School Committee Meeting - March 11, 2022

001um foreign um there's no one at the board oh yeah good evening everybody i'll call the meeting to order uh first order of businesses pledge of allegiance i'd ask stand if you're able and join me 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 with liberty and justice for all welcome everybody we just have one piece of business to do before we start and that is the mech boiler replacement award letter sarah put in our put in our dropbox today that there were three bidders the engineer looked over and so i'm going to turn it over to sarah i have the letter up just so you can thank you so as you are aware we went out to bid

002for the mac boilers we received a number of bids the three lowest bidders were give the three lowest bids were given to the engineer the engineer as as i explained to the people in the room when i opened the bids i have a degree in mathematics i don't know anything about boilers so that's why we have an engineer on the project i gave the bids from the three lowest bidders to the engineer he spent the time reviewing and checking references and then and then presented me with this letter recommending the lowest qualified bidder as the wilkinson company out of rockland massachusetts so i present this to you with the recommendation that we move forward with this company the chairman entered in a motion to award the contract to the wilkinson companies in the amount of

003262 983 dollars awesome do i hear a second discussion and again it's the lowest qualified bidder um and that's the engineer who is in charge of looking at the program for us any further yep do we have a timeline on this i may have missed that last meeting but just curious as to when this would be done i know we wanted to get moving quickly but we have two big projects going on at the neck right now and so i guess the best way to say it is the chiller which will run the air conditioning is going to be online for summer and the boilers are going to be online for next week perfect thank you so just to be clear it's going to start out with working on the chiller first in case people

004couldn't hear sarah and then it will go to make sure the boilers are online by the time winter rolls around so everything should be by the time in the seasons that they're needed excellent any other question rich sure obviously uh respect the engineer's decision on who i'm just curious have we ever had any experiences with that particular company before and if so were they good that is a question for jim hutchinson and i can get you the answer to that but but to answer that are they good part we're talking about a company that is dcam certified which is the division of capital and asset management in massachusetts so this isn't just this isn't just anybody could put in a bid for the project in when we say qualified their qualifications are it's kind of

005like angie's list except it's not household projects it's construction projects got it and just so everybody may not have heard uh the company's dcam certified meaning that uh capital improvement management from the state approves of the company certifies the company and in addition sarah is not 100 sure we've used the company in the past but is going to talk with hutch our director of facilitation sure and mr chair i'm not obviously willing to hold up my vote on this i know that the engineer stakes their reputation on the company that they choose i was just curious yeah thank you any other questions and i should also note that um that martin uh yeah i'm sorry martin richardson was the person we were using as the engineer but the wilkinson's company is also the lowest bidder

006not only the lowest qualified bidder with that all those in favor opposed unanimous thank you now we'll get to the main point of the night so tonight we're here to interview carolyn lyons um for a candidate for superintendent um just so everyone understands how it's going to go i'm going to offer carolyn opportunity to speak first and then i will go to each of you to ask questions um we'll do that until we have sort of run out of questions um and then i'm gonna take a break for a few minutes um just so everyone can recoil for a few seconds and then we'll discuss afterwards okay so with that carolyn welcome um you've been here many times in other capacities but i appreciate you coming and i'll turn the floor over to you thank

007you so hello i am carolyn lyons i am your current director of pupil personnel services for the middleborough public schools i am seeking the position of superintendent schools because simply put i want to move our district forward i'd like to tell you a little bit about myself tonight a little bit about my work with middleborough over the past 15 years and then what i see is the future plan to best meet the needs of 3 100 students in this community i grew up in avon massachusetts not too far from here i am one of six children in my family i went to college at smith college i graduated with a double major in government and economics which i completed in three and a half years and i went on to law school after taking a

008brief hiatus i went to suffolk university law school in boston i practiced law with a focus on education law until i took a position here in middleborough in 2012. education has been part of my path all along even if it was not the primary path i set out to follow and reflecting on this process exposed that for me as i've reflected on it for years as i've become the educator i am today in high school i actually had the opportunity to intern with my own second grade teacher in the avon public schools and it was a wonderful experience getting to work with young children getting to understand you know even as a high school student what their needs were at college when i was in college i actually worked with the pre-k population in a

009daycare setting so those students were ages 2.5 through 2.5 through 5. so similar to our pre-k population um here in our district i had the opportunity to work at a teen center on nantucket island for several summers working with teenage students this was a night job that was weekend nights and an alternative to getting into trouble or otherwise for local teens there and then i had the opportunity to teach ninth grade english over the summer also with nantucket schools um in a credit recovery sort of setup and this was all while i was pursuing actually my my law career so from there um i moved on to the firm of murphy hesse to me and lahain and i'll tell you a little bit about that in a moment before i do that um besides being

010a lawyer and an educator i have to point out that i am also a mother i have a son who's 10 years old whose name is grady i have a six-year-old daughter whose name is scarlett hi kids i know you're watching don't stay up too late i am blessed with a husband of over 15 years and i share this with you and the community because my lens is a mother colors everything i do and every decision i make so as i mentioned i've worked with middleborough in some capacity since 2007. when i was working for murphy hesse to me and lahain this is a law firm in quincy that represents school districts they did more than education law but i was in their education law department and they represented over 150 school districts across the

011state of massachusetts middleborough was one of my first clients and i worked continuously with middleborough starting in 2007. middleborough was one of about anywhere from 15 to 18 communities i worked with on on on any given kind of regular basis there when i began my work in middleborough what struck me and i've talked to you about it before when i became your pps director was the quality of staff that were here i met people like melissa deutschmann and mari gates and lisa mcdonald some of these people have been here over 20 years and i knew that there was something special in this community i was excited every time i got to come so when i stepped out of the law and i was making a decision to join an educational institution i like to say

012that middleborough chose me as much as i chose it and i'm proud to tell you i haven't left and i've committed to this community many many times over that time period when i joined middleborough public schools i stepped into a role of secondary special education team facilitator for grades 6 through twelve which is a mouthful i also manage the entire out of district case load for the district so what that means is essentially i was balancing half of this district's special education population by myself i ran initial and three-year re-evaluation meetings i oversaw the entire special education staff at nichols and also the high school and i played a central role in professional development is a continuing thread not just with my work at the firm but also here in the district which is one

013of the reasons i gave you an addendum with my paperwork i wanted you to see the expansive topics that i've provided professional development on i spent a lot of time in my legal career teaching educational institutions about the law and specifically about special education was one of the things i like to do the most so i used to train special education team facilitators i would train superintendents i would train sometimes entire school districts as i did i would come into an auditorium like this the entire district would be there this was how i spent my time when i wasn't involved in litigation or other matters related to education when i stepped into the district here i brought that with me so one of my first assignments on the job that summer was that i trained

014our entire administrative team on discipline law student discipline law is what i'm referring to but professional development has remained not only an interest and a joy of mine but something that i've consistently done and it's oftentimes functioned as a cost savings mechanism for this district i also built relationships with staff and my families and that's something that i think is an asset to my candidacy as the superintendent i would not need to spend any time building relationships with any member of your administrative team in particular but my relationships extend far beyond that in 2016 i took on the role of director of people personnel services and you gave me that opportunity that i have held since that time i stepped into that role because i felt that my skill set could benefit all families i'll

015talk to you a little bit about pps in a moment but my desire was to stretch my skill set beyond what i had been doing at that time pupil personnel services is as you know a large department and it covers many different aspects of what we do here in the district it involves the oversight of all special education ranging in age from kids who turn three and age into the system all the way through twenty-two it includes the oversight of our 504 process 504 being section 504 of the rehabilitation act of 1973 which governs all students and all employees who may present with a disability it involves my job involves school nursing and over the oversight of all school nursing our medicaid program which involves the submission of medically necessary services for reimbursement which is

016a way to actually earn money in our district one of the few times where we can do that i also serve as the homeless liaison homelessness is governed by a statute in this in it's a federal statute the mckinney-vento act but massachusetts also has accompanying regulations and for students who are touched by homelessness they're entitled to prompt enrollment access to transportation and equality of access of all educational services additionally i'm also the civil rights coordinator for the district this again involves professional development and education i've taken a lead role in our mandatory trainings one of my favorite things is to talk about something like title ix and break it down so that people can actually understand what it means i'm the harassment coordinator for the district which governs all students and all employees and as

017i just mentioned i'm the title ix coordinator and the title vi coordinator title nine covering discrimination on the basis of sex title vi um prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race color or national origin since 2016 and aside from these duties i've led some initiatives that i want to share with you that i also included in my packet and i want to be clear about my role in these initiatives when i say that i'm sharing these initiatives with you that doesn't mean i did everything and i would never take credit from the tremendously hard-working staff in this district um what i can share is that these i these initiatives either were my idea or they were overseen by me from start to finish so as i came into my pps role one of the first

018things actually one of the first conversations i ever had with the budget subcommittee was that i wanted to expand our behavior department at the time we had a board certified behavior analyst which is ultimately a scientist of behavior and that person was a little over half time and i wanted to expand the department because i could see that student behavior was something that we were seeing at school and rather than continue to discipline students and take them further away from their education what i wanted to do was arm our staff with additional tools to more effectively manage those behaviors i am proud to tell you that this department has blossomed under my leadership we now have a board certified behavior analyst who is .8 four days a week and three registered behavior technicians this was

019also a cost savings mechanism as i expanded this department board certified behavior analysts have more education and thus cost more money registered behavior technicians have an amazing and tremendous skill set but they cost less money so the wisdom behind bringing on manpower was of course i need to develop a department but let's not find that department in the most expensive way possible you will hear over this presentation that i am absolutely fiscally conservative when it comes to middleborough's money and public money in general special education program evaluation is something that i spearheaded from the time i moved into this position in 2016. all special education programs need to be evaluated it's part of our obligation it's part of my obligation under the director of special education aspect of my role and that makes sense because

020you want to calibrate what we're doing with students we have to make sure that translates into actual progress historically even in this district and others special ed directors bring people in experts to come in and analyze their programs this can range from a few thousand dollars to tens of thousands of dollars in expenditures at the time i had four coordinators no i had one two three four i'd fi excuse me i had more than four coordinators i had four full-time coordinators and a 0.6 coordinator um and that team had just a tremendous depth of skill and so we took on program evaluation by ourselves saving the district tens of thousands of dollars and i'd like to tell you what that yielded was us not only being able to look at our programming but then have

021a real hands-on approach of what exactly needs to be fixed there are other processes that i've engaged in through this part of my job that was mandatory and in these processes these are state audits or process or events that you have no choice but to comply with as a district that involves tiered focus monitoring which used to be called coordinated program review civil rights data collection which is federal that's not state and then the educational stability review which looks at how we have managed kids who have been touched by homelessness or foster care i'm very proud of the results of our tiered focus monitoring and civil and the coordinated program review and i share that with you again not as my own victory but as the victory of a very strong department in the two

022times i have overseen the special ed um [Music] process for tiered focus monitoring there have been no sight no citations of anything that wasn't implemented i know it's a convoluted way of talking about it but you're given a rated a rating of whether or not you're fully implemented partially implemented or not implemented it's always been the standard that you get cited with something we got cited with nothing and the last time they came through i oversaw civil rights and we were cited with nothing that means total compliance this is what you want you want your district to be functioning at its highest efficiency and capacity beyond that i have additional initiatives that are really sense the era of kovid i'm particularly proud of these initiatives because it exemplifies some of the pieces of my leadership

