yes that yes that's fine thank you sorry thank you so I just have I have sort of a very specific question which I know this is still under process but with the vacate of five literacy resources I don't see any professional development listed in here we're not going to provide anyone else the wing it good luck up on my departure no so we when we go through the implementation plan a lot of these vendors we're definitely going to as we start off we're going to negotiate that with them as we buy the whole program so hopefully they'll throw that in there and then as we look at our implementation plan after we select that but I when we start to have these talks with the vendors because that's the next thing that we're going to do right now is I'm going to work with Dr. Burns who is the Executive Director of Hill for Literacy and we're going to look at the program and try to cost them out and then that will be also include the professional development that goes along with it so a lot of times when you buy these you buy a new textbook series or you buy new materials from our vendor you include that in the whole package so the price that we present to school committee for the program that we select will include the professional development that goes along with it and so we use that as a bargaining chip when we're buying your product so what can we get for free so I'm always trying to do that in order to see what kind of discounts we can get on the professional development all right we won't show them all right did the curriculum adoption line end up in here because we were talking about it later okay I'm just going to find it so we are projecting 200,000 for curriculum adoption also as something that I would hope would stay in the budget for the next several years and the professional development could be wrapped into that if it exceeded that we do have the opportunity for the next year to use S or dollars towards some of this implementation work and or to use S or dollars to pre-purchase out a couple of grade levels if we have to to sort of offset the impact on the budget of the rollout over the next few years and I also would kind of like us to have a curriculum review you'll see this in the strategic plan but a curriculum review cycle where we're sort of regularly saying you know here's the order of curriculum areas that are going to get a refresh on texts or on software or on materials and that'll be tied to an audit cycle for curriculum areas so each year we can anticipate there will be adoption in some curriculum area in response to us doing an internal audit of a curriculum area this is something that other districts have in place that we don't have sort of a regular cycle on that we could put in place and that would be linked to that curriculum adoption line that we're adding here okay thank you and I also want to add we're going to leverage the expertise of our literacy coaches and that's where they'll be very instrumental in providing the professional development as well I want to make sure they they get their professional results absolutely they will be the first ones that we provide that for and then my other question is this what seems to be a transition from a K to 12 coordinator to a K to 5 coordinator and a 6 to 12 coordinator so I will speak to that one of the possibilities that we were discussing as part of our conversations about DEI specialists as well and building out the DEI department was the ability for us to have some shared leadership between the curriculum areas and the DEI department and and we were also talking about the possibility of a humanities or an ELA K to 5 coordinator which is a request that has come before the committee in the past to support some of the rollout of the implementation of a new curriculum if there were to be a K to 5 ELA or humanities coordinator and we sort of discuss the humanities idea because it puts disciplinary areas together allows us to do more interdisciplinary work allows us to cover more disciplinary areas with a single roll if we were to do that it would mean reorganizing the existing director roles to be 6 to 12 which would be more sustainable in terms of evaluation right now they are not very sustainable for evaluation simply because we've expanded staffing so significantly over the last several years but it's a possibility on the table I don't know that it's necessarily the top priority at the moment but it is something we've been discussing and it would certainly increase the capacity of the rollout of the ELA curriculum if we were to have additional leadership Mr. Mason monthly financial report please sorry I was sleep focused on something good evening school committee members tonight yeah I'm going to present to you the monthly financials for finances as of November 30th 2022 and novice you'll this is the same presentation but I realize after uploading it that the we were using the old branding so I wanted to correct my slides with the correct branding but there's no difference besides color schemes so in the reports you would have received your general fund which is the town appropriation revolving in special revenue the grants which included this time the fiscal 23 entitlement grants prior year carryover grants we were working on some the munis our financial system did some adjustments to budgets that were incorrect so we withheld some of the COVID related grants those will be in the next financial report or in an updated version of the report in centio so the general fund overall we're going to project a balance currently of one million which is down from the previous projected balance as I was expecting it to go down many of this is this actual the room this balance here is the true balance from our positions that are unfilled and some smaller variances of you know having less out of district placements but for the most part are this is this a pretty solid number at this point we're looking at potentially what you'll see is ideas of taking some of the one-time costs that are coming up in the budget request and possibly using that to spend down some