Okay, so in the presence of quorum, call meeting of the Amherst School Committee to order at 6.01 p.m., welcome everyone. And just as a note, this meeting is being recorded but not live broadcast by Amherst media. So welcome everyone. This is a slightly different meeting of the Amherst School Committee. This is a meeting that was actually added by the committee last December actually. December 2018 so that we could have this discussion around the MSBA statement of interest application and so a little bit of an unusual format in a few different ways. So I thought I would take a moment to explain how that's gonna be a little different today and then turn it over to Dr. Morris. That's okay. Yeah, that'd be great. Okay, so one of the things that we're doing a little differently as one of our committee members pointed out is that we don't have minutes to approve tonight, which is our usual format, but really what we wanted to do tonight was have a conversation around the MSBA application process and to talk a little bit about the history involved in our pursuit of applying for state funding for elementary school buildings. At our last meeting in December, we had discussed the recent rejection of our applications for Fort River and Wildwood and this is something that we recognize is of great interest to the community. We have gotten a lot of emails and a lot of outreach from community members. I think every single one of us probably on the committee, both as a committee and individually have been reached out to by many folks, which is great. We love seeing that kind of engagement and enthusiasm, but of course is a very serious topic. So we also wanted to make sure that we were doing our due diligence and taking time to explain a little bit about the history of this application to the state and try to provide some more information for the community about the format and process moving forward. One of the things that I just wanted to say before we dive in is that we all recognize the urgency of this situation. There's been a lot of documented information about the state of our school buildings and I think this committee has shown incredible interest in treating this matter very seriously and urgently. So that is what we're hoping we can do with the superintendent's guidance tonight. The other thing I wanted to say is we're missing a committee member tonight. Ms. Carrie Spitzer actually wasn't able to attend tonight because of a family emergency. I hear things have gotten better anyway, but she really wanted to be here tonight and I have some words from her that I'll be sharing a little bit later today. So with that, Dr. Morrison, I'm just gonna turn it over to you. Sure, I think I was gonna make one unrelated, there's no superintendent update, but just one unrelated update, which is a good news update, cautious not of the agendas, so I'll just say it and we'll move on, but is that our dual language program, as you may remember, had after your vote, but there was an application process to DESI and it was successfully responded to. So DESI had not just approved that, but we also had some very positive commentary on the work of staff who put together the application and all the work that's going into planning and developing that program. That's great news. Yeah, so I thought I'd share that because it seemed timely if unrelated. But yeah, and so just live deck as school committee members know get done late this afternoon, so it'll be on the website tomorrow morning for people who are interested. Just trying to pull together lots of information very quickly and take a little bit longer. So this is always so little funny with the cutoff which are done with notes. This screen is the better one to look at. If you want to follow along, because you can only make about the quarters of the line, the words show up on that one back there, which I apologize. I think I may actually just turn it off because it's just not helpful and probably distracting for the lights to be behind you. That's okay, because it just, you really can't make sense of what's behind you. Can everyone see that screen, okay? Yeah, I apologize, but this one's still a skew a bit. So thanks for planning this, I won't call it special meeting because that's a different purpose, but I think it's a special meeting. It's off schedule, but I think we're responding to information that we received from MSPA and to the chair's point. I know how much contact I've had with individual school committee members. Just, you know, are we gonna talk about it and making sure we get this on the agenda and bring it to the public forefront as soon as possible. So this is given the, I think we talked about it. I think it was the December meeting and with the break coming in, it just didn't allow for a meeting at that time period, but this is as soon as we were able to pull it together. So I wanna start from a place, I know a lot of people have been following this process for a long time, and then some people are new to this process or just working on this. So I wanna start from a place of talking about some of the concerns that we have about the school buildings. And I know some people have seen me or others talk about this before, but I just wanna start from that place to build a common understanding, at least from my perspective, of where we are and where we hope to go. So three primary concern areas that we've had about Wildwood and Fort Rivers infrastructure. Again, there are wonderful schools with wonderful staff and wonderful students, and that's in spite of not because of the building that those students and staff and faculty are in. So the first is just the general building conditions. So one frame of reference is the MSBA assumes that buildings can be functional school buildings for 50 years, so when you build, that's one of the ingredients that's in the cake of any MSBA process is an assumption that 50 years is a typical lifespan of a building until significant renovations are needed. And I know for some people that feels short. Many people's homes in this community are older than 50 years, but the work, I'll just pick Wildwood. So there's 410 students roughly, upwards of 70, 80 staff members who are in that building putting a lot of pounding on it, 180 days a year plus the work that happens in the summer, they're meeting in a large cafeteria spaces. And so schools, the wear and tear in schools is a little more significant than it is on residential homes. And I think that's why MSBA, even in 2019, has that 50 year assumption. Wildwood's 50 year anniversary is coming up next year, 2020, Fort Rivers three years after. So just all the building systems, the life of the buildings, they're getting towards the end of their useful life or the planned life of the schools. And well, both buildings have had minor renovations from time to time, ripping up carpet, which was significant for the health of the buildings, but not significant in terms of addressing some of those core systems. That's wild. So we've replaced boilers, we've done some things over the last five, six years that have assisted in that, but we still have a lot of original systems, original furnishings in the schools, and everything's getting to that place in terms of wear and tear, where we're gonna do something about the buildings. The second is the safety. Buildings were built very differently in 1970 than they are now, and that's true in a whole host of ways, but school safety is certainly a larger issue now in the design of buildings than it was then. We could never build those buildings today, just purely from a safety perspective, having the office about 100 feet away from the front entrance, having the doors, the exterior doors, the weight and size that they are, they would never, MSBA wouldn't fund, if an architect put a design out where the front entrance is 100 feet away, MSBA would say, what are you talking about? What are you doing here? They would never accept that. So we do have those ongoing safety concerns for buildings. We mitigate them as best we can with the video system so that office staff can see visitors as they come into the building, but it doesn't really, it doesn't substitute for a design that would prioritize school safety. It's not really, it's the best we can do, but for me it's not sufficient. And the last is the educational challenges, so I think it's been talked about a lot, but the open classrooms impinge on our ability to provide a high quality education, and there's many accessibility issues, both physical but also from a learning perspective, and the hard thing is they impact the most vulnerable students the most. So students who are, for instance, English language learners, there's research that they're more distracted by hearing multiple classrooms at once, which happens in an open classroom design. And I could go on and on on that, so I'm trying to do a broad summary now, but building conditions of safety and educational challenges, those are the three kind of large categories of concerns that I have. I think since a short slide deck, I'm looking at the chair, should I just look up after every slide, see if there's questions, but plan to roll through? Does that work for the committee? I mean, the idea was really to have this be a presentation with discussion, and then we'll allow for public comment and then have further conversation afterwards, but that works for everyone, okay. Yeah, so in terms of specific areas of concern, just to be a little more narrow, and I wanna be cautious. Oh, thank you, since it's behind me, I'm never gonna remember until Eric. Remind me. This is not an exhaustive list, so these are the primary ones that I see staff members in the audience, I think I'm sure they could certainly add to the list, but these are the ones that from my perspective are the most significant or prevalent. It's not intended to say that every issue that the buildings have is on this list. So the open classroom design, for those of you who are unfamiliar with it, and I know the committee are, but just I think it's worth stating, is that we have, the walls are not, don't provide acoustic privacy, which is a fancy way of saying they don't keep the noise out from one classroom to another. For most of the classrooms in the building, all except the kindergarten and some of the small group rooms. And so even as an adult, there are times where I'm challenged when I'm in a classroom because I'm aware of the noise that's behind me. Having taught in these classrooms, it's certainly a distraction for both students and staff alike. The second is ADA compliance. We'll be talking about that more at the next meeting and having an update from a consultant who did an ADA, which is an Americans with Disabilities Act, Act Compliance Review. So what is the accessibility for students on the outside of the building as well as the inside of the building? From safety, I talked about the distance from the entry to the office space, but also the external doors. So we are in the process of replacing the external doors at those schools, but they're incredibly heavy in an emergency. There's a question of whether staff and students in an emergency could open them themselves. So it's really a critical safety issue. Univents, which are the systems by which warm and cool air enter the classrooms. It's an incredibly outdated system. And so even though we have new boilers at Wildwood, which are working great and are improving the condition in the experience of staff, the fact that they have to go through an extremely outdated unit vent system reduces the efficiency in how much actual warm air comes out and the lived experience of staff and students in the buildings. It's also the case that the company that created them, these are original to the building. So getting parts when things break down, it's all those challenges complicate when things go wrong, how quickly we can respond and fix them. So we have a natural lack of natural light in many classrooms at those schools. Again, that's because of that quad open classroom design, lot of evidence and research that all of us, not just children, but actually everybody works better in environments where natural light comes in and basically half the classrooms at each site receive little to no natural light coming in. You know, this one's a hard one to explain, but I think it's worth noting that there's small classroom spaces. If you look on a map, like a floor map, the classroom spaces don't look small, but because of the quad system, a significant amount of real estate in each classroom has to be used for students to get to the bathroom or to, if you're in the back quad for the students, if you're in the front quad for students in the back quad to be able to walk through your room to get to their room. So the functional space, and we found this out in the Fort River Feasibility, is quite small, well below MSPA state standards for classroom spaces. And it's again that balance of trying to make it as accessible as possible then shrinks the usable classroom space of the room. So it's a balance that we'd rather not have on both ends of that. Our electrical panels are original to the building. They're made by a company that's longer in business that had a not great history electrical panels. We have a plan for that in our capital plan to have them certified and reviewed, but it is a major concern from a safety perspective. It's also when we wanna add things to the building like one-to-one computers in grade three to six, how much electrical pole do we have and making sure that's safe. It's just an additional layer of challenge. So we have high cost and inefficient energy use for a community that voted a town meeting, a community whose town meeting voted a net zero bylaw. These are far, far from being green schools. I think I'll leave it there, but there's a cost to the environment. There's a cost to the taxpayers as well. So both roofs are getting to their end of their useful life. Fort Rivers had more significant issues with water coming in, but both buildings roofs are at the end of their useful life. The cooling systems, we had a cooling system breakdown at Wildwood this fall, which you all heard quite a bit about rightfully so from staff, families, and students who were having a very difficult time with how hot it was. It was hot outside, but it was incredibly hot inside and those systems actually had all three elementary schools candidly need significant updating. This isn't about air conditioning. This is actually just getting functional cool air coming into the room, coming into the schools. We're far from having air conditioning in a Wildwood or Fort River, but even beyond that, just having cool air come in was not functioning well. And then the building envelope, which talks about windows, how air gets in and out of the school. We're talking about original windows that don't have multiple panes the way you would build it in 2019. So on cold days, even if the warm air is blowing, you get kind of the breeze that comes through those. And there's other areas of the building envelope that would need to be tightened both for an energy efficiency standpoint, but also for a comfort standpoint as well. So again, not an exhaustive list, but some of the primary concerns. So this is perhaps outdated, except we haven't done a tremendous amount in the last five years of the building. So I think it's still a relevant slide. So this was a statewide survey that was done all teachers across the Commonwealth were given the opportunity. And you can see that the prompt was the number of teachers who agree with the statement that the physical environment of the classrooms in this school supports teaching and learning. So across Massachusetts, 83% of teachers agreed with that. The Wildwood school was 24%. That Fort River school was 9%. And that Crocker Farm was 93%. So