Good evening. I'm calling to order the regular meeting in the Arlington School Committee on Thursday, November 17th, 2022. I'm Liz Exton, the chair. Permit me to confirm that all remote members and persons anticipated on the agenda are present and can hear me. When I call your name, please respond in the affirmative. Oh boy, I can't see you. Um, Ms. Ferranti, I'm going to just, our AEA rep, I see her. Can you hear me? No. Can they not hear me? All of a sudden, why we do this makes sense now. I'm thinking that this audio is not going. Test, test, test. There we go. Okay. Now can the people on Zoom hear me? No, yes. Ms. Ferranti, can you hear me? This morning, I was cursing you, and Leah was like, I'm going to move into cold room for a minute. I'm going to give you two. I'm going to give you two. No, but he's like really tough. Yeah, no, see, okay, so see, said. Test, test, test, one, two, one, two. Test, test, test, one, two, one, two. Can the people on Zoom hear me? Okay, yes, we're getting some thumbs up now. Yes. All right, excellent. Thank you. All right, we're going to try this again. Please confirm, please permit me to confirm that all remote members and persons anticipated on the agenda are present and can hear me. When I call your name, please respond in the affirmative. Ms. Ferranti. Yes, I'm here and I can hear you. Great. Thank you. Thank you. I can't. Dr. Allison Ampe and I can't, I can't read all of these names. So I'm Dr. Howman, do you know when we get I can read them here? Okay. And they're, you're here for school improvement plans. So when we get to those, we will, we can double check. Oh, Dr. Janger, I think it's meeting of the Arlington School Committee is being conducted in a hybrid model. Before we begin, permit me to offer a few notes. First, this meeting is being conducted via Zoom is being recorded and is also being simultaneously broadcast on ACMI. Persons wishing to join the meeting by Zoom may find information on how to do so on the town's website. Persons participating by Zoom are reminded that they may be visible to others and that if you wish to participate, you are asked to provide your full name in the interest of developing a record of the meeting. All participants are advised that people may be listening who do not provide comment and those persons are not required to identify themselves. Both Zoom participants and persons watching on ACMI can follow the posted agenda materials also found on the town's website using the Novus Agenda platform. And finally, each vote tonight will be taken by roll call. And Mr. Heiner will not be with us this evening. The first item on our agenda is public comment, but we do not have anyone signed up for public comment. So we will move into Arlington High School student representatives. Welcome. Yeah, if we can take that mic or you can move to that chair. Hi. Can people on Zoom hear me? Yes. Updates from the high school. The girls cross-country team made it to states. Just huge. We're very proud of them. And HHS is hosting its biggest school dance ever. We're having 500 people come. Very exciting. It's tomorrow night from 7 to 10. Have fun. Great. Thank you so much for being here. All right. The next item on our agenda is a field trip approval for Arlington High School. Dr. Danger. Yes. Mr. D'Agostino here as well. No, I don't see him. Okay. So we are looking. We have just begun. Last year there was one international trip resumed following COVID. And this year we are hoping to resume our Italy trip. So part of the reason this request is coming late is because there's a lot of history behind it. And we felt like with the interest and experience, even though it was a late proposal, we felt we were prepared to do it. So the plan, as we have done every year or every other year since for about the last 15 years is for our music program, both instrumental and choral music to travel to Italy. The travel company is a company that we've worked with for the last 15 years. They base themselves in the current model of the trip in Varese, which is in the north, and then do trips around northern Italy and then up into southern Switzerland performing in various venues. And then they do a residency at the Logano Conservatory in Switzerland with professors and students there. I was fortunate enough to go on the trip a few years ago. And it is, it's wonderful. The kids are great. The travel is great. The coordinators are great. And the experience of performing in these places. I mean, the two things I'll just take away sort of. One was when we went to a performing arts high school in Italy. And they performed. Bohemian Rhapsody and all the students started singing along. And so Mr. D'Axino stopped and invited all the students on stage. And so we had a 300 person performance of Bohemian Rhapsody with Italian performing arts high school. And then my other favorite thing was when they were performing at the Conservatory in Logano. I stepped outside and watched as the conservatory students would walk by, hear the music, try to figure out who is performing, peek in the door and then run and get their friends and all start pouring in. So it's a wonderful experience. So we are looking for approval for that. I can easily answer questions if you have questions about precautions we're taking, some of the changes we put in place post COVID things that we learned during that rapid cancellation or anything else around that. Thank you. Questions or comments from the committee? Ms. Morgan. This is a trip that's only, sorry, that's only actually open to honors level students, correct? No, it is open to anyone in the instrumental or choral music program. That's not what it says on that. Do I have that wrong? Application says you have to be an honors orchestra, major goals or jazz band. Yeah, you're correct and I'm reading it wrong. Right. So it is not the general choral or the general band. Correct. And the way honors level works in the music program. I wish Mr. Dagestino was here for that is those are advanced ensembles. We have a motion by Mr. Thielman, seconded by Mr. Schlickman to approve. I had, I had a question. The AHS music program field trip in Italy to Italy in February, 2023 discussion. Dr. Allison Ampe. Thank you. Dr. Janger, what I didn't see anything about what plans were if a student tested COVID on positive tested positive for COVID during the trip because what I was reading online is that current regulations in Italy require a five day quarantine. And then you have to be symptom free for two days before you can leave. So it could continue past five days. And I know I've had a friend who's been on a trip and I mean, it was an adult trip and stuff and they didn't have really great plans if you tested positive. So I would be, I'd really like to know what they have. I mean, I hope this isn't an issue. I know our kids are vaccinated and stuff, but still it's possible. And given Italy's rules, I want to know where the kids going to stay or that plans would be made. Yeah. I mean, so the insurance, the big change that we've made is that the, there's a fairly hefty insurance policy now standard in the past. Some of those insurance policies were optional. And so I was going to just pulling that up, but I'd have to go page by page to find your concerns. But there is coverage for illness, interrupted stay as well as extended stay. And we would work with the insurance. We would work with the travel company to allow them to stay there and leave a chaperone in order for them to stay. It'll obviously with any illness depends on the particular conditions. Right. We've had illnesses in the past where kids couldn't travel for longer periods of time than parents come over. Most of that is covered by the insurance policy that's in place. Okay. That's great. I just want to be sure that our kids are covered if something was to happen. No, that's a good question. And I actually, I appreciate your logistical thinking about that. And we'll make sure we have a conversation with the providers. Um, Dr. My question is, um, What opportunities are there for students who would like to go on this trip? But, um, The finances are a challenge for them. Sure. So, um, We have created in the past a, an international travel scholarship fund. Um, there's up to $10,000 currently set aside for international scholarships. I think Papa is also planning on providing a little bit more support for that. Um, There as soon as they're approved, we'll share that information with students and students can apply. We also build a little bit of a cushion into the, um, pricing of these through an administrative fees so that, um, In the case of sometimes late in the game, there are smaller things, you know, someone can afford some piece of the, the food or the fees. Um, And so we make sure there's a little bit of a cushion in that there's a needs-based issue there. But the main issue approaches the international travel scholarship, which I believe is shared in the packet. Um, I revised the timeline because this is running a little shorter. So I gave the example of the timeline we followed in the past. But what we would do as soon as this was passed was make the information available to students so that they could apply. Students have the, there's two deadlines for deposits. Um, I think we're going to be able to do that. Um, We're going to be able to do that. Um, $500 and then a second deposit of $500. Um, those, then the final payment is only necessary 30 days before. So if there was a student who might be questionable about whether they could afford it, we'd also work with them. Any other questions or comments before we take a vote? Um, we had a motion by Mr. Thielman seconded by Mr. Schlickman to approve the HS field trip roll call vote. Mr. Schlickman. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Dr. Allison Ampe. Yes. And I vote yes. That's six in favor. Um, five. Five. Thank you. Five in favor. One imposed. A little improvement plan. The bracket school. Welcome. You want to, those of you who are in person can step up to the table. Good evening. Hi. Good evening. Welcome. Um, they'll need to share the mic. My name is Stephanie. I'm principal at bracket. Um, best job in the world in my opinion. And tonight we have. Our interim assistant principals, Eileen Woods, who's on. Um, zoom. And. Jen rich, who are off to a wonderful start serving the community this year. Members of our leadership team who are here on this presentation, our classroom teachers. Susan and Kaminsky and. Callie Russo. Who are on zoom as well as our literacy coach, Lorraine Kerr math coach. Michelle Crawley, our. Amazing math director, Matt Coleman, who is here and our school council member, Elizabeth Rollins. I'd like to recognize all the contributors and reviewers of our plans. With a special thank you to the members of the school improvement council. Listed here on our first slide. We thank the school committee. Superintendent Liz Holman, assistant superintendents. Allison Elmer, Michael Mason and Rod McNeil for their continuing champion. And support of the bracket school community. Our second, our agenda this evening. Will be an introduction. Clicker. Pointed at Liz. Okay. An introduction to bracket. Bracket wins. And challenges. The roadmap. Priorities for 2223. Key initiatives. Action steps. Resources to support our success. And questions and answers with the community pictures. Tonight we will frame our initiatives as they relate to our overarching goal of equity and climate. We begin by sharing with you a glimpse of bracket this year. We continue to be a vibrant and active learning community. Where we find joy in learning together. Guided by our mission. Vision and core. Values of respect, responsibility and love of learning. The life. Bracket school is of course our 200. 429 students in grades kindergarten through five. In addition to the specialist areas and our SLC three to five learning center. We have a supportive culture and provide meaningful and engaging instruction because we deliberately work to invest students in their learning. Our 70 staff members are focused on developing and nurturing trusting relationships. And fostering a sense of whole school belonging. We embrace and partner with our PTO and school council. Throughout the year. Through our weekly grade level ace blocks we continue to collaborate with teachers. Service providers and coaches in reviewing student growth performance and instructional practices. We cultivate curiosity through discovery and exploration. And we facilitate and focus every faculty meeting on our initiatives through professional development. Our instructional leadership team established this year. Is collaborating to improve instruction by focusing on student learning and achievement. And building teacher capacity through differentiated support. Our teaching staff is nurturing the qualities necessary for building equity, excellence and academic and social emotional growth for all students. Okay. Slide four aligns bracket with the Earlington district vision of fostering a school classroom culture of belonging, joy, growth and empowerment. We're intentionally building a classroom climate that supports the emotional and social needs of our learners. And we look to monitor student participation in implement active learning strategies ensuring that every student is heard and engaged. This area of focus will have a direct and positive effect on student learning and achievement. New this year we've implemented a student government model for fifth grade students and they're working in different committees. We have a student issue committee, a spirit committee, community service work and the students are sharing their voices and their focus is on belonging. We've developed an effective weekly communication model between school and home. We just held a culture in creativity night which was wonderful. We had a primary education program which was dedicated to one math night this week and we have