of this projected balance as well as trying to determine if there are any positions that are in need that we're looking to do for next year we might you know potentially start looking to post positions to cover those needs this is this this is the budget transfer by budget transfer categories overall this is where we stand anything that's in the red shaded color is the actuals grays or which was on your report was like an orange gray color that is the encumbered amounts and so all of them and still are spending in plan I'd imagine that we would have to propose a transfer for any of the request of spending that if for current for the fiscal 24 spending because that would likely put some of them over but nothing to propose yet this point and this is the same thing actual versus budget but this is looking at it in a month by month basis and as well we're we're hanging in there tight special revenue and revolving at a glance basically we are collected cash in our or expecting projecting to collect cash that's going to cover our current spending rate what I didn't mention is that there's some identified transfers that you know some incorrect expense posted based on athletic salaries being posted to a revolving fund that no longer is collecting fees thanks to eliminating fees so we'll be moving those stipends over to the to the appropriate accounts on the general fund and any there's a net a change between tuition that can be put on the circuit breaker as well but overall our total are where we're expecting to not move too much in terms of where we started from this but under the year in the report I there's a projected amount in terms of the circuit breaker amount that we're going to collect for this year which we'll budget for next year and then overall the this is the grants we've been spending our prior year grants down we're carrying around 780,000 those worth on this the carry over grants and we had it was awarded about 2.5 million on our entitlement grants so right now we're spending according to plan we're around 900,000 in terms of expenditures and about another 1.4 encumbered and we hope to spend more down of our prior year grants as well as the ESSER funds if you have any questions we'll leave it to the chair Mr. Heiner Mr. Mason the line on legal services that does that cover all our legal services including SPED? correct it on the line it says projected expenses 79,000 plus is that basically SPED going forward or no it's just a formula to project that'll become more clear as the year ends correct there's no known legal expenses thank you Mr. Schlickman great report and I'm always impressed by the detail and the thoughtfulness the way things are put out because with a little bit of work and sitting here and studying it you got a good sense of what's going on I'm not going to ask you about the deficit and in electric because that could be shocking but bad point that was just got that okay yeah okay fine the two the two I want to ask about contracted transportation is it over by 209,000 is there something driving that line eight three three oh one page three of 16 my novice is just running a little slower sorry so page what which page page three of 16 yep eight three three oh one contracted transportation if I look at first glance it looks like for that particular line a budget may have been moved out of that line I'd have to further verify what happened in that department particular kind of that particular category in that department okay and professional tech services we're uh we're running a 294,000 dollar deficit I'm I'm assuming that we're taking advantage of some of the money that isn't being spent elsewhere yep so the professional tech services those are tied to encumbrances that for outside contracted services tied to hiring staff that we couldn't hire that we posted jobs for so they're providing services that's what the professional tech services line some of the professional tech services line but that's what's driving that aha so we didn't hire the person we're taking a something out of that line item as a contracted correct okay thanks thank you mr mason no problem superintendent's report dr holman okay I will get started with a strategic planning update we have completed all of our community forums our remote our last one remote was our most populated we had about 25 families join us and had some great conversations and breakout rooms and got some feedback to help us with some of the finalization of our initiative drafts I want to thank the community leaders and stakeholders who participated in this process the very very many of them who helped us actually build these initiatives and analyze data and think about our needs I want to thank you to Dan Anderson who was our consultant who did this latter part of the project with us and has helped organize us and keep us on task and frame the task and give us tools and templates and everything else he would did a fantastic job and I'm working with him right now on polishing the final documents thank you to the Arlington Education Foundation without their support we would not have been able to engage in this effort and involve nearly as many stakeholders as we did and thank you to the students and families and stakeholders who have provided their input throughout the process and thank you to Mr. Thielman who was pictured there vigorously advocating for something or other the welcome with his team the welcome center clearly timeline update is that initial drafts are being actually are completed by the planning team and we're doing refinement and revision in preparation for the January 12th meeting of the school committee and I will be sharing a sample initiative draft with the CIA subcommittee as well as a little more detail on the initiatives and where we're at with them and getting any feedback on them at the meeting next week we will we're in the process of doing a year to year cost out that'll be generated for the January 12th meeting and can be aligned with at that point our FY24 budget proposals and the draft plan is to be completed and shared January 