School Committee Meeting February 15, 2023

001foreign here oh no oh no like I don't have a picture on like if I get a picture on my phone what was that though I get a picture on my phone we will uh project the picture we'll see what he can do it wasn't backstage we'll give him Paul a second I feel like this is one of those moments from like uh like Star Wars when he's and Yoda's talking to Obi-Wan Kenobi he's like oh he's missing a planet how embarrassing School committee's missing a flag embarrassing yeah [Music] oh yeah all I had to do okay oh there we go which we have it on the computer thank you I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible

002and with liberty and justice for all thank you everybody apologize for that usually the flag's right behind us not tonight a lot of happenings with students on stage um next up is public comment does anyone have anything they wish to speak about not on tonight's agenda see no one I will move on report from school committee members go ahead Mac um so I just wanted to announce that I will not be running for re-election um I want to thank everybody on the board for making me a better educator for making me a better parent for making me a better um Town member and just educating me and a lot of things that I didn't know in the field of Education um I want to thank the members that are no longer here that were a

003part of the board since I've started um and I've just I'm gonna miss you guys and I've really had a lot of fun and I've learned a lot and so thank you to everybody thank you Theresa go right ahead well first thank you Meg I think this was six six years for you so I spent the last three with you and I've appreciated my time um and I just wanted to just touch briefly upon the budget since I was on the budget subcommittee and I will not be present for the actual presentation on March 2nd as I will be away um so I just wanted to thank um superintendent Lyons and Zeke and Sarah for all those hours we spent um I'm proud of what we're putting forward so since I won't be there that

004night I just wanted to say that tonight thank you very much and thank you to Meg we appreciate it um I'll miss you you were too but not that far because you're two doors away from my house so that makes it easy um any others who Committee Member have anything they wish to bring up seeing none then I will move on Nate's not here tonight Nate had sent me a note he's at track meet so we all wish him well and I'll turn it over to the superintendence report supernet lights thank you chairman young members of the school committee we can pull up those slides I will open my report tonight with talking about incident response and I want to just make sure that moves and we can begin okay um I brought this item

005in conjunction with the school committee this week because I thought it would be important to talk a little bit about how our district responds to incidents of various kinds um I think sometimes it is helpful to hear about what drives decision making what drives communication what drives kind of what happens behind the scenes so it is always our goal for all five schools to run smoothly and without the need for additional contact right the basic premise is that our children come to school here every day they return home every day without incident but occasionally we do need to communicate about things that occur uh during the day outside of the school day and the reason that you hear from me specifically but the rest of the leadership team is a direct effort to be transparent

006about what's happening in our schools I recognize that's a newer perspective for our district and I'll talk a little bit more about that later in the slides but it's important for you to know that one of the things I have been hearing in my entry plan collection of data is a desire for families to feel better informed about what's going on so the communication that occurs is in direct response to that desire hey can you let me know what's going on can you tell me I'm a parent that wants to be in the know with over 500 faculty and nearly 3 200 students in our district it is important to understand that many things happen every single day and many things are humdrum and not influential at all and occasionally we do have things that

007occur that I think necessitate communication with our community we represent the largest Department in Middleborough so as a result and statistically things are going to occur both large and small shock there are I just want to make sure this is advancing different types of incident and I want to kind of talk about that word right word choice matters how I communicate with the public matters um the tone that I try to create matters and not all incidents are equal there are many times that the communication earlier this year we had Paving that was going on in the community okay so that was an informational it really had nothing to do with the schools but for the fact it was going to impact transportation and getting children in and out of the the school in addition

008to faculty and staff that were also in our parking lots there's going to be time where there's Community Action we have you know an active Police Department an active fire department and those organizations are are by our school campuses so sometimes there's overlap with what's going on in the community that necessitates communication it doesn't mean it's connected to or related to the schools um but I think it's still important to communicate because we are a department of the town of Middleboro sometimes there are student needs that are Medical in nature that occur at school it doesn't invoke any type of safety concern and it isn't necessarily something for public consumption meaning it isn't something that necessarily is an issue that everybody needs to be aware of but that's something that happens from time to time

009on our campuses there's as you know inclement weather and transportation delays these are things we have ex well not in not inclement weather yet this year but we have definitely experienced Transportation delays and issues this year and we've communicated out on those topics and then lastly are safety matters and I think these are the things that most people think when they think about the word incident and they think about communication with their school system so I listed these here because I wanted the community to understand there are many reasons why I might be reaching out or why a member of my team might be sending home a communication or some type of message to you um on that note I wanted to talk briefly about an example of a safety concern that I might choose

010to communicate about and would choose to communicate about right now there's something going on in the state of Massachusetts that's called swatting and I don't know if you know everybody has kind of read about this in the news what swatting really is is a hoax it's a telephone threat that's coming into school systems you're hearing about this in the news today yesterday and probably you know even before that where where there's a caller with a what sounds to be a credible threat against students or staff or both at school systems these are designed to sound real and to date have not proven to be to be real threats so that's an example of a situation where we would communicate with you about that I think it's important for the community to know that not only

011are we well aware of swatting not only are we briefed by multiple organizations at the state level but I have regular and consistent communication with the chief of police as well of our as well as our school resource officers we also have internal process that involves our district Emergency Response Team our building Emergency Response Team and robust procedures for how we handle such things so I wanted to just sort of take that brief departure to explain what a what a safety concern you know might entail not all incidents will be discussed in full detail as it relates to two very specific issues one is student confidentiality and the other are Personnel matters with students their identities are protected and information about students will also be protected so I want that to be kind of known

012and understood that I understand there is a desire for knowledge but not all knowledge is something that can be shared you might have had this experience if you called one of the principles and said hey I want to know about this thing and the principal said to you I'm not able to discuss that in that level of detail same with Personnel matters not every detail is something that can be shared and while I know that's frustrating I have to be transparent about the fact that that's not going to change now communication with incidents it I think would be helpful for you to understand as I said earlier the frequency of communication has certainly changed when I became superintendent in July I made you know a very pointed decision to communicate on things large and small

013on things that relate to safety and not related to safety what I'm trying to accomplish is regular and consistent communication out of our schools and to be honest with you I don't always want to just communicate with you when something is wrong I want you to hear about all of the wonderful things that happen in our buildings every single day but what I'm learning I'm speaking with a with a mother about two weeks ago who told me I didn't realize that and I was hearing from you and I was worried to hear from you so I wanted to take that opportunity tonight to share that when you're hearing from me I sincerely hope your initial reaction isn't oh my God Something's Happened you know I I what I would prefer is that when you hear

014from me you're equating that with I wonder what she's reaching out about it could be an array of issues I just don't want communication to be interpreted as alarm because there are so many wonderful things to celebrate our children do amazing things every day it's one of the reasons you see student spotlights here at this meeting I will continue that practice that is the overwhelming majority of business that happens in the Middleboro public schools and that's what I want to communicate about as well communication will almost always occur at the building level first if you're thinking why haven't you heard from me it's because whatever has happened is best explained through the building lens I am one human so I am not in five buildings at once I am indeed all over campus all five

015campuses but when something happens I think hearing from building Administration is the most valuable because they have the most information and always have managed whatever has occurred Communications are not always immediate and sometimes what I want you to understand is that the very people creating the communications are also involved in whatever investigation or whatever incident has been going on okay so communication for me is about communicating what's important and communicating communicating what is accurate sometimes that takes longer than I think families would prefer and I understand that when you send a child to school you want to know if something's up you want to know right away I have chosen to make sure we are delivering accurate information in addition because you know we don't run with you know A administrative team of you know

01650 plus individuals we're oftentimes running double duty uh and especially when it comes to communication and media so that also um is a factor in how we handle such things now how we communicate is an indicator for you you might notice that I tend to send Communications when they are you know not significant or safety related matters after 5 PM I'm doing that very deliberately communication after school hours is me telling you here is something that's informational I want you to know about this but I don't want you to be concerned that something is happening right this moment during the day communication if I am reaching out at 11 o'clock in the morning or whatever time while school is in session I am indicating there's something you need to know right now the most common

017that you'll hear about this is when a bus is late and again that communication will usually come from the building level so the timing is relevant for when you're hearing from the district and then the method you'll notice we're using class tag which kind of sends you an email pops right in your email whatever's in Aspen which is I always like to remind families It's always important to have that information up to date if your email changes please do reach out to your building so that you're receiving our Communications versus all call you'll notice I haven't Robo called um actually at all since July and you know the district many years ago made the switch to reserving robocall for only those sort of immediate needed Communications I.E when school is going to be canceled and

018I've maintained that because I don't need to be calling you if it is not urgent and immediate I don't feel as though I need to communicate with you in that fashion I will use email as the preferred as the preferred method and you'll even notice I like s'more which is the application that I use to use to write newsletters we use more because it's translatable in many different foreign languages and I think that that's important as well I also wanted to share tonight a little bit about oh I went the wrong way about internal process of incidents I don't want anybody to think that things happen and that we aren't reflective that we don't learn that we don't respond as a district whatever the incident is requires investigation that doesn't necessarily mean capital I investigation

019with the Middleboro Police Department it may it may not it depends on what's happened either way your Administration gets involved to determine what exactly has happened and investigations take time particularly when it's done accurately and thoroughly that often means talking to different stakeholders it could be multiple people it often includes talking to parents um if it involves children it could involve students you know there's there's just a lot of different pieces that go into that investigatory practice if an incident does warrant that Outreach to police or a different state Authority the school handles this contact and we cooperate with authorities at all times we have wonderful relationships not just with MPD but with MFD as well and you know that won't be changing anytime soon if the incident concerns faculty and staff in our district

020if it's something that's not related to the community is what I'm saying we always conduct a digest or a process a complete and thorough process of the incident from start to finish after the fact almost like a post-mortem you know autopsy on what's happened we look at the incident we look at our response we're looking at our Communications with the community and we're asking questions like did we like how that happened did families feel like they knew did we like the tone of the message what was the result um and I think it's important that you understand that reflective practice is something that is happening all of the time sometimes when we do our incident response or incident digest things change we might change our procedures we might have to go to to school committee