you can see the distinct differences in what teachers were telling us between our three schools, but also compared to the state average. We've been talking quite a bit and we'll talk more at our next meeting about short-term capital planning. Just to be clear, when I say short-term capital planning, I'm referring not to a building project. There's ongoing capital work that can improve the condition of the schools. And some of the concerns on the prior page can be addressed with significant capital planning if the town so funds us. To do that, one is roofs. Each one is, you would estimate over $2 million at this point. The last estimate was 1.9, but that's escalated up to be over $2 million, which is a lot of money for roofs. I'm not saying it's not needed, but that's the reality. Exterior doors, I spoke about already. So from that, getting updated non-48-year-old doors in our buildings that haven't been warped and have more accessibility. So we're working on that. Univents and HVAC, again, another thing in our capital plan, which would help make our cooling and heating systems work more efficiently to get warm and cool air into classrooms. ADA access, so we'll talk about that at our next meeting, but some of those issues can be addressed through short-term capital planning. And I said cooling somewhat. And what that means is that we can improve our cooling systems in our schools, but right now our challenge is we can't control for humidity. So if you think of air conditioning, air conditioning does two things, right? It sends cooling air, but also dehumidifies the room. Right now our cooling systems at these schools provide cool air, but they're not providing the dehumidification element. So we could improve that, and that's in our capital plan to improve the cooling, but on really hot, humid, sticky days, we get sticky paper, right? We get wet floors when you have that combination. So it is, we can make progress, so we don't have a repeat of this fall at Wildwood, but our best case scenario isn't quite what we think of as the cooling that you would need on a very hot day, which I don't want to be a climate change. I don't want to talk so much about climate change, but odds are we're going to have more of those in the future than we've had in the past. So then there's some concerns that cannot be addressed, even with significant short-term capital funding. So that's open classroom design, the classroom size, those two go hand in hand. The energy use, we've gotten more efficient, our boilers are more efficient, but we're not going to get to a net zero standard without some radical change, like either renovated or new construction. The safety of the main entry, just reorganizing, reorganize the whole school to move that, and you really need some construction pieces. You can't just move the rooms. The lack of natural light in many classrooms, not something that's going to be fixed with short-term capital, and then the cooling I already spoke to, but we're not going to get to that cooling plus the humidification, which is what most would feel like is true cooling. So that's the last slide about the condition of the building before I get into MSPA process. Maybe I'll pause to see if there's questions from the committee. A lot of this is information we've already seen. Sorry, I know. And this is great, because I think that the idea was to really share or review a lot of this information for the sake of the community. Mr. Dumling? Yeah, I'll just say exactly what the chair said, which is, yes, this is information we've heard before, but I think it's very important, particularly as we're trying to engage this short process, but highly engaged process with the community of the next few months, that you start from squares from point zero and assume zero knowledge of people coming into the room. And this is all very educational, and a lot of the town doesn't have all the time in the world to follow every detail. So this is very helpful. I appreciate the way in which you're... So I'll keep going. So MSPA history, so from 2007 to 2012, multiple statements of interest were submitted for both Fort River and Wildwood schools. None of those were accepted over that time period. In the late fall of 2013, MSPA accepted Amherst's statement of interest for Wildwood School. I think it's worth noting that in the statement of interest process, you have to prioritize one school over another. At that point in time, Wildwood was prioritized because it didn't have the updated boiler system. That was the determining factor that then school committee and superintendent and then select board made to prioritize Wildwood, and that's why it was accepted versus Fort Rivers. It wasn't MSPA thought it was more in need. It was that locally that decision was made. There was a building project developed from 2013 to 2017. It failed to receive all the required local approvals to proceed to construction. So at that point, that process concluded. And last year in 2018, there were statements of interest submitted for both Fort River, which was prioritized in Wildwood School, but neither statement of interest was accepted. It's hard to read from the slides. I know that's not the most enjoyable experience. So the MSPA, I find to be incredibly candid and I appreciate, and they're not watching this. I'm just saying it because it's true that they share feedback. You ask them direct question. They give you a direct answer, which is all you can ask for from a state agency, I think. And so I have had multiple conversations with MSPA in the last month or so. Yeah, I guess that'd be right. And they expressed no concern over the technical nature of the submission. There was no disagreement that our buildings are in need of either significant renovation or addition or construction. However, they were concerned that they didn't, that the community wasn't showing that there was a consensus for how to move forward. And given the last building project experience, again, there's no, I'm being very intentional on how I feel. There's no looking back for the sake of looking back. It's them telling me, is the community, does it have a plan of what it wants to do? Does it have a consensus that the town has? And that was their concern. They expressed that during a site visit all the way back last spring. And not as clearly as they did this December. And so the recommendation was, and then if we choose that the town chooses to submit a statement of interest or statements of interest this year, that there's a formal statement around the consensus that's built. That the technical part is not the part that they have questions about, it's the consensus in the community that they want to make sure that is in place as they consider statements of interest for next year. And they were very blunt to say, if that's not realized, then maybe 2020 is the next time you submit statements of interest. That's how firmly they feel that there's a need for that to be developed in this community. Mr. Demling. This is also true of the, another major limiting factor for HBAA acceptance is that they have a fixed budget. You mentioned last meeting they had a quarter billion dollars committed in the pipeline and that they only get so much money from the state. Yeah, they were very candid to say there's more need in the state than there is dollars. That while they are a relatively well funded agency, there's two secondary projects, one that's approved and one that has a vote this spring, each of which are over a quarter billion dollars. So it was 250 some odd for Somerville and I think the next one's Arlington and I think it's in the neighborhood of $300 million. So when they support these projects, you talk about smaller projects, it does make it more competitive for the smaller ones when you have these large ones going on. So thank you for raising that important point. That was kind of the other take home they said is we'd love to support many, many of the projects. Many schools have conditions that the MSBACs is worthy of accepting into the pipeline, but their financial ability to cover that is limited and if you look at population growth in Massachusetts, when people were building a lot of schools, right, those schools are all getting to the same age that ours had and so there's an increasing number of schools that need support and need to be either renovated or knocked out. So I don't wanna then put words in your mouth or words in your mouth that would be from their mouth, but the fact that the genuine demonstrated need across the state significantly outstrips the available resources is one reason why, presumably there's a high hurdle to get in so that if they think a project isn't gonna succeed for any reason, fair or foul, they have other choices that are also equally as compelling for them. That's exactly right. So a little bit on MSBA process. So new statements of interest will be accepted for the core program, which is what we're talking about. There's one, if you're looking for boilers or roofs and that's not what we're talking about because the needs of these buildings are more significant than that. So new statements of interest are accepted until April 12th, 2019. Statements of interest need to be formally voted by both the Amherst School Committee and then the Amherstown Council, that's the process. An important note is the statements of interest while they're looking for consensus on the community on certain factors, statements of interest can include certain information because they have a robust process that the MSBA sets out that is very significant. And so for instance, making a statement whether new construction or an ad renovation is preferred and addition renovation is preferred is not something that would be warmly received by the MSBA that would come up and part of their own process. I know it's a topic that many people have asked me about and community conversations are occurring about and I think that's great that we're having that conversation for the statement of interest, that's not something that we would need to decide and actually we shouldn't decide. The second is defined site. So even though we'll have significant amount of information about Wildwood and Fort River site which is fantastic because of prior work and current work, that's not a decision that would be made by this body or town council. That would be a future building committee would be making that decision as well as the first one I mentioned who the architect should be. So that's already people have asked me who do you think would be and that's not something that actually occurs. We don't even choose the architect and MSBA process. We have locally, we have three votes out of 15 and the MSBA has 12. So to presume that we would include who the preferred architect would be presumptuous and not well received. And the last one is that specific design details are a complete educational plan. Again, that's the work of a building committee not the work of the statement of interest that goes into a statement of interest. So we'll talk about what we need to come to consensus on but I started with what we don't need to be maybe that's freeing for some folks, I don't know. So we'll talk about what we need to consensus on a bit of but I think one of the things that I've been doing a lot of thinking and I know I spoke to the chair who's also done a lot of thinking is how do we engage community to both understand limitations that we have the MSBA process and some of the details about the history because as I mentioned at the beginning there's significant people in the community who've been following this incredibly closely and then there's other people for a whole host of reasons who caught wind of the last project but now really want to dig in because they want to support our elementary school students who want them to be in the best buildings they can and there's a sense of urgency which is a word I heard multiple times from committee members so far. And so this is my initial kind of thought as to how to proceed. So it would be scheduling nine listening sessions and that's intentionally community listening sessions intentionally labeled that way starting in the next month or over the next kind of five, six weeks. Three sessions for one in each elementary school geared towards current and future parents and guardians. Three sessions location to be determined for the broader community and I thought actually I've talked to the town manager about engaging the town council. They may have some thoughts about preferred locations. I know there's five districts and not three but I think that seemed like a reasonable number and that may be a nice way that the town council needs to engage in this. And the last one, three sessions, one in each Amherst Elementary School specifically for school staff members and I think it's important to note that however long this process takes the school staff are the ones who are gonna be in the buildings 180 days a year. So their voices are incredibly important in this discussion as well. I thought I'd ask two community leaders who are on different sides of the prior building project to co-facilitate the sessions because if we're trying to build consensus I think one of the ways we can do it is modeling that the past building project is exactly that. It was the past building project that didn't come to fruition and we need to move onward together and so that was sort of my thought about it. The sessions will be light on presentation, probably not wildly different than this in my head anyway that we'd wanna get some foundational things that everyone can agree on or facts about the MSBA process, about the building and then the rest of the time focus on soliciting or understanding key priorities of the stakeholders and having that interchange, that two way communication is really critical because while it's a listening session be able to respond and people have questions that they won't wanna ask and be able to have that kind of rich dialogue is something that I thought would be helpful because I would want people walking away not just saying, oh I gave my input and we'll see what they do with it but actually I did some learning not just from the presentation but from what I heard from other people and I think that kind of dynamic and bring a community together much more than other forms of communication or engagement. And have those done by the February 26th which is not the next Amherst School Committee meeting but it's the one after that with a report from the sessions and proposed next steps of moving forward for a little asterisk at the bottom but that's just about how to get communication out about these sessions. And then I think I'll just keep going even if there's questions on that because the next slide sort of, it's the last slide because I tried to backwards design and I put the chair on this if we need to get to April 12th with getting it sent in, how do we, knowing that town council needs to take an affirmative vote and they're gonna need to consider just because school committee suggests something that you need to learn about it and sign on to it as well. So I was trying to backwards design how that might work, backwards design meeting could we start with the end in mind which is getting a statement of interest sent and then going backwards in weeks of how could we logically do this? I wanna note that March 4th and March 11th are not Amherst School Committee meeting dates right now. So this was Chair and I trying to look do this test together and do we need to add dates and I don't see a way we can get around adding dates. So if we start with that, people first being proposed town council vote. I've showed this to the town manager, town council's not seeing this presentation. So the italicized word proposed is in addition to the one at the title because at least the