some upcoming math and literacy events planned and throughout the year we'll have principle morning coffees highlighting our work and providing an opportunity for families to engage in open conversation. Our equity and climate goal will be embedded into all of our work as we build a welcoming equitable community at university level. Our goal is to increase our understanding of social justice and identity integrating culturally responsive practices and promoting student voice and choice. Our instructional objectives prioritize both math and literacy instruction. Our discourse objective aims to build teacher capacity in tier one instruction by providing resources that improve student discourse. Our data and differentiation objective will utilize a collaborative model for tier one instruction employing small group differentiation based on evolving student progress in grades K to five. We will present our equity and climate goal first. Slide six is the results of the panorama survey which shows a low percentage of favorable cultural awareness and action questions at bracket. The survey and the Arlington equity audit show a need for additional work and cultural responsiveness in our community. As a result, our goal is to increase our understanding of social justice and identity integrating culturally responsive teaching practices and promoting student voices. This year, bracket staff will embrace courageous conversations, to build a welcoming equitable community where all voices are heard sensitively and respectfully. Through our professional development work, we will continue to deepen our understanding of identity and how to engage students in conversation around culture and race. Additionally, we will organize our resources at ACE and during common planning time with our director of equity inclusion, SEL and social studies coach support as it relates to culturally responsive learning and a sense of belonging for students and families to ensure equal opportunity for all with an inclusive lens. Additionally, we will work with our instructional leadership team consultant by planning focus faculty workshops and student family presentations. Our art, music and physical education specialists will engage students to share and express their identity and heritage and integrate that information into instruction that attempts to deepen our understanding of identity and race. We will continue to engage students in conversation about belonging to a culture with the goal of developing their cognitive well-being and inner self-worth. Bracket has embraced the district's science of reading initiatives and has been teaching phonological awareness and phonics in grades K through 3 with fidelity. When we compare the cohort in grade 2, we can see positive growth trends. iReady data in grades 3 through 5 confirms the strength of phonics knowledge. Bracket staff will continue to provide systematic solid phonological awareness and phonics instruction one half of Scarborough's reading rope. iReady data in grades 3 through 5 show a need for more targeted comprehension instruction and a renewed focus on vocabulary building. mCAS results point to a strong need for improved writing instruction across the genres. This all leads us to focus on the other half of the reading rope language acquisition. Increasing student talk throughout the day, sharing their thinking, rehearsing their writing orally, will build language skills that directly impact reading and writing performance. When we analyze the 2022 mCAS data by domains, we saw that our students scored higher than state averages in each of the mathematics domains of geometry, measurement and data, number and operations and base 10 infractions, and operations and algebraic thinking. Despite learning disruptions that occurred in the 2020 and 2021 school years, our students are performing above state levels in all content areas. That also points to positive growth trends across the content areas and mathematics for grades 3 through 5. Our mCAS data is also demonstrating a need for inclusive, engaging, learning environments that welcome all students into the math community. A disproportionality between high needs and non high needs students in our school compelled us to reflect on our math communities, discussions and identities. We will utilize a collaborative press-in model to modify Tier 1 instruction while differentiating in order to provide access points and increased rigor for all of our students. Through our culturally responsive practices and by integrating practices that improve student discourse, we will build stronger teacher capacity in Tier 1 instruction. Bracket staff will prepare strong readers and writers to strengthen oral and written language development and daily interaction with a variety of texts to promote reading comprehension. Teachers will increase student engagement in math by integrating reflective classroom math discussions and strengthening instructional math strategies that elicit mathematical thinking and discourse from students. Bracket staff will continue to implement a data-informed collaborative model for Tier 1 math and ELA instruction employing small group differentiation based on evolving student progress in grades K through 5. Teachers will use core district formal and informal literacy assessments in phonics, phonological awareness, reading comprehension, vocabulary and writing to monitor student progress and tailor instruction using small, flexible groups. Teachers will use district formal and formal math assessments and screeners to monitor student progress and tailor instruction using flexible groupings. Current resources that we are grateful for are our full-time literacy coach and reading specialist and interventionist focusing our math faculty meetings with professional development aligned with district and bracket initiatives. Math, coach and interventionist in the collaboration with curriculum directors and district coaches and of course our very supportive PTO. We need to support what we need to support our plan would be ongoing professional development in the areas of differentiation, student discourse, culturally responsive teaching and SEL practices and an additional reading specialist. Next slide. Thank you for your attention to our improvement plan and for supporting the important work of teaching and learning. Thank you. Any questions or comments from the committee? Dr. Allison Ampe, if you're can't even see you. I'm good. Thank you. Thank you for the presentation. Mr. Schlickman. Okay. I'm a little fuzzy on your desired outcomes which I think are the most important part. I'm very appreciative of a needs assessment and actions you're going to take but the reason why these actions are being taken are to have some sort of measurable outcomes. The next year we can take a look at it and see have we been successful if we're addressing second grade literacy what sort of metric or outcome do we have. Now the one thing I'm really puzzled by is you stated in your document a 10% increase on the scores. Now MCAS runs from 440 to 560. So if you've got a grade 4 ELA score of 507.6 10% increase on that would be 558.4 and I don't think you mean that because that's really unattainable. So you really need to clarify that the increase will be in MCAS if that's sort of your desired outcome that you're putting in the plan. Can I hear what you were thinking about because I can maybe help you to word that a little better? Can you clarify what data which slide you're looking at? It's in the plan. Oh it's in the plan. Got it. Can I get a sense of what you were thinking you were trying to achieve with the MCAS? Percentage was inaccurate but definitely an increase. Well you might be thinking about a 10% 10% increase on the score. If you're thinking a 10% increase in the number of students who are attaining mastery that could be where you're trying to go with this that's my assumption but 10% of the students going from one level to the next level rather than needs improvement or almost meeting each of the needed categories. Your problem here is I used to do this for a living and I look at this pretty critically and I want you to be successful. I really want you to be successful with the metric that is both meaningful and attainable. Okay thank you. Anybody else? Mr. Thielman? Thank you very much for a great presentation. Good to see you all. I know Mrs. Erchicoff well and it's nice to see you. Thanks for all your service to our town and our children. The one thing I did want to ask if you could expand upon the group we have heard a lot about phonics in the news recently and the transition of more of a focus on phonics and I'm just curious to know what that looks like from a faculty level in terms of professional development conversations inside the building about that move. We've been using foundation I thought I had my big girl voice on. We've been using foundations certainly with fidelity in grades kindergarten first second and third we increased it this year as well as Hagerty I think in the classroom it's really entertaining talking about words tell me which words rhyme very quick they're fun son dog which two rhyme and the students will say that it's done in whole group in kindergarten we'll do it in small groups then they'll switch out say playground the word playground say it without the word play fun knee there's hand motions put together fun knee funny so children are manipulating sounds and manipulating words and Lorraine our reading coach was working with a class today and they were like do it again do it again it's fun talking about the words for the students and how sounds relate so that they can better sound out words when they see them cool I just wanted to it's usually one of the first subjects in the morning you'll see in first grade and in kindergarten and it's really it's it's just amazing it is a lot of fun and so they don't know they're learning that part alright thank you I just wanted a little more context on that because it's it's just been something that people have asked about Mr. Cardin hello thank you all for all your hard work first this is a very detailed SIP I've seen improvement over the years and it's really great hopefully because of the assistant principal assistance you have you're able to get this level of detail it's great to see so just a quick question on the professional development what particularly for the differentiated learning you know at the high school level for the HGI initiative they sort of had intensive professional development over the summer is that sort of what you need or do you think it can be accomplished during the school year I think it can be accomplished or it can certainly be accomplished we have our coaches that are working with the teachers at each level and talking about how we showing models they'll also model in classrooms that's really built in to the school day and to the school week for the equity and inclusion we've been working out a contract with Carlos Hoyt in fact they met today to have him come and work with families to work with students and to work with faculty thank you Ms. Morgan thank you so much this was great I really I appreciated looking at your you know really I appreciated your sort of honesty around the panorama data and the work that you have to do there I was sort of interested I was I had pulled some information from the 21-22 school year and was looking at sort of like demographics across our elementary schools and I will admit as somebody who's been here for a long time I was really surprised Brackett has the highest percentage of students with disabilities amongst all seven of our schools not necessarily the highest needs but like just the largest percentage and the largest percentage of students multirace non-Hispanic and I think that is something that is not the reputation sometimes that Brackett has in our community and so I think that the work that you guys are doing to talk about this and to be really transparent about it you do have a really diverse student body and so I I think that it's great and I am excited about where this will go for Brackett and all of our kids who are there so thank you I just wanted to make a brief comment I really appreciated the focus also on third through fifth grade and the comprehension I think so much of the focus recently on reading and the science of reading has been on the younger grades and the phonics and the phonological awareness and I do worry a little bit that we may be losing sight of the other strands of Scarborough's so I appreciated that you all are thinking about that as well and then my question for you is you mentioned in the needs a reading interventionist but so much of the conversation is about the tier one instruction which is really more where a coach is supporting a teacher can you just briefly sort of for all of our benefit what would be why is an interventionist in this case do you see that as more of a priority than another coach or just thank you for asking that because the way we're using our interventionist our goal is to have them as a present model in a classroom so that you've got the teacher working with a group of students you've got an interventionist all in the same so that they can learn from each other and the children all get to work with an interventionist as well as a classroom teacher so it helps both the teacher with the modeling and it helps the students to get more individualized attention thank you you're welcome thank you all very much I just want to say thank you to the Brackett team for a very comprehensive school improvement plan and for all of the members who are joining you remotely and here I will say Brackett's been exceptionally thoughtful about their implementation of the ILT this year it's clear they have a very large collaborative team working with them and have been really very aligned with the work that the district is doing and had piloted a lot of push-in model