023that i would bring forward as superintendent the first one is the family support channel the family support channel was my idea and in the middle of the school shutdown we were fielding calls from parents understandably so who were not sure how to best help their kids at home schools were closed for the first time for a very long time and they were trying to set up workstations for their children they weren't sure where to put those workstations what they should look like they weren't sure if their child was behaving in a way that was developmentally appropriate so what the pps department did was they created little tiny snippet videos four minutes six minutes two minutes on a wide variety of topics kate cooney from our ot department did a couple of videos on handwriting and

024finger and um graphs pencil grasp because if you're at home working with your child you may not know that right if you're not an occupational therapist that's not an unreasonable thing um we had counselors write up or uh perform little videos these are all audio visual um so it wasn't anything anyone had to read or weed through and they weren't very long but there were videos on what the workstation could look like how to minimize distraction what's developmentally appropriate for a five-year-old if you've ever worked with a five-year-old you know there's a big band in what to expect in terms of you know readiness skills for academics we understandably we had a lot of parents panicking so again this cost us no money and was a way to outreach to parents i'm very proud of

025that initiative because other communities did it differently if they did it at all and it was all homegrown and it was all run by us an initiative that launched this year is called wellness for you and it's a wellness newsletter that goes to our staff goes to our employees once a month kevin avitable who i presented with last week is my sort of editor-in-chief along with two school psychologists kiera druggin and kylie bowen again this initiative costs zero dollars to release and what it does is it demonstrates it's it's one small feature but what it demonstrates to our staff is that they matter and that's important to me too we are absolutely a service industry and as much as we are constantly caring about our 3100 we have to take care of our own too

026lastly is the equity committee and i wanted to talk to you about the equity committee because this is a new initiative this year paul branigan and i partnered in establishing an equity committee for the first time and understandably a lot of questions came up what does that mean for middleborough what exactly are we talking about what we're really talking about is creating our school environment to be a place that is accessible and welcoming to everybody whether you work here whether you're a student who attends here whether you're a family member that visits here we divided our equity committee into subcommittees which we did so that we could have a focus as you can imagine equities getting a lot of attention in the news and paul's concern along with mine was that we wanted to make

027sure we focused our work so that we had purpose and that we were keeping our tasks focused on things that related to schooling in our education so what we're looking at are our hiring practices do they reflect a procedure that's going to yield the best possible employees here in the district are they truly equal opportunity are facilities are they accessible to all jim hutchinson actually heads up that subcommittee so for example if you are in a wheelchair are you able to access all aspects of educational programming here in our district one of the best ways to do that is to take an equity walk procedures and policies how are things written when we're giving out procedures to parents or sharing something with them or asking for permission is that written in a way that's welcoming

028of everybody curriculum instruction and materials what information are we presenting to students can all students see themselves and what they're learning do the characters look like them do they sound like them do they talk like them and then lastly opportunities for learning because we fully recognize that not only is this ongoing work but none of us are experts you know you can take equity work and look at it from many different angles but i think the most important thing is to open up conversation and be able to talk about these these issues and talk about creating spaces in a non-offensive way and in a way that welcomes different difference of opinion the culvert years were a turning point for me i was a parent through this entire experience my daughter was in a pre-k setting

029that shut down and my son was in third grade in an elementary school that shut down i shared this with you because this tethered me to the parent experience not just in my community but especially here in middleborough it's not lost on me that i spent all of my time focusing on education i would often you know go to work and worry about the 3100 here and then go home and worry about the two i had at home what struck me about that experience was how well middleborough did i'm tremendously proud of the effort that this district put forward for its students i brag about it every chance i get including in my home community and what i like to say about middleborough is that they always kept their students the top priority above all

030else you had people just sort of running towards the building on fire instead of away when i spoke and addressed the entire staff on convocation day this year i compared them to a compass because compasses inherently point north and that's what an educational community is it functions as a compass and really a beacon for the community and i'm tremendously proud of that effort despite that effort and despite everything that everybody did it's not been lost on me that our momentum as a district has been stalled this is a natural byproduct of what's been going on for the last two years this has impacted students it's impacted families it's impacted staff administration whether you drive a bus to this school or teach an ap class everybody was impacted um by this experience and and how long

031this experience has lasted to me it became my calling the way out of of this situation and and the best answer i can give you is to move forward that's why i applied for this job i feel that i can help us move forward drawing on not just what i know but the relationships i've made to me our children have no time to waste i give you the example of a current first grader not just because i live with one your current first grade cohort has only known their formal education through the lens of covet um they had disrupted pre-k if they were at pre-k and they came into school in a hybrid context this year has been their first typical year if we wait another two or three years to have a leader in

032our district that needs time to acclimate and learn people and develop an entry plan those first graders will become third and fourth graders and all of their foundational skills in reading all of their mathematic and numeracy skills will have already been formed they don't have time to wait that creates a sense of urgency in me what i'll say is that superintendents serve different purposes at different times and i think this time is no different i believe that mps needs a leader with vision someone who can identify our areas of improvement and somebody who has a plan to get it done so what i'd like to talk to you about and i don't know if you want me to talk about it now okay um what i'd like to talk to you about is my vision

033and what i think is truly the bones of an entry plan that would take someone new to our district a year to complete at earliest i looked at different questions um as i created this i talked to multiple stakeholders in this community this is not the product of just my brain power this is the product of collaboration this is the product of discussion um this is the product of consultation and most of all it's the product of putting children before everything else so the questions i focused on were what did we learn through coven right what what were the takeaways that that were positive what did we learn to do better what are our priorities going forward how do we decide which things we're going to focus on and when what practices that we regularly

034engage in warrant change what drives our decisions financial decisions are always you know at the back burner but but they're not the only and then whose voice is audible who can we hear and who are we serving what i've developed is a six point plan and it targets six distinct areas the first one is curriculum and i put social emotional learning in with curriculum i do that because in my opinion social emotional learning has to be embedded in everything we do it is not extra it is not something that you do after you're presenting your content if we do not learn as a community to take care of the needs of our learners at the outset it will not matter what content you put forward as kevin talked last week part of this plan involves

035developing a centralized vision curriculum and screener for social emotional learning panorama is the software he was talking about what panorama does is create distinct and discreet skills right when i say social emotional learning it feels a little squishy what am i honestly talking about what does that mean but if i'm looking at how a student makes decisions when presented with choices that's a lot more concrete this will allow not only longitudinal data because it would run from our population pre-k all the way through through high school but it would also give us the opportunity to kind of quantify our results and address behavior from a proactive rather than a reactive standpoint i don't have to wonder why the student is you know having an issue in class if i can see that it followed right

036after the demand for work we need action plans that are effective and rooted in named skills our teachers need a toolkit in order to manage this along with seo is curriculum in a larger in a larger context similar to sel we too need a centralized vision of our curriculum review our curriculum selection dr terry marculitis will be presenting on march 17th and her work will be in will be intimately tied um to this part of the plan the second tenant of this plan involves human resources i have long found it interesting that there's no human resources department it doesn't exist at the town and doesn't exist in our school systems um that's not all that atypical a lot of a lot of communities have that uh that particular setup but what came clear to me

037in kovid is that we were constantly addressing employment matters and what we need are procedures to comprehensively manage those employment matters we need not just procedures to effectively manage our staff but those procedures properly designed and drafted would also promote the retention of high quality staff one of the most important things that we do here in this district is higher and retain staff that consistency is what benefits our students and every time high quality staff leaves and walks out the door not only is there a fiscal loss but we've missed an opportunity for our kid for our kids i'd like to see a continuation of sel based initiatives for our staff much more than a newsletter i think it's critical that we recognize as a community what our teachers and paraprofessionals and related service providers

038and our custodial staff you name it if you worked for middleborough you left it all on the mat for the last two years and your cup is empty so one of the ways you fill that up is by showing our employees that they're a part of this puzzle too i'd like to cultivate procedures that promote better work-life balance i talked about this with parents last night and i want to be careful about how i talk about it because i don't want anyone to misinterpret any amount of blame the loss of work-life balance came as a natural byproduct of what was going on nobody was going to an office nobody was leaving their home your commute was from your bed to your kitchen table or your office if you were lucky enough to have one but

039what that meant is when you left for the day you didn't actually leave for the day i know i had that experience i know my administrative team had that experience the days just sort of turned to nights and what's happened is that we've sort of stayed in that mode again as a desire to help our students but this is something that we need to address because what i'm seeing is exhaustion and that has to be something that we consider carefully going forward i also want to be clear that that does not mean and should not be interpreted to mean that i want less for our students because that's not what i'm suggesting but i am making the point that if we don't take care and people burn out and people leave it's really not going

040to matter i see this as a very critical and pressing need the third part of this plan involves student voice students need to have a voice in our process and our decision-making they belong in the driver's seat of their education not as passive participants sort of in the back of the car somewhere this promotes self-control accountability and responsible decision-making it also makes our students invested in what they do i had the experience um a couple of weeks ago our we had a high school group present to the entire leadership team they're working with the anti-defamation league and first of all hearing them present to us was spectacular not only did it stress speaking and listening skills something i would love to see enhanced but they highlighted things for me and and i'll share them with

041you in a moment but what struck me is we need to hear from them more i want to see them at school committee more i want to read about them on social media more and i want to hear about the amazing things that happen every day and i want to hear it out of them so the fourth point relates to what the students were presenting on as i mentioned in my equity work um that i referenced earlier i'd like to see the cultivation of an affirmative practice of diversity equity and inclusion i would argue we're already well at work i don't believe this is new i don't believe middleboro to be an unwelcoming place but i do think that we do need an articulated vision of what this means in public schools students need to

042have a sense of belonging in their community to be successful they have to belong and they have to feel as though they belong cultivating practices and a vision of what that looks like will get us closer those kids i was talking about they came and they read statements about how students feel um as being part of our community and those statements were not overly positive because they were talking about what they they weren't talking about whether or not their classes were good or whether they had great relationships with teachers they were talking about what it feels like to be different in the community and how it hits them and it was a wake-up call for me what i'd like to see is the expansion of the equity committee i'd like to see additional stakeholders involved

043our equity committee work right now is internal it's involving our staff but i'd love to see it involve families i'd love to see it involve students and i'd love to see us continue our work with the anti-defamation league what we really need is an entry plan at all five buildings so that we know where we're beginning this work paul branigan at middleborough high school already has a group working with the adl so naturally their entry point is going to look different than how we engage with our pre-knk students at the mec there's also a difference just mentally in those two groups so that information has to be carefully presented the next item is data and our use of data as you all know we use aspen as our data management system here in the district

044and what i've noticed about aspen over the course of the years in the rollout i believe the rollout came out around 2013 if i'm if i'm not mistaken um but we haven't really looked at it since then i mean we use aspen every day but we haven't really analyzed um or maximized its use and it's time that we start looking at that platform and start asking is this doing all the things we want it to do is it meeting our needs i'd like to see an evaluation of our use of data our storage of data how we digitize that data so how we're actually manipulating it because it's much easier to use electronically than if it's all written out on papers like i do and then our reliance most importantly our reliance on data to

045drive decisions it's tempting to make decisions based on anecdotal evidence or when you're collaborating and talking with someone that person might be factually correct but data actually tethers us to exactly what we're doing and exactly what we need data is what prevents us from buying the wrong program data is what prevents us from coming to the wrong conclusion about a student so it's critically important that we look at that now the last item on my list is facilities and i spoke with jim hutchinson about this part understandably about this part of the plan and i told him that that i would be relying heavily on him if i'm selected elementary enrollment warrants a conversation and warrants some type of solution one of our elementary schools has a higher enrollment than the other and i think

