2022 March 14- Methuen School Committee Meeting

001in infancy stages at this point but you know thinking about what would a youth community newsletter look like so that it would only be geared towards community youth programs not private programs not out of methuen programs community youth programs rec department youth sports our nevins library our ymca what are those community youth programs right so we're trying to define this to some degree because we will i know i did attach attorney joyce's you know response to this memo so you can see it uh but but there are some things that are within the purview of the school committee to define and then once you open it there are things you cannot define as a school committee so so those are good things to have knowledge of to know what happens if you know we open

002up our schools and community to to all literature and all groups uh that means all um so it you know i questioned uh attorney joyce and said so is it within the apartment right the just the point-blank question is it within the purview of the school committee to be able to define what the schools are used as venues for information right because if it's a non-school related uh anything i don't have to send it home and i say i district right it doesn't have to go home through the school so if we define what we're sending home and it's youth programs that's what it's going to be and so this is what we talked about it being which i think is what i got the sense from all of you uh at the last school

003committee meeting right like how do we promote our our community our programming right i'm not gonna promote another towns or a private league um so so uh that's that was part of the conversation so part of the idea that we had here which i did summarize if any of you have questions is thinking about a process with the youth directors in the community over the summer that we would actually have a process that you would submit right so whatever it is the youth sports uh the ymca the nevins library all the directors of those community programs um would be able to filter their information through uh us and so we would put together with the rec department just sort of one here's the events and activities right so as a parent i know if i

004see this the first friday of every month it's i can sign up for stuff there might be art classes there might be uh baseball tryouts there might be ice skating lessons whatever it might be it's it's all focused on the youth programs of methuen um so that's where we got and he was really excited to partner on this uh to figure out you know the youth um most of the athletic uh youth sports directors go through him for field use and such that they go through the rec department not matt curran matt curran works with steve angelo very closely to make sure we don't overlap right the high school sports do get priority during the high school seasons of fields for games and such like that and so they do work together very closely as

005well so we just we felt like this would be a really nice partnership to actually bring the community uh events together in a way that is a little controlled and what i mean by controlled was talking about the fact of us not having 20 flyers the first friday of every month that would be taxing end up on floors things like that but be able to combine that into a you know here's the information that this the community needs right one thing that we talked about i don't think it was with stephen that we talked about it but another colleague of mine is even adding having every community group add a qr code to the actual flyer so you can't get easier than that right so you have a physical flyer you put a qr code

006you hold your phone up and then you're in the sign up right so so if we do this efficiently we just need a little time both of us agreed this is not something that i can put together right now and it's not something he can put together right now but if we have the summer to actually think about what that process is sit with all the youth directors and the nevins library and the ymca right because i want to include every community group that has activities for our youth right everybody under 18 in this in this city um i think we can put something together that would be really efficient and effective and sort of bridge that like looking for 10 000 different pieces of information um so so that's where we that's where we

007sort of left it and wanted to present that here and there would be some rules to follow obviously for us to be able to copy and distribute all of these things but like there would be a certain date that we would select of the month that they would have to submit it by in english and spanish so that we would literally it wouldn't be any we wouldn't be editing anything right we would i mean i would edit it but uh that we would be copying and pasting what the community program wanted them you know one of the parents to know right what is it what is the age group what are the dates how do you want kids people to sign up uh things like that so we would be happy though to continue because

008we know that there are some groups i i'm gonna pick out the nevins just for one the nevins does beautiful flyers uh that are very visually um stimulating with book titles and covers and things like that so that if if groups still wanted to do that we would be happy to continue to put those in our flyer page on the website uh you know individually but as far as something physically going home we have to be able to kind of control the volume and the timing of it with our own staff and we we all felt and i had a meeting with the principals about it as well the first friday of every month is reasonable uh doing it by quarter or summit we tried all the different dates and it just it doesn't quite

009make sense because something's not going to line up with something so so if a group knows it's the first friday but i need it you know maybe two weeks prior to that then you got to get it the friday before right the month before so it's going to be an organization thing too for each of the groups um so uh some of some of the things that we would have to decide and that would be at the purview of you all or giving me the authority or delegation to do this but there are outside organizations that parents do like the information and we do share those i would say the biggest one that i know parents actually look for and have called our office looking for it every year that i've been at central office

010is the bu summer reading program so there are programs that are outside of methuen that are free to our children that and you know that are different opportunities for our children and we just have to decide how we because it is it is a outside of methuen group but it's at no cost and it's it's it's something that our families do take advantage of so we have to just kind of think through you know that that is not something that i would see that would go into a newsletter like what i'm talking about and partnering with with the rec department um but you know how do we do we just continue to maintain those those flyers electronically that's easy enough uh to make sure that we have parents still looking for those and still have

011access to those types of of information and flyers that are good for our kids just different experiences for our students so that's the first part questions about the first part remember keegan what about programs for instance the one that pops to mind your microphone is not working okay thanks um that's loud um what about programs the one that comes to mind like as for instance special olympics or the things for um our special needs community that are that methuen itself doesn't necessarily hold because it's regional typically so like top sports and those sort of things that cater to our kids but aren't necessarily a methuen thing because there isn't enough population in methuen to do that and like the special needs sort of things come to mind quickly for me but things like that how

012do we how do we still get that information to the families i don't have a full answer for that this is part of the conversation but this is this is what i'm saying so so right there would be a community youth event i heard what i heard loud and clear was youth sports so i heard that loud and clear last time right and so talking to stephen it's youth sports and what's the rec department doing which they've been doing a lot more so we want to get that which we do send out all of that information so so that was where our mind was when we had the conversation of how can we make sure that our any programs here that that are from our parents uh with our kids participating we want to send

013out physical flyers so that we would still provide the opportunity to have any other flyers electronically on the website on his website on my website still go out with the newsletters you know with the principles i don't i think that's what that's what we have to decide is at what point are you you the committee right at the will of the committee allow me uh to determine what those flyers the ones that i think are going to be good for our students to have access to like the bu reading program special olympics cpac elpac right those are all still really important pieces of information but they don't quite fit in this topic that we were bringing to the forefront again that i heard really loud and clearly from this group and the parents right so

014there's a ton this is what i'm saying there's a ton of flyers uh and it just how we compartmentalize that or how we try to move you know see if this works and if it works do we expand it do we do it differently does it work are we getting the information out um you know i again i just think we just if this allows us a process with our you know 10 most active community members to get information out at a regular pace and a regular basis right because right now what happens is i ordy get just gets random emails or we get stuff dropped off at my office and said can you improve this and then we scan we scan it and put it on the website or it comes via email and

015we upload it and again random times random just random emails right so uh we just have to decide what that do we continue that and just post online because that's in real time right we're not waiting for anything we just post it when we get it and i approve it um i mean we're here to have this discussion it just has to be reasonable the principals were very concerned about the quantity and the timeliness of this right so once a month on friday they were everybody was good they're like we can do that especially if it comes to us like this where it's a you know i don't know three four page stapled packet already copied in packs and we distribute right it's not 15 flyers that a secretary has to sit there and organize