intervention and small group flexible intervention last year and it's really exciting to see some of that expanding so nice job team thank you everybody thank you all for being here while we're transitioning to the Bishop team Tamaki I just wanted to say welcome and I'm sorry we missed you we heard about cross-country and the dance but if there's anything else you wanted to add there's a dodgepot going on coming up always fun things happen alright the Bishop school improvement plan welcome members of the school committee chair Axton this is actually an exciting night we're meeting in person first time that I've seen you all in person in a few years and it's really exciting to be here tonight to talk about the work that we're doing at Bishop before we get started I need to introduce two rock stars to the Bishop team to my right here I have Maria Amato who is our full-time literacy coach and I also have Emily Veder who is one of our math coaches we split to position 0.5 Emily is also the district math team leader so as we get started tonight we're going to update you on Bishop's priorities as a response to the data that we're going to present and that you find in the school improvement plan along with currently initiated action steps that are addressing our problem of practice and some wins that show that the work that we're doing has yielded positive results already and we're going to wrap up by taking any questions that you have so we've started the year at the Bishop with about 403 students it's about 10 an increase of 10 from last year we had a large turnover of support staff and specialists last year over the summer so we onboarded or in the process onboarding 15 new staff ranging from support staff classroom teachers and specialists Bishop's core values of respect responsibility and regard for others and their differences is threaded into everything we do into our community in addition to our core values as we the APS community links arms related to our newly crafted vision statement we aspire for students to continually gain confidence in their learning abilities and styles so they can grow and develop as active learners we also like to motivate our students to respect each other's differences encouraging them to care for each other in the learning process so that each child feels a sense of belonging as an individual and empowered as a member of our school community so I'd like to start by saying that we're going to use MCAS data tonight but the MCAS data is not exclusive to the sets of data that we use in our work, in our school but I'd like to start with this community facing data related to the spring 2002 MCAS compared to the district and state grades 3 through 8 Bishop's represented in green with the district in orange and the state in blue our results compared to the state and really proud to be aligned with the district's average so as a reminder to the committee last year when I was here remotely I highlighted Bishop's key priorities and problem of practice related to the academic achievement gap that currently exists using MCAS as a main data set this data remains a catalyst for Bishop's problem of practice so this five-year look over time of our high needs subgroup compared to the Bishop aggregate continues to be a compelling problem for us so the graph on the left is Bishop's ELA scores, grades 3 through 5 with the one on the right here being math and science technology and engineering will be the next slide with the high needs identified in red and the high needs I mean I'm sorry science technology and engineering so as we move on to revisiting Bishop's priorities you remember we're in our second year of a three-year plan I'm going to focus mainly on the key instructional objectives for this presentation with objectives 3 and 4 being just as important and I'm happy to take questions regarding those two at the end looking at our instructional objective number one around student achievement mainly focused on improving Bishop's data collection process for the purpose of designing interventions through collaborative teaming also known as ace blocks faculty meetings and staff common planning time and objective number two is focused on data analysis and math in math and ELA the focus is on the use of those assessments to inform our instruction best practices and interventions which are directly tied to that collaborative data team work for example with our early childhood grade level teams it makes sense to direct our efforts toward early reading skills lesson delivery best practice and using assessments to drive instruction as we move on to objective three focus on equity in school culture which is a consistent thread found throughout the Bishop's school improvement plan Bishop's positive behavioral interventions and supports are up and running we have a series of professional development for staff daily mentions and work with our students with the purpose of creating common expectations for all individuals in our building and the fourth objective focuses on the management and operations so dedicated to maintaining brick and mortar assessments and remediations in addition to focus on student class placement every year and hiring practices at Bishop so this is the point in the conversation that really excites me I mentioned Emily and Maria going to speak in a second before they do I just want to say that your support for full time research is in all seven of our elementary schools is proving invaluable the skill and expertise of these professionals that they've brought to the table has just made a huge difference in our work we'll pass it on to Emily thank you Mark so the work of our ILT has led to math initiatives that support that objective two that Mark was talking about where we're focusing on collecting real time data about how students make sense so the first thing that we're doing is a district-wide focus on fluency screeners in grades K to 3 well there's a lot more to mathematical understanding than just fluency using these one-on-one interviews to collect data on how students make sense of foundational facts is helping us to inform next steps so we introduced the screeners this year through grade level PD and then at Bishop we've been meeting with teacher teams and administrators to continue to collaborate to calibrate our scoring during our ace meetings by watching videos of our own students so now we're at the point where the coaches can be thought partners with the teachers as we think about how to support specific students in tier one and then also thinking about now that we have a new interventionist a math interventionist thinking about which students should be seeing her in tier two we're also tracking unit assessment data in grades three to five and we've organized it by content so we've gone back and revisited exemplars provided by the curriculum and scored the assessments together and really starting to calibrating our scoring has led to important conversations about our mathematical goals and again you can see the spreadsheets here that are color-coded so that we can very quickly look at it and think about who we need to support in tier one and who needs to see our interventionist in tier two so I'm going to pass it off to Maria Amato our building-based literacy coach and I just want to say it's been invaluable to collaborate with her as we start to put into practice this vision for coaching that was drafted by the coaching design team last year thank you Emily I feel similar I think we're a great team you Carolyn and I so similar to math teachers we work together to use assessments to inform our instruction and our district literacy assessments include the Dibbles and the DRA in early elementary and I-Ready and MCAS in the upper grades so this battery of assessments really helps us create individual learning profiles for our students and helps inform our instruction both whole class and small group so for example in grades K through three in Bishop we're using Dibbles data to help us create differentiated targeted phonics instruction and as some of you know the Dibbles is a benchmark assessment we use it three times a year which helps us detect risk and monitor the development of early literacy and early reading skills so in ACE meetings when we meet together with coaches and teachers we're working on analyzing data and you can see up here on the slide on the left are spreadsheets that the coaches create created this one on the left and we use the color code and we sort our data and we sit with teachers and we analyze this and then we use a sorting protocol which you can see on the right this happens to be a second grade team here from Bishop and we use this protocol to sort our students into targeted instructional groups and of course our goal is to meet the needs of all our students in reading in the upper grades grades three through five comprehension groups and we're going in there to model these things as coaches so that teachers can see it in action thank you Maria thank you Emily so these next three slides you can look at as a return on your investment as far as supporting coaches and interventions in our buildings it's making a huge difference so this data represents the closure and the gaps from 2019 to 2022 looking at the percentages of meeting and conceding on MCAS grades three through five and also if you look at the student growth percentiles on the right there there is growth amongst all students the high needs are the ones on the bottom that said yes 2018 to 2022 and numbers above 40 the indicator of high growth and we are seeing progress across the board demonstrating that whatever is good for one group of students is good for all students and we're seeing growth like I said across the board and we're seeing closure in gap so this is math so from 19 to 22 we have 16 percent closure in the gap with an 18 percent closure in the gap in ELA with this pretty phenomenal student growth percentile of both with the high needs at 70.5 and 13 percent drop in the achievement gap between science technology and engineering we don't have a SGP fifth grade it's first time and only time that they take that so there's nothing to compare that to so you take a moment I also wanted to share a classroom teacher feedback I have a first grade teacher and a fifth grade teacher that was kind enough to offer some feedback for tonight's presentation I just want to say this work can't be done without the buy-in from everyone and I've just been incredibly impressed with their professionalism their commitment to best practices and making child centered decisions so as you take a look at the resources needed that we currently have to sustain our effectiveness within our programming I'm going to conclude tonight's presentation there are more objectives and action steps found within the Bishop school improvement plan and I'm happy to take any questions related to those that we presented tonight I just want to thank you all again for your support for our schools our staff our students our community thank you questions or comments from the community Mr. Thielman thank you very much I do want to echo what I think someone else said the presentations the school improvement plans have gotten better and better so thanks for all the work I know there's a lot of work that goes into it and I know not everyone likes to come to the school committee and make a presentation I didn't realize that the ELL population we know that so thanks for putting that in there my question is about goal 4 I think it is about sustainability and we actually talked about this a little bit but the building your plan to enhance the main office and submit a proposal for that I'm just curious where that stands is that so yep Michael I don't know if that's a question for you well Michael and I have been working closely together I think it's appropriate for Michael to speak to this yeah so we currently engage in an architect to try to do initial scoping out of the redesign of the space we're waiting for that design to come back as well as we have submitted a request for funding to the capital capital planning it sounds like that will actually people don't like to talk a lot about structural improvements in buildings but they actually do help flow the building the sphere of the building so I applaud you for putting that right in there yeah absolutely the more you support and allow us to bring in more staff more specialized staff in the building there's a need for space and we have a large footprint in our in our front office that can absolutely be maximized by adding two to possibly three additional offices yes you guys do have that large space yes all right thank you very much thank you I like your plan and I'm really heartened to see you taking time on page 13 page 12 talking about your EL English learner population the I'm going to be a little picky here but I'm just going to do this by way of getting to another question your listing is an outcome by September of 2022 Bishop's ELL teaching team will have increased to 2.0 did that happen? yes well that's sort of not an outcome that's really more of an action step and I'm glad to have that there that you've recognized the need and we've collaborated to recognize that need and then you're following up with with a 2022 statement as well 53% of Bishop's ELL students have made progress in access by June of 23 70% of Bishop's ELLs will score in the making progress range I guess my question is just to get a little more of a flavor so one of the outcomes you're pointing to with the increase in staff is that you're in compliance with state are you in compliance with state on ELL instruction? we are now well okay that's sort of that is the outcome is that we are now in compliance because we've added the staffing do you have any other challenges you're hitting here with the ELLs population that we should know about that we can support you with because the ELLs population I really feel is