021and change a policy we might have to have additional Clarity of roles and responsibilities that whole concept of who's on first who's doing what and at what time this is what reflectively leadership looks like and it's something that's very important to me that we do we oftentimes engage with training or professional development or we look at a situation and say you know what would help us if we did the following these are things that that have happened all along but are happening um right now the lens is always Improvement focused it's not an opportunity for blaming or finger pointing and I know that that's natural too but if the concept is to improve not just our process but our communication the focus always has to be that we can improve it's the very message that

022we would send to our children and then lastly we have consultation with outside Partners sometimes what we're dealing with is something that we can all look at each other and say we're going to need some extra help and our teams are good at doing that as well you'll find this process in all five buildings across the district um I wanted to talk a little bit about confidentiality and Personnel matters I was talking about this earlier um as I've said so many times I'm a parent myself I have children in the public school system I know the world that we live in and we recognize that when parents and caregivers are scared they want answers and typically the answers you want you wanted yesterday I know this emotion I know this reaction there will be times

023when we cannot provide information to the specificity that is desired and I ask for your patience in that manner what I'm asking for at that moment is trust and I understand that trust isn't just given it's earned and my goal is to build that trust with you regular and consistent communication that you can rely on is one way we can build that trust um but I want to be upfront about that I do want families to not assume information and I know that that's particularly difficult in today's world I also want to caution our community to not seek information on social media none of us on the entire administrative team will ever post information on Facebook with something you know that relates to an incident that happened at school that is not going to happen

024and whatever information you're reading from whatever account that is is not reliable even if it's a you know some type of parent group or bears our logo we this is something we're going to be addressing but those are not groups that are endorsed by the Middleboro Public Schools they're not manned by the Middleboro public schools and while it's tempting to go to those sources and say this is where I'm going to get information I do want to just take a minute to kind of caution you got to be very careful where you're getting that information I'd much rather you pick up the phone call a principal call me call a director we are always willing to speak with with anyone who wants information um so I wanted to just kind of point that out and

025let you know where we stand on social media now I had told you I think this was over the fall that we would be preparing a family Communications guide and it's almost ready this was actually a kind of precursor if you will to that presentation Sean Siciliano who is our chief technology officer and director of communications we'll be back here with me on March 16th our next meeting is going to be the um we're going to be talking about budget but the following meeting will be coming to you with a family Communications guide if you remember the s'more that I sent out about inclement weather this is going to be a similar format and what we're doing with that guide is proactively communicating with our community and and showing you that this is a priority

026it gives you a little more meat on the bones so to speak with what I talked about here tonight um I think it's information about communication instead of just assuming that you know our intent or that you understand what's driving it this is something that we're doing to kind of spell out our decision making process um and I wanted to just share that it's not just a work that happens this is work that happens in a silo or you know by any one person the entire executive committee is kind of you know involved in this work it's part of our ongoing work and um it's something I look forward to Bringing to you shortly so you'll have that soon you'll also see that have a space in the newsletters that come home from the principles

027um through electronic correspondence every week as well just as you can find that inclement weather it's more you're going to see a companion piece um so that was my presentation I'd be happy to answer any questions anybody has a question so Mark I don't know if this is working okay um so if there is a building specific incident is there a way that we can send an email to all of the grades like for instance the last incident that happened at mkg it was only sent out to a certain grade the problem with that is that you have kids talking on the bus you have parents with multiple children in the schools they come home kids are saying something happened at school parents don't have any information is to know that there was an incident

028is there a way that we could just send it school-wide instead of just focused on the grade yeah I mean I appreciate the question um I don't agree that a message always needs to go to the whole school it really kind of depends on what happens okay I am sensitive to that I have two children so I know that life very well one comes home and says this happened the other one's like I don't know what you're talking about here's how I feel about the type of you know communication there's always a decision to make who exactly are we going to communicate with right there's times where we've had you know instances occur where it's a very limited set of children so we'll communicate with a limited set of families it kind of depends on

029the incident what I'll tell you is it's a decision made at every at every time so if there if there is a decision made and for example in in that what you're referencing where we communicated with one grade level if you're a parent at another grade level with a question that's when you call but I I the last thing I want is for any parent to rest their head at night and go I don't know what happened I don't know what's going on I don't know if I need to be concerned but I don't want to say yes absolutely we're always going to communicate with the whole building because that's not always going to be the case and certainly at the upper levels there are there are times when things occur in a classroom or

030you know occur in a very minor fashion that I I just wouldn't commute I wouldn't want to send the wrong message of concern when concern is not warranted you see what I'm saying so it's a bit of a needle to thread there what I can tell you is it's something that we assess every time though including that incident that you're referencing sure communicating at that at that level sure you can get as specific or as broad as you like it yeah I can customize any I mean I could communicate with whole Community I can communicate with fractions of the community that all of that is customizable but I will tell you it's not a mistake you know what I mean when we're communicating with a portion that's usually a decision you know whether or not

031there's agreement on that decision is a different issue but like I said you know this is when you know you have a relationship with the with the building Administration and it's and it's always welcome contact the last thing we ever want is to have concern go unchecked sure other questions does anyone else have a question please could you do me a favor could you state your name and the reason I ask people to State their name now is because my secretary who's taking the notes prefers it as opposed to she would normally write man in Green Jacket um actually my question is the two incidents uh two children and then engaging school system um the response I felt that the parent got last week specifically in regards to the second incident um was that it

032was a decision made that the second incident didn't rise to the level of the first incident I believe you can say it because the police weren't involved I want to start off by saying in 14 years of parenting I've never laid a hand on my child it is a minimal expectation for a parent when we send our kids to school no one in this faculty will touch our children I don't feel the discretion is given to the school to decide where that line is drawn on the communications like back into us my children when they went back the day after the first incident we would send an email that said the counseling would be available for any child that needed it not only were the children not directly offered it My Two children along with

033their friends were specifically told in the lunchroom you are not allowed to discuss that is completely counterintuitive of the message that was sent out last week the parent asked some very poignant questions that other examples which are what short-term controls were put into place after the first incident where these employees that monitor the lunchroom provided additional training after the first incident what background checks are done on these employees Beyond a normal query check to assure us that they are qualified to be in that position and to deal through the frustration of a very loud lunchroom that I understand has to be complete chaos I get it after the first incident I do not understand how a decision couldn't have been made to put other employees in that lunchroom Beyond the lunch monitors that we're working

034there for a second incident to occur of a child being touched whether it's rising to the level of an assault or anything to me it doesn't matter nobody in the school system should be touching our children out of frustration so all of this communication presentation sounds really good but this specific incident we should see this being implemented and I understand that their investigations involved in some of it and we as a community we understand all that and we want it to go through the right channels and we want the right follow-up done but there has been zero communication from the school system since the first incident almost a month ago and I know I'm speaking for a lot of parents in this community who are very concerned about it because there's been a lot of

035discussion and I think if that incident was clearly on the agenda you'd see a lot more parents here tonight so my question is specifically with the mkg lunchroom incidents how will the information come out to the community and will it detail what changes will or won't be made in the future so we don't have any more incidents like that thank you hold on can I just ask you to repeat that question your specific question is in response to the mkg incidents how your desirous of hearing how our what's the response to those two incidents in specific to that building right not specific to employees children nothing like that but specific to what retraining education is being done for these employees our background checks being done to assure these people should be in these this situation

036and you know what what's the short-term answer and what's the long-term answer from the committee yeah so well I mean I can tell you right out the anybody who works for the Middleboro public schools has a quarry check they do and I'm the one that reviews The Quarry check um well as of July 1st okay so every employee has a background check and we um also fingerprint all of our employees as well so those are two procedures that occur above and beyond um an entire hiring process okay which involves um you know recommendations uh resume you you know calling previous employers there's an entire packet of information but the thing that you referenced prior to that which is that in your opinion the community is desirous of more information you know my response to that

037is it sounds like another communication is needed with the whole school about response to these two incidents from the lens of that building because I can share there's not only been additional training there's been additional oversight placed in that cafeteria I was actually in that cafeteria just last week I'll be back this week so so there's a host of things that have happened um and I think that that communication is something that I'd like to put together and provide to the whole school Community since what you're expressing is that there's many people concerned about this then you know I think the building Administration will be happy to talk about some of the things that have been put in place but the incident response protocol that I was just talking to about did occur with both

038of these incidents and it absolutely you know it absolutely looks like a meeting in fact you know one of the meetings occurred during we had a professional development day and that meeting did occur to kind of go through what had happened what did we learn that was after the first incident um and then there was another meeting after the second incident so I can I mean it's not just words on a page I don't know if that's comforting or not but I mean that process did occur no and I I guess what I would say is in regards to the second incident the decision to be made to send it only to that grade I I don't agree with it it was a bad it was a bad look it really was I mean it

039looked like we don't want everyone to see that a similar incident happened at the same place that it was perceived like that sure why I mean so when you're I would say when you're dealing with those Communications that kind of stuff should should factor in that you know I get it and take your word that it wasn't the exact same thing in varying levels but to me as a parent once again it's still a faculty member touching a child when they shouldn't I mean regardless of the level of it so to me as a parent I want to know that yeah the this this has happened again but these are the steps we're doing and this is how we're ensuring that it doesn't happen again and that they're going to be the right systems in

040place so that we can do our best and I realize yeah you can't you can't stop everything in the world from happening I get it but you know it seemed to me like it really missed the mark on well these are very similar incidents very close up together and when you send it out I mean I'll say this I mean if you send it out to fourth grade and not fifth grade everyone's going to see it anyways yeah I don't understand why the decision would even be made because we're pretty as big as a community we're small community as well um sure so well one of the pieces that I mentioned last meeting was that the incidents aren't the same they're not at all the same actually which is why the response from the district

041wasn't the same and you and I may disagree about whether or not that should have been communicated in the way that it was but what I'm telling you what I'm sharing tonight is the response is an indicator of the size of the issue so I'm not expecting you to agree with me but I offer that at least as a as a reason for how decisions get made okay good thank you thank you I also want to add to that that Corey checks are done on all workers who enter this building not our own workers but um for example people who do um construction projects in here things like that they have to pass Cory checks to have to be approved by the superintendent's office too and volunteers and volunteers yeah just in my experience Corey

042checks for educators it's actually deeper level so Meg knows this um if you want to be a teacher or a staff member in a building your your level of query check is actually a lot farther down than just a volunteer so that piece is important but it doesn't take away from the fact that anybody can do harm to any child at any time if they want to so the duty is to provide that training and you know superintendent and I have had this conversation and I I agree that the concern is is valid but I I'm I'm pleased with your feelings and how you want to respond to it I think that there's work to do I don't think that we should be acting like there isn't but as long as you know we're open