046facilities might be playing a role in how we address that students need to be in classes that aren't overcrowded and in order to get to that solution you have to work with the principals you have to work with the director of facilities you have to cultivate a plan you have to think about what makes sense um i'd like to see that i'd like to see that happen my last item is to maximize the student spaces that we have one of the ways i want to do that is to put and centralize our administrative offices together if you've ever been in the nichols middle school up in the top floor in the a cluster there's a professional development center an office for the director of curriculum an office for the director of pupil personnel services and

047then the entire pupil personnel services office which houses all of our student files it takes up an entire wing of our middle school this is a problem for me because it's student space and yes we all need to be somewhere but it would be great to move us move us move these offices into a location where we are not taking student spaces away from them this would allow for smaller class size at the middle school and i know that our enrollment's increasing so you have to have the forward vision to know we've got to do something about that i don't profess to have all the answers and facilities are really any of these tenants what i can tell you is i know these to be critical issues that are hitting this district right now what

048i can tell you is that i would work collaboratively with our entire team and our entire district to get to the right answer i would always explain my thinking as i've done here tonight and as i've done every time i've been before you for that matter what i can tell you is that i look at this emblem i don't know maybe 60 times a day this every student in every classroom every day that's born out of our mission statement to foster a culture of excellence within every student in every classroom and every day and that very much continues to be our shared goal but i've been asking myself how is it we're going to get there that statement is a destination what we need is a root the root is through informed decision making thoughtful

049interventions and meaningful results i thank you for listening to me talk for so long and if you have questions i'd love to answer those questions um so i'll go around robin zeke i will start with you with the first question so i i suppose some and you kind of already touched on this um so one of my questions for you is uh what is a problem that you have solved since you've been working in the district and how did you solve that problem okay thank you great question um i use the word problem lately because to me any anything that's going on was already in good shape i never want to give the impression that things aren't really wonderful around here because i do believe that one of the areas i focused on was our

050extended school year program and i'm very proud of the trajectory of that program particularly since i became the director at the time i became the director that program had been moved to this building the nichols middle school and it's a wonderful program but it serves a primarily elementary population and it was wildly unpopular with our families that it was here so i consulted with our cpac and i moved that program back to the early childhood center at mac that did not solve all my concerns we did not have a consistent coordinator of the esy program um it had been something that the special ed coordinators sort of filled in and took on extra work but because it was an additional piece you were getting tired people trying to get this program up and running so

051i sought to hire a formal coordinator outside of our team who had fresh eyes and frankly fresh legs and and i found that i found that within within our staff uh trish freddie's been our coordinator for the past several years and if you talk to people who go to the esy program they'll talk to you about about the improvement one of the things i just did was complete um an extended school year program evaluation actually mr oakley if you remember i was talking about this uh in the summertime and i promised you i would come back to talk about it and i will but not tonight um what is so amazing is that what we're doing now with that program is pretty cutting edge and i can't wait to come back and really give you

052all the details but what we're going to be doing is using that time differently for our older students we're going to be tapping into facilities and experiences that are specific to secondary we're going to be reviving the peer mentor program which is something that um that excuse me not the peer mentor program the high school intern program that went away during covid and we're going to be infusing enrichment opportunities into this program why i'm so proud about that particular initiative is because for one it took a degree of vulnerability and humility to look at something and say this is good but how do we make it better it took research and an effort to figure out well how do we fix that and then most of all this evaluation wasn't me sitting in an office

053deciding i surveyed all of our staff who work in the program i surveyed all the parents who were in the program i asked them all sorts of questions i got a response rate on those surveys higher than most of the surveys we released in the covet era people were happy to tell me what they thought and i think that when you solicit that feedback what you end up with is something that's extremely calibrated to the needs of students does that answer your question yes it does thank you very much thanks so i'd like to know how you handle interpersonal conflict now and how you feel like that might change if you are selected as superintendent great question um i've actually had this experience before in this district where i've been a peer and then i

054was promoted and i had to be someone's boss so let me start by answering the first question how i handle conflict is fairly directly i'm not someone who hides from it but it doesn't go away by passive aggressive or saying things you don't mean i'm pretty good at sitting someone down having the tough conversation and i've had wonderful experiences in this district with people meeting me there so i would say i'm direct but i'm also predictable which is helpful because if you're navigating a conflict and you're not sure what the other person's going to do it creates a degree of stress but i want to go back to that other point because i think that's a critical point in your question which is how does that change because when you become when you're someone's peer

055and then you become their boss um it's very different it does shift the dynamic i had that experience i said i had that experience and i spoke with my team very openly about that i've actually already spoken with my team in the event that this does happen i wanted to talk to them i wanted to know what they thought i've spoken with all of the principals all of the directors and what i can tell you is conflict comes with the job and i think my team knows that i will push them i will make them uncomfortable because i'm not doing my job if i don't do that but what i will promise them is what i would tell you tonight i always try to be as respectful as i can and i'm proud to tell

056you that i've had plenty of an argument with most of my team and i have relationships that are still solid and on firm ground despite that sure can you talk about your plan for supporting special ed staff that was in one of your references and they talked about how you came up with some plans to support para's bus drivers um all of our support staff that go along with that so can you elaborate a little bit so hold on can you ask the second part of that question you were asking about how i'll manage special education like what's going to happen with special education i talked about providing some extra training or to support our support staff and special ed so can you just talk about that and elaborate on what you've done in the

057past and what you want to do in the future sure um well the i'll just talk about peris for a moment there's been um there's been a lot of different things that i've worked on um one of the things has been an annual orientation you know dr gates and i worked together on the mentoring and induction program for a long time together and it's it's a wonderful program that you welcome new teachers in you have an opportunity to learn along with them teach them about our community and get them ready for the year i designed this process for paraprofessionals i've also really cultivated a practice of planning for paraprofessionals within mind of what it is they do often times paraprofessionals are a bit of an afterthought and that's unfortunate because they are a really important

058part of special education they are our first line um before kovid one of the things we'd been working on was a strategy we were using the video intelligent minds which was something that russell johnston at dese had widely lauded um the it was a video of four vignettes which is wonderful but what we were really getting at was how we're helping paraprofessionals embed and instill in students independent skills when you work with a student one-on-one you foster this beautiful relationship with them but sometimes it can be hard to detach particularly if you are a devoted one-to-one ratio you only work with that student you know it can be hard to not do for them it's a very natural occurrence but what we had to train our paras and talk to our paras about was the

059fact that our students will leave us and if we aren't helping them become as independent as possible when they leave us we're creating a disservice i'm sure you two in particular both know that when you exit k-12 education and you enter adult service it is very different um and we've had to learn that lesson the hard way in fact not to go back to the esy program evaluation but i have to because one of our sitting paras is going to be a huge piece of how we tie in the transition into adult service because not only was she a parent but she and i worked together i was the coordinator i was the special education team facilitator and together we kind of took a journey on how we could improve that and make that information

060more accessible so one of the ways i've i've addressed that is to kind of put myself in the shoes of who's doing what job and tailor professional development for them did you ask me a second piece about special ed going forward yeah okay and that was something i didn't touch on and i don't know why i did that last night as well i do have a plan because it's impossible for me to take this next step and not and not be very concerned about the pupil personal services department and in particular special education my vision would be to split the department and create two separate roles i would restore a director of special education with a singular focus for special ed because just like all the other points i laid out special education needs a

061devoted technician someone who is going to come in with a high level of expertise and be able to laser focus on all areas i'm talking about pre-k all the way through our postgraduate program somebody who's had a variety of experiences somebody who knows how to train our staff and make them better special education teachers these are things that you know in the last two years we really haven't had time to focus on one of the things that we did last year we have a really wonderful co-teach training we used to work with the district consultant dr debra harris and one of the cost savings mechanisms i used was to build capacity and create trainers in our district so that we could move on from her training and not have to pay for a consultant year

062after year uh kim redlawn and jennifer healey are our trainers and that training is not just for special education but their general education teacher co-teach payers um and it's some of the most rich training we offer last year because of everything we presented it in a virtual context and it's a doc i mean it was still wonderful but it was not the way anybody wants it to be so we'll be restoring that um so co-teach for example is an initiative uh or you know it's called the rise training but i won't go into all the acronyms um it's an initiative that needs to be reinvigorated which we're only going to be able to accomplish if special ed gets its own focus the rest of the duties i think get brought into a you know a

063student services role the rest of those duties also create a different lens in order to focus on those tests more comprehensively so that's how i would manage that that's the vision that i would see going forward thank you thanks right so you mentioned the equity and so i'd like to hear a little about your experience with the lgbtq population and also uh this topic of gender neutral bathrooms has been uh kind of coming up a lot in uh different circles so i was this morning if you could talk about lgbtq in general the equity walk i'd like to hear more about that and then specifically on gender neutral bathrooms how you feel it is now and then do you have any plans for the future sure sure i'm going to start by telling you that

064i'm an ally and i have been my whole life um i think that this is an issue that is steeped in law and compliance when you look at not just massachusetts law but desc regulations and what they expect they expect us to create safe schools and safe spaces so a short answer on gender bathrooms or gender neutral bathrooms is that that's an initiative when they come and do that coordinated well now tiered focus monitoring i promise i'm going to stop tripping over those words when they come in and do that walk they're actually looking for initiatives like that they're asking us um you know how are you assisting this population and the really cool part about middleborough is that since i've set foot in the district i find this this district to be very welcoming

065you know i've seen students from all walks of life be welcomed in all spaces i've worked with the um the advisor for our gsas these are people i know and um what i can tell you is that you know there's a lot of work that is not just compliance driven but necessary in order to make our educational services accessible to them if a student is managing [Music] you know an issue of of you know gender identity or sexual orientation or whatever have you that gets in the way of their access to calculus or french or russian or whatever it is they're studying and so while we don't perseverate on it and make it the central point what we do is try to create plans that make sense for them how are they navigating this especially

066as someone who's young right when you're young you have a lot of questions about a lot of things the last thing i would say a kid needs is you know additional judgment from adults that work in a school so what i would say and how i see that growing is really community outreach and education and discussion about what we do and what we don't do right i think it's important to talk about the fact that you know there is no affirmative instruction in this area um but there is an effort to make sure that everything is accessible so that's actually a big part of our procedures and policies subcommittee which i am on along with a school counselor at the high school and actually that school counselor has been working on procedures a lot more

067often than i have they've contacted me a couple of times about already hitting the ground running i can also share that this is work that's been going on for some time not just at the high school but at the middle school the middle school under heidi latender this year engaged in a training in order to help our staff better understand these issues and that's probably the biggest area i see in the future is how are we helping people navigate these issues i don't think we have to have the answers but i think any educational institution should try to figure it out i would imagine that your role or rather your department's role um as both the gateway to accommodations but also the shepherd of district or taxpayer money compared to what is legally required is

068probably an extremely difficult line to walk and i was wondering if you could talk about one of the more difficult situations you've encountered with providing accommodations or adhering to the law and how did you deal with that thank you for that question it's actually going to be hard for me to pin it down um but i'll do my best i say this to the coordinators all the time i firmly believe it's the hardest job in the district when you are talking to parents about children particularly children with additional education needs there is no more sacred moment in that parent's life than that time oftentimes they're dealing with grief they're scared and they're not sure what to do so when you are put in a position where you have to somehow manage to figure out what