that from our side we're not looking at hard enough and I appreciate the question and focus on our ELLs and since we have added the additional ELL teacher we're able to kind of look at restructuring the way that we provide services for our ELLs with not so much of all pull out model but now we're starting to push in more and we're able to kind of spread the wealth our two ELL teachers have now they're actually working with all ELLs so all of our ELLs can we'll see them as their supports not just one of the ELL teachers as far as this is evolving we just received the second ELL teacher this year so we're working with Carla Brezzi and the department to kind of come up with a program that's going to be most effective to see a better progress with our ELLs and our support with staff as well Tier 1 and having a cluster multiple ELLs in one classroom requires a lot of attention and so building that capacity at a Tier 1 level with our teachers is extremely important as well What percentage of your mainstream classroom teachers have the endorsement on their license? Do you know that? We are at 95% Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful Any noting, any changes in languages that you're receiving? No changes Basically just more of the same Yes, okay, thanks Thank you Mr. Carden Thank you So two questions The first one Is there a reliable district data collection system in platform? Can PowerSchool do that? Does PowerSchool talk to IREDI and MCAS and get all that? No, we don't use PowerSchool in elementary for that We have a data base that the assistant superintendent's office has put together that we use and then the data collection systems of our coaches But you need something a little bit more robust? No, I think we just need to I think that the turnover of data from one year to another can be a little tightened up What we have is working And again, these are systems and structures that we're building as far as now that we have ace blocks we have this dedicated time looking at data having a reliable data sources to draw from that's common amongst all where it's one place where we can go and we can filter accordingly and then the more general question maybe for Dr. Homan is so the narrowing of the achievement gap that he showed in his slides which is a different look than we've seen is that similar across the district or is it unique to Bishop or we don't know yet? I think do you mean like that particular trend? Yes, I would say at different schools where there are sometimes different focus areas because of what data stands out so at Bishop they focused on high needs that's at least in part high needs is sort of an aggregate subgroup so if we can get more specific as some schools will try to they will focus on high needs and EL because they have a significantly growing EL population and other schools might focus on students who are identified as low income because that gap is wider or broader and so I think what you're seeing what we're learning is that we want to get more consistent about how we talk about the closure of gaps and which gaps it is that as a district we're trying to close and then schools might have ones that they're targeting an ace blocker in collaboration with other colleagues across departments in part because that's the one that stands out or because that's a population that's significant to that school and we're going to be working on getting more consistent about how we report that out so that you're seeing a similar view across different school improvement plans because you've seen a view for example of Dallin of what it looks like in some of our Dibbles data you do get a mix and I appreciate this from our teams of MCAS and formative assessment data we do that to indicate we're not just using MCAS but we're also using some of these formative assessments and some of the trackers and screeners that they shared to demonstrate that but yeah there's certainly a plethora and so getting more consistent about how we're showing closure of gaps is something we're working on great thank you Miss Morgan I appreciated the sort of fidelity to the high needs in this particular presentation because when you're seeing like I definitely knew what we were talking about so I really I appreciated that throughout both the written report and the slides so thank you that was good for me now and if we pick different things in the future it's just easier for me if they're all the same so thank you guys thank you so much Dr. Elsa Ampe are you okay I'm fine I appreciate I agree with Miss Morgan that was my I think to say for this too thanks thank you thank you very much for all of your hard work and for being here it's nice to see all of you in person same thank you very much oh superintendent nice job well done especially with that high needs gap closure awesome job Bishop thank you thank you it is so nice to be here in person we've been having that experience more and more as things open up a little bit for us in our meetings so thank you for having us here this evening everyone I am Kate Parrots the proud principal of the Hardee joined by Renee Nichols who is one of our district librarians and a member of our instructional leadership team so Alice is joining us on Zoom and I will be the lucky one who does all the talking this evening but I do have my colleagues who are here to help support with questions and comments after so at Hardee we actually restarted our three year school improvement plan this year so a lot of the things that you'll see in the school improvement plan as you look at it and here in the presentation are things that we have touched on in the past but we've taken the feedback and really tried to make sure that it is as data driven as it can be in order to help us tell the story that we'd like to tell and what's really interesting to me is as I listen to my bracket colleagues and listen to my Bishop colleagues and have conversations with our faculty I've been really lucky enough to be part of the strategic planning committees and I think that as we have these conversations about Arlington and the work that we're doing we see a lot of common threads and so it's almost like I could say ditto when we're talking because we see that in our communities but at Hardee we do have our own unique needs that come along with that and so I will speak to Hardee specifically but it's nice to know that we're all in this together and that we have some very common goals and I would like to say as an aside that I feel so very fortunate to be working on a team with principals assistant principals, faculty that are so focused on really thinking about this work of equity and really looking at the way we have these gaps and that it's important to this community and to our educators and I think that's something that I just I think we can't say enough and that we're not going to try to put forward a story that is you know glossy right and that because we can look at a lot of our data and really think about the ways in which it shows great wins but there are real things to work on in there so at Hardee in the last few years we have spent a lot of time recommitting ourselves to the words hand, mind and heart with our entire community you've heard me say before that this is our vision and it's carved into the side of the building it has been since 1925 here we train hand, mind and heart for the common good we've been doing this work with the students in order to make that be more action focused or accessible to them and we've taken hand, mind and heart and we've translated it into the words safe, kind and responsible and the work that we're doing with our students each day reflects the ways in which they can be those things so our wins the establishment of the instructional leadership team I think is a huge thing for all of our schools this year it's been very productive and really satisfying work thus far we're continuing to develop our teacher leadership opportunities at Hardee we have a new culturally responsive teaching team those positive behavior response teams and working with our families and our school council the PTO and the digs I think it's a real win that we're spending quite a lot of time looking at those formative assessments and we'll talk a lot about those as we go through the data and screeners in our academic areas especially in the area of reading and in math and the Dibbles has already been touched on that later as well we've made significant progress in Hardee and the development of different support systems for individuals student needs as well as school-wide supports and that's in the form of the PBIS the move to school-based coaching and ELA to join our school-based math coach is really an incredibly it's a gift to us that we have that and I think that we'll get to talking about MCAS as well but it is a win that our MCAS measures we do outperform the state in all ways and at Hardee specifically in the area of SEL we are piloting the use of digital tools for second step social skills lessons in K-5 and so data tells a story so that's what I want to try to do this evening is tell the story at the Hardee and what we're thinking about and so if we look at MCAS specifically so here's a slide that is actually in addition to what was included in the school improvement plan the talks about science MCAS in grade 5 and I think as we look at these measures through our school through our district comparing them to Massachusetts you can see that we're doing very well and so what I really want us to think about as we're going forward is what that means because we don't just want to again rest on those laurels we want to continue to push ourselves forward to do better as we look at panorama data I'll stay on this slide for now that this is coming from 2021 and overall as we think about the responses of our students and our families we see that that social emotional response that feeling of connection and belonging within our school is very high the percentage response is just a few little snapshots but I know you're all familiar with panorama and you know that there's many many questions and as we go through those we see that there are many areas in which we're doing very well however there are challenges and so I could say with MCAS that it's really an incredible thing that as we've gone through the last few years we have been able to maintain that high above the state score overall and that's pretty great right and so if we think about that our teachers have really done an amazing amount of work and our community members and our students have worked very hard to support our schools in order to make sure we're maintaining those high standards however is it for everyone and are we feeling those successes for everyone you've heard that from my colleagues and it's true at Hardy as well is that we continue to have a disproportionality in those summative assessment results for many of our cohorts and those are the groups that we and within the MCAS data talk about as our high needs groups because of that we continue to have a need for differentiation for all of our levels of learners and at the same time as we're trying to do those things we face some real challenges some real world challenges at Hardy and in Arlington as we are across America and the world really is that we have challenges in staffing especially in the areas of special education in those roles of paraprofessionals and then we have daily challenges of coverage when staff members are absent and we don't have a reliable sub pool we have rising mental health issues for all of the members of our communities of all ages and many of our families are also stressed and we see a decrease in connections with groups like PTO and so I think that it's important as we're talking about goals and things that we're trying to put forward for our kids is that we keep that in mind is that the system needs to be working in positive ways to support the people who are part of that system and so as we look at the next slide thinking about things like these measurements that are more summative like the MCAS you'll see that it continues to be those high needs groups that are below what we would like to see and that we're seeing that these are examples from 2019 to 2021 that you want to be able to look at that meeting or exceeding expectation as being the place where we're seeing that growth and not the growth happening in the areas where we are not meeting or partially meeting I think that's the real challenge right there the other part that I want us to think about is as we look at the panorama data and we're thinking about the staff members that we have that have been working in our school that we do see that that sense of belonging information is lower how well do your colleagues at school understand you as a person 40% responded favorably how connected do you feel to other adults at your school 47% responded favorably overall how much do you feel like you belong at your school 63% responded favorably so this is coming from somewhere and I think that in order to make sure that we're really supporting our students and our families and having a really equitable core education and a positive experience for everyone and all of our stakeholders we need to pay attention to what's happening with our educators and how that has an impact on the learning of our students so anyway some of these things that I think we need to really focus on as priorities are things that you've heard already and we will work on at Hardy as well so the implementation and specific focus on data driven differentiated instruction in small groups and including explicit feedback and skill development to all students so that is what we're talking about with the formative is that we need to find these access points where our teachers can work with our kids to meet and give them the feedback and target that skill development wherever they may be right and so sometimes that might mean a year's