one of the title, the first two things on here you all can control the last year you can. But if we think about town council being able to review and vote on a statement of interest we need to give them that time which then backs into school committee vote on the 11th of March which then backs into March 4th or so with me making a presentation recommendation for your consideration. I don't know how to scrunch it any more than that but that's what we came up with. And I would just add to that I think at the last meeting one of our committee members have raised the point that a good point that this is a truncated timeline and a very ambitious one. But again recognizing the sense of urgency around putting in these applications because we've heard loud and clear from community members on all sides that they are very interested in us pursuing the application of the MSBA that if we are to actually do this and as the superintendent mentioned have the MSBA seriously consider an application that we want to be able to show some kind of community support for any potential project. So this is really the timeline that we're looking at. There's not really much wiggle room there. We also wanted to in our conversation allow for time for community input not just the listening sessions that the superintendent outlined but also additional methods of communication that both individual committee members but also just the community in general has for sharing information, soliciting feedback from networks and things like that. So we were trying to be mindful of that and hopefully giving enough time for folks to respond to that. So I don't know if the committee has any questions or comments or anything that they want to raise with the superintendent right now. Mr. Demlin. I mean, so first of all, just process wise I don't want to go on for too long because we do have school community discussion after public comment. So, but just to respond like kind of immediately to this general idea. It's funny, I was hoping for something like this leading up to the statement of interest date in April and my first thought was like, oh, I'm going to have to like, you know, say you need to be like more aggressive in your timeline. So I don't think I need to say that. I think this is pretty aggressive. But I mean, like the chair said, this is, this is what we have. This is the opportunity that we have. April 12th isn't moving. That's what the MSBA sets. So we either don't try and do this or we try and do this. And so to me it's a kind of a no brainer that we forge ahead and we see if we can do it. And I think one advantage too is it's not like we're starting from scratch. It's not like we just found out about the need for the buildings yesterday and that the community has spent no time over the last X number of years and that we're going to be shocked about the issues and themes that come up. I mean, we could probably have a pretty good guess of what some of them might be. You know, so that being said, it is a pretty aggressive timeline. Five weeks to do those sessions, to do those nine sessions I think is achievable. I think, you know, like most of these things, communication is the key. And so articulating that it's not just these nine opportunities that you have to provide your input. And if you don't get there, if you don't have childcare or whatever, you know, then tough luck. But articulating that there are opportunities before, during, and after, that are more than just perfunctory. More than just, oh email school committee, whatever you want. But we actually will take your input seriously and it will be as valued as if you were coming up and speaking in public comment. Because also some people don't like coming and speaking in public as well. It's a difficult thing. The idea of listening sessions I like. I like it to be honest for this particular problem, better than the mechanism of a survey for trying to gauge public sentiment. I think trying to gauge public sentiment in general isn't a possible problem to solve. It's one of those core problems of representatives of anything. So what does the public think is very difficult. And I think in this particular problem, there's so much background that has to first be presented. All the context that you presented in your slides. Plus, you know, half a dozen other financial restrictions that we didn't mention, but we could go on at length about. There's so much context that you can provide to then get a meaningful answer to a survey that we want high participation from, I think would be difficult. Plus I don't think it's that we're looking to see, you know, whether a particular opinion is at a very specific percent. We're not looking for, do you want A or B and does it cross a 68% threshold or something like that? We want to get a general sense of where people are and I think this is a good way to do it. I would be a little concerned about the skill level of facilitation, not that I have any doubt about the sincerity of you or the other volunteers. By the way, I think the notion of getting reps from people that supported and opposed the past project and were known for that is great. Because this is really about, I think the superintendent school committee facilitating consensus, not forcing consensus. So I think that's great. You know, that being said, this is an intense thing that a lot of people care deeply about because it is so serious. We haven't talked about it for so long, but being able to work that effectively such that it produces the outcome you want, I don't know, it's a little, it's a skill, right? To be able to facilitate a group. So I don't know if maybe we want to think, I mean, I know the clock is ticking, but about professional facilitation when there's low dollar consultants who might think about, I don't know, just sort of throwing it out there because I don't want to set people up for success. But yeah, those are just my initial thoughts. So I saw Mr. Nakajima and then Ms. McDonald. Yeah, and I just want to say something very briefly because we're going to have time to talk again and also want to give people as much time as they want to speak. One of the things, interestingly enough, when the superintendent and I were talking about this subject probably a month ago or more because I mean, many of us have been banging the drum that we needed to get organized around what we were going to do next, both the immediate conditions of the buildings, the intermediate needs, and then how we either substantially renovate them or replace them in some sense of urgency around it. And you made the comment at one point that you thought we had until June or July to get town-wide consensus, we need to put an SOI in, but then we need to help see what we can get for consensus. And your language changed publicly recently at a meeting where you said we have to get consensus by April. And that stuck in my head, but since I think the conversation we have is more private, I thought, well, I'm not going to ask you publicly while you're saying something differently. And so we caught up about the issue. And what you said was the feedback from the MSBA was in fact so clear about whatever level of consensus is created in town around what our needs are, where we're going. That in fact, if it wasn't included in the official SOI, the official application, then they were not, they were not, they were going to discount it. They were not going to treat it at the same level of seriousness as if it was included officially. And that really struck me on a couple of different levels. I mean, one, where we're going is not going to be completely manufactured, right? We're going to have to get there together and we're going to have to do it. If we don't, if we fail this year, and I hate to call it failure, but if we start this conversation, we're aggressive when we fail this year, it will not be entirely in vain because if we, let's say it's like I've argued with people in the room all raised their hand and said, I don't want to do this. Let's just submit next year. This is going to be too hard. We would have to start the conversations now anyway, right? Because the point is when we have to get there, there's also a real felt sense of urgency on the condition of the buildings. So one of the reasons I'm saying this is because there's an interesting exercise and actually the chair said this to me the other day and I thought it was really interesting is what we're looking for is what is and what can we actually agree on? So my guess is coming out of the last project or in general, a lot of the debates in town we've been having, we can figure out a lot of the areas of disagreement. To me, one of the interesting questions is what are the areas? Where is their common ground? Where is their overlap? Where are there areas in which there's a common commitment, core commitment that we have to improve these facilities, improve this learning environment? And as Mr. Deming said, that we can't manufacture that consensus, but I actually think as hard as this process is with this timeline, it's worth going through together because no one would be in this room right now. I'm confident no one would be here. If they already didn't feel some level of urgency or unimproving our schools. I already said that really clearly in my view last time, much more trenchingly than I plan on saying tonight on the urgency I feel around it. So great, that's a starting point, right? And so these conversations are going to be critically getting there. I understand we have public comment now and school committee discussion later, so I'm not gonna go on, but I do have questions and thoughts about the listening sessions. I think it's a great starting point and proposal of it. You mentioned earlier about what we don't need to build consensus on or shouldn't include in that and that we would later discuss what we should be building consensus on. And is that for now, or is that sort of when we begin the full discussion, school committee discussion? Yeah, so I think they're looking for the kind of information that's not again, not about, I know I'm going back to that, but I'm doing it intentionally, not about specifically the building design or what it'll look like, but they need to know some core questions. Are we planning on replacing both buildings in some way, shape, or form, or not with this project? And that's pretty much in my conversations with the core question they need to know and as a result of that, there'll be an enrollment study if we were fortunate to get in, but they need to have a little more context than that about how that's going to work. So that's really at the gestalt of it. What they asked me was around, are you looking to replace both buildings with one? Is there some consolidation idea not that it's necessarily the same as the last time or is this looking more at the solitary, whatever is the preferred or prioritized school? That's at its core. I'm building on that, I apologize, but Mr. Drones and I were in a meeting with you in the MSB last summer over the statement of interest and it just reminded me of that conversation because when they were asking us at the time being what we were thinking, we probed their thinking and we said, well, what are you looking? And we were saying like, we want to tell you what you want to hear, although we might have wanted to do that, but it was more a matter of we need to understand better what you're trying to get at and their answer was extraordinarily pragmatic. They said, look, and I'm making up the global number for the sake of argument, but look, if we have $200 million to hand out for projects, we need to know whether your building is a $60 million building or a $45 million building. Is it a $70 million building or a $30 million renovation because when they go back to their desks and do their little spreadsheets, they need to figure out where does a puzzle piece fit into the larger picture of where they're doing projects. And so for them, it makes a huge thing literally, just if it's like a 350-kid building or it's just for sake of argument, a 600 or 700-kid building, those are two totally from their perspective, they told us those are two totally different kinds of projects and would be slotted in differently into their thinking. And so they need clarity, right? So those are my memories. It's a bit of a Tetris puzzle is what I remember them saying more or less. Yeah, budget-wise, yeah. I think I'm speculating, which is I want to be cautious about doing, but I think the other thing that I could imagine them wondering about is because the size of the school was an area of contention in the prior project. And again, I'm not trying to open that up for debate, but I think everyone would agree factually that that was, there were people who disagreed on that issue. They want to see, is there consensus on some solution? Because there's people who feel really passionately, felt very passionately on both sides of that issue the last time and is, you know, where are we, we being the community, not we being we, on that very question. So I think there's everything Mr. Nakajima said I agree with, but there's also some pragmatic pieces from them of wanting to make sure that there's community consensus on a path forward. Thank you. Or is that, does that answer all the, okay. Yeah, okay. Was I sure there was some additional, yeah. Okay, and I also, you know, I don't want to take too much time. I actually want to make sure that we do get to hear from there's a significant number of community members here tonight, which is wonderful. We want to make sure that we allow time to hear from them. I do want to say there was one comment that Mr. Nakajima made just a moment ago about, you know, the clarity of getting the consensus around the SOI. And I also just, you know, want to make a point, I think, based on the presentation that you just made, Dr. Morris, that there is still not, even that, you know, that the MSBA has indicated a strong interest in having the community express support for moving forward, you know, very big picture kind of thing. There's still not a guarantee. And so, you know, I don't say that to throw any water on this process or to, you know, try to squash conversation or discussion around this, but really just because I think it's important for us to go into this eyes wide open, right? In that we are having a conversation amongst ourselves and with our community about what we want to have happen and with a potential project. It doesn't necessarily mean that we can dive into at this point any details or that we are ready to move beyond that big picture sort of agreement. And the reason for that, again, is because, you know, A, we're not sure that this would even result in an accepted application, but B, because there's so much of this that would end up getting worked out with the community and in a later stage with the building committee and all of that. So I do think it's important to help get that straight as we talk to town council members and as we talk to individual members of the community that this really is the very initial beginning stages, but we really just want to try to see if we can get some support and a consensus from the community to move forward with the project. Does that make sense, Mr. Demling? Yes, of all the details in the details, right? And so if I was to, if I'm thinking of every possible issue, theme, argument, design decision about the building projects and whether it slots appropriately in this big picture free SOI phase or whether it slots appropriately to the building committee phase, I don't have the answer about all of those. Like I won't mention them now because I want to make sure we get to public comment and keep saying that. But I think that's one thing we need to clarify a little bit more, right? Particularly prior to the listening sessions so