069you're going to be doing with this student and you're also a gatekeeper of sorts for this district and you're navigating not for nothing but a less than clear standard that what is free and appropriate public education um i'm proud to tell you this is something that this department has learned and navigate really well and i'll give you an example because there's a parent who actually emailed me just earlier today i'm most proud of this relationship because i have gone to meetings with this parent and we have disagreed very strenuously and there have been times where you have to assert what you believe to be the standard and it is not uncommon for a parent to disagree i've never held that against a parent i wouldn't hold it ever against any parent because they're advocating for

070their child and that makes perfect sense to me but oftentimes the relationship gets very damaged and sometimes we end up in litigation that has not happened and in this particular case this particular parent and i have even said to each other we don't always agree with each other but we understand where they come from and i think that that's the biggest win when you can get to a place with someone first of all that means you've actually invested some time in that relationship but it also means that i didn't present the information in a way that that parent felt judged or shamed or that their child wasn't a priority so i obviously can't talk specifics but that's probably you know that that is but one example what i can tell you is at one point

071all i was doing was to me the majority of my time was spent in team meetings so there would be weeks when i would have six or seven contentious meetings a week and you know parents when they're grieving i can be angry and upset and i understand that but um it is difficult and yet it's still a job to do sure several of these questions here dealt with conflict and i'm going to ask a question about conflict in a different way how is superintendent would you handle a conflict you had with a school committee member sorry can you say that again school committee member has an issue or something with you and how would you deal with it oh great yeah right what happens if there's a disagreement between the school committee and me well

072first things first the superintendent has a healthy sum of obligations under that role but the school committee also has its own role so the first thing i would do is make sure there was clear understanding what are your roles what are my roles some of you have been on the school committee for a long time you're very knowledgeable in this area you're going to be teaching me plenty some of you are new and could probably benefit from learning a little bit about what the role is you're in luck because i would be learning too um the best way to handle conflict is to sit down and speak to each other and that will always be the way i will tackle it um i am someone that would welcome a conversation even a heated conversation if

073it means we can get to the root of the problem what i won't do is fester stew or avoid because that doesn't help the 3100 in this district and it doesn't solve our problem i'm a very solutions oriented person and the longer you work with me the more you'll see that in me i also can't help it but i like to persuade this is something that i have learned as a skill and i have had trouble shedding it i tend to be passionate about what i think and i want to convince you but you do get to a point in every argument where you're not going to get there and i recognize that but i'd be lying if i didn't tell you that my own team has told me that i am very persistent so

074i do think that's part of me i think it's part of my personality but just like i've had fruitful conversation and disagreement with them i think that disagreement with the school committee and the superintendent absolutely will happen and if we're doing it right we'll be able to get beyond it thank you zico go back to you um clearly you were very efficient um and you had talked about your six initiatives going forward um i was wondering are you going to focus on just one at a time or will you be focusing on them all the same because there's two different ways you could go with that and then in addition to that um do you think you have a timeline for these initiatives um great questions and it reminds me to talk about something else

075our strategic plan expires in 2022 so what you're really looking at is what i view as the major bones of our next strategic plan strategic plans are designed for really a five-year period and what i would say is you know i've laid out some some pretty lofty positions i want to be fair in my assessment to me and in some initiatives are going to be ongoing for a long long time for example i don't think equity work is something that we can do in a five-year period will be equitable and we can move on i don't really see it that work in that capacity i see that ongoing um but something like looking at data i think in a five-year period is doable to to to manage um i was thinking about what you know

076what goals i would focus on and actually let me turn to that i was thinking about what goals i might focus on kind of right away and when i talked about human resources something i'd like to get kind of hit the ground running with is the procedure manual for human resources and some of you are going to groan because you know how i like my manuals but during my time in pps i did a 504 manual i revamped a special along with teams i did a special education procedure manual i've done manuals for homeless i assisted on the one for foster care i know that was revamped again as well but the reason i like procedures is because somebody gets to look up where they can find an answer so i see that as a

077more immediate work and i also see the cultivation of student voices something that we can really hit the ground running i would like to have students just very visible i have talked with my leadership team about doing superintendent roundtable discussions i think that the kids should know who i am and not because i'm so wonderful but because they should know that they're part of how we solve our problem so i want them invested so that we can work together so those are hopefully that answers your question okay teresa tell me a little bit about your philosophy on delegating authority and then from there how do you maintain accountability okay great question also um delegating authority is essential to getting this work done first of all it's essential as part of being a superintendent the superintendent

078um is not you know teaching a science class on any given basis so i really look at my leadership team as being kind of the five long arms of the five buildings plus sarah hickey in business plus dr marcolitis in curriculum plus paula magnasco in nursing i have to be able to delegate and divide and conquer i see the role of superintendent as someone who coordinates who was informed and and there are going to be initiatives i'm going to want to do there are going to be things i'm going to be responsible i i won't be i won't be able to not simply put so that was the first part of your question how would i delegate and then there was a second part of your question accountability how would i mean all right well

079the way you maintain accountability in here is through the evaluation system um i'd want to sit down with my principals right away to talk about what goals they have not in a i got you now sort of but what they want to see what's their professional growth um i often would tell my special ed coordinators that it was my job to make them special education directors and i feel that way about the rest of the leadership team i'm only doing my job if i'm preparing them for the next step so i want to work alongside them as i said not in a punitive way but in order to develop them because i think that's the role the superintendent also sure talk a little bit about your lack of experience in a classroom and how you

080would handle that with teachers that may see that as a deficit for you sure well i would start by saying i've been navigating that for the past 10 years so it's not new um and i would also argue that i have overseen all of special education with the same experience i carry today and if it hasn't been an issue for the special education population then i would argue it's not an issue period because certainly our special ed students are entitled to that of every other student in our district i would also point out that i very much am an educator and while i may not have taught science um i absolutely have experience in the classroom and most importantly i've been conferring knowledge and training since the day i walked in this district in 2007.

081so you have to think about what the superintendent does right any superintendent does not come out of the classroom and become a superintendent they're very far from classroom instruction by the time they get there and i would be no different in that case but i do think i could bring leadership to those who oversee teachers and i think that's how i would navigate that sure so one of my big concerns for the school is school safety i know because of kovid i think a lot of resources have been devoted to just that and that's the way it just happened but we do have the alice program here and i just wondering what your experience with alice is and how are your plans are you continuing that or is there something else you're going to do

082for school safety school safety remains a top priority whether we're talking covet or otherwise i mean it is always a top priority safe schools um are the first step so i have i have experience i've actually served on the dirt executive committee not recently but andy diesel and i have worked together for years he and i worked together when i was the special ed team facilitator um at the middleborough high school so i participated in all of the drills including the year that i was pregnant and i couldn't get up off the floor because we were doing these uh lockdown drills and we were in this classroom you know i've barricaded the doors in the futures program um i've participated in these drills for several years i'm very familiar with it i don't see that

083as something i'm going to change you asked specifically about alice um i don't see making radical changes you know to the work that that andy diesel has led i think successfully for so long but it's funny because sarah hickey and i happened to have been talking about dirt earlier today um and andy's on my list he's someone i would sit down with and say okay let's recalibrate now that we can get back to kind of the traditional way of things what do you see as needs what do you see as areas of growth and what continues to be your prevailing concern in school safety i also see continuing and having i think it's of critical importance that we maintain our relationship with the middleborough police department they are a tremendously supportive and professional organization um

084i've had experiences with them during times where i've covered the district when when superintendent lynch has been out of town and i don't know why but when he's out of town there tends to be something it's just kind of been really helpful training for maine in retrospect but um any time there's been a need you know joe perkins and his team chief perkins excuse me um that they're there for our needs and i i absolutely i'm a strong believer of when things are working well you you don't mess with them and i see school safety as something that's working very well i feel safe i've always felt safe as an employee and i think our kids feel safe too and that's that's what matters to me you mentioned earlier and i liked the way you

085put it that you're very protective of the use of public money so i wanted to know my mom lives in a town where there's a two and a half override every year just about so i wanted to know that given the interaction between the community the school committee the budget and the superintendent obviously if there was something that you felt very strongly about that would no doubt lead to an ask of additional money of the town knowing the pressures that are on everyone how would you navigate something like that it's a great question particularly because in the time that we're in right now we are in a period where there's been additional grant money but that time is going to end and i'm very aware of that so you have to brace you have to

086prepare what's going to happen you know if we have positions that we need to fund that we can't so that's kind of the avenue where i'm already thinking now why would i do that well if i had positions that were directly serving students that would be something that's important to me so first things first you are my consultative body school committee is one of the first places probably the first place i would go along with leadership team because one of the things that has to be calibrated is that we need unity in what our priorities are right we have to take turns our principals are extremely persistent they're wonderful advocates advocates for their buildings but we can't have all things at the same time so there would have to be some degree of unity in

087what it was we were asking the first step would be to go to school committee and discuss strategy for how we were going to navigate this the next thing i would do is consider if there's any possible grant funding kevin avitable emailed me just a couple of days ago and he sent me a rundown of these grants grants that are all sel based he said have you thought about this and i'm like bursting with excitement that is exactly the type of innovative thinking i was hoping i would get when i hired him but that's another avenue you have to figure out where the income stream is going to come from and i'm pretty creative when it comes to that if i need to as i am in my home budget if i need to buy

088something you know you can go the traditional way of getting money from the same source or you can try to earn it or you can look to grants one of the programs that i would love to see blossom within the special education department is our high school and postgrad program and i do and would like to be able to offer tuition for other districts to tuition into those programs specifically provided there is room and provided our students needs are met because our students take priority but that's an example of something i would tap into if i thought that we could create revenue that that revenue stream becomes a funding source for something else and then the last piece would be to go to the town manager and i expect to have regular uh regular dealings

089with the town manager what concerns me about that is that the school department is one of many departments and i understand that the town manager is going to have to navigate competing interests just as i would with my leadership team i see it very similar so that's kind of the loose outline of how how i would address it um what i'll tell you is no one has a crystal ball so there are off ramps on kind of all of those avenues where that might fall off the last case scenario i would look at is looking within our existing pizza what can we cut out in order to fund it ourselves but i will tell you i don't always love doing that because when you continue to cut the pizza you are left with nothing at

090the end you've cut it too much right so it's another avenue but not my favorite avenue sure can you talk to us about if you get this position your own personal work-life balance going forward great question um it's something i've thought about i've actually spent a lot of time over the last two weeks um kind of intensely thinking about it first things first i am truly truly blessed with the man i chose to marry and i think the key to work-life balance is setting yourself up for success and i certainly did that when i married him 15 years ago so he's a huge component of my work-life balance the other part of work-life balance is having the fortitude to know when to stop working i will freely admit to you this is an area of

091growth for me during covid i did not do a good job of turning off i was simply overwhelmed by the need the urgency of the situation made it tremendously difficult for me to ever really put it down and when i was done at the end of my day i found myself propping up others within the district because i just felt the need to help in a totally different way in this position i will absolutely enforce some internal rules for me and the first one is proactive planning i want to be of presence in the buildings and i recognize that the more you do the more time that's going to take up but i do co-lead a household and when you plan in advance and you stick to your plan you get pretty good at it

092i'm also going to say something that i've long believed working parents are some of the most efficient employees you have and that is because we're so used to having to deal with competing interests that those are the people that don't linger around the water cooler so to speak these are people who do what they have to do get done what they have to get done and then go home to their families my family is going to be a huge part in my work life balance they are what brings me joy so i see myself instituting procedures to help myself and then affirmative stops now i will say to you in the role of superintendent that's a very flexible wall because if there is an issue i would never want anyone to think that i wouldn't