12th hopefully with a final plan able to be looked at and approved in late January a lot of the refinement that's happening right now is around things like being really specific about the needs based in the data and our goals in terms of reducing gaps being really clear about modeling exactly the kind of data interrogation that we want to see in our school-based plans and department-based plans moving forward making sure that we're really we're as specific as we can get about the dollars that are going to be required for each initiative that's a little tricky as you get into the out years of 3, 4, 5 because we know that some of those initiatives are dependent upon us doing community work to decide what exactly we're going to do in the next step so there will be parts of it that are more specific and parts of it that are slightly less specific because it's contingent on community engagement and about sort of what happens in some of the out years but we are working on that timeline and we'll be doing a lot of work over the haul I will be doing a lot of work with Dan and going back and forth with some of the teams over the holiday break to make sure that those are ready for you in the new year I wanted to give you an overview of the strategic priorities themselves so that you can see the direction we're headed in one of our goals was to have drafts to the committee for today I really wanted to make sure that we could have strong drafts for the committee before we brought them to you so we're still working on them but I wanted you to have a picture of some of the things we're looking at under strategic priority one there are three initiatives one focused on instructional vision and coherence that will be framed around this idea of deeper learning and some of the deeper learning work we've already been doing in the district defining what we mean by that identifying aspects of strong pedagogical practice as well as curricula that are aligned with ensuring that all students can have immersive experiences can have highly engaging experiences and can have a strong sense of academic identity and so that they can be challenged in all of their classes another one is around student belonging and adult support and that's really focused on the student experience and supportive relationships with adults and peers and the third is around implementing MTSS this came out of our equity audit that we really needed to take a look at our intervention systems communication systems for intervention and the data that we use to inform intervention so that's going to be a core initiative under priority one priority two has some really exciting initiatives linked to it one is a pathway to teaching a set of programs that will allow for pathways for future educators inside and outside the district the goal of this is to increase racial and ethnic representation of the local community within our APS workforce gives students more and different perspectives to serve as role models for them in the classroom another is continuing the reimagination of our professional development that's responsive to their needs that gives them some level of choice and agency in determining their path of learning themselves and their growth and development and making sure that we have a professional development strategy that is aligned with our vision and that is expanded to include our paraprofessional and non-instructional staff the last one under strategic priority two surrounds competitive compensation and ensuring that we are prioritizing increasing the competitiveness of our compensation across all of our bargaining units and all areas of our system so that we can have really competitive candidates as well strategic priority three which is focused on infrastructure operations and sustainability has three major initiatives under it one is inclusive in modern schools making sure our facilities have effective spaces technology adequate actual room for us to do the programming that we want to do the second one is surrounding healthy meals for all we've expanded our breakfast program in recent years and we're committed to making sure that we have a lot of options for students and that we're also teaching them about nutrition about sustainability and about eating in ways that support our environment and support their health and support their learning and the third one is focused on facilities stewardship and ensuring that our schools are managed proactively continuously and that our maintenance they have enough maintenance and care to provide a safe healthy and comfortable student experience that may require additional staffing capacity it may require us to think really proactively about what kinds of facilities improvements we want to make over the next five years so you'll see some pretty concrete things some of which are already in the capital plan linked in that initiative and finally strategic priority for is tied to sustaining collaborative partnerships with our community major priority there is access to before and after school care services I will be providing an update on before school care at the next meeting which I'll talk about in a second but one of the goals of the planning committee was to expand our before and after care options so that our students are able to access varied before and after school care and learning services and thinking about what other learning services are extracurricular options we could give students for after school as well some of which you heard about tonight from the performing arts team the second one is tied to this welcome center and registration we would like to have a centralized location where we can provide families with a really effective onboarding experience and enrollment experience to the schools where we can also hold family workshops support the development of an LPAC and make sure that we have translated documents and resources available and that we are able to connect families with care providers throughout town for services that we may not provide as a public school system but that we can link them to and