043about that and transparent that things are going to happen at times we're not okay with those things happening and we're going to respond accordingly so I mean I think that's all you can do is when something happens evaluate it and move forward and try to train better if that's what happens following up on I think it was Mr robotize response um I guess that's my concern with the whole sending it out to the entire building versus a certain grade I understand that you don't want to do that in all incidents um but I know that it's an a want to have parents to feel comfortable coming to an Administration if they have a question but you're going to have parents that either don't feel comfortable picking up the phone and calling Administration or just aren't

044going to do it so where they're going to take that is to social media the very thing that it was in the presentation we don't want and that's the problem is that a rumor mill starts and then you don't know what's true and then I think it just makes parents even more uneasy because then they don't understand what's being talked about because they didn't receive communication so I think that's just one aspect I think I hope it's reconsidered that it would be a building-wide email if there is an incident with a specific grade in the building just other questions thank you very much okay my next item is the student services update with Mr Kevin avatadley so if you want to come to the table this is our director of student services he's going to

045be presenting on a few items tonight and I believe he has a PowerPoint I don't know if I need to get rid of mine I think it'll be switched out thank you while we're waiting on that PowerPoint to come up um why don't you tell us a little bit about the beginning of this position for you and what student services is it would be a great place to start we got him all right so this is student services so as you know obviously Carolyn and Mrs Lyons took over the superintendent job in the department of people Services was broken up into two separate departments so the department of special ed which I believe Miss Jennifer Healy presented last time and then student services so this is my fun little slide over here of what is

046actually student services so it kind of encompasses a lot of uh what we do in the building that engages community and students so that they can best service themselves kind of moving towards that future so it's Community it's mental health so I oversee all of the clinical staff in the district school psychologists school counselors adjustment counselors and then I also have a staff of student services that will get to a second I conduct titled nine and title six investigations um and I oversee the social emotional learning portion of it and I did want to just touch upon what social emotional learning is because that has become a taboo word it's become something that people have different opinions of what it is and what it isn't typically when somebody says this is social emotional learning this

047is where I give you a I look up a definition from Castle and then kind of repeat what it is and that we just kind of move on like my version I was hired as a coordinator of social English learning quite honestly I didn't know what that meant uh it social emotional learning like I've been doing it my entire career and it's just something that's embedded into natural good teaching and best practices so I don't believe it's a curriculum I don't believe it's something in addition I believe that it's embedded in what we do every day and it's not a New Concept I'll date myself here a little bit but my graduating class was the first class that MCAS became part of the graduation requirement and during my time at Middleboro high school and I

048graduated here in that time the response was that we cut homec we cut wood design over the course of time we cut Deca we cut things and opportunities that were embedded for a lot of my kids my friends are doing to this day because they found themselves in the education and the academic opportunities that were presented in front of them it became a large shift of colleges the only way you have to do this you have to do that there's the five core core contents and over the last few years we've kind of realized we've done an overshift and we've kind of said like okay well we're missing all these opportunities now you know when we look at how education was formed back in the 90s and you know late 80s like there was more

049time for recess there was more time for for those classes that were you know not just College driven college-bound classes and that's social emotional learning is trying to figure out what your skill set is and then being able to offer you opportunities for you to be able to move in that direction so as I go through my my presentation today a lot of the things that I'm doing in the district are things embedded in what we're doing best practices it's not a curriculum it's not a philosophy it's it's it's really something that has to largely be looked at as a as an entire scale about how we're engaging our kids so that they see themselves in the curriculum that we're presenting and that's not just sometimes math English and science I've worked I was a

050principal of an alternative school and I've said you know I had kids that could go out and build my car in the parking lot but they thought they were less than because they failed out of school or they failed English or math and there's a combination there's a balance to all of this but really the ultimate goal is to be successful humans and successful adults and not not always just successful students right we have to kind of bridge that gap of how that encompasses the whole student um so I think that's an important part as I go through this like while I'm looking at data and while I'm looking at programs that's largely what I'm trying to accomplish every day so we have um the student service team right now which is Megan Quirk who's

051been part of the district for quite a while the Family Resource coordinator Caitlin McSweeney is new to the staff as a staff mental health liaison and then Josh Porter who's been the director of alternative Pathways up until um Friday and then we'll be transitioning over into an Outreach counselor position under our purview so each one of us kind of have a different role in terms of how we're trying to engage staff and community and students and to try to to build a comprehensive system that there's some place or somewhere to go to answer a lot of the issues that we see on a day-to-day basis so Megan Miss Quark has you know she's a guru of resources if you need something or if we need to place a family or get services in place she

052knows where to go she has contacts in the community you know she's a she's a valuable part of of how we find supports for for students and families in need Caitlyn's kind of been an evolving position she's done a really great job of organizing she she comes from a community organizing background she used to chair Middleboro matters and has taken that skill set over to us now and is has really blossomed into somebody who has taken the lead in a lot of District initiatives and has grown and kind of continued to grow these opportunities for the whole District so she's we're kind of balancing out like whether it's the staff mental health liaison or whether it's a community based it's as an entirety we're trying to make sure that she's impactful and and she's proven

053so so far and then Josh is going to be really that bridge between the schools and the community as a clinical staff we're often dealed with you know crisis level incidents and happening on a day-to-day basis that doesn't really allow for us to do more than what the day entails and so we have resource or services that kind of need that extra helping hand and Josh now will be able to go out in the community and meet with the families in their homes and help sign paperwork and go to hospitals and kind of help work the court systems and so he's really kind of our Swiss army knife of supports within the community and so we're really excited to have this position um because it's really that missing link between what we can do in

054the school and how we can help kind of bridge that into the community so he'll be starting after break with us and I think that'll be a very valuable position for our district so we're going to start off with Panorama again another thing that I think sometimes people are misinformed of what Panorama is and what it isn't uh where it's basically a data housing system but it's pulling all the data that we already currently use and pulling it into a user-friendly format so when we go into it we have all the MCAS scores and the AP scores attendance conduct we have all of that information already in Aspen it's just very difficult to find that information in real time particularly when you're a counselor or your teacher and you're kind of stacked up against timelines

055and you if you need a quick answer about who's in front of you particularly in transitional years from going from eighth grade to ninth grade or fifth grade to sixth grade you're trying to get to know the kids in front of you we're now able to kind of communicate between schools and classrooms so that we can kind of have a small snapshot of who's in front of us in a much quicker format and so that's really what Panorama has been helpful for us is being able to use data in real time instead of having to wait run reports get reports put in your mailbox have to do the data analysis it's really doing a lot of that heavy lifting for us at the beginning which again just kind of enriches the conversations when we're trying

056to figure out what we need to do to best service our students the other part of Panorama that is new to the district is the Panorama screener so this is a social emotional screener it is not a mental health screener that we're asking surface level questions to try to find Trends within our district so that we know where to put supports and resources if it was a mental health screener that's where you get into those questions that are a little bit more personal a little bit more direct you know we've specifically designed our screener to kind of maintain that surface level by giving us enough information but not overstepping that boundary of you know that personal information so it's broken up when you go into the student section it's based off a student compensity so

057those are the questions that the students themselves are answering so that's based off of self-management social awareness growth mindset grit and emotion regulation that goes into their signal success platform so we have access to that information the student support and environment is completely Anonymous so students are answering that question and we do not have access to how they're answering those questions so that is really trying to help us determine what the culture is of the buildings what the student teacher relationship is the sense of belonging I kind of grouped it into so the first one the teacher student relationship is what's going on in the classroom the sense of belonging is what's going on in the hallways and the uh cafeteria in the gymnasium on the sports field it's a little bit more of like

058how they feel they connect to the school and then engagement is really but as an administrative team what are we doing to engage our students with 21st Century Learning opportunities are we giving them the best the best skill set or the best chance to find curriculum that they can identify with and I and I think because of that you've seen three different kind of areas to a kind of analyze the trends within our school so I'm going to kind of walk you through how we did this as a district obviously if I went through every single Trend we would be if all night and I was told to not talk for too long so um I'm gonna I've broke it up in the category so that you get an idea of the process when people

059look at data specifically when there's a lot of data they tend to look at the questions in the percentage and they base it off of whatever that is so they may see 50 of the students in this category is has low self-esteem and that becomes the trend and so I met with all of our clinicians and our counselors we have a district clinical team and we're I really challenge them to look beyond the specific questions and try to pull out trends that we're getting from that so that the data is a little bit more enriching so an example of that I did one for each school so you could kind of get a baseline of what it is um but for example like I'll give you uh you know at Nichols no one Trend that

060we picked up was there was a lack of empowerment Independence and having a voice uh 68 of the students reportedly struggling to describe their failing feelings 43 reportedly struggled to stand up for themselves and somebody was asking or saying bad things so we tried to tie each Trend into something else and this is helping us navigate how we're doing our RTI groups how we're doing our social emotional groups how we're bringing in programming into the school so instead of looking at you know and we we do look at individual students to try to give them the the needs that they have but there's also a a greater chance of success when we can deal with the system as a whole so when we're looking at groupings and and when we're looking at uh clinical interventions

061if we're able to kind of get similar student profiles then we can kind of we can find interventions that are more impactful instead of just guessing so I think a lot of times particularly you know my past experiences when you have a lot of clinical need in the school and not a lot of info information you just kind of guess like I'm going to do a boys group I'm going to do a girls group they could have entirely different needs but we just kind of group them and pair them in something that makes sense to us as adults this gives us a little bit more information to be specific with our interventions to look at the curriculum to look at what we're trying to deliver and then be able to be specific with those interventions

062for the students so that's kind of how we're dealing with the trends here um and then the other one the student supports an environment so you know I think the other thing that I think is important to note is anytime that you you survey students like there's a level of variability there right so there's ways to track that within the data so that we know if it's relatively consistent or not within the questions and I would say that the the data that we got from this was pretty consistent throughout each question so I feel there's still a margin of error naturally but you know I feel like that was relatively representative and then also at the elementary school level kids are naturally going to be a little bit more engaged in the secondary level um