093come running because the simple truth is if the phone rings it has to be answered and i'm prepared to embark on that journey i would say that the last two years has prepared me for taking on that role and it wasn't until then that i thought you know what i can do this so hopefully that answers your question it does thank this you be my last question um and perhaps this is a question from a naive and new committee member uh but this is the chance to brag about yourself a little bit so i'm kind of so what quality or characteristic about yourself uh or what is a quality characteristic about yourself that you are most proud of why and how do you think that's going to help as a superintendent i think i handle

094pressure really well i think that it's really hard to knock me off my game and if you've seen me in my presentation mode you'll know that but if you've worked alongside me what the rest of the team will tell you is when the chips are down and they need to call someone they call me because they know i'm going to be calm and i think that that will bode very very well for a superintendent in a community things are going to go wrong things are going to happen and the worst case scenario you have someone at the helm who's panicking and someone who really can't handle pressure um i've handled pressure my entire life you know ranging from experiences as a kid through sitting for a bar exam that i passed the first time i

095took it to you know handling emergencies here at school over the last 10 years so i feel prepared but i feel like that's my strength so you're from a different town which is absolutely fine but my question is sort of just wrapped around the work life balance at some point you have to go home but there's obviously lots going on in the district after hours whether it be sports events or just different events that um you know i'd like to see how you feel about kind of like where that would put you you know you want to you want to maintain that that home connection but also be a presence in the community sure sure well and that's where the planning comes into play the way i kind of saw that going down was sitting

096down my principles at the beginning of the year they all do a year-long calendar and then purposefully selecting the activities now what that what that earnestly means is the on the fly thing will be harder for me right because i take that promise seriously if i say to my kids i'm going to be home for dinner on this particular day i'd like to be able to stick to it but i think that if there is a commitment to a certain amount of events per week or a certain amount of events per month that i'll achieve that visibility and there are additional pieces too you know there's a lot of weekend activities that i see myself bringing my family to you know i don't see the two worlds as being um something that can't you know

097join in the middle but you are right to have that concern and it's a concern i have for myself what i can tell you is i've balanced it um i've lived in the same community the entire 10 years i've been here so i would say that i have been able to navigate it but i fully recognize that as superintendent it would take on a whole new meaning sure can you talk about some concerns you have if you were to get the position great question um i think my biggest concern is the unpredictability of the job if i've if i've learned one thing in the last two years it's that anything that can happen will happen and that makes it harder to plan and as you've now heard i really like to plan so i think

098the unpredictability of what awaits you know we are in this sort of tenuous time where we're coming out of this period um hopefully a return to kind of a dawn of a new era um and there's a bit of me that wonders is that going to happen are we are we good can we move forward um so i would say the uncertainty and then i think the other major concern i really have is for my staff um i can't i don't mean to sound dramatic about it but i sense in them a degree of fatigue that i am really hopeful we can reinvigorate but i'd be lying if i didn't say i wasn't worried about it um and i don't think it's specific to education if you've kind of read the articles about the great

099resignation i think a lot of people are sort of asking those large questions is this the thing i want to do and in a lot of ways i'm no different i sort of went the other way with it but you know a lot of people are kind of doing that right now um and you can't run a school without people so that's probably another big concern of mine thank you sure so there's been a lot of talk around wide-ranging discussions about the curriculum and parent involvement and the process of curriculum selection what degree do you think the community should be involved in community curriculum development and how would you approach changing it good question um i do think that that's a question that's going to hopefully be somewhat answered by dr marcolitis because one she

100is the person who's going to be leading us into the future with this work but two you know i um i'm a believer that parents should have a say really on anything going on i don't um i kind of view this industry as customer service related a bit right i mean i want our customers should be happy those are our students and our families um so i see cur i see families certainly involved in weighing in about curriculum but i do see our curriculum director and our larger administrative team as responsible for selecting the curriculum ultimately they're the ones with the training they're the ones who are going to be carrying it out and having the professional development and teaching it you know down to our students so i don't want to sound as though

101there isn't room for parent involvement but i also don't want to overstate the role i would view them as a consultative body not necessarily a decision-making body okay thank you sure so um can you tell me how many employees you directly supervise now and from your understanding of the current structures how many employees you would directly supervise as the superintendent approximately not looking for exact numbers sure sure um yeah you know what i should have done this research and had this answer better i don't have the actual number right now i'd give you a ballpark um i would put it in the neighborhood of 12 and as superintendent i would see that ballooning to closer to 16 17. i don't think i don't actually think it's that different and i'm talking strictly about evaluation right

102now um when i when you're talking about oversight of staff you know my oversight of staff has been pretty expansive all along and as i mentioned earlier every time superintendent lynch leaves the district it's all me anyway um and he doesn't leave that frequently but when he does that that falls to me so i don't see the role being all that more tedious in terms of the additional oversight but i do think the work shifts it is different when you're overseeing administration at a building-based level than it is a principle of a building that's a that's not only a tremendous honor but it's also a tremendous responsibility so i take that very seriously thank you sure can you talk a little about technology and education and in particular what you would look at when purchasing

103new technology be it apps programs or merchandise yeah well for starters there needs to be a plan so the thing about technology which is wonderful is that it goes obsolete and a lot of technology doesn't last that long so my first question because i'm fiscally frugal is i'm going to want to know if we buy this thing how long is this thing going to be current and then what's our plan for continuing to fund the thing as it needs to be replaced certain is inexpensive and easy to replace um you know pps has long used ipads um ipads have really ballooned in their ability to meet assistive technology needs for students and it's low cost which is great if you can kind of think of the old dynavox some of these older machines which were

104not just massive but really really expensive you know the ipod the ipad has revolutionized sort of that that process when i'm looking at software and i'm looking at technology the first thing i'd be looking for is a plan the second thing i would be looking for is efficacy with students tools are great i have no problem with technology but it needs to be integrated into our learning i don't see technology as something our students passively learn on right it's not the thing that like that you set up and they watch while we eat our dinner technology should be fully integrated and complementing the curriculum that we're already using so in terms of selection you know my questions are going to focus on well who already uses this how does it work there how do you

105incorporate it into your instruction and then most of all is it if do the students like it that's the other part of technology it's great sometimes i don't know if you've had this experience but we think something's great we think it's a great idea and then you bring the child and you talk to the child and they think that idea is terrible so i'd love to see beta testing with some of these pieces because all the great ideas in the world don't work if the students don't think so and if you've ever sat in a team meeting you know that this is something that comes up quite a bit in our teams um as adults we love to you know sit around a table and plan for the student but it's way more effective when

106they're there telling us i'm not going to do that thing so i view technology as something that needs to be kind of road tested a bit with kids too sure you mentioned how much you currently do which is quite extensive and i know that you want to split that department so my question would be regarding the budget how how do you see that sort of fitting into the current budget going forward and how would you then support those new roles sure um well so for starters the pps role um is very large and so the salary goes along with that a director of special education would be a smaller salary if you look at that director of student service sort of concept what i'd be looking to do is create a new job description but

107i'm hoping i would have internal candidates for that particular position which would would or could function as a cost savings mechanism because if that's the case then you can subsume one role within the other that may not happen but if it does happen then then that would be one way to financially accomplish that goal if i was not able to do that because it is it is conceivable i would not be able to do that the other thing i could do is look at my leadership team for the additional roles and divvy them up sometimes the superintendent actually retains certain roles so that's something else that i would consider if i needed to as well because i only see myself as part of the solution not just the problem but my hope is that it

108wouldn't actually be a tremendous additional financial burden for the district that would be the goal thank you sure um what do you think makes a good superintendent i think the best superintendents understand why we are here and they never lose sight of the fact that it's about kids it's not about ego it's not about anything else not about people it's about students we are an educational institution it's something i've told my staff for years try to make the best decision for the student do that because it's always going to be defendable even if you make a mistake or you make the wrong decision if you used the student as the guiding light for why you made the decision you may have made a mistake but you at least were well intentioned and i think that

109for superintendents that should be their goal as well i think sometimes superintendents trip up when they lose sight of it thank you sure so this next question i'm going to try to put two together i don't know if that's unfair but so i i was impressed with mr lynch always met with all the candidates when they came in for hiring um he felt very strongly that he had to be there what do you when you're hiring a new employee what is your role as superintendent and also more well i think more importantly is if you had to let go of an employee uh what was your approach sure um it's funny you say that i've actually told superintendent lynch that i like that about him too i like it so much that i want to

110model it um i've heard it from staff that they really really loved that the superintendent gave them some time and it's just stuck with me as a practice that i think is a smart one and i'm the first to tell you i don't i don't always have the best idea but i like to steal the best idea for sure so if someone's doing it then i'm all for it and um i've heard it over the years it doesn't matter what the job is but uh i love that he does that and it's something i would do you asked the second part of an employee i've had the unfortunate experience of doing that um and that's also an in-person meeting you know it's very similar um what i'd what i what i would do is what

111i've done up until this point which is you know look that person in the eye and tell them the truth um and be as kind as possible on what amounts to somebody's worst day thank you sure well said so in my job and probably in all of our jobs i think um there is um uh oh sorry i forgot i wanted to preface this um so i am very conscious of the fact i believe that interviews in a large part are performance of sorts but i think in all of our jobs there's evidence of kind of irrefutable evidence of extra time spent and mentoring and you know initiatives you've talked about initiatives but i wondered if if uh you could give an example of someone that you have spent extra time with and mentored and

112are proud to see what they have accomplished as maybe not as a result because that would be taking credit for their success but but someone that you've seen succeed under your mentorship sure the person that comes to mind is jennifer healy so when i first came into the district i was the special ed coordinator at the middle school well my office was at the middle school and jennifer hilly was a brand new teacher but across the hallway from where my office door was and she was young and had been on the job a couple of years and she was a really exciting and engaging teacher i found myself in her class watching because i loved to watch her connection with kids we sat down together at a team meeting because this was part of my

113role and i saw something in her right away that spoke to me that she had possessed a certain degree of leadership skill and some knowledge far beyond her years and not long after that i approached jen about what her future plans were and i think i caught her off guard because she i think thought i was a little bit off base and wondering why i was asking her these questions but what i was really asking is what do you see in the future for yourself and from that point in time i've worked very closely with jen i've watched jen and sort of kept my eye on jen and we meet we meet pretty regularly we talk all of the time and it came as no surprise that when it came time for me to step

114into my pps role i remember paul branigan sat me down and he said now what because i had cultivated a very close relationship with paul and understandably he wanted to know who was going to fill my shoes and i said paul i have the perfect candidate for you i really do and you know we posted we you know had to see what was out there and jen rose to the top unsurprisingly and she stepped into that role as she became a mother for the first time and i'm proud to tell you that when i left middleborough high school they didn't miss me that is the sign of a leader if something can function without you you've done your job and um every time i've set a goal for jen jen's shot way beyond that and

115i can't wait to see what she'll do next because she really does hold a ton of promise she's become a leader she's become a trainer within our district and she's become someone that people look up to and i think that's leadership thank you sure can you talk to me in in becoming superintendent what your role would be with our six unions ah yeah sure so i'm currently on the negotiation you know team and we're um we're in that process now um but the superintendent holds a very important relationship with all six unions in the sense that you have to have a relationship with all sex unions this is the crux of how you solve problems and how you navigate disputes um so i will be engaging with all six unions this year um and i

116had made that choice months ago because i knew that you know that was something i i wanted to know more about and wanted to have the specific experience of working with our particular unions i'd also like to kind of point out that we're lucky we're very lucky with our union leadership and the way our unions engage with us as a community this is another thing that if you've paid attention to the news over the last couple of years some communities have been at loggerheads and you know really been unable to come to agreement and i think that we're very fortunate that our unions have always worked alongside the administrative team i see the superintendent as having an integral role in being connected to all six unions meeting with all six unions and being a source