worth of growth and a year's worth of time sometimes with that specific and targeted feedback and work in small groups that might mean more than a year's worth of growth and a year's worth of time because the students are getting what they need the use of student data in the area of social emotional learning in order to implement equitable evidence based interventions that promote skill development in self awareness, self management, social awareness, relationship skills and responsible decision making our students need the instruction in these skills. We're seeing at very young ages that students are having disruptions to their learning because of the skill development being delayed for whatever reason that might be and so using programs like Second Step is a way to be able to target that need a way to help the teachers to do that is using the digital tools that we're piloting at the hearty for the Second Step program which is something we're really thankful to have and that the teachers are feeling like here's something that I can really use to access this which has been great. We also have as a priority the creation of an environment that consistently supports conversations about a recognition of diverse backgrounds, identities and individual differences that actively and explicitly integrate the experiences of our students, faculty and families and I think this is something that we're really going to be thinking about over a longer term, over the next three years within this school improvement plan because in the panorama data our instructional leadership team spent time looking at what were the answers to those specific questions that had to do with race and the conversation about race within our classrooms and those percentages in Arlington and at hearty were the answers were very low, very low five, six percent and so in order to first get to that place in which that environment is created where we can have those conversations we need to really focus to these pieces of identity and belonging and what that means to us and so through our ILD we have decided that we're going to spend time gathering information to help better understand and support what our community members believe when it comes to a sense of belonging because with our school council we've also discovered that what that means to these different groups is very, very different and even when we're talking about race and we're thinking about the experiences of the different members of our community and different racial groups how that responds how that feels what it means to belong is very, very different and stuff of course and stuff so our action steps it's the look at formative data it's the baseline data and what that will look like and providing opportunity for each classroom teacher to be able to find the entry point for each one of our students we'll be able to think about that and talk about that through our meetings and common planning times and we continue to be very thankful to have those ace block times we're going to continue our focus on the practice of using responsive classroom which remains our primary approach to social emotional learning the second step with the digital tools our PBIS team our culturally responsive teaching team we have a PBIS coach that we have through the MTSS academy through DESI we have a culturally responsive teaching coach we meet with those coaches for two hours each month and they are helping to instruct and guide us the establishment of our instructional leadership team of course has been very helpful developing the building based faculty professional development with the ILT with that focus on belonging we're going to start with you know really doing questionnaires and pulling that information together and thinking about focus groups or empathy interviews which I know we've talked about before and then really design the next steps that may include those focus groups or empathy interviews to better understand the experience of our students and community members and answer the question what does belonging mean to me resources I think our focus on staffing and our ability to attract and retain both professional and paraprofessional staff members is something that we all think about quite a lot here in Arlington it needs to continue to be a focus and we need to continue to work on that together we need to continue the development of partnerships between our coaches our librarians and other professional staff and general education classroom teachers it has to do with teaming it has to do with bringing all of these resources together because we do we have a lot of really intelligent people on our teams and we need to find the way to improve the structures in which they work together we'll continue to support the use of these digital tools in SEL lessons including SEL Coaches we had an ACE meeting with one of our SEL Coaches today in first grade it was wonderful we need at Hardy specifically to continue the development of our special education programming at Hardy we have an SLC that is transitioning from Brackett to Hardy and we're working with various sorry word finding problems right here at the end it's getting late consultants to help us work on those structures and how to best make sure that we are doing our best work for those most of our all of those students too continue to focus on differentiated professional development opportunities with all staff this is what I was talking about with PBIS and Adaptive X that's our culturally responsive teaching coach that's their organization Adaptive X and time for evaluation in the PD calendar for the core literacy program review and other responsibilities while we continue to work on school based schools it's a lot it's a lot and I think that with time and attention and working together we can manage to move ourselves forward with our goals without overwhelming our system and without you know really moving one of our groups forward at the you know the detriment of another right so I thank you for your time and attention I hope you appreciate the story of the Hardy and the work that we're doing I'm very very proud of our school and our community so thank you thank you questions or comments from the committee Mr. Schlickman okay y'all doing well I could say it's for all the schools I mean you know when I took a look at the MCAS scores on the academic side there's a lot of high growth around the district and you know Hardy's doing well in talking to the Bishop they discussed the English language learner population EL's can you fill in a little more about where you are with being able to meet the needs of English learners yes absolutely we're also lucky enough to have gone to two full time EL teachers at the beginning of this year which is great it's very helpful we're looking at the structure of how to meet the needs of those students and so between those two staff members we've been thinking about the ways in which we can create a caseload for them that makes sense and a plan that makes sense that involves both the pull out that's necessary for those students who really are beginners and need those separate students away from the classroom and then that push in that you've heard everyone talking about because it's really also very interesting that the sense of belonging doesn't come when students are pulled from classrooms all the time and so we really need to continue to support the work of that inclusion so it's not just in special education it's not just in EL but it's in every area of what we do within the classroom is that the students need to feel connected to the classrooms so that push in with our EL teachers and all of our support people has been something that we've really been working on for the last several years at Hardy and so our two EL teachers but caseload is important so what we discovered is that our younger grades were more heavily there were higher numbers of beginners in those younger grades which makes sense right and so instead of having like a K to 2 model and a 3 to 5 model for the teachers what we've done is restructured their schedule in order to support having an equitable number of beginners and students who were functioning at a higher level and then having that balance of that pull out and that push in so that overall structure has been something that's taken some time and we're still working on but I think it's getting more time for kids in classrooms with their teachers it sounds as if this is sort of a common theme around the district at least in a couple of schools that we've now given you sufficient resources to meet standards for English instruction and now you're working through how to be most effective in terms of using those resources that's right because I think that the same old kind of plans that we had in the past just aren't cutting it anymore and we really need to think about that and it's the same for the math interventionist like Stephanie was talking about that's spending more time pushing in with the group so that we can have the flexible groupings or the reading support that's at that grade level and we're working across as teams in our grade levels instead of individual teachers trying to do the work of the needs of all of those 24 students at the same time all by themselves the one disappointment I have with your plan is there was a real lack of specificity in terms of student outcomes you wrote the students will have a one year worth of growth at minimum from baseline in formative assessments yeah I mean that's certainly what we're looking for but in an improvement plan I'd sort of be looking for more guideposts of how to go and where you're thinking and where your outcomes are so for next year when you're developing the plan I'd certainly like to see more focus for some sort of data marker for outcomes that's tied to the work you're doing thanks yep thank you anybody else Mr. Simmons great presentation good to see you Mr. Parrots and I serve on the strategic planning committee number four which rocks I mean really it is the best one I didn't realize it was number four he tells us this all the time yeah it's a great committee we bonded over the strategic plan and the principal is very good at redirecting me and it's really good at that no we're on this part of the lesson now sit up Fran my question thank you very much great presentation like all the others my question for you I was I appreciated your honesty in the challenges and I'm kind of curious about and I always like that when a leader just says here are the challenges here they are I'm curious to know about staffing you said challenges in staffing especially in the area of special education role of paraprofessionals how are you on staffing are you fully staffed are there vacancies now we do progress but we definitely still have vacancies and it's been a real challenge yeah and so I really do appreciate the support that's given with trying to make sure that we're maintaining those staffing levels but also having a high quality of staff member you know because I think that it's just times have just changed you know we have in the past our paraprofessionals were people who were teachers who are trying to get their foot in their door because a teaching job was a really hard thing to get especially in a district like Arlington and now what we're finding is that we don't have that pool I think it's still we still do better with those certified jobs right so we still have a lot of applicants when we're trying to do classroom generally you know general educators but it's harder in the field of special education and also those people who are applying if they are even applying for those jobs of paraprofessionals or people who don't have training and so it's a real challenge in order to it or it's a different it's a different challenge I should say than we've had in the past and I think we were very lucky you know if you have these paraprofessionals who are teachers it makes a big difference than someone who's coming in and we're very happy to have them but we need to support them on what it means to be a person who works in a school and sometimes we really are starting with the very basics so it's got it I know we're using search firm are we using a search firm for some of this stuff or is it search group we're using sort of an out placement out placement yeah but the yeah sort of outsourcing some of it when we can but I mean we're trying still too high and we we're going to talk a little bit about that later but we're still trying to hire people directly to get a little bit of a difference yeah yeah obviously obviously but as a some support for the process is what you alright thank you very much appreciate it I similar to Mr. Schlickman I as a classroom teacher appreciate the sort of choice in initiative one but at the same time I I feel like a focus across the school you know allows teachers to collaborate PD can be coordinated it can give sort of a direction to to conversations and things like that so I also looked at that and was a little concerned about it's open-ended yeah and so I guess that I would like to comment on that just a little bit to let you into our thinking as a community about it and so you know it's important to I know you know this but you know we have our district goals we create our school improvement plan and what our goals are but then the teachers have their goals that they're working on and so to us we're empowering our teachers to make choices about what it is they're working on every day and so as I work and as Ms. Tzoulis works together as the supervisors of our educators at the different grade levels we've worked to create this joint goal with the teachers but wanted to give them the choice to be able to find those places to get into that right so some are working on literacy some are working on math some are working on social emotional learning and the measurements we are using are the measurements that we use