063so you'll see that students at HPB have a strong relationships with their students and they feel respected and supported 95 of the students in grades three through five feel their teachers are respectful towards them you know but then we we can go down and kind of look at you know nickels in terms of the sense of belonging student sense of belonging to Nichols is significantly less than their connection to their individual teacher and what that means is they're connected to the teacher in their classroom but in the hallways and in the class in the in the cafeteria they're getting mixed messages and that's the trend that we're seeing so there isn't a consistent message the vocabulary is not the same the expectations aren't the same and so students are feeling that their sense of belonging

064is lacking because of that so really as a goal when we met with the administrative team to talk about this it's really about trying to figure out commonalities between the approaches between the staff members between Administration so that they know and this is something that isn't subjective this is what the kids are telling us so there's truth in it so you know I think this is where it becomes for us like how do we respond to this in in a way that's not just like okay well you know this is bad we have to now come up with systems that help us manage these and then at the high school you know the lack of empowerment connection and involvement has led to a system of disengagement you know one of the biggest stats and and

065that we saw through the what through the data was engagement levels were were very low and I think that directly correlates to some of the curriculum that we're offering at the secondary level um and whether or not they're engaged truly Beyond school and and they see themselves in the curriculum and that's something that we have to consider uh addressing as we move forward and I think we are addressing um with some of the changes that we have but it's a good self-reflective practice for us as much as it is for the kids so you know we're looking at Trends within the district not necessarily you know individualized pockets and I think that's an important thing to know of what we're trying to do with the data um we got a SEO Elemental Health Grant over

066the last two years we got 118 000 through these two grants this has helped utilize funding portion of Panorama has allowed for district-wide professional development opportunities with Riverside trauma center and my mind Wells Innovations it has helped find Karma Choice it has allowed for me to pay some SEL stipends to help continue this work with myself and then a Consulting service with the main Institute for implementation at the high school another big grant that we got was through youth works and mass higher and this is really where you get into the nuts and bolts of like what are we doing to handle some of the data that we got and what are we doing to try to plan for the future so this is a grant where we were awarded 82 000 a little north

067of 82 000 to fund a school to work program um to that targeted uh specific High School population so the program works on building soft skills assisting students and setting up bank accounts budgeting resumes interview skills and really what we do is we place them with jobs as you can see we have placements at Fitch Farm Town of Middleboro red line and suds borrowbot YMCA Conway house Rob Ray Construction and EFC carpentry these are jobs typically a 17 year old wouldn't be eligible to get but we go to that employer and we say that we will fund the first 300 hours of employment and we will pay for that to help Monitor and help work on these soft skills alongside of the students with the ultimate goal that the employer will then hire them as

068a full-time employment at the end of that and if it doesn't work out then we find someplace else or we come up with an agreement where we'll pay half and the employer will pay half but this is really what we're trying to do in terms of you know giving students really real life opportunity to understand the skills that we're talking about in school actually correlate to real life opportunities and so we're able to work alongside with a lot of these employers we're able to do site visits we're able to work on some of the soft skills by having a relationship with the employer if the employer says that they're struggling with accountability or showing up on time or communication we're able to go now go back into the school day through our curriculum and address

069those skills so that they can build without without the the threat of kind of being fired or you know just kind of being pushed to the side because they're young so now there's a bridge gap between the two so this is something that is has been super exciting super successful we have 17 students currently in paid employment right now and we're looking to grow we've also because of the success of this program we did a Nichols Youth Work Junior program where we've been sending over some nickel students up to the mlab working with Tony CUPE and Lacey Foley doing similar project-based uh project-based curriculum where they're learning how to do these skills so communication coping confidence the teachers at Nichols have noticed an improvement with these with these students we've tracked them we have qualitative

070data that has improved their attendance their conducting overall engagement we've spoken to their parents and they've noticed we've had students now applying to BP who are otherwise looking you know they said they were going to drop out at the beginning of the year so now they're starting to see themselves in the curriculum and see themselves in Opportunities Beyond just the classroom that we've given them so this is something that you know I think can't be understated the impact that it can have by author offering some of these alternative education models within the school day that that allow for different types of learning um skills or interest to be acknowledged through the course of academics [Music] so the future of youth work so this year we got paid employment for 20 high schools for sorry we

071got actually approved for 15 we currently have 17 so we're hoping we make budget but we'll figure it out uh next year we have we got approved for 20 students 20 high school students but we're also going to be able to do paid employment for the Nichols Juniors program so they're going to be doing paid project-based learning opportunities through the Innovation lab and through youth works so that's kind of a junior program where now they're labeled they'll be able to get paid employment as early as 8th grade with the goal that we'll be able to transition and work with them as they go up into high school so they're going to get early exposure into some of the opportunities that we have at the high school level and see and grow and they'll be able

072to go directly into the high school hopefully with the skill set that they otherwise would not have and more importantly than that they'll be connected to somebody in an adult and this program is specifically geared towards students who you know you know I don't want to say aren't college-bound students but they're that's probably not their primary interest they're looking for something a little bit more Hands-On they're looking for some a little bit more alternative and this is a program that we can support so this is something that we I just finished wrote on the right in the grant I've met with them last week we got approved and so we're excited to be able to do this we also have the peer leader model so we're going to be able to give more paid employment

073for some of our higher functioning students in this program to go down and help our elementary school students so I actually spoke with Rich Oakley about setting up a program with borrowbot where we're going to send over three to five of our students he's going to help train them and then there's going to be a peer leader model where they'll come in and actually do an after-school program or a continuation model at the elementary school level or middle school so we'll be able to increase our students level of Engagement empowerment and belief that there is something Beyond so we're excited about that as well this is a good example so they actually worked with the town of middle mile to redo the Oliver house so there was some of that wood boarding on the side

074that was rotted and kind of taken apart and so Tony QP along with some of the students involved in the youth Works programs went over there took down the um the wood paneling brought it into the Innovation lab redid the whole thing went back to the end went back to all of rain or the Oliver house and uh actually input it now so if you go over there that is directly related to the program that we have and that we set up through this program um through the course of that I talked a little bit over professional development for our clinical staff and I think this has been a great partnership and something we're continuing to build off of I think for a long time um you know the clinical staff was kind of you

075know they they kind of muddled during PD there wasn't always something specifically addressed to them and it wasn't something that we were tearing off and building off of common vocabularies and interventions and this was something that we did so we partnered with Riverside trauma through the course of this year we've done professional development on suicide assessment interventions and strategies understanding trauma trauma-informed systems a consultation group but we had like a workshop model where we were able to work on individual basis with our clinicians fostering resilience understanding stress in the mind and body mandating reporting in the Plymouth County response and recognizing reporting and responding to child abuse so we're really trying to build off of each PD and grow our skill sets out of our school counselors so that we're more prepared to deal with

076the issues that we face each day into next year we have a partnership with maska which is mass School mental health Consortium where we're going to continue to work with the comprehensive mental health system which I'll talk about in a few slides and evidence-based needs assessment and then professional development on tier one and tier two for our building and District clinical staff members we're also looking to do a a district-wide threat assessment or safety assessment protocol which is the prepare model where we'll actually be able to train our clinical staff to then train future clinical staff members so this one-time professional development will hopefully be able to embed into our program for years to come because our clinicians will now be trained to train other clinicians which is a model that we'd like to continue

077to sustain because it's a lot easier to do that and have them work with Arts teachers and have them be the experts so we're looking to we are partnering with Melissa Reeves in the prepare threat assessment into next year we had a conversation this has been an evolving conversation about family strong and and parent Cafe it kind of was a Brain Trust of Paul Brannigan um and Heidi latender and it kind of evolved into being more of a community-based event instead of a school-based event so that we could get a little bit more impact and a little bit more engagement so the family strong is a new community-wide Initiative Program um for parents and oops oops sorry about that um uh to discuss topics of Interest so the first uh event was held on January

07824th in the blocks black box with close to 50 community members we had nine Community Resources available to help navigate systems within our community we have a next event on April 4th with Jim McCauley of Riverside trauma who will be offering supports on the topic of how to respond to your child when they use language about self-harm or suicide and using and working with the parents and listening to their feedback they're really looking for more than just resource courses they're looking on what to do in scenarios like this and that was pretty clear during that session and then we had a survey that went out to some parents and and they they want tools in the toolbox they want to be able to go in and research and have that available to them so that's

079really going to be the focus of family strong is trying to find tools that they can go back and then the parent Cafe is an opportunity is something make work and Caitlin are really taken over and they've been Paramount as well with family strong both of them have um but parent Cafe specifically is going to be another opportunity for parents to come in and be able to bring up issues and concerns and kind of lead that narrative about what they want to see within the school and then give us feedback on where to go with that information I think it's important that we're being receptive to you know we need to do more of this and less of this and there isn't a set topic and I'm and I don't lead with the message that

080my way is the only way I think that it has to be collaborative particularly when you're talking about mental health it is all gray and so we have to kind of do our best job of providing resources and materials and tools that are easily accessible that they can go back and that it helps bridge the gap between some of the services that they're looking for versus the services that are available because I think we all know that there's a huge discrepancy just between those so this is another Community event that I would love to see continue to grow and get bigger we're going to plan on we have one more this year and then we're going to plan on doing five each year so one every month basically through the school year into next year

081and that'll be uh opposite of the parent Cafe which would be the uh the months that we're not having family strong so it'll be kind of building off of each other each continuous month and hopefully the more information and the more buyback and buy-in we get the better these will become but the first one I thought went really fantastic and we got some really good feedback from parents and that's helping us to kind of navigate this next one this was a picture of that first event we also applied and was accepted for the ntss Academy through the state so at Mac mkg hbb and Nichols are involved in a three-year mtss which is a multi-tiered systems of support which kind of encompasses PBIS which is positive behavioral um and so what we're trying to do

082is use common language amongst all of our buildings you know coming here last year from another District it was it seemed like a lot of the schools were doing their own separate things and they were doing them well but they're all going to the same places they're all going to nickels they're all going to the high school and really trying to coordinate efforts so that it became a little bit more linear is really the goal of of organizing this Academy within the district so you can kind of see where doing a matrix review and Alignment so each one of those schools now in hbb and mkg are now working on common language that they're both using at both of the schools that expected behaviors look the same in both schools and then not only that