117of support thank you sure this will be my final question so regarding the behavior piece you talked about you know expanding that role and but with the ever-growing mental health concerns and we know that that it's just a huge piece right now lot but this district has been really strong in supporting that so where you might be superintendent how do you see this being an area you continue to support i think the biggest way to continue to support these initiatives is to continue to endorse the funding of those positions the school committee has been amazing i was talking about that when i was here before that in a time when you've seen communities cut this community has chosen to expand and i think it's the superintendent's job to safeguard those roles make sure they're not

118going away um and make sure those rules are being put to maximal use you know if anything i was talking with josh porter the director of alternative pathways yesterday and he was talking to me about an innovative concept where you know we have wonderful expansive uh clinical team for our students he said what do you think about staff and a light bulb kind of went off because i thought that was a really great idea you know when you're an employee and you're having an issue you know our clinical staff is wonderful and they're very generous with their time but they're busy so i kind of saw that as a as a particular area of growth but um i think the most important thing the superintendent can do is continue to talk about the importance of

119supporting mental health in schools make sure that you have community buy-in with that concept and then make sure those positions stay in place thank you sure can you talk a little bit about how you would advocate for middleborough at the state level sure so i'm already part of organizations um you know within my role and that also includes regular meetings with the ese i am proud to tell you i am always an outspoken representative in middleborough i always have been and i always will be so i see myself engaging with the esc and the way i have as a as a director of people personnel services um i think that it's perfectly reasonable to ask questions to ask clarity um and i'm proud to tell you i've developed positive relationships with them as well you

120know one of the initiatives that we have to do every year it's not really an initiative one of the things we have to do every year is submit a circuit breaker file and i used to hate i would have to drive to these you have to train every year because the file is very complicated it's a little bit like learning calculus in the sense that it's a foreign language you have to kind of review it before you do it each year but i would have to drive to remote locations in order to get the training so i made dese offer the training sites here because one we'd gone one to one as an initiative so we had computer labs which is where um where that happens and they were they were available and two it

121was a way to kind of maximize so that's one example of how i how i've advocated in the past but um i think that people know me to be outspoken and that would continue thank you sure so i think this will be all my final question for you ms lyons um it has to do with the um you mentioned your notes here one of your vision statements was the uh you know student voice but also for the community how how do you intend on staying in touch with the community see what the interests are and that student voice that you talked about that's a great question um i think one of the ways you stay in touch with the community is by attending events you know i mean there's a myriad of ways whether you're

122engaging through the arts or the sports there's of course school committee but you know it depends week to week and what the topic is depending on interest one of the practices i cultivated a couple of years ago was a twitter presence and i've been navigating my community that way and not that i have like a million followers because that's certainly not the case but i think communication with our kin with our community is going to be something that they can rely upon with me i tend to be someone who communicates a lot i tend to be someone who explains my thinking and i think that cultivating that practice of communication is one way to draw families in if they can rely on hearing from me and they know what i'm thinking they may not always

123agree with what i'm thinking but at least they'll understand you know my rationale or my decision making process or minimally they'll know me which i think breaks down a barrier right i don't want to be this sort of faceless person that sits in an office i'd like to be accessible to the community thank you sure so i wondered if you could talk about a professional mistake that you have made and how you made it right because i don't think anyone's perfect no and my goodness i've made so many um i'm trying to decide what a good example of that would be i mean i can tell you early on in my role at pps grants were new to me um and i was somewhat threatened by the filing of grants and the drafting of grants

124it just wasn't something i'd done and the very first grants i filed um i submitted and there was a mistake in the grant and so when you're new at doing this you're sure the world's going to end because you've made a mistake and you've sent it to the state and of all the places to make a mistake it's financial game over packing my bags moving out of the district the whole nine i'm happy to tell you it's not that rigid a process but what helped is that i identified the mistake right away and i called the state right away so i was able to quickly and efficiently repair the mistake um and there are truly many more but i really think as with all things one of the most important lessons we model for our

125kids is this growth mindset that you learn through mistake i'm happy to tell you i've never made that mistake again with a grant um not that particular mistake but i think that modeling for our kids that it's okay to make mistakes and that you learn when you do and that the most important thing you can be in that time is honest then i've modeled the skill i want to see in our kids thanks sure carol talk to us about where you see yourself in five years in five years i hope to be sitting here in the seat you know it's funny when um mr lynch hired me superintendent lynch hired me for pps he asked me the same question and i told him that i had so much to accomplish that i'd be lucky if

126i could accomplish that in 10 years with this particular seat i don't want to go anywhere else there's nowhere else for me to go so not only do i want to be sitting in this seat but i want to be advancing in front of you a whole new plan with new ideas fresh ideas talking about the successes that we've had as a community that's where i want to be and i hope i get there so i've spoken to just like we all have i'm sure spoken to members of the community about you and about the superintendent search and um about plans for the district and problems potential problems and uh two things i wondered if you could talk about i'm trying greg's trick to get you to answer two things at once um the the

127first thing is um uh around availability of uh substitute teachers and what it is that we can do to solve what it sounds like is a problem around that and i don't think it's a middlebury problem i think it's probably a you know everywhere problem but um could you could you touch on that briefly and then could you also talk about the um the level of support that you feel pps is able to offer to the district and is it enough and are there vacancies and if so what are you going to do to solve that so it was like kind of 10 questions but is that okay let me let me start let me start with substitutes first okay you are right in the sense that that is very much not a um that

128is not a just middleborough problem you're seeing that everywhere um one of the things that i think we haven't tapped into that i think we could tap into for substitutes is partnering with local colleges like bsu if it's one thing i've learned about college kids is that they occasionally have more time than us and i think the key with substitutes is trying to tap into new areas for staffing college kids are young they're fresh and a lot of them at bsu are learning to be teachers so it would be attractive to create some type of system between our organizations right you scratch your back i scratch mine you know um that's something i've thought about it is tempting to say well raise the pay as substitutes you'll get more substitutes i haven't kind of looked

129at that enough to affirmatively tell you i think this would solve the problem it's certainly something i could look into um and give you a better answer in the future but the other thing i think we could do is really advertise in a different way you know how we advertise and how we um hire people is something that we could review in fact sarah hickey now we're talking about the hiring packet um no i'm sorry it was dr marcolitis and i they were talking about the hiring packet just last week and really looking at are we casting our net you know as far as we can are we looking in all the crannies are we looking in all the places where people might be looking for work so that's the other thing i might try

130so that was the first part of the question and then um pps current staffing levels capabilities is it enough and if not what would you do to sure sure yeah um well i i this question is hard for me because i have not really gone too far down the path of what you know how am i going to manage that because i don't yet know the outcome of this process right so first things first that yes i have an open position and yes i have been unable to fill it um that is partly because the vacancy came open at the end of the calendar year so i had a vacancy in january i did have a pool of applicants i did find an applicant i advanced a finalist i was ready to move and that

131applicant backed out not because of it had nothing to do with middleborough and nothing to do with us sometimes that does happen i'm not concerned about filling that position because we are coming into hiring season and i did have several candidates reach out to me that said i would love to come and do this job but i can't leave my community in january and i'll be honest when someone says that to me i respect them even more and that makes me want to hire them extra so i have their names and phone numbers those are some of the first phone calls i'll make because i'm confident that i'll be able to reload so to speak the other part of your question is is the current staffing level enough and the truthful answer is i don't

132yet know i want time to talk to my team and really explore that you know it really depends on what's going on is there a new pps director is there you know like the reason i'm struggling to give you an affirmative answer is because it kind of depends on what happens here i could certainly see a scenario where i want to increase i could it really and it depends is a terrible answer but it honestly is the true answer here um what i can assure you is that it would be based on real numbers on real research in collaboration with not just the coordinators but also my broader administrative team my leadership team because this is a team that has changed in size over the years and so i know that um that they have

133opinions on it rightfully so and i would include them in the solution um as i would for anything else sure you have other questions are you going to i do you do good thank you okay go ahead okay we have another question um so obviously the um the budget subcommittee worked with the superintendent and sarah to um create a to pass a budget um you obviously were a part of that budget as well um i just wondered if you were the superintendent with that budget that was just passed look the same oh great question um yes i think substantially so i would work i mean that's one of the benefits of um of going with an internal candidate is that i know exactly how disruptive it would be if i said oh by the way

134i'm gonna need you know x amount of money that we don't possess um and while i certainly need to as i was just talking to you about the coordinator scenario that's something i would want to consider but i don't see a substantial change i was in the room for a lot of that design i'm aware of i'm very familiar with the budget or at least as familiar as the non-business manager can be director of business and finance but um i don't forecast significant change okay thank you sure okay yeah um i wondered uh if you have ever had a disagreement uh doesn't have to be a specific person that you mentioned but on the direction of the district with a stakeholder within the middlebury public schools and if so how did you how did you

135manage that situation and maintain the relationship so is the is the question about the direction of the district no it's just any type of disagreement it's i mean in my head i'm imagining um brian lynch wants to do x you want to do y um have you disagreed on stuff and how did you solve that disagreement oh yeah superintendent lynch and i disagree quite a bit and i think he still has an affinity for me despite that um especially because i will you know superintendent lynch and i sit down very regularly to talk about special education and expenditures and unsurprisingly a lot of my asks come with money so i know that there are times where i have asked for things um and he has said you absolutely cannot right so are you asking for

136like what was the thing i asked for or are you asking more about how did that how did that get navigated yeah i think i think what i was looking for and and i didn't say it clearly but is um how did you make sure that you advocated as strongly as possible for that without you know stepping over that line into you know relationship ruined yeah yeah well i mean for starters superintendent lynch is my supervisor right and um i'm a chain of command person i really am so he'll tell you he you know i know his body language at this point so i know when i'm approaching the place where he is done wanting to discuss something with me um and i think that using nonverbal communication and reading each other is a whole

137separate skill that is critical you have to know when the person is either verbally or non-verbally telling you that they are approaching the end of a conversation and i think i'm in tune with that um but what i'll say is you know brian and i have had disagreements on things where we've agreed to put it away and come back to it um and talk about it at a later time it kind of depends you know he and i are famous for this sort of north of four o'clock conversation um but a lot gets done at that hour so it's hard to not have it um i don't know that i'm really answering your question i think what you just said about um being able to put it away and come back to it i think

138that's a that's kind of what i was looking for and thank you that's that's great sure um okay sorry i apparently need glasses now um um okay i think i am approaching the end of my list um but i did have one hidden in here somewhere that i really wanted to ask no actually that meg asked that one so i am i'm done thank you very much so thank you my last question for you is this as i look over the amount of questions we've asked you because i kept a running list and then other people asked is there a question we missed is there a question we should have asked that by you answering gives us some bit of information that's important to you so i want to ask that i think you might

139have stumped me i feel like i've asked i think i've answered a lot of questions um i can't tell you that i i mean i feel like you've learned a lot about me tonight um i think you've heard about my why um i think you've heard about my work and i think you've learned a little bit about what kind of makes me tick so i don't i wouldn't uh i wouldn't offer anything else is there anything you want to say to wrap up well i wanted to thank everybody for their time and the thoughtful questions and the depth of questions um it's a testament to the community to to really vet people who work in our district um and what i would say is that you know something i heard earlier tonight is that when