finally the last one under strategic priority for surrounds communication and partnership and making sure that we are improving our communication systems that those communication systems are two way and that they are consistent across educators in classrooms schools and for the entire district so that's a lot of initiatives they're pretty aligned with a lot of the work that we're already doing we've made a lot of progress actually in many of these in the last year or so and so hopefully what you'll see in the initiatives that come before you is that we're continuing to build on where our strengths are and identify where our areas for growth are and I'm looking forward to going through the whole detailed swath of them with you very soon happy to take any questions on those in a minute but I have a couple more updates first I want to highlight some of the work happening in first grade computer science this is a picture that I got from Dr. McNeil earlier today of our amazing director of digital learning Rashmi Pimperkar working with a group of first grade students with bebots which are little robots that you can program to follow a path and they can use that to demonstrate their knowledge of like say a life cycle for example or to tell a story and we've just introduced these bebots to our students at the specific schools or across all first grade at Dallin I'm going around at different schools going around to different schools to introduce the bebots to k5 students so I just wanted to highlight some of that exciting work happening we have done two sets of instructional rounds done instructional rounds at the elementary level for the first set and then at the secondary level at OMS and Arlington High School for the second set that we've been deeply focused on the instructional task what students are actually being asked to do and thinking about how that instructional tasks hold students to high standards what kinds of questions we're asking in the classroom and it's been a really great experience we really enjoyed visiting OMS I had some fun at Ms. Key's room with her students a couple weeks ago we are going to another deeper learning convening in a couple of months there is a convening in San Diego in early February and we are in the process of developing a deeper learning administrative team so that more of that learning can happen across our administrative team Mr. Dingman is heading up that effort as one of our building leaders and he's working directly with some folks from the deeper learning dozen to facilitate some of that work and we're really looking forward to sort of spreading some of the deeper learning concepts that we've been working on to the greater administrative team to start thinking about how they spread that to their departments before school care has been going well at Thompson and Pierce we anticipate that it will continue at Thompson and Pierce through the year I am in the process of setting up a meet I don't have a lot of details on this right now because I'm in the process of setting up a meeting with Ms. List who is our coordinator for that program to get the details and numbers and breakdown in terms of tuition and how our enrollment has done in that program but we do want to keep it open we if you recall had reduced the fee for that and wrapped the program breakfast program sort of partway through and that has improved the enrollment in the before care program slightly so we'll have all of more of an update on that for the new year but it will continue at Thompson and Pierce and we're analyzing whether we can roll it out to more schools this year or whether we want to just do it finish out the pilot for this year and then make a decision about next year the APS calendar committee has been meeting and we'll meet again we just sent out a survey to families which I will remind everybody to make sure that they take before we leave for the winter break that that survey is asking families to tell us what the impact of eliminating a few holidays that we currently have on the calendar not because they're holidays but because we had concerns about our ability to operate on those days because those holidays could impose a challenge to attendance for teachers and for students there's Yom Kippur Rosh Hashanah and Good Friday and that those were off of our calendar where we were off on those days on our calendar because we were concerned about operating so we're asking families questions about if those days were school days would you send your child what would the positive or negative impact be of us being open on those days and we'll use that feedback to make a the for the calendar committee to make a recommendation to me to make a recommendation to all of you about three years worth of school calendars moving forward so that'll be coming in January they are meeting again in January to look over that data and then we'll have a conversation and make some decisions the oddison transportation situation has been challenging for a lot of families that challenges that a lot of our students in East Arlington are having trouble getting across town to the oddison we are in the process of developing a survey right now that will go out to the oddison community we're almost to the place where we have the capacity to run a bus from East Arlington to the oddison and we're going to try to get that in place at the start of the new year there will be a fee for this bus it'll be it'll match the MBTA fees so we're not asking families to pay more than they would otherwise pay to use the MBTA and we also have I've been working with Representative Garbally on some advocacy to get another 77 route moving on Mass Ave but unfortunately we just haven't seen that have any fruition to it so we're hopeful that that will maybe happen but in the meantime we're going to work on our own solution the deputy superintendent search is often running we will have an orientation on Monday for the full committee it's a committee of about 14 Ms. Exton is going to be representative from the school committee on that on that initial search committee