throughout the district we're using dibbles we're using IREDI we're using the math screeners that Emily was talking about we're using the panorama but we're also using the elements that you find for assessment within the second step curriculum so each one of these things has a measurement and we have a baseline and each of the teachers knows and we're working on the during ace blocks about what those baseline measurements are and where we want to go but in my mind in our mind that's the place where we can find the equity in our instruction only when we look at that individual data at the student level and that the teachers are really connected to it and that there's a piece of them being able to make those decisions based on the students that they have in front of them every day so that's the thinking behind that thank you can I ask a question? I'm going to put you on the spot sorry Ms. Nichols but as a member I'm curious if you could share with us a little bit about what that experience has been like well for me I'm brand new to the Hardy this year so I don't know if we're on like week 9 or 10 and you put me on the Dow and ILT team at the leadership committee so I've also been somewhat working with them as well it's a really great experience especially being brand new to the school it's given me a way to connect with other educators it's given me a way to begin conversations with the math coaches and with the ELA coaches who are also on the team it's great to hear the teachers talk about their students and what they're noticing as we're looking at the data and most of them they've been there for years and they know these students as more than just these numbers on the paper and so it's been helpful for me to hear their stories and to hear what they're trying to do with their students in terms of how they're trying to improve instruction and accommodate all learners on the area of belonging and diversity equity and inclusion is very near and dear to my heart so I'm always listening out for ways that I can kind of insert what I know and what I would love to do with them in their classrooms but I think for me in a new role as well the librarian position being stationed at any schools is brand new this year and finding those ways to connect in the ILT and also look at what the school goals are and what the data is that informs those has been really helpful it's wonderful to have you and your colleagues from the library team on our leadership teams and nice job party thank you very much I'd like to ask the superintendent a question that came up in Mr. Thielman's questioning that if we are bringing in new people as parents who don't have that connection to schools one of the things that I've seen in my professional practice is that teachers learn how to work with kids but not necessarily with other adults in the classroom what are we I don't want to ask what are we doing but what are our thoughts about supporting teachers in their work with other adults that they're responsible for such as a power or somebody who's coming in who is not a licensed educator who's a support person within their classroom are we thinking about that are we doing anything with that is that something on the radar I would say I'm sure it is for our professionals at the school level at a district level I think the conversation we were just having highlights a need that I have certainly heard from educators which is that we need to think about how we're supporting our paraprofessionals when they come into the district and you raise a good point that also means supporting our teachers who are working directly with those paraprofessionals I've been in settings where there's a very specific focus on the use of teaching assistants in the classroom it has not been the professional development focus at the district level for us this year because we've been redesigning some other things relative to PD but it's certainly cropping up as a need particularly as we see this trend emerging where the expertise our paraprofessionals enter with is different than it has been in the past I know one of the strengths that you're trying to build into our PD is to give teachers choice for things they feel they need and this might be something to explore great thank you thank you hardy for being here we appreciate it thank you yeah mo and tamaki and Amy if you need to go you are welcome to leave thank you very much for being here we appreciate it have a good night sorry about that I know I'll say that again for our millions of listeners I have two slide decks in novice one is the presentation slide deck and the other one is the slide that has a little bit more information so we wanted to keep it kind of succinct on the presentation for tonight and then I will also respond to any questions that you have I wouldn't use that you're going to want to use that so alright I'm organized now okay so the presentation tonight will include disciplinary outcomes by the elementary level and at each secondary school and it will include out of school suspensions and in school suspensions and we have desegregated the data by ethnicity, race gender and IEP status and then we can talk about district-wide steps themes that each school at each level that we're doing in order to support behavior and then we'll open it up for questions and comments so we'll start off at Arlington High School this is the raw data so last year and I also want to emphasize that the discipline data that I am presenting is from last school year so FY22 and so there were 12 students who received out of school suspensions at the high school and as you can see the breakdown there five were males, seven were females and then you see the percentages for how many students were on IEP and then you see the percentages for the different race and ethnicity and then looking down at bullet number five you'll see some of the biggest reasons for the out of school suspensions were drugs, fight assault, a fighting assault theft, chronic behavior such as absenteeism and we had a student that was charged with the filming so moving to our in school suspension data there were 26 students who received in school suspensions 15 were males, 11 were females you'll see the percentage breakdown by IEP status and race and ethnicity next we have out of school middle school again we have the out of school suspension data for out of middle school and I will have to check on this because I did speak to principal and I think we have to adjust that 21 students who were suspended so I am going to check on that so I just want to point that out but the data that I have is through the different incidents and right now we have 21 students who were suspended 16 were male five were female you'll see the IEP status breakdown by the percentage of students who have an IEP the race and ethnicity percentages and some of the biggest reasons for those out of school suspensions were vandalism physical and physical altercations and then for our in school suspension you'll see we had 23 students who received in school suspensions at Addison last year 17 were males six were females you'll see the percentages breakdown for students who are under IEP and for race and ethnicity then at Gibbs we had five students who received an out of school suspension five were male we didn't have any students who identified as female and you'll see the percentages for breakdown for the IEP status and some of the biggest reasons for the out of school suspensions were bullying and threatening behavior or language and then at the elementary level we had one student district wide who received an in school suspension and I didn't provide any additional demographic information because I didn't want to identify that student so looking at overall district wide looking at the data overall we have at the secondary level it shows that students from the following groups are more likely to receive an out of school or in school suspension and those are students who are in IEP and students who identify as black African American or Hispanic Latino and a majority of our suspensions are in school suspensions and as you can see from the school improvement presentations today some of the things that we're doing at all schools across the district is we continue to train staff on alternative approaches to discipline review and implement strategic recommendations for our most recent equity audit to promote engagement and belonging continue to support the work of school counselors social workers and district wide social and emotional coaches to create tools and strategies to teach all students how to fully engage in learning continue to offer basis unconscious bias training to all staff through district wide professional development sessions and our ideas courses continue to administer, collect and analyze data from our mental health screener and our culture and climate surveys to understand how to best support students in their respective learning environments and continue to implement explicit social and emotional curriculum at each level so I will open it up for questions anybody? no? Dr. Allison Ampe did you she has a question yeah thank you thank you Dr. McNeil for the presentation I had a couple questions first I want to say I appreciate having the breakdown in terms of IAP versus not I am concerned about the over representation of people who have IAPs in terms of being suspended either in school or out of school and continue to be concerned whether this means there is something we need to be doing differently with our special education students either they need more supervision or something feels not right so that's one thing I know last year we had seen detention data for at least autism and I kind of thought we were hoping to see that again for all the schools at least to give secondary schools and I just wondered about that too I can definitely produce some data as it relates to that I can speak with the secondary principals I know that at Gibbs they do not have detention and at elementary we do not have detention so I will have to discuss that with our high school Dr. Janger and Mr. Maringer at the oddison thank you can I just add to the point about some of the discrepancy you see in particular as it relates to students with IEPs I do think that is worth us reflecting on the environment for our students with IEPs and I also think it's important for us to think about how we the environment that we as adults are creating for our students with IEPs and how our practices when it comes to things like de-escalation or our own biases as it relates to students needs with IEPs come into play there so we are planning on doing some training around disciplinary practices with our administrative team later on this spring we're both going to do regulatory training around bullying law and then do follow up conversations with staff about situations that warrant drastic disciplinary measures like suspension and when you can use other means of helping students learn about their actions that aren't disciplinary so I think that it's a yes to what you said Dr. Alice Nampy and an and that we need to learn other strategies that will help us avoid situations where our students who have IEPs are in situations where they're disciplined I would like to add on that That's awesome, thank you very much and we've already started those conversations about the different situations when we are implementing our discipline policy and I will say also it's all all district staff or all instructional staff that we need to have that conversation with and it's not just a staff who are special educators Mr. Schlickman Do you know if the students with IEPs that are running into suspension issues are coming in with IEPs that have elements that revolve around conductor or working being around others you understand what I'm saying I do, I did not go through the data to look at the specific IEP goals or why a student has we haven't made that correlation I would go back and echo what Dr. Holman just articulated that looking at the environment for all of our students looking at unconscious bias and how we're treating our students who are on IEP in relation to how we treat our students who are not on IEP I think looking at it from that aspect and understanding how to support students and looking at our strategies and practices and not really looking at the student and saying like we need to look at our actions and our instructional practice and how we're supporting those students and so it's more reflecting on our behavior than rather than looking at the different in relation to what the needs are of the students but looking at our practices and how we're supporting those students so they're going to be successful and perhaps going back into the IEP and looking to see if there are adjustments to be made in the way that we're interacting with their disability that's exactly what I'm alluding to are how we're interacting with those students and supporting them, absolutely. Okay, thanks. Next, we have Superintendent Evaluation for Dr. Holman so I so just for those watching the Summit of Evaluation is the public evaluation of the Superintendent the Superintendent has only one evaluator, the committee as a whole and therefore has one evaluation so this evaluation that's in Novus is intended to provide feedback that will help the Superintendent know where the committee believes the Superintendent has been successful and where improvement may be warranted and so committee members shared their individual evaluations with me and I worked to create a composite evaluation and then I shared both the individual evaluations and the composite evaluation with Dr. Holman so I'm going to start by going through briefly the composite evaluation and then if there are committee members who feel like something is missing or they'd like to add something from their individual evaluations we can have a conversation about that. So, I'm going to try to make this