Any questions or discussion on those items? >> No. Um, all in favor? I >> I >> Okay, that's unanimous. Um so, um future agenda items. Um I know we've got some stuff pending. Jay, um Raj, is there anything that we might need to discuss before the May 5th meeting? >> If nothing from our side is going there, right? So we'll definitely be in attendance given the budget, you know, and all that good stuff that's going on. So I'm I'm going to be there, right? But uh there's nothing directly related to us that's going going on the town meeting, you know. Okay, >> great. Um any board members have any new business? >> No, nothing new on my end, Ed. And we put off again uh I apologize the crowd discussion. meeting with with Jack Lewis uh tomorrow and that was rescheduled and so I wouldn't have had anything to add.
Those are important things. I wish more people showed up to those meetings cuz that's what really we needed to hear and see our concerns that we had and what this position was going to put us in by the numbers they were reaching for us. So, Aaron will walk you through his budget presentation and we'll be able to answer some questions for you as well, too. Um let let me start with um Al mentioned there was a small change this morning. Um in light of the vote last night and I think some comments about vocational transportation on the Boylston side, uh I reached out again to our transportation provider. Um as we know, the numbers for vocational from Boylston have dropped significantly. At this point, um there really are very few students um going from Boylston to Assabet right now. Um and that can be accommodated on a van.
Any discussion? Any further discussion? Take a vote, please. Mr. Jones. Yes. Mr. Mejia. Yes. Miss Mercedes. Yes. Mr. Tarbox. Miss Ferris. Yes. Mr. Tisler. Yes. >> Mr. Hayner. Thank you, everyone. All right. We're good.
>> All right. Everybody else, good job. All right. >> All right. Thank you very much everybody for being here. Thank you board of education for the opportunity to brag about some amazing kids and eligible students. We've had a really wonderful year and I'm honored to get a chance to or to recognize some of the highlighted accomplishments. Um I'd love to start with an athletic accomplishment. So our cross country runners have four cross country runners here. Can you come forward? I'll talk about you all as as a group. So um Lilian Okconor versa Bernie Gavin Lammy can you come up talk about what these wonderful athletes. So um I'm extremely pleased to honor these students for outstanding uh athletic accomplishments. This is our cross country team. were four members of our cross country team and I understand that cross country is a fall sport and we're here several months later but the championship race was after my fall board of education meeting and we couldn't let the year go by without recognizing what happened at Wing Park in November.
When you get to uh your station, we're going to have a data overview where we're going to walk you through the slides. Of course, we're going to give you think time and process time uh to make observations. And then on step three is when we're going to have that collaborative conversation. And in our and we'll do that three times because you're going to you're going to shift from station one to station two to station three. Once you hit the last station, we are going to ask you to have that reflection time um at the final station using the compass reflection graphic questions. Sounds good. Easy peasy. All right, we are going to have about 20 to 25 minutes per round and we'll kind of gauge the conversation and see if we need to adjust that a bit. Um, I'm going to ask our wonderful ed service team to move to their station so we can start transitioning.
An unauthorized civil immigration arrest or detention will be a class C felony. For the purposes of this section, civil immigration status means a person's status under federal immigration law that is civil in nature not by itself a crime a criminal offense under state law. Reasonable suspicion shall mean not based on based solely on race, color, ethnicity, national origin, ancestry, language, accent, religion, manner of dress, presence in a particular location, or the exercise of rights protected by the United States Constitution. And we'll delete the definition of interrogation and delete or the or in the quote or the Hawaii state constitution from the reasonable suspicion definition. And we'll add a savings clause. And then I'd also like to add committee language pointing out to conferees that there are several related bills still alive and we'll list them and note that they aren't all referred the same way, so I'll include specifically Senator Chang's bill Senate Bill 2203 in addition to those noted um in other places.
Um her communication is incredible with parents, with students, her artist of the week, her newsletters weekly, reminding parents of upcoming events that don't even have to do with art, but just making sure that kids and parents have have that knowledge of what's going on on campus. And so, um she has a remarkable ability um that stands out to uh build positive and trusting relationship with students, and it's her kind and calm demeanor that makes her wonderful to have on our campus. So, thank you, Ms. Bowman, for all you do for Cooley. >> [applause] >> And last up is our student point of pride, who we almost didn't have with us tonight because she didn't We were going to surprise her because she actually was part of the school budgeting project that our school purchase participatory budget project that presented earlier tonight. If you didn't have a chance to watch it, it's amazing to see all the different projects.