that it's not just an open-ended, hey, what do you want in a building, right? And so it's maybe a little bit framed about these are the sort of things we've identified as the big picture issues that the MSBA is looking for and this is what will help us out in advance of the April 12th observation. So with that, unless there's something burning that you... Well, I think it's relevant before public comment and it's very brief, if it's okay. To that point, the way I was envisioning the listening sessions, I should have said this earlier, was to have kind of non-leading prompts that the community could respond to. So you're right about the framing piece, right? Because if we get on a conversation about new versus ad reno, that's a really helpful feedback for our future building committee. And it's not that it's not worth talking about but it's probably not worth talking about now. It's not gonna get us to a consensus place on an item that we need consensus. And maybe it gets us to consensus on something that we would need years from now. So I do think having some open-ended prompts to start a conversation was sort of in my mindset of how to frame and solicit meaningful feedback that we can bring back here. Yeah, and so okay, so on the agenda, we actually, we do things also a little bit differently and I should have said this at the very start of the meeting. We purposefully put public comment kind of in the middle of our meeting tonight. Primarily because we wanted to have the presentation from Dr. Morris to help set the framework for our conversation but also because typically speaking for our school committee meetings, we have public comment at the start of our meetings and then oftentimes, you know, community members will leave after they make their public comments and we don't usually respond to those comments. So tonight, even though we haven't set up a format for like a Q and A kind of forum, so we won't be responding directly to questions or things like that from the community, we felt like this would help be more of a relevant conversation if we could have the presentation followed by public comment and then followed by committee discussion. So with that, I'm going to open up public comment now and as a reminder, if anyone wants to make a public comment, you can come up to the microphone, you have three minutes to speak. We will be adhering to the three minute rule tonight and what I would suggest is if you have more you wanna say and three minutes is up that maybe you take a seat and you can come back and continue your comments after others have had a chance to speak. There are a lot of people here tonight and we wanna make sure that everybody has a chance to speak. We have about 40 minutes slotted but I've heard from committee members that we are interested and wanna hear from as many folks as we possibly can. So we will extend that if we need to. But with that, I will open up public comment. So if anyone wants to speak, please come up to the microphone and state your name. Can I say, did you want me to set up the screen where people can see? You can do that. If you haven't set up, that's great. I have it on my phone too over here.  Sure, that's great. Hi, my name is Ira Brick. I live on Strong Street. I sent you a letter, but I'm also gonna read it so people can hear it. I moved my family to Amherst in 1993 aiming to live somewhere between Florence and Pella. As we had two young children, one about to enter first grade. My scouting mission included visiting every elementary school in that target territory. And when visiting Wildwood School, sat in on the classroom where I couldn't locate the teacher for quite a while that all the children were not quite quietly engaged in the project. I finally realized that the teacher was busy with an energized group of children under a large table in the corner. I made a major life decision to live near Wildwood based on that gut impression. Both our children grew into themselves during their years there. They were not obviously harmed by the open classroom design that seemed like a good idea when constructed. Also, I taught elementary school after college, running an experimental free school, K to six age kids, all together in a structure that made open classrooms seem parochial. I understand that the struggle over our school redevelopment has become quite unpleasant between those who supported the co-located school plan versus others who thought it was too flawed and that it was less risky to take our chances getting funding later for a more ideal plan. And I recently heard that the reason we were again denied for funding is that the state feels Amherst is not in a ready state to receive it because of our discord, which leaves us incapable of spending it wisely.  And to help do that, consider a unique effective exercise that could simultaneously get us more on the same page, albeit a new page, by using the services of the world class design firm IDEO to build perfect schools. IDEO is an international organization but has a Cambridge office. They use a magical strategy to think about structure and function using a team of people, us having every sensible and wacky perspective going for the biggest audacious ideas in a process to design something that is both spectacular and practical. Some of what they've designed are the first computer mouse, steel case chairs, federal offices, and as you can see in the links below, the perfect shopping cart and cubicle. If anybody just Googles IDEO, shopping cart or cubicle, you'll see that. I think that for Amherst to have IDEO guide them through the design of our own perfect school, it may increase our goodwill and collaboration and sharpen our focus on what important criteria belong on our checklist aside from whether to co-locate or how to divide grades. Think of it as a way we can escape from our current Chinese finger trap. The trick there is to ease up, loosen the tension and slide out of the trap. I hope enough members of the school committee and town council, plus other school and town leaders and influencers will be open to this low risk experiment that could be great for what ails us. I have not been a central player in this dispute but would be more than interested in working with others to bring this possible solution to town. I'm a three school age, children one in the elementary school and two here at the high school. I come to thank you for your leadership and your initiative in moving this process along at a rapid pace because we all share that sense of urgency. I would like to encourage you all to continue to keep us as a community focused on what the MSBA has tasked us to do which and what it has tasked us not to do. So thank you very much. Thank you. Hi, my name's Kip Prather. I'm a sixth grade teacher at Crocker Farm. When Dr. Morris brought up the temperatures in the schools, it's very real. I'm in a particular room in Crocker Farm that is not like the rest of Crocker Farm. The upper corner and gets south and west exposure and I put a thermometer on my board and it was in the upper 80s but that's not Crocker Farm. State Crocker Farm is pretty decent coolers compared to Wildwood and Fort River. And I didn't get, I don't have the temperatures for Fort River and Wildwood but I did report my temperatures because I had a thermometer on the board to my principal and he confirmed to me that Wildwood was experiencing similar conditions and I know firsthand what 87 degrees feels like teaching kids and education was weighed out on my list. I had fans blowing everywhere and the kids were really melting. It was sort of like hydrate, hydrate, try to keep the kids as cool as possible with the lights down and it's not conducive to good learning. And I wasn't thinking of that when I showed up tonight. I just thought that when Dr. Morse brought it up. But I would, my feeling about the vote two years ago was that there was a lot of misconception and confusion amongst, you know, I'll just call it what it is. I think a lot of the people who voted no were voting kind of out of in this state. And in my opinion, I don't think they had enough knowledge of what it meant if this doesn't go through. And I would urge the committee and then obviously the town council and Dr. Morse to push the real simple explanation of what we're looking for and what we want to build and what happens, what's the reality, the timing. My friend who was here a little while ago gave me some insight, Tom Davies, on the timing on what happens when we don't, when this doesn't go through. And my guess is from what he told me it's quite a long time before we're gonna see things. So I think it's urgent that we act. I'm sensing that the urgency is in the room so I'm happy about that. But I would say a real simple way of getting the information to the residents of Amherst would be effective. And that the priority would be students and staff getting them into a sound, safe and healthy building and then what happens if we don't act. Thank you. My name is Melissa Jarreau and I always talk too long at these meetings so I'll try to keep it short. I think if there's anything good that came out of the proposal not passing in town meeting and I actually really, really struggled to find it personally and yeah. But if there's anything good it's that I think since then because it's such a complicated process there's a lot more information that town members have and there's a lot more information in general about how people learn and about what an integrated school really is or what an integrated school system really is and how important preschool is, how successful preschool is to life outcomes of kids and families and communities. So my hope is that even though two years ago and before that just listening to a lot of these conversations it felt like integration was on everyone's list but it was never number one and never number two. I mean talking to voters, right? I hope that that changes, you know that this we keep in mind that you can have equity and excellence and that all of our kids deserve a great education. So I really hope there's been so much research that's gone into really public newspapers and journals about since DeVos and Trump and Black Lives Matter about what true integration is as opposed to just having a lot of different color kids in your class and yeah I really hope that we can learn together and I hope that you guys continue as that original plan did to make equity and integration a priority, so thanks. I just wanna say there's a few folks that are in the back of the room standing which is totally fine if that's what you prefer but there's also a whole row of seats that are open over here if you wanna come up. No pressure. My name's Jean Fay. I am a special education pair educator in my 21st year at Crocker Farm. I'm also a parent of three children that went through the Amherst Public School Systems and I just happen to be the president of the Amherst Pelham Education Association. Last October I gave a presentation with photos to the Amherst School Committee that showed the horrendous conditions of some of our buildings and I was appalled and I know that you were all appalled at the conditions because the photos really spoke loudly. Dr. Morris spoke earlier tonight about the conditions of our buildings being challenges to providing an excellent education to all our students but I actually would take that a step further. I would say that we're at the point now where the conditions of the buildings are becoming barriers to providing an excellent education to all of our students and my colleague, Kip, mentioned Crocker Farm which is a building that's considered to have no problems. His classrooms saw temperatures in the high 80s. Well today I took a photo of a thermometer in a building, a room in my building. The temperature was 42 degrees. So our staff and our students are in learning environments where they cannot succeed right now. We are in a town that values education. If we value education, then what are we doing? We really need to fix this now. This is a priority, this is beyond urgent. Thank you for all that you've done. I wanna make sure that the community knows that the school committee has really listened to the educators on this issue and I thank you for that but this is urgent. My name is Janet McGowan. Both of my kids went through Fort River and I have a few questions and then sort of a comment. I'm wondering if the MSBA was aware of the Fort River Feasibility Committee process and all the good work that they've done and I'm hoping that community members will also learn about the work during the public outreach process because I thought they came up with seven basic goals that almost anyone could agree on and I thought that work and then the different options they had of different renovation builds were just super illuminating to me. So I think that information should be brought to the community. I think if you're gonna have a community process you need to be very clear about what the community needs to reach consensus on and how will you know if the community has reached consensus without a survey because it's the middle of the winter, there's lots of people, you can reach out to your circles but your circles aren't the residents of Amherst and there's tons of people that would not be reached out and a lot of times if there's a snow day you've lost one of your meetings or maybe if 30 people showed up but 7,000 people voted on this and so we need to reach those people. I think in terms of the clarity of what you're asking people, I think what I'm hearing here is the issue is does Amherst want to consolidate their two smaller schools into a larger one? And that's the core question. The question really is asking does the community want two smaller schools about 350 to 400 students or do they want a large consolidated school of 700 or so? I think that's a question people can answer. You can ask them in a survey, reach out to them, get information back from them. There are lots of residents in this town that their kids have gone through the schools or they have gone through schools or their grandkids are going through these schools. We have generations of people. There's lots of educators that have strong views on that and there's lots of thoughtful residents. In the last process, I can't tell you how many conversations I have with people who just were asking super picky questions and about the different plans. And so I think that if you're gonna look for consensus you have to be clear about what you're asking about it and actually ask a lot of people. Otherwise, I just think I don't understand how you could do that without a survey and really pushing information out to the community and having as many avenues back. And if that's the question, I think you can get an answer to that. Hi, my name is Mary Clark. I sent a letter to the committee and I really thank you very much for all of your hard work. I have questions about the SOI which are mainly how soon can we possibly be successful in changing anything that currently exists for example Fort River, my son's school. I don't know if he's gonna be able to even have anything different exist. He's a second grader in the time that he will have there. Is there, what's the timeline I guess is the question I have about the SOI word to be successful. The other is I guess the feeling that anything would help. I mean I just, the urgency I can't even underscore but I also think about the timeline that Dr. Morris recommended thinking about from the MSPA process 50 years in the future too. Like this is not about my son's elementary school experience at this point, it is. He is experiencing it. I don't like it. He has great teachers. He has great friends. He has a great experience because he overcomes that but as several people have already noted there are significant barriers to that success