083but it's now built off of at Nichols so instead of it being different spaces in different times it's now something that is being built off of each other which is the ultimate goal at Nichols they started a tiger strong video which is available on met right now but it's really about the goals of moving forward in that building so grade six is about empowerment grade seven is about growth and grade 8 about success and trying to move them through the school with a really concrete streamline of what this is and what it isn't so each School kind of has their own little things that they're doing to make it unique for their own and it's a three-year Academy so that she is really about the needs assessment of each building and then figuring out how

084we're aligning practices so we meet monthly as a district clinical team to review uh the steps that they've making they've had professional development uh three in-person professional development and then they have monthly virtual check-ins through the state so it's free professional development that's being offered and it's not just representative clinical staff there's teachers on it there's Paras there is administrators it's it the goal is that for it to be as well represented as possible in the buildings so it's certainly a process it's not going to be done tomorrow but it's something that we've been working hard on and made a lot of good progress over the course of the last several months uh I brought this up briefly a little bit is trying to build a comprehensive mental health system again this kind of goes

085on to the same track of using common language and procedures policies when we're doing uh safety assessments and suicide assessments community-based resource guides re-entry planning you know I think for particularly our most at-risk students are the students that we see a lot during these sessions it doesn't help if each clinician is doing their own system or their own intervention because that's a it it's easier for them to feel safe when they know what's coming and they know that the verbiage is similar they know the process is similar there's a there's a level of safe and safety and trust that kind of gets built off of that and so being able to really slow down and look at how we've been doing procedures and come up with a common uh streamline of of how we're doing

086this is the goal of a comprehensive mental health system along with organizing uh organization of our professional development goals and then working on Justice restorative justice practices and procedures so it's really trying to organize the systems within the buildings so that it's five different schools with one message and one procedure when possible [Music] we have some miscellaneous programs that are going on so Rebecca Fiddler is coming in to do a proactive train the trainer model group on preventative Services at mkg and hbb so they will she will be working on training our staff to be able to continue the service but specifically looking around at-risk behaviors and working with them to be preventative and proactive we have a sole Homestead collaboration a partnership between the nlab and Soh Homestead with two classes at mkg working

087with the sole academic team on showing our students the transition of schools and agriculture within our community so that'll include an opportunity to do some project-based learning at mkg and then also Soul homes the sole Homestead and then the N lab and so the goal is they'll they'll see kind of those pre-assured prehistoric tools or maybe not prehistoric the starboard but uh you know tools that were bib from 100 years ago versus what they're using now in The Innovation lab and seeing that development so again being able to incorporate what we have in our community now and building those opportunities for the students to see you know some of these things now already exist in our high school and give them something to look forward to we're doing something similar with the project learning opportunity

088at hbb with Josh Porter and Tony CUPE doing project-based learning again with some fifth graders where they're going to go in and work on specific skills while doing Hands-On activities so communication coping and problem solving so we'll build a system around those where the kids are getting deliverables in a manner that is a little bit outside of the normal academic expectation we have redesigned the CST process to be more collaborative and this has been this has been a work in progress because it's been such a shift in some of the buildings that it's really taken some time to get off the ground and to really understand truly what tier one is and what tier two is and understanding the roles and the responsibilities of each but everything comes from being collaborative and although it's kind

089of slow to get off the ground we're still staying the course and staying consistent and working towards that that goal so with time I think that'll that'll that'll come and then we have CC's CCBC providing individual counseling at the high school it's only Mass health we are in the process of at least looking at or or potentially bringing in some other outside agencies to help with some Clinical Services for our district because I think that was another thing during family strong they talked quite a bit about the Gap in coverages and eating some triage services and what we could do as a school to support them so we are looking at other opportunities that we had um the middle of our area Coalition Rebrand we had Middleboro matters and we had the middle of our

090area Coalition we have all these Community Partners kind of doing similar things in different pockets and so Meg and Caitlin and myself kind of came up with the idea that we should just take it all and combine it into one group instead of everybody doing different things in isolation which we can really kind of bridge together and network and do similar activities so that we can be collaborative versus reactive and so this has taken off we started this a few months ago it's been a good process so far I think again just trying to organize the resources in Middleboro so that we're not repeating different things in different areas man I do have a lot I don't know who I said this too but I have way more um sorry we I think this is

091the last one um well and then I get to care Solace but that's Carolyn's fault so uh the staff Wellness Fair we ran in November uh which was another really cool opportunity and something that we wanted to do to provide something different to our staff so we were able to run 16 professional development opportunities for our staff instead of doing um you know something in the afternoon that might have been mundane or or continuous this was something a little bit outside the box so we had 16 professional development come in we had breathing cardio sport Reiki Financial Wellness line dancing mental health and movement yoga gnome gnome jar we had 15 resource panels from the counseling agent Health Services Hope Floats and really the purpose of all this was trying to navigate and put resources

092in front of our staff so that they knew that you know it's not all business sometimes like there we have to I think it's very easy to talk about taking care of yourself to staff but then it's a lot harder to put that into practice and I think this was you know Miss lying's idea about trying to you know give them something as well and I think it went really well it was very well organized Kayla McSweeney did a fantastic job kind of show you some pitches we had food trucks come um you know we had a run around the town we had uh up up on the top we have a couple of Middleboro alumni Randy Townsend and Tiffany Townsend from Fusion Behavioral Health talking about mental health and movement you know so I

093think overall it was a really good First Resource fair and something that we're going to build off into the future uh and this was the care Solace which was I was supposed to Burnside at last time but we didn't have it last time so here I am growing again before you go into carousels take a breath okay I thought it would be helpful before this item to detailed questions that was a lot of information a lot of helpful information but I'm thinking I see some questions thanks tons of information but I a couple of things kind of came out to me regarding the Panorama first of all you mentioned that that's more about Trends and just sort of how you view how each student views the building that they're in my question is is there

094a way or how how do you foresee specifying for a child so in particular a child who might be exhibiting some signs of uh you know crisis what what do you have in place to kind of field those issues and then what would the steps be like involved in the family would it be you know certain steps that you take so I'm just curious yep so each one of us so we go through they still will classify as critical warning or kind of green right they kind of color code each one so if anybody in critical we have a established program or policy that we've kind of set up a procedure we've set up within the district clinical team of doing check-ins reaching out to the families um there is a possibility that we could

095bring in a biomass which is a little bit more of an intensive assessment tool that would be only by parents being willing to engage in that there's a cost associated with that so we've been kind of navigating like in the future could we be doing something like that for specific students we tier each one of our students off of a critical list and then the one list and then that's when we're coming up with the group in student profile interventions based off of that so that could look like individual check-ins or that could look like a student group but each one is categorized and each building now has a clinical a clinical building team where they're reviewing all this data in collection so there's building clinical teams kind of working through the data then they

096come with me and we do the district clinical team and we kind of make sure that we're aligning the same practices so you know and I could share it with you exactly what the process and procedures are but we do have a system for each one who kind of Falls in each category to ensure that we are checking and making sure that students aren't falling between the crack because ultimately that's what Panorama is doing is trying to assess a multitude of data points so that there is no data point that kind of takes over the next right I think sometimes we get caught up on it's just conduct or it's just attendance now we're able to kind of cross-reference all of those data points to get a general well-balanced vision of what the student is

097and then look at specific needs of what we need to be doing as a school to better service them thank you I think that's important for the community to understand and myself included and then I said one more question regarding the youth work program so I love that you do it at the high school and that you're trying to incorporate the middle school but can you tell me what the parameters are for like what does a student look like that's going to be recommended for that type of a program is it tied to possible you know behaviors that that are concerned is it grades is you know what does it look like so there has to be some sort of at-risk indicator what that looks like can be really determined based off of the district

098you know the state has kind of their own guidelines of what that is but they've been pretty flexible in terms of like you know allowing us to do what's in the best interest of the students so it might be a student's disengage in academics it could be that they're not coming to school it could be that they're involved with DCF it could be there involved at dys it could be that they just have no plan after high school they're on an IEP or 504 you know there's something that is alerting them that they're they might not have a plan Beyond and that this would be a good opportunity to kind of refocus and calibrate the future perspective because I think a lot of times you lose kids in high school when there is no plan

099for the future and it just kind of becomes like I'm just trying to get that diploma and you become diploma Jason but without a plan a diploma really loses its its value even now so I think we're really trying to work on establishing plans and Bridging the conversation about you know you don't have to be good at everything to be good at something right as adults I think we know that we can be good at one thing and make a career out of that and if and if that's all kids need to know to make sure that they're being well balanced in other other areas so that they can be successful in the area they're actually interested in you know I think that's the over the overall goal of a program like that yeah great

100just one more question um so is it tied also to so you mentioned that it feels like at the middle school that it's actually helping that you know teachers are seeing more engagement so that's all great but would would that student then be told you know you need to do XYZ at school in order to continue being in this program or you know I don't want it to sound like punitive but totally against that Mantra oh no I am too and that's why I'm asking you I think it's always funny this is I'll probably get myself in trouble with somebody but uh I think it's always funny that we take away things that kids are good at when you know we're trying to engage and make things that they're not good at right so that's

101why I was asking oh this isn't going to get taken away this is an opportunity I mean you can get fired from a job but just doesn't mean you're fired from the program means we'll replace you we'll work on the skills that you were fired for and then we'll try to replace you after that uh you know I think that that's an important message that we need to especially in this day and age like you can be bad at certain certain things it doesn't mean you're a bad person it doesn't mean that you're not going to be able to accomplish what you want to accomplish it just means you might have to do it differently and allowing students to have that level of failure and still have opportunity I think is important for them and

102particularly when we're talking about jobs that you know things that we take away from them that could turn into employment right if I'm taking away a job that they could ultimately make money in a career off of because they're failing math but they hate math and they're never going to be a mathematician kind of defeats the purpose of Education right like we're trying to build successful 25 year olds like I don't really care if you're successful at 15. I mean I do but well thank you that's that's what I was hoping to hear but I just wanted to ask thank you um Kevin I have a question about the surveys sure when we when we get information and you see Trends in schools how do we talk to families about those trends yeah so right

103now it's been kind of a slow process because it was the first year that we did it so we really didn't get the trends until like december-ish and then we spent like the last month kind of meeting with principals and talking about it and unpacking it there I think we first I just presented in front of executive back in December I believe it's been a slow roll light because I really was trying to challenge the clinical staff on looking at how we're looking at data it's not as simple as just pulling numbers out of it and telling me that your school's struggling in X like I really want to know the meaning behind it all and so it's been a little bit slower this year this year has really been kind of like that first