the Margaret Cuddle Thomas will serve as a process monitor to help us reflect on our process and make sure that we're mitigating for bias as much as we can we're doing a blind review of the resumes for our initial search and our first round of interviews will be the first week of January into the second week of January and enrollments are in your materials happy to take any questions Mr. Schlegman I just want to note for the record that last week the MBTA announced they were reducing morning service on the 77 which is totally inexcusable and I've had conversations with representative Garverly too I mean we're going to have a change in administration in the corner office next month and Governor elect Healy has shown that she pays attention Arlington Sunday before the election she chose Arlington as a place to hold a round so she knows us she loves us and I think we'll probably have better chance of engaging in a conversation with the executive branch next month than we have now that said I think that at some point we should consider having our representatives in uh once we get some clarity with within the new administration and possibly as a committee writing a letter to the governor and to the MBTA regarding our experiences with student transportation and our hopes that they would go back to serving us in a reasonable manner I'm going to chime in on that don't have them come here have them at the oddison at 8 30 in the morning and watch these frazzled kids running in worried that they're late worried that they had a test and they missed part of it the bus was late they're freezing cold that's who they need to go talk to anybody else the next item on our agenda is a review of and possible vote on the current bullying intervention and prevention policy Dr McNeil had asked us to I will explain it first and then if you want to weigh in feel free to essentially we need to make sure that the that we update or have eyes on this policy by annually and right now the latest prevention and implementation plan the bullying prevention plan has the date of 2017 on it and we want to make sure that that has a more current date on it it's linked to this policy so there aren't any changes to this policy our lawyers have reviewed this policy we just want to make sure that this is up to date and that the school committee has said yes this is our bullying policy and it is up to date and then we are going to go through and look at the intervention prevention plan and we need to update it because it had some out of date references in it and our legal council gave us some additional updates this week so we're going to go through and make sure that that intervention plan is also posted to the website with the new updated date on it so that we are in compliance on our bullying policy and our intervention prevention plan Mr. Schlickman so basically all we do is vote the policy at this point and it would be the same policy in the same place in the policy manual except that voted by the Arlington School Committee December 15, 2022 that's the only thing that's really changing here we're just putting a date stamp on it so I would like to move so I assume this is the first read I move that we suspend the rules to move to second read on this which requires a two-thirds vote second we have a motion by Mr. Schlickman seconded by Mr. Thielman to suspend the rules for a second read discussion roll call vote Mr. Hayner yes Mr. Cardin yes Ms. Morgan yes Mr. Schlickman yes Mr. Thielman yes Dr. Allison Ampe yes and I vote yes that's unanimous we've suspended the rules would someone like to make a motion on second read I move to to approve policy JICFB building prevention second we have a motion by Mr. Schlickman seconded by Mr. Hayner to approve policy JICFB any discussion roll call vote Mr. Hayner yes Mr. Cardin yes sorry Dr. Allison Ampe I was just going to point out to our audience that this is the exact same policy that we already have there are no changes so I'll start again Mr. Hayner yes Mr. Cardin yes Ms. Morgan yes Mr. Schlickman yes Mr. Thielman yes Dr. Allison Ampe yes and I vote yes that's unanimous okay now we have a lot of policies for second read I so before we approve them I wrote an amendment as Mr. Thielman asked thank you to um so for the public comment so sorry so it's policy BEDH-E guidelines for a public comment I perhaps someone will make a motion to amend the policy where it says number one members of the public who wish to address the committee during public comment are advised to register to speak by 6 p.m. on the day of the meeting by telephone or by email directed to the administrative secretary of the school committee the rest of it stays the same so after 6 p.m. someone can come to the school committee room and sign up on a paper so Mr. Thielman I'm gonna I'm gonna support your amendment so what's the best way to do this I guess I'm gonna move to amend the original the first three that the the policy is written in the first reading to the way Dr. Ms. X and just word it so it's changing basically changing the time 6 p.m. 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. yeah second on Mr. Thielman's we have a motion by Mr. Thielman seconded by Ms. Morgan to amend policy BEDH-E Mr. Hanner can I speak to it? yeah I just want to be clear does this still we have a limited amount of people in signing up for time would this person say a person walks in and signs up would they be at the bottom of the list yes I haven't changed anything to this except for the time at which thank you Dr. Allison Ampe thank you I appreciate what you're trying to do with this but I am concerned that six o'clock is a difficult time for our staff I mean that that's they have to get prepared for the meeting and stuff too including things like eating and you know getting the school committee room ready and stuff and I'm just concerned that that's close enough to we're not allowing them enough time for preparing for the meeting itself and so I'm questioning whether six o'clock is too late and so right now I'm not going to support this but that's anyway