140you interview there's a degree of performance um and i've had that experience as someone who hires you know you think you know someone you they manage the interview a certain way and then they come on the scene and maybe it matches maybe it doesn't the good news for you is that you all know exactly how i perform you've had a track record with me um longer than than most applicants so what i would ask is that you know you look at that record and ask if that's what's right for this community at this time i've spent a lot of times telling you that i think that i'm right and i'm right now but i think you have to ask yourself the same question thank you very much we appreciate the time and with that i'm

141going to take a brief five minute recess and then we'll come back okay thank you thank you i don't recommend the meaning um so at this time what i'm going to ask everyone to do is this i'm just going to call on you you can say whatever you want about what we've heard from tonight anything you'd like to say and then i will after everyone has had an opportunity i'll discuss we'll move to next steps okay so zeke i'm going to start with you because you're at the end of the table all right um i think what we heard tonight was was pretty good this is this was great i i've never been in the position before where i've needed to hire a candidate before and this is great learning experience but i i wonder

142if because this is my first time doing this i don't have a lot of experience in terms of a reference to judge this on um so i guess my question is is is there anyone else that we could look at even for a brief amount of time i don't know what the process might be at all is is there somehow someone out there that we could also get to interview that way we at least have i guess you could say a bigger pool but i mean it's really only one one other person and that way we can see we can measure up uh because i think carolyn blew it out of the park tonight i really believe that but i also but i also wonder you know if there is someone else that could that

143could also do that that's my my two cents thank you teresa this is this is conflicting for me coming into this process again i've never done this before but i've been a parent in this district for 15 years so i very much been looking forward to an opportunity at some point in my lifetime which i'm proud to be here and be part of it but it's something i take extremely seriously and it's it's come with a lot of internal struggle for me in the last couple of weeks because i feel that i i was voted into the seat to be a voice for the for the community and that's something i do take seriously and i want to make sure that people feel heard my biggest concern and truly miss lions this is really it

144comes down to being about you in a lot more ways than i think maybe you aren't sure of i want you to shine so i i've had many experiences with you and i want to make sure that the community knows you to be the person that i have seen from you know you to be um and my concern is that when people have this reservation what you only interviewed one person and we go forward with that one person that that's sort of going to be hanging over you a little bit and i don't want that for you so that's my conflict because you did shine you did exactly what i would have expected you to do um i thought you were tremendous this evening but i have to weigh that so i feel like i'm

145sort of on that same path of can we look at one or two other people and it's not because i don't want you to be that final candidate it's more because i i do but i want everyone on board and i want everyone to feel really confident about that and that the decision that we made was in the best interest of this district and that we really just exhausted all avenues and that we still said she's our girl so that's where i'm at i guess um so similarly to teresa i look at this position as something that i'm elected to do and to listen to both sides and to hear everybody within the community and come to a decision that is separate of my thoughts my feelings because that's not why i'm in this role

146so for me i i don't think we're going to find somebody better i really don't i think you you hit every nail on the head i think the fact that you're here already you've been here you know our system you know our people you know our kids you know a good chunk of our parents you have so much working for you but to take you on as our superintendent and not see you against anyone else we're doing you a disservice and all we're doing is setting you up for failure and i don't want to set you up for failure i want you to be successful so i share those same concerns about not interviewing anyone else and i've never done this before either so this was a great learning process for me to be able

147to see how the interview format worked what types of questions we were asking what kind of answers i wanted to hear answers i didn't know i wanted to hear but then heard um so i just i i i think we need to kind of look at like zeke and theresa said one or two other people great so you know the way i feel first of all i was impressed with carolyn her experience knowledge and i want to say presence because i felt like i got to know the person in front of me tonight i know she's had a long week she's had public q a last night she had the meeting with staff the week before that she was meeting with town departments so this is a gauntlet a lot of people if you can

148imagine interviewing for a job right how nervous you are sitting in a room with one other person but now put yourself in a room with six interviewers and have it being broadcast on live tv uh it's a tremendous oppression i do think carolyn did a great job i just want to talk about this idea of one candidate um i am actually going to disagree with my previous three committee members uh we had six qualified candidates in our school system and when we first embarked on this process mr young who has been through the hiring process a few times and mr lynch who has been 40 years in the in his profession both said to us the committee without reservation we have people in our district that will be great superintendents and they said that in

149the plural and i believe them because i happen to know and work with those people as well so i think we are in the enviable state of having a lot of internal people now yes only one person came forward to apply and i do realize the optics of that in the public seem like oh we hand-picked our superintendent no that was not the case in fact when we sat down we knew the six people that were qualified and there's probably more in the district that we don't know about that have the licensure but we knew at least six and we i was expecting two or three people to apply and have a robust system but carolyn was the one that came forward the other people for their own reasons decided not to apply okay i

150also want to say i think so i don't look at it as one candidate i look as we had six candidates and this is the one that applied um also superintendents serve at the discretion of the school committee this is our most important job but it's a job that we have all year long it's this isn't a decision that we're making for the district for the next five or six years every year the superintendent sits in the meetings with school committee and they have to go through an evaluation process every year and that like a hiring process in public the superintendent is also i think under a lot of pressure to be evaluated in public they have to sit at the table and listen to their evaluation being broadcast to a live public audience i

151think uh carolyn showed me a lot today so i want to finish up with uh saying that the question i got a lot this week and there's been hey i am thrilled i i'm people may not believe this it's been a tough year being on school committee it really has uh we've had a lot of people coming at us with a lot of different views but i will say this level of community engagement is good and i don't i'm not saying i just my decision tonight's not going against community engagement but i had the question a few times how can you be sure you have the best person for the job by the only interviewing one candidate that was the question posed to me after tonight my true feeling is this is how i sat

152here and watched an extraordinary candidate sit in front of us okay so after tonight i am very much convinced that carolyn is the best person for the job sometimes things work out sometimes you get the right person now there are other districts looking for superintendents i would not be surprised to see some other people from our district going out for those jobs okay so i believe that we have had a robust process i am sure that she will make a great superintendent so i am actually not concerned about the one candidate issue thank you mr trump um i have been flopping around on this in my head for um ever since we heard that superintendent lynch was uh going to retire and even more extreme you know you know just struggling with with how to

153make the best choice for this school district um in one of kind of the two major ways that school committees influence these things um i very much struggled with struggle with the um the question of single candidate um however i i have uh up until uh 705 when this began i was very much of the mind that um i i think i would like to push for some additional candidates um however that changed listening to um carolyn speak and um i i very much appreciated uh what mr stevens said about his rationale behind the single candidate and and what i would say is i have taken the time to watch superintendent uh interviews locally that just happened and i think that if we were to put the for instance i watched a bunch in hingham

154if we were to put the hingham public schools superintendent uh interviews right next to carolyn lyon's superintendent interview i think it would be very obvious that we have something really special and what i really wanted to push is because i have talked to a lot of people about my feelings on this i've reached out to people i know who teach in the district i've reached out to people i know who work in other capacities in the district i've reached out to parents i've even reached out to parents that i specifically knew had difficulty advocating for their children through the pps department and i i have heard uh nothing but incredible things and then i wanted to make one more point is that we all have experiences in our jobs i think that make us in

155some way or another qualified to assess a candidate doesn't mean that i have had to work in a school system it means that i regularly interact with the chief scientific officer and the ceo and the president of my current company it means that i i am a member of leadership in my current company i know how to see someone that will create and move things forward because i've seen it and i i'm learning how to be it and i am blown away by the q a that i watched last night all the presentations that i've ever seen carolyn give and this tonight was was really just the total icing on the cake and um um i just uh were being televised so just a message to those that asked me if we would expand this

156search i worry that if we do that we might lose the the brightest shining star i think in the district and i think we might lose the next uh uh two to three four years um like carolyn outlined here um by uh losing the progress the relationships and the plan that carolyn has and so um i wanna be clear i am not saying that right now i am ready to extend an offer and this is where i need help from um from chair young i would like to i took a ton of notes on what you said i would like to watch this interview over and over again and i would like to if the chair and the committee agrees return to this next week that's those are my feelings so things normally the school

157committee makes a decision right after they have the candidate that this and backing for that but i do want to say a couple of things first so i want to give my piece if that's okay um first and foremost is this with all due respect to carolyn i i didn't want to be here tonight and i don't think anyone else did um and i don't think she did and i don't think the minister is here and the reason is because brian's leaving um just to be clear the committee charged me in september to negotiate a contract in extension to the contract with brian brian and i had tried to work on that um we were going back and forth and having a really good time doing it um but then he just decided it was

158time and i respect that and so i'll miss brian um having been here i will also tell everybody uh the same thing which is when brian was selected i heard lots of different things from the community about his only principle he doesn't have a doctorate i mean i can go on and on and on with all the sort of things but what it boiled down to me is probably i've been in the school committee remember now in my 14th year between two communities it was a discussion i had with a young lady at the high school when we're in the middle of the process and she came up to me and said mr yang don't choose a superintendent who wants to be a superintendent choose a superintendent who wants to be middleborough superintendent those are

159powerful words to me and resonated and when you saw brian's interview that night it became very clear he wanted to be middlebar superintendent one of the things that i do when candidates come at times for superintendent i really fundamentally look at one thing lots of people can talk the superintendent talk and speak the superintendent speak but how do they tailor it to middleborough what did they do to look at the pieces and say this is how i wha what i would implement in middleborough and so you know i've i've seen the other you know i've seen other candidates rich i know you put out some um i spent a lot of time when i'm out at masc events and especially the convention talking to people i have a lot of friends who are school committee

160members who have made um relationships with over that time i also feel really good about i have lots of relationships with other superintendents i agree with you rich what happens is that there are more and more vacancies coming up people are getting out of the system but this is extraordinarily unique first and foremost this is the person brian put in charge of the system when he's away okay so when assessing other superintendents the first assessment you make is with brian because that's the superintendent we all know and then in addition several of you are teachers and aides and have worked for other superintendents i know for a fact that i'm not going to point out who some of you have worked for bad superintendents and if they ever applied here you know their their uh

161their resume would go on the receptive because we know their bad superintendents right some of you work for good superintendents and have good relationships um and so i've seen it i've witnessed it i've been a part of it i've also been to conferences with some of you where we sit there and we listen for hours to other school community members talking to us about this happen that happen and we chuckle because we're like that's not what happened and greg and i had to sit down with a local school committee and have a fundamental conversation about what the role and responsibility with budget was and to the point they were like no the superintendent gave us the budget and told us we had to pass it and i was like no it doesn't have to be

162that way and they went back to their community and changed it so i get it i really do i think the points that resonate for me more than anything else is this you're not going to find an outside candidate who comes in and is able to do anything in the first year you're not going to find an outside candidate who is able to draft an entry plan the moment they arrive you're going to have to wait you're going to have to wait for them to assess the community that doesn't happen here if caroline's chosen it she starts on the ground the other piece that is huge is you're going to have somebody if you have if you wait to have somebody come in they're clearly not part of the budget process their product clearly not

163part of the negotiating process they're clearly not part of the wrapping up process with the superintendent that doesn't happen and there's a gap there too um this is an opportunity to have a candidate that i think clearly you can see is extraordinarily qualified to hold the position and does a couple of other things first it gives her time to work with current administration and make the transition as smooth as possible smooth than it would ever be otherwise it gives her time to immediately begin looking at her position and other positions of what she can do and how she can start it also gives an easier transition from the end with sort of brian and walking out i believe in opportunities i really do i believe every once in a while opportunities arise that and the