104step I think we need to develop a plan about how we're we're establishing um you know what the trends are you know working with the building principles you know to be quite Frank we just haven't made it that far this year yet just because it's it's really been a learning experience for the whole District to kind of embed Panorama into what they're doing on a daily basis we're still you know I just met with the high school department head yesterday or Tuesday to start doing more trainings with them because there been very focused on the clinical and administrative staff and now we're trying to roll it out to the teachers so it's we're trying to be purposeful and slow and I don't want to rush to anything but you know that's certainly something that you

105know Miss Lyons and I and the building principles will have to come up with a plan uh moving forward because this will be happening twice a year so you know in the spring we would have a better plan for that other question I did see two in the in a piece that I want to ask you one is um how frequent of the surveys to Children twice a year okay and the other question was do parents have the ability to access some of the Panorama information they don't have the ability to like lock into Panorama but they have access to all of the information so I've had multiple parents reach out and ask for the report and to the clinicians in their building they have complete access to wherever they land how they answered the

106questions if they so choose is not um is not for us only you know but parents should have access to it and so that uh absolutely thank you I don't have a question just a comment you know one of the things that I'm asked frequently is what is student services so I appreciate this presentation and how robust it was because I hope the community takes away what I'm taking away from it which was by the way why it needed to be its own department is how expansive this work is what Mr avatarley talked about tonight doesn't just it's not just one area it's not just social emotional learning it's not just creating opportunities for school to work and alternative Pathways other than College um it's not just family support and family engagement events you know

107it's really looking at staff wellness it's looking at helping create you know Comprehensive Mental Health Systems to bolster a state system that is not meeting the needs of our children or families um it's really a holistic approach to what we're seeing in a word student services is responsiveness to what this community needs so I just wanted to thank you for that presentation um and point out how obviously busy you are and you know I hope the community takes that message away tonight as well lucky for you I'm not done I'll keep going so the next item on the report is in fact care Solace so you can continue on all right so care Solace is a new um it's a new program I'll talk a little bit but I'll explain where we've been first so

108we used to use William James interface it was a program that we used to service all many of our communities and students um it was trying to align Mental Health Services and wait lists uh to you know kind of alleviate the needs of our community unfortunately the system didn't really work very well it wasn't very well received it wasn't very well utilized over the course of last summer we discontinued services with it with the goal of kind of accessing a new opportunity and so we did some research and we've been looking around on trying to find a program and so this has been vetted through multiple Community Partners professional people that I've worked with and so we are moving towards care Solace so this is a mental health care System coordination service that is ensuring

109every person with mental health or substance abuse challenges can quickly find Quality Care match to their unique unique needs regardless of circumstances so this really is going to help save our clinical staff a lot of the staff a lot a lot of the time that it takes to coordinate services I don't know if any of you guys have gone through this but it takes hours to find Services particularly in the school particularly when you don't have their insurance information it become it can become a cumbersome act and so now we have a service well they'll really pick it up and we'll do this warm handoff is what they call it and they're going to be able to help us coordinate those services in real time while maintaining services or connections with us but not always

110which we'll get to so the Y is one in five you know one in five adults with mental health uh illnesses each year one in six between age 16 uh and six and Seventeen experience of mental health disorder one in five have a diagnosed behavioral health issue um you know I'm gonna kind of leave out that for a second and just give you a quick story so we had Jim McCauley come in and do our our training uh for trauma informed Care at the beginning of the school year with our entire district and I was supposed to um I was supposed to I did introduce him and I had it written down in my head that I was going to introduce it that you know I recognize that we aren't a mental health care system

111and that we're asked to do a lot that's outside of our scope and I didn't say that but that's what I was thinking in my head and Jim came up and he said pretty much regardless of what you think schools are the largest mental health providing system for students 18 or children 18 and under whether you like it or not that's a reality what we deal with on a day-to-day basis is Clinic is clinical level care um Pre-K to 12. um and and I think that is understated sometimes because it doesn't really hit every family but the families that it does hit it's very real and you know I think because of that the services like we talk about we have 17 clinical team members um with over 3 000 students you know well in

112in comparison to a lot of districts that's actually pretty decent number um however that still you can see the discrepancy when you're talking about mkg with one with one adjustment counselor and close to 650 students it becomes very difficult to service clinical level needs when there's one of them and you know teachers and school psychologists and like everybody tries to but it it's challenging um so care Solace is something that is really I think beneficial to us because it's 24 7 365. they will work with any Middleboro Community member so they don't have to have a a student in Middleboro they don't have to have a connection to the middle of our school system we have a unique URL that they'll be able to access and utilize in addition all of our staff members even

113staff members who do not live in Middle bar will have access to this platform including their their their children husbands spouses anybody in their immediate family so we'll be able to you know really spread who we're able to impact and help just by offering this service to the entire District of Middleboro so this is something that we are paying for but really the correlation between what schools and this service is providing is really just that we're trying to help a significant need that's in our community um the impact the utilizing care service will this is all just data kind of points I mean I'll take up too much time what I do like about this service is there's three ways to kind of get it they can families can individually reach out to this program

114through our own individual URL they can call them directly or they can go through our schools clinicians in order to do so if you decide to take the first two options we will still be able to track the data but we will it'll be completely Anonymous there'll be no name there'll be no identifying information on you it's simply telling us what people are being serviced for so it tells us of whether or not people are utilizing the platform this is important because when we're talking about Trends again when we're talking about panorama we're talking about Community when we're talking about family strong we're trying to look at what the trends are in our district so we know where to put money money is not doesn't grow on trees we don't have unlimited access to it

115we want to be real purposeful with the programs that we do bring into the school so that when we do come in here and present I want to bring in this program it's based in fact and not subjective information right we want to be able to say this is a exactly why we're doing this and this program will be able to help us as you can kind of see like what are the community needs this is an example of what they provided but you know anxiety depression trauma marital they'll tell us exactly what um you know uh insurance providers are being used but like I said unless you guys unless the families decide to go directly through us we won't have access to that so it is anonymous which I think is an important part

116because not everybody's going to want to come to the school and they don't have to so there's a communication coming out about this program tonight from Sean Siciliano and in the middle of our public schools and then there's going to be continuous communication home over the next week kind of providing a little bit more information giving the community access to the URL and the phone numbers and then trying to push this out there so that people know that it's available and able to be accessed and that's it uh Kevin just a comment because I do similar work in more narrow Fields um I I think the program makes a lot of sense because it gives it gives people opportunities to cut through problematic issues like Insurance like finding available counselors Etc um I I would

117say the one key thing and I think we need to message it this way too is this is a referral service if especially someone from the community is in immediate crisis they should call 988 or 9-1-1 yes so in all the communication home is that's that's directed in there as such so it is it is a referral based process you know and I think that's important that they know it's not necessarily affiliated with Middleboro Public Schools they're not getting like it's a service that's available that they're going to have to outreach and if there's an emergency they need to go through the proper protocol so that is part of the communication that will be sent out um and I think again having dealt with and worked for places similar but different um there is also

118the process of somebody called here in crisis they would be transferred to those numbers so part of that too yes so we do have three contact persons within the district if carousels had to get in contact with somebody so obviously I'm number one uh Miss Lyons is number two uh and then Jennifer healy's number three so there would be three people in case there was something that they had to contact with somebody in the district kerosolus has our information but there's also that caveat of they should be calling 9-1-1 or um you know mental health service providers that uh and I would also say again having dealt with similar places and also dealt with William James interface the William James interface was much more clinically focused if you called up as opposed to sort of

119a consumer friendly Focus for an outside firm does that make sense yeah absolutely okay and this will be able to yeah so it's it's this is a much more collaborative process as well so we'll be able to track if they decide to go through the school we'll be able to see exactly where they are and the families are even if they don't go through US they'll be able to see exactly where they are in terms of the referral process so it's all trans it's it's um there's nothing hidden so they're going to be able to kind of go along with it and see and be along for the ride and not just kind of be waiting thank you I think it's a great idea and I think it makes it's it's the next step I

120mean we signed on to the um interface because it was part of a gift to us to do that and this makes sense to move forward in a different direction I think that would be more Community focused and provide more opportunities for the whole community and additionally staff who now can access it because even though if they don't live in Middle yes other questions thank you I think what I'll just add is that this I would say this was the easiest decision I've made since July 1st one of the things I heard all throughout coven I heard from moms I heard from dads I heard from grandparents it didn't matter was please help me find therapy for my child I've called I've spent hours it wasn't even necessarily about insurance there were not counselors to

121be had and our children were in crisis what was so attractive about this to me was that it offered families a Lifeline at a time when you know really their backs are against the wall so this really was a no-brainer I did not have to think about it long Mr avatable went found this platform we had a demo and we've been hooked ever since so I'm really excited for this to come online and I would really like to hear feedback from the community what I like about this referral system is that it actually follows you all the way through the first appointment and asks questions like did your child connect with that therapist if you've ever had a child in therapy then you know you can get to the end of that line and that

122child will tell you I didn't really like her so that part's critically important it really is a full serve full-service sort of concierge designed service um and like I said it it scratches a real big edge here in Middleboro so I'm excited and please please give us that feedback so thank you thank you thank you all right with that I'll move to the next item which is the athletic winter sports update and upcoming summer programs athletic director Ryan Sylvia will be uh coming online to talk to us about that Solutions hello Ryan hello thank you uh Mrs Lyons chairman young school committee members for having me tonight Kevin thank you for that presentation that was uh impressive um and my presentation is not quite as detailed but um but we'll be equally impressive all right

123athletics department update first office participation this is just for fall Sports so we had at just in athletics we also had some activities that I'm going to talk about we had how many do we have here one two three four six boys programs six girls programs 127 male participants 117 female participants so it's nice that we have that balance obviously that's required equal opportunities there we do have a couple of programs that are not gender specific like the wrestling program and the gymnastics program both are co-ops and wrestling we're the host school we host Old Colony and gymnastics We Are The Guest school and we are hosted by Carver but we actually practiced and participated over at Autumn the Middleboro YMCA this year so those are the participation numbers for the fall I'm sorry for