every day. They are multiplied with problems I think. Individual children are not learning well in those environments. I think we're talking about also getting people to think about what the future of Amherst is also. That this is, we're building for 50 years in the future and that these buildings should not exist this way. They're absolutely unacceptable and I wish that to change. Can you please tell us what we need to do to make it work? I don't know how to fix the divisiveness in the community about everything but how can we come together as a community to unite behind investing not just right now but for the next five decades? I just, if you could help us, we as community members might be able to help too. That's the plea that I have. And again, I think there are lots of, again, details about getting into how could this be arranged and what's the best way to get feedback but I really appreciate you offering the opportunity to communicate with you and for your really sincere listening. I think that's a huge benefit to me but again, I'm just gonna underscore urgency, tear it down would be a good option. Replace it with something new would be a great option. I'm like, that's yay. That's what I'll vote for. Thank you. I'm Maria Kapicki, a parent of elementary school kids. So elementary schools, all of our schools are community resources and ultimately to get to the solution that we all want which is to address both of these schools the question being essentially sequentially or simultaneously is going to require community response to do that. You're going to have to get consensus not only of the people that you can reach with listening sessions and the folks that can come and attend meetings and do that but you're going to need to get enough people, hopefully a large majority to truly bring our town together. And I think that if you want to know what people are going, how do you, what is that thing that is going to bring a large majority of people together? I think that there's really no other way to do that than to ask them to provide enough information to say these are our basic choices, give some information that we can all agree upon of we have choice A, B, C and these are the pros and cons of all of those, explain that, give that information, do monumental work to get that information out to as many people as possible, most especially to the folks who can't come to listening sessions, who can't, who don't have the resources to be heard, who can't do that, but everybody's going to have to weigh in on this. And I think in order to explain to the MSBA, this is the consensus that will result in some future time and us going forward and putting the period on this project, whatever project or projects it may be, I don't see how you can do that without doing some kind of survey without asking and getting a response back and saying, what's acceptable? What can we get behind? I'm concerned that if we just do listening sessions and we don't get that, we're gonna be making decisions based on speculation and based on sampling bias of who's weighed in. So that's my concern, but thank you very much for taking this on. Sorry, my name is Paula Lima Jones and so my comment might seem like the antithesis of what everyone is saying, but it's not meant to be. I do really appreciate the efforts that everyone is saying about having community input. I'm relatively new to Amherst and one of the things that I noticed about this community is that we have people with a lot of opinions and I think that's awesome. And I think that I would also like to hear from this process more from the educators, more from folks who have done this research. I know that a survey had gone out and I think with that survey and the previous process had gone out about whether I liked a K through six, I might have said yes, because that's all I knew. I find myself to be a very educated person, but I don't know what I don't know. That's not my area of expertise. So in this process that we're also giving the information or we're letting the community know that we're hearing what you're saying, but we're also putting into the mix kind of the research base, the evidence-based practices. So thank you. I used to teach at the high school for 32 years and now I'm a grandmother of a child that will be starting kindergarten in Wildwood. So if we could go back to the slide of what you don't want, they don't want input on. I think that would be helpful because I think in having these listening sessions, I'm afraid a lot of that is gonna come up. So by April 12th, they don't wanna know if it's new construction or addition or renovation that's preferred, right?   And then in terms of the specific design that we enclosed classrooms that have space and light how do we not engage in that conversation at these listening sessions and still get consensus for what you need to produce? That's what's confusing me. Thank you. Thank you a lot. I'm gonna like to say something as a principal. Yeah. Maybe that's fine. Nah. You're always welcome. My name's Derek Shea. I'm the principal at Crocker Farm, but also two kids in the school system. Let's just say a couple of quick things. So I worked at Fort River for eight years. I loved it. But I just wanna go back to some, I don't know if Melissa's still in the audience. Melissa, so Melissa said something earlier, really important about equity and I think excellence and integration and Dr. Mike Morris sitting here worked at Fort River for how long Mike? Five, six years. It's genuinely really difficult to accomplish some of those things when you're working in a building that really makes it difficult for fairly large numbers of kids to, I was the guidance counselor there, so I was working with some of the, some kids who were at risk and who needed some assistance. And so it was genuinely a struggle sometimes to get to that place. Melissa, when you've got a building that really didn't make sense in lots of ways. My two kids went to Weldwood for the longest time, told this story a number of times when Mark's Medal closed and they went to Weldwood, they say they don't care as long as Nick's the principal and Bill's the bus driver. So some of that was true and then some of it didn't quite work out because I know one of my kids struggled with the competing noise that took place in the room and it wasn't easy for one of my kids because of that. I was fortunate enough to go to high school, to work for a while and then I went to work at Crocker Farm nine years ago. I was given a family a tour today and so Crocker Farm has some faults but we've got a picture window in every room, walls. We've got this huge, beautiful cafeteria, a brilliant big ceiling so you can have lunch there and you make all the noise you want and it's not really noisy. We've got a beautiful library. Kip, Mr. Prather here, he sent me that 87 degrees thing on August 25th, the first day of school. It was outrageously hot in his room. It was 42 degrees today in the gym. That's where it was 42 degrees today. It was really difficult to be in there. You can warm up but it's still 42 degrees. I should just say my last thing is this is something you just remember. So if you've got heating in your house and some folks have got air conditioned, so you press a button and the heat comes on, right? And then you press a button and the AC comes on. That's not how it works in our schools. It takes a week for it to turn over from one to the other so it's a big guessing game. So Doug P on our top electrician guy says to me, what do you think? When do you think the weather, I'm not the greatest with the weather, when do you think we should change it over, Derek? I don't know, Doug. I haven't looked at the weather recently. So sometimes you can be moving into something where you're turning it over to heat when it's gonna be another 80 degree week and you've actually just had to do it because you have to do it. So that's all our schools. Some things need to give. I don't know how we get there, but definitely some things need to give. Thank you. I was here during the presentation by the architect of the Fort River Feasibility Committee and they had the committee, which had a whole variety of views. They had seven goals for the new building or the change or the renovation or whatever you wanna call it. Could you read that out to the group? Because I thought, everybody who saw that I thought was like, oh yeah, that's what we want. And so I wonder, that could be a kind of, even at this meeting, sort of a unifying thing. And that, you know, the committee's worked for like a year and a half through a lot of issues. So I wonder if someone could just read those out to the group? We can try to look that up, but I don't know. So Jenna Markwood, one very quick thought exercise that might be helpful before these listening sessions is to actually draft what that statement of support might look like that you submit with the application. Not the content of it, but the structure. Because I think a lot of the questions that have come up about what exactly is the consensus can be on? How do we know we reached it? All of those things, if you mentally think through what that statement would look like now might be actually helpful in driving what those conversations look like. So just a small process. Hi, I hadn't necessarily planned to speak tonight, but it's Christa Osterling-Rising. And my daughter went through Crocker Farm, my younger daughter starting in third grade, and that was about 20 years ago. And I think it was at the very end of her time there that they had the renovation. My concern is that I think there were a lot of people who had children in the schools that desperately needed to be renovated, and who felt that it was very urgent that it be done immediately. And I can understand that feeling, but I think what a lot of people may not have understood is that some of us, and I felt that it needed to be done right, that the most important thing was the children, and that the proposal that had been proposed would have been disastrous. At least that's how I felt. I felt that it would be bad for the children in every way. It would have been bad educationally, and I read articles that talked about research that said that this was true and that the teachers hadn't been in favor of the proposal that was put forward because of that. It would have been bad emotionally, and I can say this from my own experience with my oldest daughter, for whom transitions were difficult, and very difficult. And I had a conversation at one point with Eric. I hope you don't mind my saying that, where he said that when he came to Amherst, his family moved several times, and that was traumatic. That was the word he used, and I hope you don't mind my quoting you on that, Eric. But I wanted to be right for the kids. I want the buildings to be healthy buildings. I want the heat to be right. I want all of those things to be right, but I don't want the kids to be rushed from one, to be transitioned three times in elementary school from one school to another. I don't think that's a healthy situation. It would have been terrible for my oldest daughter. That's why I felt so strongly that it was a terrible proposal. And I am still not sure who came up with it, although I've been told several times that it was Maria Garrick. I don't know what her educational background was, but I thought it was a disastrous proposal. I thought it was, as I said, I thought it would have been bad educationally, very bad emotionally for my daughter, and also I felt that it would be bad environmentally. And we're handing a planet to the kids that's already in danger environmentally. Why bust them all over the place more than is necessary. I just felt that if we're gonna come up with a proposal, it has to be the right one. It has to be good for the kids. It has to be good buildings. And I was looking at people who wanted to rush into a proposal because they wanted the buildings to be fixed. And I understand that the buildings need to be fixed, but I want them to be right for the kids. And I thought that the reason there was so much divisiveness was that people who had kids in the buildings who felt that the buildings were in bad condition and who knew they were in bad condition were assuming that it was about money, that people didn't want to pay for our new buildings and they had the wrong motives for not wanting the schools to be passed. And that's not true. And I'm just gonna say one more thing and that is that I think it was Patty Stein who had been on the select board, if I'm getting her name right. There was a very tiny article in the paper in the Gazette where she wrote a letter saying, or it was a letter, a little article saying, I opposed this school for a number of reasons. And one of them was that she had spoken with, I think a superintendent or teachers and superintendents at another school system that had put through a system like that, a co-located school where the kids went from one school to another, an elementary school and they really regretted it. They really regretted it. And she said, we already built Wildwood and Fort River. They were supposed to be state of the art. That open classroom idea was considered to be a great idea. Now people don't feel that way. And I think it's probably not a good idea myself. I don't really know, my daughter was in Fort River. But we have to do it right this time. I don't wanna rush into a bad plan. That's not fair to the kids.  We need to do it right. And that's why people voted against it. They really wanted to do it right for the kids. Thank you very much. It's Wendy Weber and I've had two children go through the schools, Amherst schools. And I guess just my observation is, as we're going through this process for community input, maybe to extend the why. So everybody that doesn't have children or haven't had children go through can also appreciate and support this. We all know the schools are falling apart without a safe, comfortable environment for our children. They're not gonna get a good education without that strong instruction and a good facility. And so I feel strongly that we need to, you know, if we have a good, strong education, then we're gonna have a strong economy. People are gonna wanna come here. It's gonna build the tax base. We're gonna have people that this is a sought after place rather than leaving. And I think building and talking about that bigger picture about the importance, not only of education for all of us that have kids and really appreciate it, what does it do for our community? And really building that bigger why. And I just want to second, I think a facilitator has to be as well trained to really run a good meeting. I thought that was a good point. So my suggestion would be to get some qualified trained facilitators as we go through this rather than have any kind of inherent bias come out or people that don't have that training. I don't know the individuals, but that's just my recommendation. But anyway, so just to reiterate, I appreciate all that you're doing. I appreciate you taking the time and listening to community and the importance of an education is not only important to our children and the parents of those children, but to the community and to the strength of the economy of that community. So thank you very much. Thank you very much. Hi, I'm Catherine Oppie. And I just wanted, I wasn't gonna speak, but I just wanna follow up on something that Wendy Weber said. But first I just wanted to begin by thanking the school committee and thanking the superintendent for your urgency, your understanding of the urgency of this and all the work that you are putting into helping our students be in buildings with windows and walls. And we've heard so many people tonight talk about what it's like to try to learn and teach in these buildings, what the conditions of