Our school's election day was on Wednesday, February 4th, 2026. And the winning project was window wrap. >> [applause] >> 374 students voted for the window wrap. And 215 students voted for the sports equipment. The window wrap was the project students voted for the most. We are excited to bring this idea to life and make our school even more welcoming and full of pride. >> [applause] >> Hello, I'm Jayden and I'm the student council treasurer. I'm Joy and your student council president. Hi, I'm Tatum and I'm student council vice president. I'm Owen, the student council PR. Hi, I'm Kendall. I'm the secretary. Student council ran the SPB. We had 40 students collaborate and we used our meeting time to vote. We narrowed it down to five ideas. One of our ideas were to wrap the gym to make our school look better for assemblies, which we added to the fun this year and families.
Mickey reaches out to figure out the census, how many children are in in the actually live within the Pelham School District. We have that conversation. Um we know that people can move in, can move out. Um and so, we often make sure that we have enough seats to account for the spaces that we could have available, as well as if we have someone that moves into the district and we have to make sure that they have a seat because we are their school. We're a public school system. Um critical things that we also think about is Pelham's actual infrastructure. Um Pelham school building is not huge. You know, um and so we would not want to max out the classrooms because we want to think about safety, the amount of desks, chairs, and those types of things. So, you know, those are all things that we take into account when we're sitting on it determining how many seats are available.
>> Yeah. So maybe if one if that meeting does happen, we can just get that added to our next agenda from May 5th. >> Sure. >> All right. So for now everyone, our next meeting is on May 5th. Um if no one else has anything, I will request a motion to adjurnn. >> So moved. >> Second. Great. Um thank you everybody. Thanks for attending.
I wasn't certain what the cost of that was going to be. I left the placeholder in because of even a van can be fairly expensive, but if you can ride share that van, uh you can reduce that cost. So, my call to them this morning um led to, you know, what what what can we get the pencils down to if there's some ride sharing or things like that. So, they were able to reduce that cost. I got in touch with Boylston. Um I guess I want to thank Jess for for bringing it up. It it it dawned on me like, "Let's make the call and do it." So, I did make the call. So, that ended up being about $31,000 um of savings. So, that salvages a little bit. Um you know, I think it's really important to be clear that I mean, you know, we've we've heard it over and over.
So we want to shout out the entire cross country team who put in excellent hard work throughout the season setting personal records and improving throughout. But these four athletes uh performed exceptionally well at the end of season state middle school state cross country championship which is held at Wickham Park in November. Um this is out of a field of 300 as I tell you where they finished. Remember this is out of a field of 300 runners and I brought the top two runners from both the boys team and the and the girls team. So I want to first call up Luke de Mandy who finished out of 300 12 and also from the boys team Kevin Mullins. He finished third. And then from the girls team, congratulations to Marissa Burning who finished. And last last but not least, we want to offer a huge congratulations to Lillian O' Conor who won the whole thing.
We do need to move our um, projector slide um, panels a little bit and get logged in, but if you remember what station you're at, you can already start to head that way. We're going to have the board members um, sitting in the uh, outside of the dis. If you're at um station two, you're going to be uh right in the center, >> right over here. high school, middle school. So you're missing um just so you know the way it's set up as I said we'll start with students and we'll go to families and each the first section is always an overview of the longitudinal The next question starting with our high school. You can see here this measure is describing the degree to their students supportive collaborative relationship and what this area is at the very Oh, also I want to mention the high school is on a fivepoint scale.
Let me repeat that. Questions or concerns? If not, Vice Chair. On HB 1886 HD2 SD1 recommendation to pass with amendments. Are there any no votes or reservations? Hearing none, measure is adopted. Thank you. Next up is HB 1897. This amends the conditions and procedures of alternate dispute resolution for condo-related disputes. Um This one I'm not quite happy with yet, so I'm going to defer it until Thursday 10:02 a.m. Uh that is April 9th at in this room 016. Okay, next up is HB 1957 related to safe entryways. Establishes for a county with a population greater than 300,000 enforcement procedures to prevent people or personal property from blocking or otherwise impeding entryways. Um This one I'm going to defer indefinitely. Uh it certainly isn't a a problem it certainly is a problem in the district I represent, but if the doorway is private property, that's trespass.