124the winter and then we also had additional activities within the department on Nichols Middle School intramurals with 39 cheerleading 21. High School strength and conditioning with 20 and then majorettes with 18 which is majorettes is kind of a hybrid they start in the winter and they go all the way through part of the spring so they kind of operate in two seasons So within the activities uh portion of the department there was only 98 participants so total we had 342 participants this winter 20 individual teams 14 unique programs with a participation rate at the high school we kind of removed the Middle School from that participation rate of about 32 percent so we'd love to see that number go up you know some of these programs definitely have some Thin numbers um but we have

125we had a strong season uh regardless uh and it's still going on for many of our teams uh for most of our teams actually so um just to kind of give you a snapshot we had approximately and these are approximate numbers they're actually probably a little higher than this 575 practice sessions across all the different teams 225 competitions 95 bus trips all in about 90 days or a little over 90 days by the time we get to March so it's a dynamic Department I love uh being part of it I love leading this department we talk about social emotional learning uh we heard a lot about that earlier and this is where a lot of that learning takes place I think with the teaching that our coaches do and I get to observe besides just

126worrying about buses and officials and scheduling and things like that I get to observe our students doing the activities and the in the things that they're really passionate about so one note on the bottom Nichols Middle School is going to be offering Special Olympics Massachusetts unified basketball this March which we're really excited about we were able to get a small grant to get that off the ground it's a short season they're going to have a couple of games one home game one away game and meet a couple of days a week and so that's kind of an addition to um the activities portion at the middle school level just a slide on leadership we did have seven underclassmen representing Middleboro High School across multiple Sports in all three seasons attend diversity equity and inclusion Summit

127through the MIAA on January 20th at Holy Cross Mrs Lyons and and one of our coaches TJ Smith actually joined us for that that field trip that day and this was really just kind of a an opportunity for us to um bring some students that we thought were students that show leadership qualities to kind of take a dip in in some of these hot topics and and really be students that can bring this back to our school and and um and just kind of have an idea of of what it means of what these different topics mean they were able to choose two topics throughout the day so they didn't get to hit all of them but I did put on there they had wheelchair racing in Massachusetts social media and hate speech Four P's

128of the n-word the power of multimedia storytelling Special Olympics Massachusetts unified Champion schools program which Middleboro is a proud member of that program and a unified Champion School foundations of lgbtq inclusive schools and making a podcast a tool for awareness and Justice and we really with all these topics it was just kind of an informal conversation after the students had the opportunity to listen to these speakers um just kind of debriefing after each one nothing real formal in terms of having them present or go back to to their teams or any groups or anything like that but just an opportunity to have our kids be exposed to hearing some of these about some of these topics community service we I had a goal this year to make sure we had at least one service project

129each season so our in the fall we collected socks versus October in the winter we've been collecting uh new or Gently Used winter hats mittens and gloves and still have that going on and then in the spring our hope is and it hasn't been officially confirmed yet but last year we hosted the Special Olympics sectional Championship meet with the 17 schools at Middleboro high school for unified track and field and the goal is to do that again this spring and we have all of our spring athletes acting as volunteers for that meet because it is a large event and then uh sorry I feel like I'm showing here the back of this uh can you turn that mic down a little bit the back of this um uh presentation competitive success uh we've had some

130successful teams this winter with five League championship teams uh and I'll just give a shout out to those teams uh it'll borrow boys basketball who's on the road tonight at Dartmouth uh Nichols Middle School boys basketball who is undefeated this year 16-0 so that was quite an accomplishment um the MHS slash nms girls swimming and Diving team were the league champions for the South Shore League the indoor tracking girls indoor track and field uh won the um South Shore league for the sixth consecutive year and the boys team won it for the second consecutive year the those two teams are competing at the states right now at the Reggie Lewis Center in Boston tonight actually last I checked the boys were in first place so they've still got a few more events coming but that's

131a huge uh huge accomplishment if they can pull that off and then we have nine plus teams and or individuals qualifying for uh postseason play uh league and Regional All-Star recognition is coming soon they're still having those meetings and things like that so the teams have been successful this season um that was kind of the first part anybody any questions on winter sports no thank you Ryan I appreciate it you know you you've really brought this place along and having to deal with this building being under construction and having to travel to a wide variety of places to hold home meets um and everything you've done I can't say enough good things about your work right so thank you thanks it's um yes um having had the the two student athletes since 2017 when you

132came in as an athletic director um I've been to many many events through the years with my boys being multi-athletes multi-sport athletes so the culture that you have created and I've told you this on a personal level but I'd like to say it publicly you've created a culture that that is second to none truly I've been to so many other districts and the way that our student athletes represent this district and this community quite often is is really spectacular and I know that there was an incident a couple of weeks ago that I was very proud to to be a parent of one of those boys who was subject to something that was you know really inappropriate and and the way that our boys responded is a testament to your leadership in this athletic department

133and all of the coaching staff that that works for you and with you and so as a mom and now of a college athlete I appreciate you and I thank you uh just I'll just make one comment on that you know we have we see incidents of you know on sportsmanlike conduct bad language you know inappropriate language things like that that happen and my take on that is that and I think everybody knows this and Mr Brown you know you know a test of this too we don't we're not going to accept that at Middleboro we're not going to accept it from our fans we're not going to accept it from our student athletes and we don't expect expect to be treated that way when we go other places we can only control what we

134do uh what our coaches do what our students do how other schools decide to handle those situations that's up to them but I think we've set a pretty clear expectation for you know have we had our own set of uh situations that we've had to deal with yeah we've we've had those um but nothing that we that we haven't been able to uh get pointed in the right direction and and handle appropriately so wow thank you for that appreciate that um so summer athletic programs this is something that we started five years ago or we kind of expanded five years ago and it's just grown and grown and grown and it's been really good for uh the athletic department for the schools um basically coaches are going to run a clinic based on their schedule

135in whatever format they see best fits so some will run a four-day Clinic Monday through Thursday with Friday as a makeup day the age groups range from grade 3 all the way through 12. some are on weekly clinics two to four hours per week depending on how many days they meet everything is coached by the high school coaches and assistant coaches or volunteer student volunteers if we have student High School volunteers working the youth camps or summer programs then we allow them to use those hours towards the graduation requirement for community service hours the times of a broad range you know the strength and conditioning is is probably one of the most popular it's six seven eight and nine a.m Monday through Thursday so every day uh or four days a week during those times

136um the sport clinics vary in times the weekly clinics again one to three days per week the summer schedule is still being finalized we expect to have all of those programs published uh early March when we get back from the Break um I think I already put this part in the age students entering grades 3 through 12. one program that I kind of want to highlight well let me I'll say that in a minute but the registration and payment is all done through what used to be family ID now it's Arbiter Sports it's on the school website payments can be made through UniBank so that's linked through Arbiter as well the fees vary depending on the clinic so most of them are pretty low on that 85 dollar range the golf Clinic when it's run

137is a little more expensive obviously because we have Greens fees and things like that so the coaching staff payroll is listed there head coaches at a certain level athletic trainer assistant coaches and then student volunteers and then facilities I work pretty closely with Jim Hutchinson on making sure that we're coordinating rentals with if there are any rentals with just facility availability based on you know whatever work might be getting done in the district during the summer and then marketing this is all gets marketed through our my monthly s'more that goes out I'll do a little plug for that please make sure you're you're reading through that but basically anything you need to know about our department is in there or on our website but obviously you can call the office or send me an email

138as well um one before the summer leagues I only have two slides left one program that we're really looking to get off the ground this year and hopefully a very low cost or no cost program is our Track and Field Youth track and field program we're looking at a model our head coach TJ Smith and myself from a local community and it's a really nice activity for the summer where families for students all the way down to potentially kindergarten or first grade can bring their children to the um to the track one night a week get a chance to kind of go through some of the events walk the track get some Fitness and activity in um and it's about you know an hour and an hour and 30 minute session so we're working on

139the details of that but I just wanted to kind of plug it I know I was going to work with the elementary school principals to push that out to them as well as kind of a wellness just opportunity for to come use our facility and and for the kids to learn the sport so more more information to come on that but that hopefully will be part of the song or definitely will be part of the summer athletic program in some form and these football passing league and the high school girls basketball summer league both of these are kind of one in the same I'll kind of toggle between but um basically we we started this last year when we had the okay to use the facilities and it's our high school teams are always traveling

140in the summer to join these leagues to train for the upcoming season and because we have the new facility here at the high school and we wanted to kind of show it off a little bit we offered to host these leagues the past couple of years so there's a cost per team to join the League and that covers basically the cost of the officials and the staff that we need to work those games footballs on Monday nights basketball is on Monday and Wednesday nights we have supervision for those our coaches are there um and it's just really nice to keep our kids in Middleboro for these for these leagues rather than sending them off to whichever other schools hosting it um so that's it for the summer program I just have one plug for the

141booster club uh after that any questions on summer programs any questions sure on the summer league ones is that open to incoming freshmen or is it just current high school students so I should have made them uh more clear all of the summer programs well I'm sorry the leagues the leagues okay the leagues those would be open to incoming 9th graders the other programs are mostly geared towards elementary and middle school students perfect thank you all right um the all sports boosters Association has had some always has successful fundraisers and we do a big fundraiser each season fall winter and spring and um they're really student-based the students do the majority of the fundraising uh this past winter they raised over sixteen thousand dollars with a calendar fundraiser These funds go towards things that coaches

142request and then are voted on by the booster uh Club board so things like additional coaches for like a team like the track team that had 95 participants this year we were able to pay some additional coaches to help with supervision during practices and things like that film editing software various tournaments and competitions additional equipment uniforms all that type of stuff spring fundraiser is going to be raffle tickets they start March 25th after the first week of the season and then the golf tournament is always the first Sunday in May at squirrel run this year it's May 7th 9 A.M and there'll be more information coming on that too facility I just wanted to say thank you this work is equally as important you know sports are a major um inroad for a student's sense

143of belonging and if you've ever talked to someone who was a high school athlete or a current High School athlete they'll talk to you about how it folds into their identity and how they learn lifelong lessons of teamwork and Leadership through these opportunities so I don't ever want anyone to think that this work isn't as important as everything else that happens in our system I'm proud of this program and is incredibly well run and thank you our next item is a new scholarship that if you want to it's in the binder yeah it's in the binder this has been a scholarship that was started sadly shortly after Mr catino had passed away um everything was finalized and Paul reached out to us early last week but it was it was added so it could make