the buildings are, and listening to some of the educators and thinking about the fact that now the buildings are actually acting as a barrier to learning. So, but to follow up on what the previous speaker said, as we go forward and as we try to reach consensus and we're all focused on the schools right now, but also to understand, and I think put into context, that the schools, the elementary schools and Amherst are a department of the larger town and that there are several very important projects coming before or in front of our town and looking for very limited capital resources and the school is just one of them. But there are community members who feel equally passionate and feel it's equally important that we have a new fire station or that the library be renovated because so many people use it or that the DPW, all of the things that you have all heard before, but I think in educating, as we go forward educating the community and trying to reach consensus, I think we really do need to put that money is not unlimited and that we really need to put the schools and in the larger context of the town. So, thank you. Yeah, we don't have that immediately in our disposal and I think Dr. Morris just walked away, so he's kind of the only person. I'm sorry, so you wanted to read the seven goals that were presented? That was for the Fort River Feasibility Study Building Committee. Does the committee have any objection to that? It's the same as what we're coming in. It is? Okay. Just want to make sure we have time. I'm so encouraged when I heard these things. So, the architect, I think the committee agreed on seven goals for the new whatever happened to Fort River. One that the building would be simple and child friendly, that it would have an age-appropriate scale, that there would be natural light and welcoming, a welcoming feel, using multifunctional space like not having flexible space that could use for multiple things, having the materials and the building itself to be beautiful and durable, having connections to the outdoors, and then a focus on security and safety. So, I'm feeling like the energy is sort of winding down a little bit in public comments, which is good. That means hopefully everyone that came here to say something has said something. And again, I want to thank all of you for coming and taking the time tonight to share your thoughts with the committee. It's really, really important on so many different levels. We all appreciate how busy all of you are and what's involved in stepping away from your normal lives to come here and speak to us. We really, really appreciate that. I think, again, I want to reiterate something that was said earlier, which is that this whole process will be extremely important to make sure that we have as wide and as, you know, engaged in community as we can, widely engaged in community as we can. We are definitely going to be pursuing various avenues to make sure that that happens. But we also have our normal avenues, which are, you know, e-mails, you know, phones and reaching out to us as many of you already do. Grocery stores, et cetera. So I definitely want to say again thank you for coming tonight and we really appreciate that. So the next item on the agenda is a discussion. And I think we heard a lot tonight from the community, but also from Dr. Morris that is worth talking about and considering a little more deeply. One of the things that Dr. Morris and I had actually spoken about past week or so as we were preparing for this meeting was in, you know, not just a timeline and process for gathering input and feedback, but really what it is. And we heard that mentioned also in some of our comments tonight. Are we looking for, you know, a statement of some kind at the end? Is there some kind of, you know, petition that circulated what does consensus actually look like in a community with so many different voices and so many different opinions? So I think those are questions that we have to try to answer. If not tonight at the very least, sometime in the next few weeks, I think it'll be extremely valuable for the community to understand what we're working towards in order to be able to come up with something that feels like to be and must be hopefully consensus. So that was one thing that I think, you know, we wanted to definitely talk about. But I'm also just curious that, you know, there's, you know, there's been some concerns raised about making sure that we are, you know, we're hearing from as wide, you know, group in the community as we possibly can. There's been conversations about, you know, focus groups and surveys and things like that. And then I think also, you know, what the parameters actually would look like for a project. So that's I think what we wanted to put out back to the community or to the committee to consider. Dr. Morris, I don't know if there's anything else that you want to add to that before we dive in. I think as long as I can jump in when I have thoughts, well, the discussion is happening. Yeah. So there's no formal, we didn't really think through like a formal way of doing this. So I'm just going to invite the committee to go ahead and jump in. Ms. McDonnell, do you want to leave us off? Yeah, I think you raised the point that I've sort of been tossing around. We talked about it at the last time that we met, which is twofold is that we, you know, when we need to document the consensus and then as you talked about it, we need to facilitate the consensus. So I think maybe that might be a way that we can structure our conversation tonight is maybe start with how do we want to document that and then separately, okay, how are we going to facilitate that that we can get to it? There are very different processes and how to get to that point and I don't have the answer, but I think that that can be a good way for approaching the conversation because I still struggle to envision what is that going to look like and I've heard the suggestion of a petition and that might be a great way like putting that whatever the consensus is on a piece of paper, virtual and collecting the signatures of community members that would sign on to that, but that's labor intensive and so may not be 21st century, the best 21st century way of doing that. So, you know, open to other ideas and ways that we can document that. You know, obviously the vote of the town council and our own committee is a way and necessary, but what other ways can we get to demonstrating that consensus is, I think, a key thing before then we can start talking about how we're going to get to that consensus. Yeah. So, I had a couple things and one thing which I'm going to toss out and then put aside is I think it would be I'm interested to hear whether the committee thinks it'd be helpful to have some kind of a presentation from the town manager or from town hall on town finances and capital projects and what we're doing fits with that. Just because it was brought up just a moment ago by the public obviously that this, whatever we're going to be doing around a new school building or buildings is going to have to fit within the town's finances, other projects that are going on in is literally, I guess, a department of the town so it would be I just wonder whether that would be helpful to have something and then I've got the weeks, next few weeks that would be almost more informational than anything else not trying to help shape what the outcome is, but just give both the committee as well as the public a better understanding of where that is and the other side of speaking more directly to what Ms. McDonald was just talking about I feel another suggestion that came from the audience around trying to reverse engineer what what does the consensus document look like and I think going back to something Ms. McDonald said last meeting what's also the minimum, I think, viable product but in this context what's the sort of minimum agreement that's also meaningful because the key challenge we have is that there's really a consensus on something and that would be kind of fun to do because it feels like we haven't had a lot of consensus all the time but if it was a consensus that didn't speak to the MSBA's considerations and didn't really speak in a meaningful way then that wasn't really a graphic just as, right and on the other hand, as was also mentioned by the public, there's like a million things you could imagine trying to line up consensus on where we know they're like all of them are like third rails and we could be arguing for the next two years over them whether they're asked for in their submission or not and I don't know if you have any guidance on that but I say that because it kind of also helps shape in my mind what the sequence is of trying to get there's a process to me of both public education not having to tell them what they had to think but literally informing them of the process and until as many people as possible are informed then there's nothing to ask them about their opinion because they're just starting to think about it the second step is trying to gauge if we have a sense of what we are outcome, not the specifics of the outcome but literally what a member of the audience said what does that frame look like then we start to know how we frame a conversation to at least probe for a consensus and then after you do that then you could test whether or not there's broad support for it because you can then make a meaningful statement and test more broadly if you'll agree with it and these are just thoughts but it's one of my questions for Dr. Morris I guess and I'm trying to be cute about this but I mean are we at a point where you have a sense of what an end document looks like not in its details but even in its frame yeah so so I think the things that MSPA my opinion is the things that MSPA would be looking for would be kind of the rough size of the school which we talked about earlier and whether it's replacing one or both buildings and I'm being intentional in my language because we've gotten a lot of emails in the last couple weeks and a lot of creative ideas about how some people might hear those two questions and feel like there's a pre-ordained answer that like oh well if you want to replace both buildings the school size has to be take two buildings and combine them and I think there's many different ways that one could approach that task whether you're doing one building or two and so I think the options are less limiting than perhaps the perception when I say size of building and replacing one or both buildings because there's a number of factors at play there so I know it sounds simplistic but really there's more variations than one could list here and there's more ways to approach that task does that help? Yeah I mean I would go ahead Mr. Dilling no no go ahead please alright go ahead first I'm sorry I didn't see your hand before so I just started talking before I mean I would think that you know this all of us are going to have opinions scope educational plan and all of that for me it feels like the wrong the wrong approach I feel like hopefully in everything that we do and every conversation that we have we should be thinking about what's best for students in the district and for our educators and I think that a lot of the ideas that have been put forth both in the previous project and in this one are trying to help us meet that and they're trying to as Mr. Nakajima said I think most people have best interests in school and students in mind that said I think that there's also certain things that only you Dr. Morris or perhaps and or perhaps other administrators and educators can provide in the sense of what it's like what the experience is like working and living in those buildings from day to day and that can provide some actual guidance for us on what an appropriate project would be in the right parameters where we give guidance is basically on what the town what we're hearing back from community what sort of policy we want to have in place with regards to an educational plan none of which we're ready to get to at this point and so I guess what I'm thinking about when I'm hearing all of these comments coming back from individual community members and even from us what I'm hearing is a need for that synthesis that you described before of coming back and sharing with us a recommendation that's something that we can then respond to and that we can bounce off of because before that point it's basically just us propping more of our ideas and more opinions and it's not necessarily giving any structure or shape to what an application would even look like so even just answering the basic question of what the rough size of the school might be I think all of us would come or many of us would come up with different ideas of what an appropriate size for an elementary school would be that doesn't necessarily make it right and so I feel like we've seen even Fort River and Wildwood in themselves a physical structure of those buildings have experienced many different numbers of students and one of those at this point Fort River has just over 300 students for a school that was built for close to 700 students in its prime that size of school is inappropriate for the number of students that are there but I can't say that's the preferred size of a school because it's not something based on anything beyond my personal like or taste what I would want to hear and to inform that is do we think that this is actually the appropriate size for where our students are learning are the spaces that are in there actually right sized for them and right sized for educators in the 21st century are we having challenges right now with the spaces and do we expect that there should be any changes made both because of population but also just because of learning styles all of which I know from conversations and some of those answers but I think having that exercise happen during the next few weeks will be helpful for the rest of the community that may not be as deeply mired in some of these decisions as we are so that's just kind of where my thinking is at this point I think it's really again very helpful to hear from you what you're thinking is and your recommendations are which I know are coming but at this stage I'm going to go with Mr. Dunlap so it's interesting I'm trying to tie this back to your presentation from last meeting and your statements there and so to very roughly paraphrase you you talked about what is your first level your personal priorities that you would be a dogged advocate for and correct me if I'm wrong but it was walls 80A accessibility and completed meaning both buildings solved before our current kindergartners leave elementary school so the first three I don't think there's much debate about the community and if there is it's not certainly something I would not endorse so I think we're cool on natural light 80A accessibility in rooms it's that last one that I think is the thing that is the very first step I think just again in terms of time efficiency it makes sense to expeditiously look at it directly because I think the rest of these questions fall after this it's the way I think about this is that if that's truly a non-negotiable if truly we want both buildings solved within the next five and a half years which is when our current kindergartners graduate if we were still K-to-6 and further we assume that the town is not going to fully fund a building and we've had no indication that the town is going or able to do that when I last pressed the town manager on it he very accurately said he was not a politician but his advice is that he would not doesn't think that's a feasible thing so we're working under the assumption this is MSBA and so if we're working under the assumption this is MSBA and we're going to be done in five and a half years there's no other option than