01615 flyers in packs of 25 for 45 classrooms because that's what it ends up being and that's that's multiple days worth of organization that we just we don't have the time to do so this is what stephen and i are trying to figure out like how we can utilize both of our departments you know even at the central office building to be able to coordinate this put it together and give the boxes already organized to the to the school buildings so i don't have a perfect answer for this because there's going to be a lot that are going to come in that i think our parents are going to need the information for uh that i would not want to hold back from you know sharing okay remember zombie pesh thanks so i i think

017this is a good start and i agree with you um madam superintendent i heard sports really loud and clear as well and i think it makes sense my only caveat with this is and i think this has to be tonight has to be you know a small section of a much larger discussion that we need to have because it's a very slippery slope and while i understand the need maybe for some discretion and allowing particular groups that are outside of school again it makes me very nervous even putting that soul discretion on you or on us without carving out a very narrow interpretation for those discretionary items because what comes to my mind immediately is like politics right and now some of some young political groups could be very beneficial might even be school sanctioned

018correct but i think we need to be very careful because those are also the items that sometimes you know get misinterpreted and parents see them is very um uh almost targeted and and it just becomes very yes it becomes a very you know very muddy waters so i think when we do this it's all in the verbiage and again i think we need a much larger discussion but the ambiguity of outside non-school related groups just isn't working for me so i think as a as a group we're going to really need to carve out what those exceptions may be and then even if the discretion then is passed to you at least you have some sort of a uh design to work with you know you need some parameters because parameters because it's just going

019to be it's too broad i don't disagree with you so the initial conversation i had with attorney joyce was this is a start right and we we he he certainly is not going to advise us in a place that is going to land us into a difficult situation and there are some things that we will have to do differently and post in things like our handbook so that it's really clear what we're doing and what we're sharing with our students right um exactly and why in the interim i think it might behoove us to start with sports only i think that's a very easy well i mean i guess if you're putting this off until next year we have time to talk about it but if we want to do something in the immediate future

020i think it's very easy to say school related sports flyers and do like a trial run with just those items and then maybe work on a larger policy because the immediate need for our sports group seems to be that they just need their words out and the teams are faltering and they don't have enough players and i mean that was the message i heard so if that's something to do with a quicker turnaround i don't i don't think that's a bad place to start either while we carve out a larger a larger policy that's more inclusive of other items that might benefit our student body yeah i don't disagree with you it's my understanding that the spring sports youth spartans are already done which is why steven and i talked a little bit about the

021fact that throwing this together right now is potentially going to put us into a more challenging situation if i'm just going to open the door for just flyers to come through for the next three months and then trying to gather and put a process in place you know starting in august right um so so we both felt very strongly that this is this is a really good task for us for july because we could easily get all the people in the room that need to be in the room nobody will be in the middle of a season you know at that time and hopefully we can get everybody on board so everybody understands the process what are they going to submit how are they going to submit it and the timeliness of those submissions right

022um and that's fine we so we do have so i feel we do have the next couple of months to actually just talk this through if this is something we want to start with i can talk to attorney joyce and say this is what we want to start with how do we make sure that we don't find ourselves in a difficult situation with this scenario well i think we need to share we have the time i think your first your first um pass out it makes the most sense and try to just not only limit it to sports in that in that case and then we can kind of see where we go again i'm just super nervous and saying you know everything outside of sports lays on the shoulders of the superintendent because i

023think we're just opening ourselves up for for a lot of critique right so um yeah i mean like i said i'm happy to be part of that larger discussion um but i think this is a good start because i i think you know we're alleviating some of the burden of multiple publications and multiple delivery dates and that sort of stuff so i think it's i think it's the best of the both worlds i just um like i said i think we need to really be careful with our verbiage yeah and one of the things i was going to have uh when things slow down i don't know when that is july when they slow down a little bit is is have difficulty when do we slow down yeah i know i i'm just waiting mr

024noble's still trying to find out when that slow time is for us i promised it was july but that doesn't work necessarily for the assistant superintendents um but but i think um i was going to ask dodie to kind of look through what's a year's worth of flyers look like for us right what are if if we had to dump them into buckets and categories you know what is it that i mean i know she gets email some and i check you know like i approve them some emails i get and forward them to her i just i just always go through her for flyers so i was thinking of that too like what what if if we had to pick the five buckets that we get right is it academic you know free academic

025opportunities for students is that a bucket and do we get a lot of flyers in that bucket uh you know do we get a lot of buckets from other athletic uh you know aau's or which i don't think we do but you know if we do we send those home what does that look like boy scouts girl scouts there are some things there that we have to be cautious of which i was forewarned about that because those could be the deci actually also for wunderson on those if they are uh discriminating against gender identity things like that we we don't want to be involved in supplying that so so we do have to look at all of those things as we as we go through this process and you might if you're going to do

026a composite newsletter versus the flyers once that's decided it almost makes sense maybe that's how you separate it right maybe we have different titles on that newsletter you know and it has to fall under these particular categories outside learning opportunities for students um you know athletics whatever i mean maybe that's a way to to kind of limit it but you know i don't know yeah this is if if announce whatever comments and discussion people want to have uh we will definitely you know we have again we have some time because we don't think we can tackle this until june july anyway uh but this is the direct again this was the conversation and i'm lucky right now because i think stephen wants to partner and go in this direction with us right he has a

027lot to gain from this as well and we want to get as much information out to our kids about what's happening in methuen as possible uh you know his programs plus right everybody seems to be intertwined in programming right matt curran as well a lot of our coaches do uh their own programming so we like to promote those some of those are going through the rec department now so we just we have this sort of um i guess this is the right time to try to do something like this and bring this together a little bit more cohesively and i think that's where we both were headed and like how could we bring these messages so so parents aren't searching for all of these different places even on websites and where do you find the

028methuen youth basketball like do you just start google search these things and right because they're not just easily sort of posted somewhere so so that's we can move in that direction and again i will continue michael joyce will be advising us in this regard as we move through this process to make sure that we don't get ourselves into a difficult situation the second part there so as i put in the middle uh the other large bucket uh is the ptos in the buildings um so having spoken to the principals about this i think that we are all in agreement that the ptos are just going to work with their school principals and if they have flyers sign ups information that needs to go home pertaining to their own buildings they're going to work through the

029principal get the flyers approved go through me and we're not going to do it once a month it'll be on a friday and it will be timely and necessary based on whatever the fundraiser activity might be that the pto is having i think the ptos would be very happy to hear that but we are okay moving back in that direction we did the first year as well let the ptos continue just because there are things that like physically you know uh parents had to sign up for and and actually write uh to give to the pto because they can't use our programming so there are some things that we'll have to go home so that was something that was pretty again an easy uh go around for our ptos and i should have put on

030there and i'm sorry i didn't but that would go for our cpac and our lpac as well so our cpac group often sends home flyers for community events and things that they put on or meetings our lpac is our english learner family group which is actually up and running at this point so uh either one of those i would consider like a pto and be able to send that home in a timely manner for our students and families okay i actually um are you done member pleasure i just wanna make sure okay um i actually have a question so is there a um guideline that all principals will follow as to what can be approved and what cannot be approved is there the only thing the principal is approving right now is a pto flyer