Um there's a YouTube stream from it earlier that you could check out. And so, um she was part of that. We were going to surprise her right after, but it finished a little faster. And so, we didn't want her to miss out, so we had to ruin the surprise a little bit early. But, um our student is Layla Jessinghaus. I always mispronounce her name. Layla is an eighth-grade student at Cooley who has an incredible academic and extracurricular resume as you would expect. Um but even more than that, I want to highlight Layla's kindness, um who she is on campus. She's always there to help take care of other students, take care of her peers. Um she's truly genuine as a person, and you don't often see that. Um and it's just wonderful to work with Layla in anything she does. And I have a story in just a second, but I want to highlight some of her academic and um extracurricular endeavors.
Another idea we had was to fix the mount for the Higley bell because we think it is an important piece to our district. Our third idea was to replace the gravel pit with turf to allow students and teachers to use it for read alouds and other activities. We held our vote on February 6th and for the vote we had the younger kids vote on paper and the older kids vote on a electronics. And the And the winner is Wrapping HTA. Which we which we announced at our most recent pep assembly. >> [applause] >> Hello, my name is Jazlyn Bottomfield and I am in sixth grade and I am uh part of the steering committee. This year our school took on the challenge of of the school participatory budget creating ideas that will beautify our school and make our school even better. My name is Jim Smith.
Of course, school the school committee already voted to approve that. Um we usually have a um application window. Opening up the application window earlier doesn't really help us at this time, but for example, Mickey starts I think it's the 19th the 18th the 18th next Saturday the 18th. >> open house. Yes, the 18th. Exactly. So, the 18th um prior to us opening applications, Mickey usually has like an school choice open house where she has parents come in, they do a tour, um she talks to them about the school, and then after that we kind of like within by May or so we open up our application for school choice. Um and we're following our same timeline. We understand what the we what we understand the urgency that the community has come to with, but we've also put some processes in place and these are long-standing processes.
I heard it since the day I got here that Boylston is at their limit. Right? And and that's not going to change without something like a 2 and 1/2 override. Um they've said that very publicly. I'm not I'm not like sharing any big secrets, right? Um so, taking those numbers, the work we've done with the admin team, uh we spent this morning and and that's part of the reason we're waiting for final numbers, waiting for answers is why, you know, maybe you didn't get very specific items in uh the drive, right? And the hope is that we need to talk to staff. We need to be mindful of not creating havoc until we have that opportunity to talk to those individual staff members on a one-on-one basis. Um so, going [clears throat] in where we are now, um from an operating budget standpoint, um I think I skipped this slide, but there's just a title slide.
First, >> thank you very much. Congratulations to our to our athletes. I return Houston. Well, now my largest group of the evening, if I could have you do the same thing. The students who uh performed at the Northern Region Music Festival, if you could join me up here. Northern Region Music Festival. Thank you. So, as you know, um, Canton has a long and prestigious history of supporting music and we have some exceptional musical talent throughout the district and this year once again we were named one of the best communities for music education. I mentioned this to highlight that the talent pool here in Canton is deep and from um and from that pool these students uh have shown themselves to be truly exceptional. They decided to apply for the rigorous process of auditioning for the northern region music festival. So that is where they are given a music a complicated musical piece which they must learn and rehearse on their own and then auditioned uh after they have learned only the highest cal of young musicians are then selected to participate.
So students answer this way whether they strongly disagree all the way up to strongly agree. on the five point scale here in the 58 and you can >> so this is um the national we're a little national and this is the average California and then you You can also see that since um 2023 here was our school consolidation kind of had a positive trajectory. >> Then this is the actual statements that the students into. And this is again high school student. I feel I really feel like a part of my school's community. I feel safe at school. students are friendly to me around other students. So the positive percentile is the amount of students that responsibly. So if you look at the percentages and then if you look at the trend from last year we're trending positively actually in all of those. Next we're going to be looking at middle school.