to have one physical structure that's the constraint so when I think about constraints I get concerned about going out to the community and asking all sorts of broad-based questions about how many buildings would you like and what is your preferred educational like that is interesting and helpful and productive on a certain in a certain context but in this context I feel like if those two things are true we have to do this MSBA and we are committed to being done in five and a half years it has to be one physical structure there's no other way to fund it and I think the information you present tonight about the educational urgency and financial constraints we've gone over them before getting people to that point and saying this is where we're at then lays the foundation for the conversation about well then what size of school do we want to have what does that look like can it be collocated can it be different kinds of designs and then it gets into great configuration I don't want to put cards before the horse but I also want this thing to have teeth if it's going to actually be a consensus document not just a happy document I think we're going to have to talk about just the concept of great configuration whether or not it's appropriate in this kind of document so that's sort of where I start I think that gets to some of the comments that we heard during public comment a bit of confusion about what would help the MSBA and what they don't want to hear and what they do want to hear in terms of consensus building so yeah, that's where I'm at Mr. Nakajima I'll let you put a finer point on my earlier comment about having the town manager or other built-in town hall come in the reason I wanted that to happen is because I think we need to have a deeper conversation about knowing that the town council is going to be making a lot of decisions before the horse but our committee needs to have a better understanding so I remember the comment the town manager made but the bottom line is I hate to call it an off the cuff comment but essentially an off the cuff response in a meeting about the feasibility of self-funding a school isn't really thorough enough to diligence for us or for the community to hear so my point is what you're raising Mr. Dilling is exactly why I wanted the committee to see if we could invite in the town manager and others a finance director to come in and speak and provide some more greater information and context for the community discussion around financing I think it would be helpful for all of us particularly if the outcome is that it is less likely or less feasible that we could even consider self-funding then you're right, it puts more of a fine point on what are we really looking at and I think that the I mean we had a long conversation about this last meeting around the question of what does it mean to fix both schools in a short period of time I actually think that part of the not to read into it too much the part of the comment the superintendent made a moment ago was that sometimes all of our creativity or awareness around what's the best, what's the optimal combination between facility design infrastructure and the optimal learning environment for kids is overly predetermined it's either predetermined by the experience of your kids or your own experience or what you read in Time Magazine once and I'm not trying to be sarcastic about this but I'm just saying we walk in with these cognitive lenses that are really strong and powerful about what we think works in a school that may or may not be born out so may not be born out by the relative shades of gray between different scenarios almost all of which involves some level of trade-off between how much money you have how much space you have to build a building how much time you have and all these kind of constraints you have there's always going to be trade-offs in what you do with your facilities and those trade-offs are going to have impacts that some people in the community are going to have really strong opinions about that's why being guided by the best research and best educational practice is important but also I think something that the superintendent was hinting at earlier not be over-determined with the idea that the only scenario is one scenario and forgive me this is actually not a comment about whether it means one building but if it means let's say one campus or one area or one complex are those different ways those things are designed are those different ways those things are laid out are there different ways of doing shared services that can still create a good scaled environment for kids my guess is probably but I would like to know more about that because I think part of the problem I have and it's also part of the problem of the idea of let's say if you take an argument we decided tomorrow to do a survey I don't have any idea what those questions would be how they'd be framed out or how we'd even understand the answers if you said to people right now would you prefer two smaller schools over one larger one they're going to put all sorts of freight into what that question means to them then if you also said would you like two smaller schools or one larger one but you can get the second one 15 years from now and I'm making that up but I'm just saying if you said that you might get a different answer from people right and so not only does that document become highly politicized potentially politicized but the more anodyne it is the more sort of boring on paper it is and like watching paint dry probably the less meaningful the answers are going to get out of it because the reality is a lot of what you're talking about is fairly dynamic and also there's more than one way you can design these things and so what I'd love to do if we're going to come to if we're going to try to approach consensus on some things what I'd love to do is think about these facilitated sessions or even in advance of them how do we improve the quality and I don't mean like I'm not this is not a statement that any debate has been bad or uninformed what I'm saying is what we do is we sort of have a do no harm attitude that instead of further messing up the town's debate on this subject we leave it better than we found it right and we actually have we have even better information around what this could look like and with that it's also more likely we're going to be able to get hopefully you can move on sort of some consensus I agree with what Mr. Dillmonger is saying a moment ago is that I'm also it's an interesting challenge on the one hand I am genuinely curious to see what consensus we can arrive at and that can only occur with open listening and open and active engagement which is not overly freighted with our expectations and you have to mean it in order for it to happen on the flip side of it I also think it's really important to not mislead anyone about what would it look like to actually have the problem solved in five years or five and a half years if there's an answer to that and the answer is plural not singular it's still probably a bounded set of alternatives right it's not like it's not all things to all people hopefully that added something to the conversation I'm not sure it did building on things that each of you have said I do think I love the suggestion of the listening sessions I'm not sure I think that that's enough sort of and I don't know the answer there's a lot I want to say but sort of staying on this idea of open listening versus frameworks versus given our timeline I don't think that we have the luxury of having completely unbordered or bounded open listening sessions and conversations I think we really need to get to a point that we're showing some options and I think a lot of thoughts swirling in my head people come into these things and say either this or that it's going to be the evaluation of that is going to be based on their own experiences or their things that they've heard and we won't know that and that's not going to be useful for us but it's also we need to it's not an we don't have unlimited funds we don't have unlimited time whether we adhere to our goal of getting the current kindergartners into new learning environments in sixth grade or just before the buildings literally fall apart and fall down that detail it's meaningless we need to do something so I can eat all the ice cream I want and it's going to cost me something it's going to have impacts on other things in my life so I think we need to spell out what that it's a mathematical thing where you draw the lines and you see this is the area in which I can make a decision and I think sort of mapping out that the decision parameters that we need to be making and some of the options and reading all of the letters and emails that we've gotten over the last couple weeks I agree that there's just to say we're going to address both buildings in one project is not necessarily me it's going to be one building with 700 students there's so many other creative ways that we can address focusing our community discussions on eliciting some of those ideas and getting that consensus and I think that can help people come to this that proposal with more than just oh well if you say it's going to be both we're going to address both buildings that's only one solution I think that's we're never going to get there and I think by bounding that conversation that way we can get to sort of more of the nuances within that conversation I think also on the listening sessions and I don't know if we want to go right now into that or if we want to stay in this sort of the same space I think either way it's fine yeah so on the listening sessions I do think again given the timeline that we're looking at and the importance of that as well as all of the well you know the strong and well founded opinions and ideas and suggestions and conversation coming from the community we really need to have skilled and professional facilitation I think for that in addition to coming at it with a framework and actually looking to get reaction as opposed to just open ended feedback so that's my one thought on that and probably even not just the facilitation but developing the framework and the prompts like having some professional support on that as well as synthesizing those learnings into what are the themes so having you know all sides and as many community members present to hear that including ourselves is important but I think facilitation and the synthesis we need to have some of that professional support so that we're ensuring that we're getting the most out of it so whether that's a task force that's pulled together of small task force with experts or that we actually look to work with somebody that can support us in that and I do think I hear the many requests for surveys and I know that that was my first knee jerk oh we need to do a survey and I think surveys get a bad wrap coming from my background in product management and the like where we do a lot of surveys but the one thing is you can't rely on just one mode for collecting input and I do think and I don't buy into this idea that we can't measure community sentiment you can if it might be difficult in the time that we have but I do think that we can get a good handle on it and I do agree with the concern that we need to make sure that we're getting that broad input and I worry like some of the people who have spoken tonight that by focusing using these listening sessions as our sole means of getting that input is going to limit the kind of input that we get so not sure you know there's creative ways that you can build a survey so that it's sort of decision choice matrixes or sort of the either or and you present sort of trade off analyses that's probably getting way more complicated and expensive than what we want to do so I won't recommend that but you know are there other ways that we can address the different ways that people are comfortable and able to give us feedback on some of our reactions and one thought that I just have you know is it a public folder or discussion board or chat area where we're collecting the letters and sharing them back also so that the rest of the community can benefit from the comments and ideas that we're getting in our inboxes or our conversations statements from the public for the public consumption are ways that people can read what other people are saying and contribute to the conversation that way in a way that isn't in the newspaper or standing and coming to a listening at a school committee meeting or something like that and I don't, those are just one idea I'm sure there's others but I do think that we need to spend the time to think of other ways beyond the listening sessions that we're getting additional documented and shared input from others. Thank you. Dr. Morris, just a question who happened to know off the top of your head what the response rate was for the last survey that we that was done for the building project? I don't. I apologize. Do you have a rough sense? I'm sorry, I really Okay. Yeah, yeah, no it's um I raise the question because if I remember correctly you know I remember seeing that and thinking to myself you know it was a decent response rate but not not as high of a number as you would hope right for you know several thousand people that are potential voters on any given topic or issue um and so you know I think for in terms of engagement I would agree with Ms. McDonald about not relying on only one form of solicitation right so I think you know listening sessions are useful because they allow you to kind of dig under the surface so not two dimensional the way the surveys tend to be um when you release a survey out there and you can only fit so many questions on a piece of paper or an online form for people who's interested don't fill in that I've gone through that a million times I know a lot of other people who do as well um and you can't understand necessarily even with a comment section to what degree people really care about something or don't care about something right or you know when you're making decisions about something that might affect policy or that might affect something like a building uh it's difficult to gauge how deeply people are informed about it and how much they really care or know about something so you know those are my concerns with surveys going out I feel that uh listening sessions or you know even better if we had all the time in the world we probably would have some sort of focus groups you know and uh facilitated focus groups of some kind there was a public commenter who mentioned IDEO before there I've worked with them before it's a design thinking firm um they're wonderful extremely expensive very much in high demand you know around the world and I don't have no you know uh I have aspirations I guess that they would you know potentially want to work on this particular project but you know I won't pursue that because I don't think that that would actually be very reasonable for this project however I do think that facilitating some kind of I think you call it facilitating consensus is extremely important right having some kind of you know opportunity to gauge where people are to ask pointed questions to you know have that back and forth might be useful um so you know the problem I think for us is budget and time right because those 10 kinds of things are expensive you bring in contractors from outside to do that work um you know they tend to cost money uh money which we don't really have and I think also that the timeline you know means that we would be trying to hire contractors to come in and do this kind of work um and to schedule these you know facilitated conversations which may also prove very challenging I'm not saying we should do it but it's just something that is in the back of my mind so to me that means you know uh surveys less