031okay all right and there's no specific guidelines within that for them to say no i can't there's something on this flyer i can't you know what i'm trying to get to no we we've never had an issue with that so if it pertains to the actual event or again fundraiser uh the principals need to make sure that whatever information is on there needs to be on there and then it goes to me so i'm once it comes to me then i look for the principal's initials because i want to make sure that something's not trying to get past somebody right exactly yeah okay great here's my question yep are there any other questions about that no okay thank you so much uh may i have a motion to approve the community program salary moved by

032member nicholson second second by member de zoglio see all those in favor signify by discussion discussion discussion yes please so i do have mr cafoy here who joined us tonight so i will pass my microphone off to him so if you all have questions or you just want him to summarize where this is coming from that will be helpful for your discussion before approval sir thank you you're welcome so i uh i i think it's pretty clear in the memo i it's been several years since we've had when we started the program the salary range is similar to what you see here currently hourly rates that we have and so right now it's tough as as colleen could tell you about trying to get staff on board we're competing with places like mcdonald's who are

033paying and i put them in there 15 18 an hour to start and the lowest hourly we have is our our high school juniors and seniors that are eligible to be trainees they don't lead a group alone but they work with our group leaders and we have been paying them by my law i think by regulation we could do a dollar less than minimum wage but one minute as you know minimum wage has been going up every year now for the last four or five years and we're at 14 25 right now um and so i would like to uh do at least that for them these are potential a lot of these students that start out as trainees become group leaders for us they like the work so much that they they stay involved

034and they and they keep reapplying to be part of our program um and working with the kids so it helps us uh immensely um and then you know it's broken down we have a program coordinator of all four grammar schools we have assistant coordinators um in the mornings typically in the afternoons right now where we we're short of staff there and then the group leaders the communities i compared it to i'm a member of a of a massachusetts group my peers this was from a chart that they submitted i mean numbers they submitted so i know we're not a natick type community but that's what i have natick medford framingham and as you can see what i've proposed is not anything i don't think outrageous um and i think it's you know very reasonable and

035we can cover that right now you know one of my discussions with the superintendent was do we need to look at the rates again i came to you last year to raise rates i don't want to have to do it again i think we can do this you know if it's an issue then i'll come back but i don't see it as an issue i don't want our parents to have to pay any more this year a good telltale telltale sign will be in the summertime when we do the summer program um but i'd like to you know implement this uh immediately if if you see fit any questions you have a question remember johnny pesch um do you have the rates so you kind of touched on my question um i'd like to see

036the rates it's funny when you when last we looked at them how do they compare to other communities i remember them being very very low in compared with other communities so i understand we don't want our parents to pay more but we also have to be in line because i don't disagree with you at all everything's gone up and and believe me in my private business i'm competing with mcdonald's and that's like ridiculous because places are just overpaying because they can't find help so i don't disagree that we need this but my memory and i wish i had the rates in front of me because again i'm going by memory but i remember in my comparison of like you know private day care and stuff the rates were very very low in comparison to that

037so i have no problem voting for this and getting these in line but i i would like to make sure that our charges are in line with the same figures right with neighboring communities and what have you even if it's a little bit less i just don't want it to be you know disproportionate i did start to look at that and um it's tough now to try so i have the chart from last may oh you do it yes i don't and i remember you said that at the time maybe we should go higher so uh so you know what i did like um had compared our first seven years eight years uh we were current across the board and then we went up last year um and um i compared to methuen little sprouts

038methuen ymca north andover's um school year yeah those are good comparisons and uh the numbers so i can't tell you i've been digging to see what little sprouts has and you can't you have to apply i think or start that process to get some straw applicants yeah well you pretty much have to do that right to uh to see what this is um and the methuen why i uh i don't think that's changed any i don't think it's gone down um their camp order program is more expensive than our summer program is so and that's it's a tough comparison i'm thinking they offer quite a bit more though than we may uh less hours um and uh but um i don't know i like to think we offer no i was just thinking in terms

039of facilities yes yeah it's outdoors and salem i believe in southern new hampshire um i can get those figures and and submit them again through memo to the superintendent for you to you to see i'll do my best yeah thank you no i'd appreciate that and again i don't disagree with what you have here i think we need to retain our employees i think it makes sense especially for long term and we need to take care of the people who work for us so thank you i appreciate you bringing this forward member de zoglio thank you madam vice chair um i just want to say um even dating back to when i worked at the tenney school i remember this program very well especially when i was teaching summer school and the one thing i

040loved about it was it was kids teaching kids and especially with covet today and the way kids are socially emotionally the best way i think to teach them is through kids right now and when kids are like we said we're competing with mcdonald's and these other things and especially with the environment that these kids are dealing with too they might think it's easy to go somewhere else for if they're going to get more money so and so what my attitude is it's very important to keep these kids involved with kids to show better examples because we need that type of influence on our kids right now is all the kids teaching our kids way to be uh certain things um so i'm in favor of this all together um i love what you do i

041i i've seen it even when i was inside working um and like like um the madame uh superintendent mountain patch said we need to keep our staff but most importantly we got to keep our kids involved with the kids in our community right so you will have my full support thank you any other questions comments okay so i have a motion on the floor right now to um so all those in favor signify by saying i i i opposed passes unanimously thank you thank you very much for coming thank you appreciate it okay i'd like to open for discussion the superintendent's self-evaluation on her mid-cycle goals i can start if you would like me to break absolutely i know i know i'll i'll break the ice uh so so i'm so i'm gonna just announce

042this publicly so part of uh what is in my contract is that i owe you a mid-cycle uh self-evaluation of my goals in february so we are a little delayed but i put it in this packet for the discussion to make sure that you had uh within your purview you know where where i am with the four goals that i presented and you approved in the fall um so all of the uh dark bullets are the pieces that were actually in the goal the action items and the bullets underneath those with the hollowed out holes are my updates where i am right now with these goals um so i basically am i'm just giving you that update i'm looking for if there are any questions or if any of you have questions i guess about

043this going forward so over the summer my my i guess the june workshop would be when i would be presenting my evidence to all of you you'll all get evidence that backs up that right this is just me saying it giving you an update on where i'm at uh but i have been collecting a binder of evidence of all these things that i've bulleted here so you can see what does uh what does a stock take which i did actually put in here we have been doing those every month with our leadership team based on our goals you know what does that template look like i think that's important for you guys to to see those pieces uh you know what does the work look like that i've been doing with the uh leading with

044race and equity in mind right what what kinds of tasks am i being asked to do uh what does that look like and what am i being asked to bring back to the district so i've been collecting all that in a binder that is something that i will share with you in june as you all will be conducting my evaluation over the summer and i did get one i do want to tell everybody because somebody asked so on page eight at the very bottom just so that there's no bypoc is somewhat of a new acronym but it's black and indigenous people of color that is what bipoc means we have a bipark club here at the high school now that is in going into year three of running a completely student-run group but this is