144the the scholarship it's a new scholarship and it could make the scholarship booklet for all the students and Frank I'll let you talk about excuse me Paul I'll let you talk about the frankettino scholarship um first and foremost thank you so much for letting me um come and present these two additional scholarships to ensure the fact that it could be entered into the booklet and then our class of 2023 seniors would be able to apply to them so there were two scholarships that the catino family as you know that frankettino a long time math teacher here at the high school passed away in April of last year and the family had started a scholarship in his name esecatino family had had other scholarships for for other members of the family as well one of them

145is just a name change that the family wanted to begin a redesign of one scholarship which is a Frank catino Memorial Scholarship for stem it's a scholarship that will be awarded to a graduating senior from Middleboro High School who will be pursuing a degree in stem and it will be given in memory of Frank catino a priority will be given to a student that demonstrates a financial need and awardees must submit a college College transcript upon completion of the first semester of college so it's really moving from mathematics to really more of a global view in stem and then the second one which is a brand new scholarship which is really pending your approval and your support is it is called the frankettino Memorial Scholarship the scholarship is awarded to a graduating senior of Middleboro

146High School who will be pursuing an Associates or bachelor's degree in any field it is given in memory of Frank catino a Middleborough high school graduate and longtime mathematics teacher at MHS and priority will be given to a student that demonstrates a financial need and again that all awardees will have to provide for semester grades for the scholarship so um it is with um we're really quite honored that the katino family wants to continue in Frank's name in making sure the name is alive and well and many graduates to come so I thank you for your consideration so chair and attend a motion to accept the two new scholarships go here a second discussion hearing Paul again thank you to the casino family they um it was sad we lost Frank um Frank was a

147great teacher and obviously a great Union president who I had the fortune of dealing with on a wide array of occasions always a gentleman yeah and so with that all those in favor say aye aye opposed the unanimous Paul thank you thank you so much okay the next item on my report is the reads collaborative agreement Amendment this is in your packet I will summarize for you very briefly what really the change is if you note this agreement hasn't been amended since 2014 so it's been a minute ultimately back in 2014 there were fewer members of the collaborative so when things and business needed to occur it was pretty easy to get unanimous decision on certain items that is the language that Miss Craig is seeking to have adjusted at this point there is some

148business some discussion of potentially bringing on additional uh member districts to the reads collaborative in order to even have the conversation um the previous agreement warranted all people all members of the board of directors be present and then vote unanimously so that really sums up what we're you know we're trying what what this change ultimately outlines is not having to have everybody be there physically in person what you're talking about is multiple area superintendents who make up this board so asking them to physically be present is in some cases very difficult given the the geography of where they are obviously for Middleboro it's a little easier but most communities don't have that good fortune so that is the amendment that you would need to vote on to approve and I would also add it changes

149it it changes the um for example if a new member were to come in Not only would it require two-thirds vote of the board it would require two-thirds votes of each school committee uh yes because it previously also warranted a completely unanimous decision of not just the board of directors but also the school committees that's right and so there are 18 members of the committee and there it would require at least 12 members to agree so correct so with that the chair will entertain a motion to allow the chair to sign the new agreement discussion again I would like to say reads has been very transparent with us we get their budget each and every year they do offer to come and be part of our meeting if we so choose we have had them

150for occasion when they were looking at the new buildings they decided the space ran out and so we should also say that uh Miss Craig has been fantastic in coming to us anytime we wanted I think it's also helpful that it's in Middleboro yeah so that makes it easy but with that all those in favor say aye aye opposed it's unanimous so thank you great my second to last item is Student Activities account with director of business and finance Sarah hickey thank you superintendent Lyons and school committee members as you know and as community members know we have some new friends at the Town Hall Renee Fernandez is our new town Treasurer and Bob Eckstrom is our new town accountant and I have the pleasure of working with these two people I have met with

151Renee Fernandez on a couple of occasions and one of the things that we're working on is the accounts that are being held by the town and so Student Activity accounts uh fall under that the so in Massachusetts the Student Activity account is held jointly by the town Treasurer and principal of a building um I don't have oversight over though I don't I I can't withdraw or depos I can't talk to the bank about it even um but I do an internal audit of student account activities every year I arrange the external audit so what I needed to talk to you about tonight is um when we were talking about Student Activity accounts Renee Fernandez explained to me um that there is a Student Activity account a joint account for the School Street School in the

152Lincoln D Lynch School which both of those buildings have been closed since 2008 so there's been money sitting in an account for 15 years and I asked her can we take the amount of money that's there and divide it up proportionately among the Student Activity the active Student Activities accounts we have and she said yes we could do that so there is about thirteen thousand dollars that's been sitting in account it was raised or it it was from the students of Middleboro to begin with it should go to the students of Middleboro so we just want to make sure we will put on the an agenda exactly where that money will go but just making sure that that sounded reasonable to everybody yeah okay that's great um and uh so everyone understands um the last

153class that attended those I believe graduated two years ago so there is there is no current class anywhere that attended those two buildings so yes cool okay thank you and oh sorry well when we had our budget I'm sorry our agenda setting meeting you said you wanted a budget update but they didn't make it on here no no problem I just wanted to to basically to remind everybody that next meeting will be the the budget hearing it'll be very fun please attend and I I will say that the uh the we have to by law make a public hearing notice in a local paper and we did in the masket weekly and so that has been done and so we are in accordance with the law for our next meeting great my final item is

154for our very patient visitor I wanted to welcome the new town manager Mr James mcgrail if you want to come on up to our table we'd like to warmly welcome you to Middleborough hello welcome how are you guys how are you I'm doing well have you enjoyed Middleboro this far it's been busy you guys have kept me on my toes to say the least it's uh been very good though it's I've really enjoyed I I think it's I started mid November and it's been trial by fire no question um but honestly I'm feeling really good about where we're at I had the opportunity in my first month to undertake the FY 24 budget and I think that was no better way to start uh my tenure here in Middleboro then then that you know it

155gave me the opportunity to work with every Department including the school department to really understand some of the pressures and priorities with all those groups and build a budget moving forward that I think represents the town well in all aspects and and one that I I truly support so excellent I mean we had a great relationship with Bob when Bob was here I would also add too that I think it's important that for example you know that you're welcome to attend any of our negotiation sessions I always sort of solicit and put down with the unions that you could be a potential part of that because it's always made sense Bob and I would always meet and go over essentially what was the town negotiating so that we weren't creating Bad Blood between unions that

156some people get different amounts over others you know I think there's intricacies in all the contracts because they're different and they deal with different professions but it always made sense to the two of us to try to make it as close as possible um with obviously some differences sometimes things are a little out of whack and need to be corrected because they don't meet the market and we need to make sure that that people are taken care of but it was always sort of that open dialogue and I would welcome that with you too yeah I certainly had that I'm coming from the Orr you know district and I was a you know I had a really strong relationship with the superintendent there and basically I'm available to you any way you want me you

157know in certain instances superintendent Nelson wanted me to participate in the room because he thought it would help in certain instances he asked me to just meet with him behind the scenes so um however you guys want to use me in that capacity I appreciate the opportunity to be a part of it any way that you want and I think being on the same page from the beginning is is the best way to go about it so I'm certainly I'm certainly ready for that correct I can tell you Mr mcgrail has hit the ground running he has department meetings that I attend he's already made efforts to draw our departments together um to create a unified Community which is exactly how we should behave he's more than available we consult regularly we're in contact regularly

158and he's always you know a gracious host and I'm excited to not be the newest kid on the Block so welcome Mr McGraw yeah thank you I can say the same thing about superintendent Alliance from even before I started you know we we both committed to each other that our relationship is probably the most critical relationship in the town and I still feel that way you know four months later so yes Teresa Farley um did he have a chance to watch your budget presentation since I wasn't able to attend that meeting and I'm also in budget subcommittee so I just want to be sure that you know everything was looking as it should but you did a great job I appreciate your comprehensive presentation um looking forward to to seeing what you can do for

159the town but I appreciate your willingness to continue the um support of the the school district because without a good school district the community is certainly not as strong as I as it could be so I wanted to thank you for that and welcome you to our town as a town manager thank you yeah I mean you guys certainly have an advocate for the school and me I served three years on the school committee in Sandwich I was the chair for uh two of those years uh after that I worked in the district for a year so I certainly know your side of it and the school side of it and it's an important part of my my mom's a retired school teacher so certainly an advocate for you thank you thank you very much

160and welcome you know thank you so much thanks for coming thanks for sticking around yep sounds good I learned a lot actually I'm glad I got to see the presentations both to Athletics one and the student services both good stuff good information to Garner thanks and that completes my report for this evening uh as far as our high school building project I should mention we haven't had a meeting but miss migrill is also on the high school building project committee um so I really don't have any updates uh for that we have a meeting in March I believe we do okay um the one action item we have left is an out-of-state fail trip for the Mary Kate good to Roger Williams Zoo um show incident motion to approve so moved second discussion hearing none

161other than this is a normal every year field trip we're required to approve it because it's out of state all those in favor say aye aye opposed unanimous um a couple of things on other we had a wide variety of donations um donations for the Family Resource Center the prints which are photography as is Life Touch in Hannaford's uh yeah sorry um hold on let me just pull up my packet no problem I don't know that and we also have a math uh meet field trip for the middle school which would be going to Westport Public Schools so I know that we had uh life touchable you already did live touch which is our um the group that takes photos and they donate a percentage of the sales the Hannaford supermarkets donation was raised uh

162510 like um Hannaford is a regular contributor and then there were let's see Ohio Ohio pile the other was the Family Resource Center we had State Street Alpha professional development participants and mentors they donated basic needs items for our district to the family resource Center or would like to and they are also at they would like to seek that approval to ask for a donation from Lowe's in the form of totes that they would be using to cart items um and I think that's it okay any questions um before we adjourn just a quick note next meeting will be our budget hearing on March 2nd I would point out to everybody that the superintendent and I have talked and we are going to sort of focus most of meeting around the bud the you know

163the budget except we'll have a couple things that we have to do I would also point out to community members that soon thereafter they will get um the superintendent's evaluation because those need to be done essentially before the next election and they need to be returned back to me by the last uh by the first the last Friday in March right because they first sat the last set first Saturday in is April 1st so I'll need it by then with that show entertain a motion to adjourn second all those in favor say um opposed unanimous thank you very much everybody good night [Music] foreign