quick based on the feedback from the committee members Dr. Holman met her professional practice goals the student learning goal and the district improvement goal and she received a proficient rating for standard one instructional leadership a proficient rating for standard two management and operations a proficient rating for standard three family and community engagement and a proficient rating for standard four and so our overall summative performance rating of Dr. Holman is proficient thank you very much Dr. Holman I'm going to read these comments as our composite and then if people want to add something. The Arlington school committee would like to congratulate Dr. Holman on a strong start in her role as superintendent of the Arlington public schools Dr. Holman has established herself as an impactful instructional leader with an inclusive approach to budget development and family and community engagement notable achievements of Dr. Holman's first year of superintendency include the return to school plan new district vision mission and strategic priorities a revised values based budget process and improved transparency and consistency of school improvement plans community outreach increased stakeholder engagement and developing common language around teaching and learning were goals Dr. Holman would like to see Dr. Holman's model for broader two-way communication expanded across the district and throughout leadership teams the committee recognizes Dr. Holman's approachability communication skills and commitment to the academic and social emotional well-being of students as strengths Dr. Holman welcomes feedback from the committee and the community both in formal and informal settings she is a strong communicator who shares information clearly with data to back up decision making moving forward the committee would like to see the same levels of transparency and communication consistently across the district it is noteworthy that fiscal year 23 was Dr. Holman's first time leading a budget cycle as in other areas of her work she implemented a comprehensive and collaborative budget process with her cabinet team curriculum leaders and leadership teams while keeping the needs of students at the same time there were some areas of challenge partially due to COVID around communication and incorporation of feedback from all stakeholders the committee recognizes that the superintendent has reflected on this and will make adjustments going forward in conclusion the school committee commends the superintendent for her accomplishments and looks forward to working together to build upon her successful first year in Arlington so I am not going to read all the sub goals but there are comments in there as a committee that I tried to incorporate what others had shared so at this point if there are committee members would like to add anything Dr. Allison Ampia I can't even see her we need to vote Mr. Schlitzman I'm looking at you we can we can move acceptance will we receive the evaluation second we have a motion by Mr. Schlitzman seconded by Mr. Thielman to receive the superintendent's evaluation roll call vote discussion Mr. Garten Mr. Morgan Dr. Allison Ampia yes and I vote yes that's unanimous thank you very much Dr. Holman it's been a great 14 months we appreciate your hard work I just want to say thank you to the committee members for your very thorough and thoughtful feedback I know how time consuming it is to work through this rubric and with this rubric and to provide feedback on each indicator area and I have valued the feedback not only from the evaluation but also the feedback I get from each of you as we do our work together and the collaboration of this committee it's really been a wonderful 14 15 16 months however long I've been working on this thank you thank you job descriptions to approve so we'll start with the assistant superintendent of finance and operations so you have a job description for assistant superintendent of finance and operations which is the role that Mr. Mason will assume on January 1st it is similar to the role of CFO with adjustments in supervisory capacity for the role and a few adjustments in membership that we would expect this person to maintain because there's a little more flexibility we of course want them to maintain membership in some of the financial school finance organizations but also in mass association of school superintendents if you have any questions about this one I'm happy to answer them questions, comments? motion to approve sorry thank you go ahead Dr. Allison just budget met last week and we reviewed the draft CFO job description and made a couple edits and then moved to recommend a approval of the job description to the full committee so that's all and the one that's in here is the one that has the edits okay thank you thanks a motion? second motion by Mr. Thielman seconded by Mr. Schlickman discussion welcome to vote Mr. Cardin yes Ms. Morgan yes Mr. Schlickman yes Dr. Allison Ampey yes and I vote yes that's unanimous and now we have the deputy sorry now I've lost it deputy superintendent teaching and learning okay so this is a job description for the replacement role when Dr. McNeil sadly leaves our team we would like to post this as soon as he hasn't agreed upon contract it is an adjustment in title a slight one from curriculum and instruction to teaching and learning that's a cast that a lot of areas have put on this role it's sort of more descriptive and straightforward way of describing what the role is about it's about teaching and learning and the instead of assistant superintendent it is listed as deputy I did some thinking about whether I wanted that deputization to be something a little more flexible in thinking about it I do want this role to be the second in command role sort of structurally in the system and so that deputy is intended to signal that that's the second in command and sort of my or the superintendent's thought partner when it comes to leading the district and of course there's there we work as a team there's thought partnership across all members of our cabinet team but that deputy is meant to signal that that is the second in command in the event that I am out or there needs to be an acting superintendent we've also sort of reformatted elements of the job description to make it more concise there were elements in the old job description that were sort of repetitive as you moved through performance responsibilities we didn't adjust minimum qualifications except to say that there would be a minimum of five years teaching experience and teaching and it used to say K-12 school or district administration preferred and now the minimum qualification is that there is that five years of K-12 school or district administration experience so those are the major adjustments to this Miss Morgan we talked about this at CIA on Monday given some time constraints we did not vote on it but our lack of recommendation does not indicate a lack of we didn't vote on it but here we are I value the discussion we had in the CIA subcommittee because we raised the question of whether the deputy position would be floating or tied to a position and I'm glad that the superintendent was reflective about it and I very happy to support her decision within the structure I move approval second motion by Mr. Schlickman second by Mr. Thielman any more discussion roll call Mr. Cardin Ms. Morgan Mr. Thielman Dr. Allison Ampe and I vote yes that's unanimous superintendent's update Dr. Holman so I need my notes on this I have I updated the slides today in your materials from what you had originally gotten because we had a few additional updates that we added in so you might want to take a look if you haven't had a chance to for strategic planning updates we have conducted two community forums we did one just last night in Boston it was great fun Mr. Thielman attended and we were at Mecca headquarters and it was great to meet a couple of our families in Boston residents we have two coming up one is in person at Arlington High School one is virtual and we are also in the process well we collected staff feedback on the November 8 professional development day we gave staff considerable time in breakout sessions to take a deep dive into one priority area and provide feedback which the teams took a look at and used to further refine their initiatives over the last couple weeks we are conducting student empathy interviews those are just getting started and they'll be, we're sort of using the PE wellness department to help organize this because that's one of the department that really hits sort of all of the kids so they'll be conducting some empathy interviews with students asking questions that are sort of targeted around each priority area but that are very student friendly asking them about their experiences and what they would like to see improve about their experiences at school in each of the four priority areas you can view initiative overview documents in your school committee materials if they're not in your materials for tonight they are in the materials for CIAA subcommittee that was just held on Monday and had a chance to look over those and get some feedback, I appreciated feedback in CIAA the other day that helped us sort of identify places where we might have gotten a little too granular and could pull up a bit we shared that with the committee the following evening and it's they were I think relieved in some ways to help a little and give some more flexibility of implementation in how they articulate the initiatives our timeline right now is that initial drafts were submitted on Monday and those are currently being refined really they're being refined by our consultant Dan Anderson and then I'm going to look over them next we're going to start the process of attaching financials to the initiatives over a course of five years and we'll have those drafts done in December and we'll have them reviewed and further refined by the planning teams in December integrating some more of the feedback from stakeholders and from our empathy interviews with students we'll be generating that year to year cost out and that'll be happening right as we're working on FY24 budget proposals and the final plan should be completed and shared in January so that's where we're at we're moving right along some additional updates the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education determination came in this week under part B of IDEA the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and I wanted to update you that we were found to meet requirements and earned almost all of the points awarded 28 out of 30 also we did our tiered focus monitoring site visits this week, shout out to Ms. Elmer who has been deeply involved in all of that areas of review tied to special education during tiered focus monitoring include student assessments, determination of eligibility IEP team process, IEP development and implementation and we also had areas of review related to civil rights including bullying, student discipline, physical restraint and access to school programs for all students they conducted interviews this week with district staff and administrators reviewed student records conducted on-site observations at a couple of our schools and they also interviewed the chairpersons of the CPAC and other caregivers as part of their on-site visit so congratulations to Ms. Elmer for the coordination and successful completion of that we had our exit interview with them today and they shared some trends with us and were overall very positive about some of the work that we're doing in our schools we look forward to sharing their final report with you when it comes in Ms. Elmer anything you want to add to that? No I actually I turned on my camera because you handled it pretty quickly and well so I don't have anything to add just thanks to the staff and the families who participated we did have a good response rate to the surveys that were sent out to each family and the student with an IAP and like you mentioned our entire department over the last year has done a lot to prepare for this both through the self-assessment and now the on-site visit so I want to thank the folks who participated in the interviews, helped with the record reviews uploaded data etc Thank you Alright we had a very successful November 8th Professional Development Day Dr. McNeil and Ms. Thomas put together a spectacular program for us in collaboration with many many others it started out with a first performance of staff musicians doing a performance of music by, price is the last name what's the first name of the musician? Florence Price who is a musician-composer whose work was very uncelebrated during her life and so there was a piece by the musicians and a slideshow that talked about the experiences that she had had throughout her life trying to get her music recognized in some of the obstacles that she had faced when the performance was done we had a staff panel of staff sharing their experiences and what they thought belonging looked like as staff members in APS that was very powerful we did a huge of our literacy review process in the afternoon all of our elementary educators were in the auditorium and learned about what the process would be for vertical teaming and taking a look at our literacy resources which was a great use of the day again back in the morning we had staff look at the strategic initiatives and provide us feedback on that which was a good use of time too and there was a 200 foot sandwich from Dagestino's that was great fun and a little silly we really enjoyed it it was to benefit FoodLink which was fantastic it was a really great cause for us to support in partnership with Dagestino's which is a restaurant we all fondly go to on a regular basis they also passed out $1 coupons for our teachers to go back if they wanted to so that was nice of them I wanted to share that our Massachusetts School