045the the leading with with race and equity in mind uh the work that i'm doing is in two uh groups we have 12 white superintendents and there are 12 bi-pac superintendents we spend some time apart every month and we spend some time together every month and it's just it's been a really thought-provoking growth oriented process for me for sure and my colleagues it's been great i just i realized i didn't spell that out so you might people thank you for doing that yeah so if there's any questions if not that's my update thus far and we'll go into probably more depth in june no questions okay back to you madam superintendent uh would you please start the presentation on the strategy for district improvement quarterly update yes so i'm going to turn this over so

046you have the uh packet hopefully was delivered with you with a slide so we'll put it up on the screen so people watching can also see uh so this is our hard to believe we're on where it's march 28th uh this year has gone by very quickly uh so this is our third uh presentation to all of you based on our goals so uh there are some uh really interesting uh and exciting things that we are seeing happening that we are gonna be sharing with you this evening but mr noble will i'm going to turn it over to him thank you the master of ceremony tonight for this i feel like we should have some like elevator music or something while he's uh tuning that up oh ryan said he was going to sing for

047us tonight oh there it is good job good evening everyone so i'm going to take you through our quarterly update as superintendent mentioned this the third time uh we've been before you with an update like this so many of the slides are going to be very familiar i'm not going to um read them to you but i wanted to make sure you all have them so that we're grounded in the same language so here's our theory of action this is straight from our district strategy for improvement and guides all of this work that is unpacked into our three core objectives each of which i'll provide an update on tonight so objective one we're calling colloquially our literacy goal objective two is about students mental health and objective three is about educational equity so just as

048a reminder of where we started and where we're hoping to get to for for our first objective so for our literacy goal um we set a goal that by the end of this school year 60 percent of our students in grades three through eight would read at or above grade level okay so our baseline is that we're at 43 percent um back in 2019 on the mcas test and the rapid assessment which is the screener we're using k-12 this year when we began the year 24 of our students in those grades were expected to [Music] be reading at or above grade level by the end of the year okay so let's see how we're doing so i've added to this chart the last update we had two bars this time we have three bars i

049think in general the good news is that the bars keep getting taller and we continue to see the same trend emerge that we saw with the second update which is that the kids in their earliest grades are showing really dramatic gains so for example kindergartner started with the fall rapid test only five percent of of kindergarteners in this district were expected to read at or above grade level by the end of the school year and we're up to 32 percent so still not where we want to be but that does represent a 540 increase all right and you see similar um big jumps for grades uh one through three as well things sort of start to plateau as you get up into the middle school grades i think some of that you can attribute to

050the fact that they started much higher um so for example eighth grade which has been relatively flat throughout the year started at 54 likely to be reading at or above grade level by the end of the year they're at 55 so functionally flat so we haven't moved any additional kids toward that goal of reading at or above grade level i will say our our literacy work this year has has been heavily focused on the youngest grades um i think when we got that first round of data we were pretty shell-shocked by what it suggested about the kids that were coming in in kindergarten first and second grade and have poured a lot of our new literacy coordinators time literacy supervisors time working with those grade level teams in all four buildings and have brought in

051a lot of new resources new curricula new materials to support work in those grades also that's where i think the the biggest change to the daily schedule for teachers and students has been has been observed so it doesn't surprise me that we're seeing bigger gains there um i think i think we're at the point now where we feel really good about the work that that's been done in those grades with those teachers and are starting to turn our attention more directly to the grades in the middle and upper upper school any questions about these data please is this data all inclusive like do these numbers include like ell or it does yeah so i think i was debbie downer last time too and and i don't mean to be and i don't doubt the hard

052work and effort that's going in these numbers terrify me still like when we came up with that number of to me that's all inclusive as well right like that gives us 40 of people of students with the ell students whoever right like i i love that i love your optimism and you know the way you talk about large gains and starting from a higher level but like 20 percent it's very very concerning for me when we start to get into those middle grades as i'm sure it is for you guys um you know to have 43 of seventh graders to be expected to read at or above their grade level is just atrocious i mean we can't we can't ensure these students you know higher education and doing well with 43 with you know 57

053of those kids not even reading at their grade level um so i'm just venting i have no solution and i think i said that as well last time but and i will i will say as well i'm so happy to have this data because we didn't have it before and i was hoping to see wonderful things and yes these numbers look wonderful but i just i'm i'm so scared for our students with some of these numbers so i think we need to just keep looking at it i think you guys are doing all the right things um but but we need we need these numbers higher we just do and i i don't doubt that you guys feel the same way i 100 agree with you and i think what reassures me is that you

054know where we've spent the time and attention this year and made the big investments we are seeing growth so i think the evidence-based strategies i hope to see a bigger jump only because so many of these so that fall based testing i thought was really coming off of a really really hard year and we might still be paying for some of that loss right that that could very well be the case um but i expected a larger jump like kindergarten doesn't worry me like that's great but i expect that of kindergartners because a lot of kindergarteners can't read so it makes sense right even first grade when you're getting that they're getting more proficient at reading but the ones that really scare me are you know like fourth grade up um because they should be

055reading they should be reading often and i mean again preaching to the choir but reading is the basis for everything i mean it's just it's it's such a big deal and i hope students understand that and parents understand that and we can only do so much um but yeah i think we just need to to follow this and and again i'm happy with some of the changes i just you know we got to keep pushing great right and the fourth graders going into upper school so that's like one of those big turning points but i'm sorry remember does oglio you madam rice yeah um i was actually really good with the numbers but as madame patch has also um addressed her concerns it is mine the curious thing that i have and i it's the

056the big jump from fourth to fifth grade is like in that sense um in the springtime but like and then it drops back like it spikes up to the sixth grade to 17 and then it drops again down to like 15 and what's going on in those grades where there's a big like drop and then it's a big spike in these different grids can you explain what's happening in these grades is it because there's more ell students or is there just i i just was curious about that yeah it's a great question i don't think it has anything to do with the student demographics because we're fairly consistent across across the grade levels um i think it's a lot to do with the materials teachers are using with their kids like we have high quality

057core ela materials for grades k through six we've the district prior to my arrival made big investments in new programs which you all are aware of so now it's about making sure teachers have the support they need to use those skillfully and again i think you know we've poured our our time into those young grades we've tried to supplement those those core materials with additional resources to fill the gaps that we know our kids are are showing i think when you start to creep up into grades four and five it's it's new territory for a lot of our fourth and fifth grade teachers to be teaching basic phonics right they haven't had to do that or maybe they should have been doing it but didn't do it and so you're you're asking you know teachers

058across the district to react to the kids in front of them and now we have this data to your point member pesh we we know where our holes are we know there's tons of fourth and fifth graders who need that time on foundational skills that might have just got lost in the shuffle in years past they're not getting lost now and now it's about building up our teachers acumen to effectively develop those foundational skills while at the same time trying to get kids to write with endurance and trying to get kids to grapple with complex texts and trying to get kids to build background knowledge that's going to serve them for the rest of their academic careers through the stuff that they read and talk about and think about in in class so they're having