that's me Mr. Heiner prior to the pandemic people could come in as they could come in as late as 6 30 and sign up so when we moved it back this uh suggestion is moving no I really I'm taking Ms. Morgan made a suggestion to have it be 6 25 I agree that the administration is getting administrative staff is getting ready for this meeting and so six o'clock felt like a time late enough to make me feel comfortable about people who cannot physically get here while giving the administrative staff time to prepare for this meeting so that's how I landed on six o'clock yes people can walk in here and sign up at 6 30 that part has not changed any more discussion Mr. Schlegman I'm also inclined to vote no on the on the amendment as I do share the concern about I watch what Ms. Diggins is doing in the hour before the meeting and it's very intense her workday ends at four I don't think that extending this beyond an hour before her cut off for her workday is a reasonable thing to do she works from 10 to 6 on Thursday you know I just want I just want to say you know this is coming from the chair who's been running this committee for the past year and working with all the staff so I trust this plan and I think it's a good one and I urge the committee to support it more all right we have a motion by Mr. Thielman second by Ms. Morgan to amend the policy to 6 p.m. roll call vote Mr. can I just say we're amending the policy that we haven't voted on yet correct the proposed yes the proposed policy the proposed thank you yes sorry proposed policy yes and the only thing that changed is that we're going from 3 to 6 correct okay Mr. Heiner yes Mr. Cardin yes Ms. Morgan yes Mr. Schlickman no Mr. Thielman yes Dr. Allison Ampe no and I vote yes the motion passes one two three four five to two okay so I think we'll vote this policy separately since the time has been changed so let's start with that one because we're discussing it and then I think we can do the rest as of can we do all the rest in one vote because it's a secondary so I move that we adopt by we adopt all of the all of the policies that were first reads at our last meeting with the exception of this one BEDH but when we dispose of this one first so why don't we move okay I move approval of BEDH dash E as amended second we have a motion by Mr. Schlickman seconded by Mr. Thielman to approve policy BEDH dash E as amended any discussion roll call vote Mr. Hayner yes Mr. Cardin yes Ms. Morgan yes Mr. Schlickman yes Mr. Thielman yes Dr. Allison Ampe yes and I vote yes that's unanimous I think we can do the rest as a I have I have I have a request to withhold ECEV okay okay why don't we take ECEV then okay so policy ECEV Mr. Cardin do you want to say something before no I appreciate I appreciate the intent of the policy I think it's just a little bit too prescriptive for a school committee policy I mean I dislike the bikes that are attached to the benches beautiful benches that we have out front but I'm not going to propose a policy that we can't have bikes attached to those benches so I'm not going to support it but I understand that I appreciate the intent thanks approval of policy ECEV electric vehicle charging stations we have a motion by Mr. Slickman seconded by Mr. Hainer to approve policy ECE dash V for electric vehicles any discussion Mr. Thielman was there any conversation within the school leadership about this Dr. Holman and what's their feeling yes we I've discussed it we've discussed it in policy subcommittee it's I mean we won't be the enforcers of this policy it would need to fall to towns folks we can put the signs up and make sure that we encourage people only to use those charging stations when they are actively charging we've already informed staff that that is the expectation and we've seen some improvement over the last couple of weeks but our ability to manage parking during the school day is simply not not not possible so we are reliant on the clause in the policy that says that we will be needing to collaborate with APD and parking enforcement in town to oversee the monitoring of this policy but you you support the policy or the your team does or you what do you use I I do and so far is I think our staff should have access to charge their vehicles when they're at school one thing that's notable though is we're going to tell staff you're not expected to move your car once you're done charging you need to plug it in at the start of the day and use the spot to charge your vehicle but we're not going to expect staff to move their cars once it's full Dr. Allison Ampe thanks I just wanted to point out this is a little different than people parking there I mean locking their bikes to the benches in that if we're truly trying to electrify our vehicles people have to be able to charge and if someone is parked and not using the charger and say is a gas car not using the charger then they're locking the ability of someone else to use it and that's different than just making an ice or or something so even if this seems a little prescriptive it is in line with our desire to move things to decrease our CO2 admissions and move to an electrical vehicle feature thank you Ms. Morgan I don't I don't I wasn't on the policy so this doesn't fall under like town rules about electrical vehicles like we don't fall under that because it's our property it's ours yeah yeah thank you and in fact deputy town manager is very encouraged by our work on this he's and he will be taking our policy to the select board and look to amend the traffic rules and orders of the town to align with what we're doing we have a motion by Mr. Slickman seconded by Mr. Hainer I think to approve policy EC-V for electric vehicles any more discussion okay Mr. Hainer yes Mr. Cardin no Ms. Morgan yes Mr. Slickman yes Mr. Thielman yes Dr. Allison Ampey yes and I vote yes that's six in favor and one opposed okay now I think we can take the rest is there any anyone else have any other policy I'm gonna take it no okay so we did BED so I move approval of JFBB BEDH-E J-I-C-A we did BED okay it's listed twice in the file here J