Wellness Advisory Council applied for and was chosen as one of the 15 districts in Massachusetts we have a wellness coach from the Mass School Wellness Coaching Program the wellness coach will assist the council in reviewing our district wellness policy and provide guidance as we make updates to that and ensure it complies with state and federal standards and so if we need to make updates to that policy we'll certainly be in touch with Mr. Schlickman and we're looking forward to hearing how that process goes with the wellness committee which I believe you sit on as well too we are in the process of planning for an overnight experience we discussed this with the Gibbs staff on November 8th as part of their building time in the afternoon it's possible that we might be able to use some of this time if we do it with sixth grade for staff to support the transition into sixth grade so we're trying to really think about if students are out of the building for some number of days and some staff go and some staff stay back how can we use this time to support planning and transition or other efforts at our sixth grade school so we're looking at what the cost implications are going to be think about what students might need so that we can support any of those needs that they might have figure out a system for supporting any students who might not be able to financially support going and make sure that we feel good about the supervision that would happen to them so that we can understand what the cost implications are about the supervision that would happen overnight because we would plan to use their overnight services in order to support this effort they also have an on-site nurse which is one of the reasons why this program was the one that we were willing to consider playground update Bishop and Stratton are open which is very exciting Pierce inspection is scheduled for the 23rd and opening is targeted for the 28th of November we will have a hearing for assistant superintendent will deputy superintendent of teaching and learning now and we will as soon as we are able to post it start the process of putting together an initial search team there will be a call for community members to participate in that for students to participate in it as well as staff members members of our administrative team so be on the lookout for that and I'm happy to share more details as we start moving through the process and finalist tasks as well so it will be lengthy my guess at the moment is that we would post it through December and then start the actual interview process in the new year so we have plenty of time to gather applications we did want to give you your enrollments are in your materials and I wanted to have Mr. Spiegel give you vacancies update thank you so currently I think as of next week we will have 6.6 vacancies in unit A positions which include school nurses two school nurses I think three special ed teachers in different schools one phys ed teacher and a .6 speech language pathologist who are there's that's a resignation that hasn't taken effect yet but is will take effect at the end of the month and so we need to replace that position the nurses I will say are being covered the vacancies and nurses are being covered by substitutes and resource nurses so we do have coverage for nurses but we do have a couple full-time vacancies that we are still looking to fill and then as Ms. Parritz kind of alluded to the biggest number of vacancies for people who are working with students in the district are in the paraprofessionals and it's been hard to fully staff most of our schools with paraprofessionals and there's you know schools have one to I think to four vacancies and paraprofessionals so most schools have two or three vacancies and we are still looking to fill so I would say about 19 paraprofessionals district-wide that are vacant and we also have some vacancies in some of our custodial services and facilities and crossing guard and some food service so there's different support areas that we can still use we can still use more help for coverage when there's needs for substitute coverage for our day care so there's different areas where we could use some help as we mentioned earlier we are trying to fill positions directly and hire people and the pools are not as great as they used to be and the level of experience as Miss Parrot said is not the same for the paraprofessionals right now and we are engaging with a few staffing agencies one that we use primarily who will we contract with the staffing agency and they will provide they can also staff the positions either teachers we used a couple teachers and paraprofessionals but we're still looking in our first priority is to fill the positions directly I want to note that for the nursing positions they are also at schools that have an additional professional nurse so autism middle school and AHS over the two vacancies are those two schools that have more than one nurse at that school so we are filling those vacancies with no sub coverage there's no school that's without a professional nurse that's one of our employees consent agenda all items listed with an asterisk are considered to be routine and will be enacted by one motion there will be no separate discussion of these items unless a member of the committee so requests in which event the item will be considered in its normal sequence warrant number zero nine one in the amount of nine hundred eighty two thousand four hundred fourteen dollars in eighty one cents dated November first twenty twenty two warrant number two three one zero four in the amount of six hundred eighty thousand three hundred eighty six dollars and seventy one cents dated November fifteenth twenty twenty two school committee meeting minutes October twenty seven twenty twenty two would someone like to move approval so moved second motion by Mr. Thielman seconded by Mr. Schlickman roll call vote Mr. Cardin yes Ms. Morgan yes Mr. Schlickman yes Mr. Thielman yes Dr. Allison Ampe yes and I vote yes that's unanimous subcommittee leaves reports and announcements budget Dr. Allison Ampe so we met on the eighth we discussed the end of year review FY23 budget FY24 budget process ESSER 3 and program feeds and also the CFO job description the for the FY24 budget I just realized I don't think we've sent you the calendar we don't feel it needs to be approved by the committee by the full committee but we feel it actually belongs with the superintendent but I meant to have that shared with you so that you're aware so well we can just send that I'll ask Ms. Diggins to send that out for us but in terms of the feed program feeds after reviewing the program fees structure we made a motion to forward the fee structure as presented and ESSER found a novice to the full school committee to approve so that is so I move approval of the fee structure as presented the fees for FY22-23 wait a second I'll second we have a motion by Dr. Allison Ampe seconded by Mr. Thielman discussion I didn't see a marker on here so I didn't look in here for content this is the first time seeing it we had approved most of these fees in the spring in the spring there were some that were missing that were added for middle school classrooms in gym and then placeholders for high school oh it's not no there are high school cafeteria the numbers sorry there were some administrative problems getting encoded so I'm sorry that you didn't see it before yeah I didn't peak in that slot in the novice because the little indicator wasn't on but I'm cool with this fine we have a motion by Dr. Allison Ampe seconded by Mr. Thielman I'll vote Mr. Cardin Ms. Morgan Mr. Schlickman Dr. Allison Ampe and I vote yes that's unanimous Ms. Morgan the daily before school rate on here is $15 a day I thought we had gone we'd moved that down on the one we just approved sorry I know it's not do we want do we do we know the number can we find out the number we could keep discussing and come back to this alright Ms. Morgan would you okay alright so do we want to so I move that the before school fee be adjusted to $9 second we have a motion by Mr. Cardin seconded by Mr. Schlickman discussion roll call vote Mr. Cardin Ms. Morgan Mr. Thielman Dr. Allison Ampe and I vote yes that's unanimous community relations Mr. Heiner is not here Mr. Cardin do you want to say anything else should the chat minutes be put in novice they're not but we had a chat this weekend with the special education focus there were four or five parents on during the half hour that we were there nothing of huge concern but we'll share the minutes curriculum instruction assessment and accountability Ms. Morgan we met on Monday we had a really good conversation about SLC and special education programming at Gibbs we talked about the strategic planning we talked about the overnight experience and we talked about the deputy superintendent job description we are meeting again in December for what I call in my mind HSD but more specifically we are talking about the an HDI update I think with just some of the pieces that we didn't that weren't part of the October update we're talking about open campus and substitutes at AHS and strategic planning and that is on December 21st thank you facilities Mr. Thielman yes so our subcommittee met yesterday afternoon and there is an interest in the part of the Greek church in acquiring 3,000 square feet of space that is near the church that is owned by the Arlington public schools in town council the IEM walks us through the process to respond to that request and we need more information so we need more information on what the church wants to do and it's a process that involves a review by our subcommittee a consultation with the state because the I don't think it's going to amount to much because the building was funded with state funds some of the reconstruction a vote of the full school committee a town meeting an appraisal an open bidding process so I'm not sure what's going to happen we just had a preliminary meeting to learn more we're at the beginning stages of the conversation we'll report back thank you policy and procedures Mr. Schlickman we will be meeting next Monday at 2pm we have a full agenda we have a plethora of adjustments to several non-discrimination policies to amend the footnotes and references pertaining to the crown act we'll also be discussing electric vehicle charging stations agenda format preparation dissemination public comment and guidelines for same as the policy in our practice have diverged with the zoom meeting so we're going to try to get it back to where our policy aligns to our practice thank you Arlington high school building committee we meet next on December whatever the first Tuesday in December nothing really major to report superintendent evaluation Mr. Cardin I think we're done for now well done thank you for your work there Liaison reports Ms. Morgan as Dr. Homan said we have a consultant for the wellness committee which is great we have spent a lot of time we met this week it's possible it was just yesterday yeah I think it was anyway there are very substantive changes to the wellness policy that are coming I'm actually going to try and talk to Mr. about how to manage that the wellness policy is big it has its recess it's food in schools there's a lot of stuff yeah there's a lot of stuff in there and so there are a lot of some changes that we have to make to be in alignment and as all good groups do lots of discussion about other possible things yeah it's a great group working really hard so I think the plan is to try and have that done like this school year so then it would come to us and we would go from there I think Mr. Thielman was chair of the subcommittee when we rewrote this last time around 2012 and it was an onerous task for which we threw rose petals at his feet with a lot of appreciation for guiding us through that I blocked that out I'm expecting the rose petals because I didn't understand this was coming when I got put on this and come April it'll be fun for somebody else to get those rose petals yeah you might get reassigned any other liaison report future agenda announcements just another report is that I did attend the MASC conference we had two resolutions which were both adopted by an overwhelming margin the one regarding representation on the state board of education Worcester came in with an amendment looking for geographic diversity as well folks wanted to add diversity into that there was also there's also a I was on a panel for the Safe Houses School and we talked about how Arlington was participating we're the first district in Massachusetts and one of the first two districts in the nation to be piloting this after a couple of schools in the Bronx started so we're early leaders in this and at the vendors tables HMF H Architects we're handing out these wonderful postcards and you can see there's a very beautiful high school that is widely depicted in their advertising so I brought home a couple for us so you can see it a lot of pride in Arlington High and the part of our architects one little one little report just thank you you know I did Dr. Holman, Dr. McNeil and the whole team, actually the whole leadership team Alice and Elmer was at Metco headquarters last night for the meeting with parents it was a good session so my compliments to the team on that it was a chance to speak to a few parents about their experience and one little boy there with a partner so they have long days these kids they leave at 6.40 in the morning they get home at 4.30 in the afternoon and they're all sleeping on the bus the bus monitor told me so it was a good I was about like a good thing for it'd be good for the school committee if we can get out there sometime but I have a meeting there so I think we should yeah okay yeah it was good good session so moved we all have our jobs Mr. Cardin Mr. Morgan Mr. Slickman Dr. Allison Ampe and I vote yes that's unanimous meeting is adjourned