059to do all of those pieces that have always been part of their grade level standards but also accelerate up on the foundational skills for and i think that's what's taking time it's new for them to teach that stuff if i could comment uh briefly too i i just don't want to lose sight of the fact that when we walked into school this year one of the things that we were hit with that was harder than we thought it was going to be was where the kids were emotionally and the amount of time that it took us to re-regulate our students and adults and parents and everybody else to school as we were pressing forward with our literacy goal right it was it was an incredibly uh new loss change lots going on kids right i

060had we had parents at me and everybody trying to re-regulate to to be being in school again uh which i know you all experienced as well but uh it was coming fast and furious at all of us and i feel like uh once we hit the holidays things did i know kovac kind of ramped up again but the regulation of uh student behaviors and you know parents parent behavior and staff and everything was starting to regulate again so just in our even professional conversations it feels really good right now to have conversations with teachers and have them be a part of how we're going to make this better next year and that for me has been uh the most refreshing part right it wasn't that we're doing this to kids and doing this to to

061staff and parents right we need to focus on literacy and we need to make sure our kids are reading but our kids needed some time to to relearn being in school with peers and we had many new students in our school so which you'll see during the budget process just how many new students came to our school during september and during the school year but i just i don't want to lose sight of that because i think we feel right now we are in such a better place with having these conversations working with the teachers union working with teacher groups i mean we're meeting we're starting to but but we have working groups of k2 teachers reading success to talk to us about the schedule of it and how you know how we're functioning how

062the group selections have been to help us drive those conversations so we can make a schedule that actually is beneficial to students and staff for for this purpose right so um it took us a little bit to get there but we're there and it feels really good so it is here and i and i think you're right we've never had such concrete timely consistent data um i'm very interested and we've had mr noble and i've had this conversation recently as we embark upon the mcas season to see how right we're looking at a 60 uh reading success if you would based on an mcas measure right that's what this goal is has been built around uh how is that going to correlate with this information that we're really diving deep this is diving deeper right

063we're not going to get this kind of information from an mcas test but it's going to be really interesting for us to see once we start getting those scores back over the summer and in september how does that correlate to what's happening here right is is this a a different kind of measure and we can kind of gain a little bit about how we correlate that measure the measures better uh on on what we're doing with students so that's we're a little bit anxious about that uh you know seeing this and what this is measuring and how we're moving kids uh in these deeper categories and then how does that correlate to the mcas performance because that's going to be incredibly public and that's part of you know again that's the major statistic for our

064goal data point sorry oh remember nicholson and then we'll go to you member uh thank you superintendent member nicholson your microphone is not working it's on green thank you ryan thank you superintendent and assistant superintendent for reminding us of the challenges that our students and our staff faced during the past couple of years i think that's important to note i'm also thankful that we now have concrete data in front of us these test scores are not what we want the data points are not what we want but they've been around for a while the the we were worried about this in in all of your work is showing us that we had a right to be worried about it um i'm thrilled that um we've seen great progress at the lower levels k one and

065two and i think part of that is the fundations program because i think it's a great program i totally understand the challenges of our upper grade teachers perhaps teaching phonics for the first time those are challenges that they are facing that they are working through and i commend them for that but these test scores have been around they're not going to change dramatically overnight they never do and when you're bringing in professional development when you're challenging teachers when you're in the classrooms and i read through these documents you're giving feedback to the teachers and i think that's critically important to help them grow professionally i also believe i read somewhere in these documents that you're looking at the ela program at the upper elementary level and you're aligning it to the high school level and

066i think that that's critically important to do also um so i i don't think any of us are happy with with the data points as they are now and as they have been for a while and i'm not pointing fingers at anybody but that's the reality we do need our students to be reading at or above grade level and i think you have a lot of support in place for our teachers for our support staff to help get our students there but again as anyone knows you're implementing a new program those changes sometimes take a little bit of time so i'm happy with what i'm seeing again i commend you i commend the teachers for for all their effective work but it's challenging and we've had all these other pieces that are out there that

067we're well aware of from our meetings from being in our buildings but anyway thank you for the work that you've done i think it's incredibly important as we we've heard already this evening we're focused on it and i'm thrilled that you're bringing back these updates to us and to the public so we can celebrate the successes and we can see where we need to do more work and that's that's pretty evident here with the level of detail um that we're looking at tonight so thank you thank you member nicholson remember zoni pesh oh okay okay remember keegan um the the data is i mean i'm glad to see it going up but one of the biggest holes that i want to make sure does not get lost is that the kids who are in our

068gen ed population are getting the benefit of consistent curriculums and the kids in our sub separates are not and we need to make sure that our sub-separates have continuous curriculum just like the gen ed kids and that we're following a curriculum for all kids in the district not just the gen ed population i'm super concerned that going from building to building in a sub-separate or from teacher to teacher in a sub-separate our kids are completely getting different curriculums different non-curriculums different web searches for pulling stuff out of the air and so i really want the district to focus on making sure that we have a consistent curriculum for every student and that the kids in those sub separates are getting the skills consistently and methodically regardless of what teacher they have regardless of what building

069they're sitting in that they're making progress in a methodical way with an actual high quality curriculum um and i would really like to see the district um ensure that for us and i'd love to see the the data for the kids um in that aren't in the gen ed classroom for ela whether they're a partial inclusion kid or a pullout kid or a sub separate kid i'd like to see that data to see that they're making that progress too um and i'd like to to really push that we need this for all of our kids not just for some i don't want any of our kids getting left behind i certainly agree with that sentiment we we did disaggregate the date a little bit based on the committee's requests during the last update we could

070certainly go deeper always but we did look at students with ieps and when you look at the district as a whole 39 percent of arcade students have an rsp which which again is the reading success probability of 70 or higher that number is 21 for students with ieps for our students who are learning english one really interesting um takeaway for me was um for former english learners that number is actually 42 which is as you know higher than our district average and our students of color are at 47 again compared to that 39 of the district overall so we can certainly take a deeper dive always to drill down and again this is one measure the teachers are obviously using multiple measures when it comes to you know sort of tracking progress progress especially when

071when you're talking about a student with an about individualized plan i also can i just make one comment on that i just want to make sure because i believe we said this last time but this is not inclusive of every single student in the district if they cannot access an assessment like this they're not taking it right so if they are a level one english learner and don't know any english we are not going to force them to sit and take an english based test that isn't going to give us data that is worth looking at right uh if they are in a sub-separate program and and cannot access this assessment uh we're not going to give it to them right so i do want to be really clear this isn't inclusive of it has

072to be inclusive of all the kids who can access this assessment much like the mcas right there are exclusions to the mcas if they cannot access a test like this it doesn't make sense to give it so there has to be some other ways that we might have to assess that progress it wouldn't be on an assessment like this where kids are independently reading and taking that test right so so there just might be other ways i just want to be really clear about that because it's not inclusive of every single child we have in this district but isn't reading teaching reading teaching reading regardless of whether they're an english learner or not i mean we should be teaching them how to read in whatever whatever their basic language is so that they're not missing

073out on the reading skills yeah no that i'm not disagreeing with okay but i'm disagree what i'm clarifying is that this data is not going to be data we can look at for every student in every subgroup so we can't take we don't have the ability to monitor say a spanish-speaking level one english person in reading we have no ability to assess their reading level in a non-english way is that correct so we would not give them a an assessment in their own language the access test is something we use for our english learners that we use every year when we get those results about now we'll start getting those results back to show progress in english learning and reading um but all i'm saying is that there's other ways to monitor it we're just