desirable but maybe a combination of things where it's you know some you know survey going out to gauge more or less general people's education or knowledge of where we are in the process provide some general feedback and then maybe some additional focus groups or something that allow us to get some more pointed information you know from folks and allows us to ask some of the deeper questions and I think it would look very much like the listening sessions that you outlined Dr. Morris already because we're looking at educators we're looking at you know parents and uh caregivers and we're looking at just the general community right it also provides I think an opportunity for town council to provide some some leadership in this which they've expressed an interest in already we've received a couple of different emails from town council members uh expressing interest in you know bringing these discussions to their districts having you know conversations um you know I think that would be a great way to engage the community I would want to make sure that everybody's hearing the same thing and that they're you know so if we were to do something like that we want to make sure that you know we have decided already what the it is that we're trying to get to before releasing that out in the wild um but again I think a great opportunity for some engagement in different circles so we don't necessarily always you know have input from um finally I would say I think the you know the town finances I was wondering if the presentation that was made at the four boards meeting um by the town manager provides enough information I realized that that was before the town council came into you know uh receded um but I'm wondering if that provides at least enough financial information about where we the town currently is I wouldn't imagine that much has changed in the past four months um that then allows us to kind of take it to that next level as Mr. Nakajima mentioned just understanding you know where we are maybe it's you know that presentation plus some additional uh data that we have come in or I don't know if the finance committee or anyone else has you know given any further thought to where what our town finances look like but in many cases I just you know I'm trying to think of just in terms of timing and what's feasible if that might be a way to get to what you were saying you wanted um and that I think would probably be helpful for for all of us right I also just wanted to bring up uh some as Spitzer I had mentioned this at the start of the meeting with Spitzer had shared some some thinking with with me um prior knowing that she wasn't going to be here and one of the things that she had said was actually very similar to what we've been talking about was you know uh we want to be able to agree on a timeline and a means of engaging stakeholders which is what we're kind of grappling with right now um but one thing that she suggested is you know that maybe we just want to be able to uh include in the application that there is a process in place for soliciting input and maybe you know not sure if that's enough but if we don't get to a point where we have complete consensus whatever that looks like in the community if maybe it's enough for the MSBA to understand that we have a plan in place for getting that right I don't know um I think that was just something that she wanted to share um and then I think she she also mentioned you know sort of parameters um so obviously she hasn't been privy to this conversation but it sounds like I think a lot of you know all of us are pretty much in the same place of sort of establishing some general guidelines and finally I just wanted to say I think you know that I also appreciate having some general guidelines um and that goes back to my point my earlier point to you Dr. Morris about coming back with some recommendations because I think that that is a great place to start in addition to the finances but also to town finances and feasibility of any project but also just understanding you know what what your recommendations might be for moving forward extremely helpful in my mind for the decision-releness Mr. Nakajima? You could just be giving a million things to respond to so we're giving so a million in one a million in one and I just want to put a I wanted to put a fine point on the very last thing that the chair just said is um I have heard you say and we have talked that um you think that you're just sitting around eating ice cream and staring at the sun but based on your experience and your expertise um that an optimal learning community or learning environment is around you know 300, 350 students or something like that and I've heard you make that comment more than once particularly recently what's probably this goes to the point about about a couple things one, framing out where we think we are in this process in the town two understanding where this process is in terms of the MSBI where we are in town and what we're doing where are we in terms of trying to get consensus what does that consensus mean does it mean trying to solve both buildings in a short period of time whatever pressure that puts on because I mean those are sort of mechanical pressures that are on us we know we don't have all the money in the world I think there is probably already consensus that the buildings stink and need to be substantially overhauled or replaced and there's probably not actually a lot of disagreement on that and not even that there's some urgency around doing that I'm not even sure there's any disagreement on that so then the nub of it comes back to this question of what are the core educational principles that we actually think are critical that we support as a school district and then what facilities correspond or what kinds of facilities because it may not be singular, it may be plural what kinds of facilities can match those learning objectives and then I'm going to throw in a third one just because I feel like it is that when you're dealing with buildings that are going to be around for 50 years what decisions do you need to make now around educational program and what ones are actually not necessary to make because the building itself may in fact go through many lives over four years or 50 years and needs to be flexible enough to be able to adapt to them Do you want to walk out now? You have 30 seconds to respond all right I'll get the timer back up so I want to start from the place actually going back, Mr. Demling brought up a comment I made last week about kindergarten in sixth grade and actually a piece of feedback I received since that meeting in December which is interesting, it doesn't change the timeline or it doesn't change my thinking but it was just a different way to put it it wasn't my comment but I think it resonated with me is those kids that's talking about like one year so that's like a very aspirational thing that we think about our younger students now what I should have been thinking about was babies being born in 2019 and do they ever go into an open classroom with elementary school experience so ironically I heard that after there was a baby at our last meeting so it was sort of resonated with me and perhaps that person watched it on Amherst media and saw me talking and said what the heck are you talking about like look 12 feet over so I think it doesn't change the sense, I say that because I think it's about the urgency so I agree with some of the comments particularly Ms. Fay frequently about the urgency that we're facing right now so I just want to restate that that it was I think for me I have to start from an aspirational place of what's the best I can do to advocate for the kids that are in the district now and are coming to the district like that's my job, I should be routinely things that I do whether that happens or not is obviously a much larger conversation but that's I feel really strongly about that I think on the consensus point I wanted to back up and share some thoughts about the consensus so I'm going to make a statement that's not a fact but it's just my opinion but I think it's likely the case that even in the best case scenario here where we get broad consensus, we file the MSBA, we feel really the community comes together that we're not going to get to agreement on what the best possible school size is like those things I think there's going to be a diversity of opinions and I don't believe that we can get to a place where everyone at the end of the day agrees that their personal favorite opinion is the one that happens like I think that's a false not that anyone said that but I want to lower my expectation because I think that's a false expectation I think there's certainly people we heard it tonight in the audience who have really strong feelings about school size one way or the other, they're really strong feelings about co-location one way or the other right so for me it's how do we find something that can move the community forward how do we find the hill that everyone can coexist on and move together and build consensus on that hill there's a bunch of hills that people aren't willing to build consensus on and for me I'm trying to figure out can my sense is the urgency and I can be a little flexible on some of the other pieces because I feel like we have buildings that are not functioning as they should students are being educated in their education would be subsequently different if their environment was different and so that's where my focus is I'm not willing to let go of everything that's not what I'm saying but I'm trying to model that what I think is perhaps the optimum is important but it's not the only thing in the conversation and hopefully people in the community can meet me halfway to understand that they may feel really strongly on one certain aspect of this but how do we find that place where we can move forward together so that's really what I want because I agree with the points multiple people have made everyone wants what's best for kids there's no disagreement there's no argument that people who are spending time on a Monday night to come to a school committee meeting even if they intensely disagree with the other people's thoughts they're doing because they care about the kids I think really clear so when you think about consensus for me it's not my first choice option or someone else's first choice option can we agree on some foundational principles and then find a way to move forward where the vast majority of people can say either that makes logical sense that's perfect or in a perfect world I might choose this but you know what for the good of the order we understand and gladly move forward with so I think that's the consensus building that I personally am looking for is not convincing people about the last project or future project none of that is in my thinking at all it's how do we actually find that hill and so that's what I'm constantly thinking about as I go through this I think the challenge in finding that hill is the number of unknowns in some ways is larger or greater than the number of knowns so we think about the unknowns what's the capital need eight years from now if we still have one or both of these buildings that's really hard to script out some things like roofs and HVAC and all that will know some of the schools are 58 years old what's going to happen to some of the electrical there's so many unknowns in that equation that it makes it hard to project out those things how quickly we get into MSBA whenever people who look at data and there's people who disagree on that I think the thing that everyone agrees is there's a range right no one knows even if we get everything goes well to the chair's point earlier if we're going to get in the chair there's no certainty in that we can guess, we can believe but MSBA because I asked that question because I'm that guy who asked those questions they're not willing to share that and the thing they continue to say on their right is every year is a new year the first runner up not that we were but some district that is the first runner up that if some other district like decided we're imploding, we're not even going to go through this process who would they go to that does not guarantee that the following year would be in right away it's not a queue that you wait your turn and you just logically get in and they're incredibly clear on that topic so I think one of the things that when we're projecting these things out the number of unknowns is hard and I think something that happened last time but I could be wrong is that this is really expensive right so even for the most ardent supporters of the schools the most cost effective plan that one could come up with has a sticker shock for some folks that are going to say couldn't we do this differently couldn't we figure out a different way that's going to happen as a reality of projects cost escalation is real the longer we wait the more expensive things get the per square foot cost is going to be more five years from now than it was five years ago and so that's a reality it's not like gas, right which is more variable this only goes in one direction unless as Mr. Nakajima predicted not predicted but stated sorry other people are starting to predict that we have some economic meltdown and things change but you know if you look at the history of the MSPA projects only go one direction in terms of the cost so how much things are going to cost eight nine years from now from standard escalation it's going to be significantly more you know even five years from now if you compound the interest of four percent you're at twenty two percent that's a lot when you're talking about millions of millions of dollars so that's even just I'm pointing this out now because I have an answer it's actually to raise the point of the number of unknowns that makes it a really challenging thing to talk about I agree with Mr. Backelman and I'll talk to him I think the four boards meeting actually captured some time about this including today and I don't want to speak for him but I'll be so bold to say he'd be happy to come and share his perspective on things as to listening sessions right I'm happy to be a large part of the facilitation or not I don't have I just want to put it out there I felt no affront some people are being cautious not at all and whatever the committee decides is best for the process I'm happy to be heavily involved not heavily involved and I can see the pros and cons of that I think that's a real discussion that you all need to have and I'm not probably going to proffer an opinion on that but I do think it'd be good to leave tonight with a sense of direction on that just because of the timeline I think perhaps the last thing I'll comment this go around you know as it goes to Mr. Narkejima's comments about learning environment and size and educational programming so when I came to Fort River in 2001 it was between I think a bit over 550 students I think it was a school that worked well for children then Principal wanted to see if he could break it up into sort of school within a school or he didn't frame it that way and sort of for a lot of reasons it didn't happen and for me it's really when I think about it it's the cohort size so you know when we think about number of students who then get mixed into classrooms year after year right so that really matters for the student experience it really matters for the teacher experience so I think there are different ways you know there's the size of the building and then there's the size of the experience that students and teachers have and those can be two very different things so I do think there's a significant amount of research to suggest you know it's a little harder than those numbers but between four and five hundred seem to work very well for kids knowing each oth