074not going to see it here in the lexia rapid test okay right it's just not going to show here the way this data is nice and like going to show us that progression it's going to be different for for different kids okay i have remember zany pesh and then member de zoglio no okay so thanks just super quick something you touched on you were saying that you were polling teachers and getting teacher groups and stuff i love that i was actually going to ask about it um if there are any ideas or things that are working i'd love to see that in the next report because i think they're the ones really you know dealing with this on the day-to-day so if there's something you know again no magical recipe but i'd love to see

075some of the info on that and see you know what we're doing to kind of you know make the program work for them so that we can implement it maybe we'll get another boost that way so i love that you're doing that that's it i'm good so on that point i think i think the um most heartening day i've had in my time in methuen was last week we did walk throughs in a grade three for a grade three team at one of the schools and so the biggest shift we've made this year hasn't been materials or hasn't been pedagogy it's been structural so every st every student k8 has a designated period of their day where we're using the rapid data or other assessment data that goes along with rapid to identify their specific

076weaknesses related to reading and provided them providing them a targeted period we're calling that reading success for k4 and it happens during win for 5 8. we're including as many of our english learners and as many of our students on ieps as we can into the into that block of time and when we walked through this particular building it was super clear in every classroom on that grade level team what skills uh the particular group of students that the teacher was working with and this is these are not their home rooms right we're shuffling the deck every day and uh it was super clear you know which teacher was working on reading comprehension versus which teacher uh was working on on foundational skills word recognition and that was really encouraging to see um because again

077that's a that's a structural piece it's about giving up control for the teachers right they're not with their homerooms all day like they have been they're they're receiving a different group of students um for the for the trimester they're they're having to develop those unique lessons that are specifically targeting those areas that that group has been identified as needing support in and and just that was it was just great to see it was so evident what was going on in every room kids were working in small groups teachers were facilitating centers teachers were on the carpet with kids doing flash card exercises where they needed it other groups were were reading really complex texts and having really incredible conversations about them because that's where they were at it was just a it was just a

078really good reinforcement for um the structures that we're trying to get in place and i think the more consistent we get with how that looks every day across every building across every grade level team i get the better these results will be but certainly the better the experience kids are going to have every day will be and correlating that with the scores that was the second part of our conversation is this makes sense to us what we're seeing on the scores because what we're seeing now right so our teachers are getting into that place more and more frequently which is again a very positive experience for us and that's why we do our walk-throughs and that's why we're visiting buildings every month and that's why the principals are doing these every month every week every

079day with their humanity supervisors so by the time we come they've already done this five six seven eight times with their own you know building base less people which also has been a refreshing change too everybody knows we're talking about this right we all are talking the same language we all are focused on the same structure and our eye is on the prize right we want it we want to give every kid an opportunity to be the best reader they can be they don't get a do-over right i can't say that enough our kids do not get do-overs in grade one they have one year in grade one and that's their shot and we got to give it the best shot we can and i just i keep leading with that i'm gonna i'm gonna

080keep you know saying that you know we don't have do-overs and our teachers have really taken that to heart and come a long way so um it has been the last couple weeks has been thrilling for us to be able to see that come to full fruition in many places so my two cents so you see some of the key actions we've taken and then sort of the stuff that's on the horizon here remember nicholson mentioned we're doing a lot of work with our great upper school ela teachers grade 5 through 88 teachers to align what they're looking for in student writing with the high school's really well developed high school writing rubric so that when kids come here they don't have that shock of oh wait the expectations just dramatically shifted and i don't

081know where i fit we also just launched last week a partnership with in partnership with merrimack college a high school writing center that students here can access four days a week in the afternoon have some expert one-on-one tutoring with some merrimack students that have been trained up to provide guidance and feedback on their writing so we're really excited to have more kids take us up on that opportunity here at the high school and if that works well that's something we may also push down to the upper schools we're working on the schedules for next year trying to maximize time on literacy and making sure um the schedule really emphasizes our focus here uh and and we're just continuing to refine expectations and guidance for teachers in collaboration with our four building-based literacy supervisors so if

082it pleases a committee we'll move on to objective two the mental health objective mr crocker is obviously our um our leader here on this goal and he's not with us tonight but i told him i would do my best to cover this goal for him um so so he's broken out our baseline uh in a very comprehensive way which you can see and was presented to you last time um but we did want to touch on a few of the uh key actions that have taken place since that last update so really important for the public to hear we have two virtual family events coming up one at the end of april and one at the beginning of may this was part of our commitment to let people know what the school counseling departments in

083every building can offer they have a lot to offer and and one of the barriers that we heard through stakeholder engagement was families don't know what to ask for so this is an opportunity to hear directly from john about what his team can do for families and students in the schools so that's going to be two opportunities coming up we also have additional screening happening so i don't have a data update for you on this objective because we're sort of in between screening periods but we will have one for the final quarterly update this year we're looking at our our trails to wellness which is our seo curriculum we're in that first year of implementation for grades 5 through 12. so we're in the thick of that and we're preparing to launch that k4 next

084year and then just on friday we had a really excellent presentation by stuart ablon from mgh who did a session for five through 12 teachers on collaborative problem solving as we talked about earlier behaviors is a major thing right now and we want to make sure we're addressing them in productive ways that don't just have a short term fix but can be part of a longer term change in mindset for the student and for the teacher frankly too and so this was a great jumping off point for us to start to talk about a new framework for thinking about student discipline so that just happened for folks on friday and the feedback i've gotten from teachers and administrators who were there has been really really positive i just want to share this there's qr codes

085here for links to the two upcoming sessions the upcoming family sessions and a little bit of a description here about what those sessions will cover again we hope lots of families come just to learn more about what the counseling department can do and then up next um we've got the uh we've got the next round of screening as i mentioned uh we're continuing to evaluate our our programming um and we're monitoring our our roll out of that trails to wellness curriculum any questions about objective 2 before we jump on remember keegan it's not really a question i just want to say i am absolutely thrilled to hear that we're doing collaborative problem solving in the schools um it is a spectacular way of of discipline and and working with students and really getting them involved

086in their own um their own behavior um and i can't say enough about the program especially through mgh i it's phenomenal um and it when i just heard that i was so excited so i just want to say thank you for doing that because i think it will bring a lot to our schools thank you it was a great it was a great jumping-off point to establish that framework for teachers to think about what are the underlying reasons why and and i think the big message we heard was what a student's misbehaving it's it's not will it's a lack of skill and just starting to figure out okay how do we ramp up those that skill development so that those behaviors don't manifest i appreciate the endorsement should we move on okay objective three is

087our equity goal we've talked about uh the why behind this goal uh at our previous updates and we've talked about our baseline here some of the key actions we've launched uh between now and our previous update we have a working group of administrators that's that's working with the superintendent and myself to develop a shared vision of educational equity that will sort of be the umbrella for all of this work moving forward we also received back and i've mentioned this a few times in previous updates we received back our knowledge map from johns hopkins which is a breakdown of all of the texts that students can be expected to read in methuen in grades seven through twelve seven through twelve are the grades where we have a lot of homegrown curricula in use we don't have

088a commercial product sort of driving instruction in those grades it's been a it's been a locally developed effort this is a summary of the knowledge map project from johns hopkins they've done this now with lots of commercial curricula and lots of district-based curricula and this these are their high-level findings from methuen the heat map indicates that methuen's secondary ela curriculum exposes students to very rich texts and present knowledge in a variety of domains and topics you can read on so they presented these findings to us in our leadership team which included all the principals and central office administrators one of the things they said to us on that call and actually asked us permission to share our map with other clients as an example of a very robust set of texts you know from a

089homegrown perspective um so we were quite pleased with that i'm gonna share just uh one finding so for each domain of knowledge that they looked at you get these what they call heat maps and i've given you the key at the bottom so the darkest blue means that students see eight or more texts that cover that sub-domain of knowledge so these this this is one of the areas where we've been most focused on diversity equity and inclusion and this is one that we were cited as as very strong by the researchers so you can see we've got lots of dark blue and dark-ish blue and then what we have to do is where we see gaps we have to decide is that okay because we're not going to cover every single domain of knowledge or

090sub domain at the at the darkest blue level so the task for our team now is to look at this report and say where are the gaps that we are concerned about and where are the gaps that we may be okay about and where what are the trade-offs but we can actually drill down in the report they gave to see the specific text that caused the category to be shaded blue and how quality those texts are and how interrelated they are so not only can we see saturation but we can also see proximity this was really exciting to get back and um our main takeaway from that is we we feel really good about the text that students could potentially have access to but because there's so much teacher choice in those grade spans it's

091possible that through a bunch of choices students could be denied access to lots of these domains of knowledge so how do we look at the progression and and kind of create some ideal pathways that really capitalize on what we learned from this report and then how do we support teachers by building out the essential questions of the lesson that that's around that text or strategies for engaging kids um in those specific texts so that's where we're heading next and we have um you'll recall hearing about the gleam grant which is a state run grant that we have for this year and the next two to fund that work that development of that sort of here's the ideal pathway through for teachers to draw upon and here are some additional pedagogical resources that can help them

092teach those texts most effectively so we weren't sure where we were going to land we didn't know if we were going to be in a place where the map was so poor that we actually had to kind of rethink our whole curriculum or where we are which is our curriculum is strong and now it's about adding those supporting pieces and really giving teachers more explicit guidance about how to maximize the impact of these great texts um in through their instruction remember to zoglio thank you madam i share um i actually actually enjoyed looking at this i think this was very interesting and especially as someone becoming a history teacher this would have been really helpful for me and for the most part learning um i do i don't i don't know uh core of methuen's

093curriculum but individual disabilities nine and ten we plan on working that i don't know what type of text could be out there but i really do believe that is a very important thing especially in our community where people are dealing with different disabilities nowadays and i think if people understood especially and also with homelessness homelessness is actually becoming a bigger factor in our communities i feel like these type of texts would be more something we need to start thinking of involving our children in because those are the things that actually are how not just happening to their classmates um their individual lives um but i think that's very important that we educate them on those type of factors as well so remember zagler you're asking the exact question that we now have to ask ourselves

094of all these maps is you pointed out you're right in nine and ten we have zero texts that cover the domain of individuals with disabilities so you know now the next task is do we go out and find some additional text and add them to those units and if so what are we taking out and will that create other holes so that's the kind of of thinking that we now are in that space to do with our teachers members on epesh just for my own curiosity how hard would it be to get us a list of these texts not hard i can i can certainly share um the full report very easily and that has all of the different domains so you'll get these heat maps for every domain and then um i'll have to

095think about how to give you because we have a we have a database but i may be able to just get a school committee set of credentials for the database so you can dig in and see just be curious to see the titles and such thank you i agree remember keegan um i know my my current ninth grader and my junior who was a ninth grader two years ago um both read something in english that had to do with disabilities um and i i wish i could remember which book it was um but i'm it was a it was somebody with an intellectual disability in the book and he's one of the main characters um so i i'm wondering why that one is completely blank um but off the top of my head i cannot

096remember what the book was it sounds like that that would be pretty central to the story they do they do have a caveat in the report which you'll see um that says the mere like mention of of a domain doesn't turn it blue right so it's got to really grapple with that concept it sounds like in this case that textbook yeah he's one of the main characters and um and the essays that they wrote were about how he was having to make decisions but he had clearly has disabilities um and so i'm gonna have to go home and ask them and we could definitely look at that was it yeah was it mice and men maybe what lenny yes of mice and men yeah we'd have to look and see where that shows up in

097our in our map and you know yeah i mean all three of my kids have been through the ninth grade at the high school all read it yeah we can look at that any other questions about this okay so that's our q3 update we'll be back in a couple months with q4 thank you very much for that okay may i have a motion to approve the amended fy 22 school committee calendar second motion motion by member jose gulio seconded by member zoni pash discussion no it's just in there because we added those two in bold yeah right so uh so i anticipate uh we anticipate likely needing may 11th uh we did put there may 18th if needed so hopefully uh as we go through the budget process we're gonna we're gonna go through this

098smoothly and not need additional meetings and we can cancel that but um just make sure those two are booked in your calendar for the record i will be in mexico on may 18th i did let dodie know yes maybe we'll have the meeting in mexico instead of the methuen high school media center that's great okay we'll have no discussion i have a motion on the floor all those in favor signify by saying aye aye opposed okay thank you very much could you please update us on your meetings with the holiday celebration working group be happy to so i have a memo here that really summarizes we met once on march 15th and it was eye-opening we didn't we didn't have a direct uh agenda but one of the things i wanted to hear from was

099for from each member had an opportunity to share sort of what their initial thoughts were what they wanted to get out of this group and and sort of what were the important uh points and as i was listening and taking notes i shared this with the group uh before we ended that these four themes really popped out for everybody in the group uh which was i think is going to make our work very directed and and pretty easy to facilitate um but pretty much every member whether they were the teacher the parent the administrator really wants consistency which we heard from a lot of parents during the past few months of what is the expectation at the cgs the attending why why are expectations different in grade three in one school in grade one in

100the same school like what is the consistency around that so that was something that came out um i think another thing that came out that was people had really strong feelings about this is making sure that all of our students and families feel valued and respected so that we have an opportunity to make sure that we include uh you know everybody who is in our classroom classroom walls which kind of led to the third one there which really was there's a strong desire to and these these are a little bit separate so we're going to work through this as a group but there's a strong desire to incorporate multicultural education throughout the year and and that's a broad term but we were really clear and people uh again felt very strongly about this that we

101we should do more education with our children about ramadan and you know all the different kinds of um cultures religions traditions that our children and families represent that was very heartwarming to to hear and to feel because that was really strong and so one of the things we see you know that might not come in a holiday celebration conversation but that's going to be another thread that i think is going to show up here that is going to be really important to us and what does it look like and i and i will say right we are on the we're on the eaves here of ramadan beginning which is very important for a high percentage of our student and staff population and that starts on friday and so there has been a lot of conversation

102what does that mean right students have to fast and they can't eat lunch and they can't have snack and so so there's there's a there's more open conversations about that and i think we are all feeling strongly about doing a much more uh you know having a stronger path uh for those opportunities in our schools and so that was that was really strong um and then the last one was and this is more structural and sort of what would what would come of sort of protocols is you know what belongs in school and what belongs outside of school and i think that has to be a really important part of our conversation uh and i probably should call this group something different and i'm sure attorney joyce will help me with this um but it's

103really uh you know we're walking a little bit of a fine line of celebrating versus educating and and and that's going to be a lot of our conversation uh that's where we get into a little bit of a pickle uh with the law is if we are pushing certain celebrations uh versus educating on what all of these mean and where they come from so we're going to navigate through this uh i gave the group some homework from the last time i think i attached a few readings you know some legal briefing and then some just opinion you know from vetted uh journals that that i have gathered over over time uh attorney joyce has agreed to also put something in a legal brief from his experience for our group for our next meeting so we

104did set up the next three meetings april 5th may 3rd and may 25th and our goal really everybody is we're going to we're going to plow forward and hope that we can create something to present to the school committee which is what i think i i suggested last time is to create an actual document i've said this is what halloween is going to look like in school this is what it's going to look like out of school so everybody has the same expectation and it's not a guessing game and it doesn't happen a week before or two weeks before it's just something that i i foresee being able to put in again like the student handbook right and becoming part of our business um i think that would be incredibly helpful to our everybody staff

105parents kids everybody knows right we're going to do this and we're not going to do this we're going to do this we're not going to do this right we're going to we're going to really focus on the educating uh on cell you know holidays and structure and multicultural events and and those all aren't going to come in december i think that's something that as i was reading right it ramadan's happening now that's when we should be teaching about ramadan is now right and so you know when christmas happens that's when we should be teaching about christmas when hanukkah happens that's when we should be teaching about hanukkah when kwanzaa right so it's all those different things that we're gonna we're gonna walk through i'm very excited though i think we have a great group of

106uh parents and and teachers and the four principals are also you know everybody has a very uh deep-hearted passion about doing this work and doing it right to make sure that we do value and respect everybody and again we're going to see the good that's going to come on this and potentially even doing more of that multicultural work in education so it's exciting but member santos and i will keep you posted as we go through the next several meetings that are here it was a very productive conversation i feel like it everyone was pretty much on the same page and everyone brought new ideas um and everyone was already ready to rock and roll let's go so thank you gave them plenty of homework yes yes any questions okay is there any other business from

107the committee nothing all right can i just make a comment sure i just want to say thank you i think it's really important publicly to say this we had an incredible telethon last week we raised over 32 thousand dollars and the the bids are still coming in until the end of this week which is incredible it's been several years since we've raised that much money so a lot of folks on the foundation board put a lot of energy and time into that but but people came through i have to give a special shout out to you guys who were there the first night making phone calls and the second night the we had six police officers there uh raising quite a bit of money uh for for our kids so uh really thank you to

108the whole community thirty two thousand dollars a lot of a lot of money and it was a lot of fun and people every the bidding um i believe bidding owl closes on april 1st so if you go on i'll have to post the link again but there's a lot of great items up for auction a lot of great items a lot of them any teachers still watching mr noble and i have put ourselves on the bidding block for a full day of subbing on the day after the long weekend so you can enjoy an extra long weekend we will sub i think we're up pretty high now we're like you took the lead today i did a new one today great see what you never know what we're gonna do on that day which makes

109it fun it was good but yes i would be remiss if i didn't share that it was a really really um just felt good coming together to do that again that was great everyone did a great job any other business from the committee say that again oh yeah of course yeah i'll send the link to everyone remember keegan um so i have a question that i wanted to bring up with everyone i had already spoken to superintendent huang about this but i'm a little bit concerned about our special needs asset tracking as i have been personally somebody came to me to let me know that some of the equipment that a student was using got mysteriously lost in one of our buildings from basically a friday to a monday and it was multiple thousands of

110dollars worth of equipment and um i i feel like we need some sort of policy that makes sure that our um assets are being tracked and we know where they are and stuff doesn't just disappear out of thin air i'm going to yeah absolutely i'm going to ask madam superintendent who it who tracks that equipment so everything from the special education department gets tracked through the special education department okay so that would be gina bozak um the situation that ms keegan uh shared with me i do have details of that i don't think is appropriate to share here um but yeah and then there's a combined if it's technology based then ed lucia's department also asset tags it so they there's little like barcode tags that go on any of our technology devices as well

111okay to make sure that we have a full scale of where they are who who it's gone to when we're building and lives in okay does that answer your question [Music] i'm still unclear whether or not we have a policy that says that assets need to be tracked in like special education um equipment i'm unclear we have an asset a requirement that our assets are tracked i don't know i can i can find out that would be great i i can tell you that any asset over five thousand dollars must be tracked we do get audited every year company comes in goes and looks for those assets anything over five thousand and they give us a full report on where they are and their condition etc so i know by law anything over 5 000

112must be tracked and every year they come in and do us in the city at the same time so i can't speak to that a little bit um that's not specific to special ed materials and i believe we're talking about stuff that's under 5000 but i can't speak to the library numbers okay do asset type disaster type tracking fall within the job descriptions of those particular departments so like for special ed assets would that fall under gina bozak for like you said technology so it's part of their i'm thinking their job description right to track that so maybe i don't know if at some point we can get more information i agree that it's probably not for open discussion right now but um maybe we can just find out more about what goes into the

113specific departments in their tracking yep yeah if you would would you would the next meeting be enough time to collect that um superintendent yes okay great thank you madame um i'm not gonna go into technicalities but um because we're special ed specifically we we have to be very careful where we trend our lines but if we approve a budget right where we where those objects are bought through us technically we can actually make policy of how we track departments track what we are agreeing to buy on our budgets i'm just would that be something legal can talk about in our peripheral of making a policy of how these departments are tracking their items and if students i feel like we have to go into more details more than tonight but i feel like we do

114have a say of how these departments track our items that we are technically approving every year to buy so yeah i'll i'll follow up there are some that are already lost so there would be duplication if we were making policy of it but i will um i will talk to mike and or sarah i i'll see sarah first uh spadafora to ask them if they have any insight to policies for asset tracking great thank you any other business of the committee nope okay um i have a motion to and may have a motion to enter into executive session still moved some motion by member zonipash second by member nicholson let's see so pursuant to mgi.c.30a [Music] section 21a3 to discuss strategy with respect to collective bargaining or litigation if an open meeting may have a

115detrimental effect on the bargaining or litigation position of the public body and the chair so declares unit b we will not reconvene into an open session at the conclusion of the executive session roll call please rachel banks yes ryan dezuglio yes lori keegan yes susan nicholson yes jaina zhani pash yes luanne santos yes manuel perry's not present okay meeting is adjourned as of 8 07 p.m good night methuen [Music] so [Music] uh [Music] so [Music] you