164stars align that makes sense i don't believe in hoping to see something i mean everything you've told me is she did a fantastic job here she'd make a fantastic superintendent but i'd like to see somebody else do poorly so i know she's best right i mean that's what i'm hearing i'd like to see i'd like to see somebody else show me that she's the best when you sat here and realized she answered like go through those questions i started saw the way you react i see the way you answer she answers the way we want middleborough to be and the reason is because she understands middleware more so than anyone else who's going to come here or be a part of it and that's the piece and that's the opportunity that gives us a chance

165now i will admit that i really wish as greg said there were six other p you know there's five other people who all have um who all have the ability to be superintendent they all have the licensure right um when brian told me he was not going to be doing it five seconds later we had a conversation with sarah and the first thing sarah said to me is i'm up i'm not doing it and and i know sarah held the license because we had the conversation i fundamentally believe really in the staff we have and i've said that over and over again and i can't say it enough i will also tell each and every one of you as we sit here this is not unique to tonight we've sat here and done this a

166lot we moved internally somebody to be the principal of this building we moved internally for somebody to be principal the mech we moved internally for somebody to be the pps director and director of sped we moved internally for assistance principal positions and the reason why is because we had quality staff to do it and it made sense for our community i agree with everybody at this table that there i wish things were different okay but again i also fundamentally believe that when an opportunity arises that you take the opportunity to grab it and you feel good about i'm not hearing anybody tell me not a single person you know if we make caroline superintendent it's gonna if making her superintendent is gonna make us feel bad what we're saying is i just wanted to see

167somebody else opportunities here opportunities in front of us this would be the best step for middleborough and i can't emphasize enough take it tonight and accept it and you'll feel great about yourself while you're sitting in those roles you guys all know this is this is sort of my final run i have i ran one time i have two years left i i fundamentally believe that my time you know will be over in two years because my kids are just my kids are out of school i want other people to become involved in the school system and be part of it i'd like you guys to be around i know greg is not going to be i think you guys do a really good job i get that you haven't been through this process before

168but i will tell you this you know i've done it a lot like i told you um my last time in avon what we had done was we took this current superintendent we had a great candidate who made sense we put in her contract that she would be superintendent after the superintendent resigned she did it she was in avon for another 12 years she was a great candidate and as a matter of fact does some of the superintendent searches right now um i i've been doing this for a while and i get that i wish we had more candidates but as each and every one of you get the best candidate came out tonight it's not about how many candidates you have it's do you have the right person to be the superintendent of middleborough

169and not that they want to be superintendent but they want to be superintendent of middleborough so thank you for listening i really implore you not do not walk away from an opportunity that i really feel that you'll regret later on and i don't say that lightly and i don't say that any other way but again i know how much i know how much you all appreciate brian and think brian's a good superintendent and to me that piece is this is the person he entrusts with the district when he's out and i you know brian's not going to choose sides here and it's not a superintendent place i've worked with this lady a lot she's by far and away the best pps director special ed director i have ever been associated with my entire life and

170i really fundamentally believe 10 years from now the people in middleborough will still be happy the fact that she's prince she's the superintendent of this district so thanks for listening mr chair yeah i would really love um an opportunity to follow up on some of the things that i heard um not from uh miss lyons but from people that now that i've heard them i think would be able to give me a little more insight on and as a result i would i would like to make a motion that we push this decision to next week this is not normally a procedure that we do rich and i'll be honest with you the reason is is because the decision of this group um i really think we have to move to a decision of what

171we do tonight to play out i i don't know how this is my own personal opinion i don't know how waiting is going to be helpful um it what will be helpful to me is to make a decision and to proceed with where what the next steps are because if we get to next meeting i want to have some idea where we're going with those next steps greg so when we first started this process we agreed that we would open up the um position to internal candidates we would interview those candidates we'd make a decision then if we didn't find a suitable candidate that we were all happy with we would move on to an external search which would require hiring an interim um superintendent because this will take a lot more time to get

172a search firm hired and all that stuff so i i guess i am comfortable i i think miss lyons has put herself out there she has done more than i can imagine i just i the whole time she's sitting there i just put myself in her shoes going i could not do what she's doing um i think we owe it to miss lyons like i think we need to make a decision i mean maybe i feel i mean this has been going on i mean i if if you don't have by tonight enough information i don't know what else you need sure okay i really don't i i'm just sitting there going if we make everybody wait i don't know like mr young said i i don't know what that buys us like we're not

173going to get another candidate right so you know i think we need to make a decision and we've done the first part of the process we've had the interviews i think we make it to is that what i'm hearing mr young yeah we we agreed to the process we make a decision if we don't think miss caroline's is the right position then we move to an external search now maybe maybe if we vote no tonight on this lines and she applies in the extra i mean she's still i mean everybody can still apply in the external external means everybody can apply so i mean that can just open up the whole game again but i think we owe it um i think we owe it to the process that we decided unanimously to at least

174make a decision do you want to make a motion for discussion uh i would like to make the motion that we i already made a motion oh but you didn't get a second so get an opportunity to second it if there's no seconds it's fine i just want to make sure okay right so normally the motion would be to offer uh the candidate the contract as superintendent subject to the negotiations sure please outline because like i said i haven't done this process before so if we do decide to go externally what does that look like so now what happens what's the timeline we're talking about like all of that stuff that's going to help me kind of it would be my recommendation to the committee to hire a search firm there there are a lot

175of different search firms but i would be required to get three different search firms i need to get their proposals and to make sure they fall within the guidelines of massachusetts and i would come to the committee i don't know that i could do it necessarily in one week because i have to make sure i get the physical proposals yes depending on the cost if it's um going to be over fifty thousand dollars we would actually have to go out to bid for it right that requires and it does it's not most of the proposals that i've seen are in the 12 to 15 thousand dollar issue i would get the proposals bring them to committee i would recommend a firm to the committee and then after we recommended the firm then we have to

176schedule time with the firm they would come out then they would set up a process of how long this would take their thing they would bring set up external candidates go through a screening process everything like that it will probably a minimum take at some point so let's say if i put let's say if it played out in april just using that by this by the next meeting in april we could meet with them um and then they'd start that process so we'd be looking at candidates sometime within end of summer early september those candidates would then have to come here in a similar interview we would also we don't necessarily have to do this but to be honest with you it is a normal procedure that we would go out to their districts and

177do what's called a site visitation we do those site visitations and then we have to negotiate what time they could start depending on their contracts so let's say a best case scenario we finish at end of summer and september we're making the decision most contracts have anywhere from a 60 to 120 day window so you're looking anywhere end of december early early beginning of the following year on top of that um july 1st we don't have a superintendent so i would have to i would talk to masc they provide me with a list of um potential superintendents um what normally happens is i go through that list like i did last time i look for people who have been in sort of similar districts i do sort of phone interviews with them go through their

178their uh recommendation you know their resume and everything like that and then i would more than likely bring a candidate back to you um sometime in probably end of april early may and they would take over um for the district so that would be the process does that make sense me any questions about the process no that actually really helps me because that just sounds awful and it just sounds a habit like having nobody in charge as of july 1st essentially is awful to me and then we're going you know almost half a school year with nobody in charge either because we're still going through that process so that helps me um kind of sway my mind one way or the other and there's a couple things related that's important to to do that i

179think it's important to know it's a sometimes when you get a firm sometimes the firms will ask you to wait okay and the reason they want you to wait is this is if your area has a lot of superintendents leaving there's a there's a lot of people you're essentially vying for at times for the same pool and what you will encounter sometimes is you may get the same candidates that everyone's come down to and normally what happens is the school committee asks for three to five as a number okay so the screening committee wills it down to three to five part of the problem that they run into is when you get to that three to five you're competing against like i said other school districts so sometimes you're down to less numbers because they're

180they're whittling away um the other thing i i want to say about that process too because i've seen it and i think it's important think about it this way one of the first questions that the search firm asks you do you have internal candidates and then their answer is why don't we just search the internal candidates first but then there's another piece too that i think is important if i'm hearing the committee again and telling me they like carolyn lyons right and everything working out uh they're gonna ask the representative the candidates will call the representative and say is there an internal candidate and do they like her and you're going to lose people based on that too because people are going to be like why am i going now i should tell you you'll

181hear a lot of times that you get you know such and such a school got 50 candidates right which sounds like a big pool but then when you sit down with the person who runs it they will tell you up front there'll be a stack of 10 resumes they tell you apply to every single superintendent opening in the world and they said we wouldn't take them and then they go through the resumes of everybody else and this is why it's important to have a search form when you do it that way they'll go through and tell you what the problem is with why this candidate is leaving their district okay one of my favorites from last time was there's a particular candidate who got fired by the school committee that would show up at the

182selectmen's meeting every monday night spend the public comment piece attacking the school committee for firing them at every single select me and and the person who told me this i was just like it's unbelievable and sure enough when i went to look they did um so that's that's the process in the nutshell no problem mr chair um yeah i just wanted to comment on that i mean i think hearing the process that it we would have to go through to do an external search uh it sounds like it would take an awful lot of time and i'm really worried that not only would we um spin our wheels time when a lot of other places are also looking for candidates but i also fear that our very own candidate could get an offer externally and

183we might lose her in that process as well and so um with that said i just wanted to kind of clarify what i was asking for um i still believe that it would be the right decision um to hire miss lyons and um oh i've interviewed before i've hired before unfortunately fired before as well and um i personally have never stood up from an interview and been immediately ready to offer the job to someone and that's all i was asking for was just more time to consider what was said tonight that's it but i'm i'm very much um in favor of miss science and um if given the choice if there was no second to my motion that's fine given the choice of looking externally and going through that process or making a decision tonight

184then i'm ready to make a decision tonight i i agree with everything you said except one point yeah every other time you're hiring and making a decision the person isn't sitting in front of a camera right and that that's the piece i think greg was talking about too which is it prolongs the problem prolongs a piece that is really you know i don't think anybody here has ever gone through an interview in which you're in front of the public you're sitting there you know it's televised everyone's watching i've been through some interviews with a lot of people right but not like that and so that that's part of the reason why and so i agree so thank you rich so so i'll make a motion to um offer miss caroline's the position of superintendent for

185middlebury schools subject to negotiation okay so here's a second second here we are so i think that uh each of us have given our true feelings on all of it um however i'm one of six and i respect that this committee is coming to that decision this evening and so that said i i i will fully support this decision this evening and my vote will be to extend that offer to miss lyons i want to see a unified frontier and i don't think that it would do any good for us to um be divided here so i think that these last two years have been hard on everyone and we need a true unification so if that's where we're at then i'm comfortable with that and then i'm good so thank you any other [Music]

186so discussion discussion about the decision but just um about what happens next um obviously pending um whatever greg said pending yeah what does that process look like how long does that take and when can we expect to to have this be finalized sure so immediately after this immediately next i have an executive session to go into discuss the potential futures superintendent's contract you will give me guidelines i will sit down with carolyn and negotiate a contract and then i will bring it back to this body and we will vote on it in open session where people can understand the guidelines part of it is i will go over some things with you after today um looking for those guidelines got it okay um it's sort of a practice if no one minds that for the

187um vote for superintendent i'll take a roll call vote if no one minds zeke teresa meg aye greg aye rich aye and the chair votes eye to make it unanimous so carolyn welcome to the world [Applause] thank you with that us having no further business the chair would um entertain a motion to move into executive session for procedure to to conduct strategy sessions in preparation for negotiations with non-union personnel or to conduct collective bargaining sessions or contract negotiations with non-union personnel thus being the future superintendent um do i have that motion so moved second second um it requires a role called vote zeke theresa may greg aye rich aye chair votes i will not only reconvene to adjourn so thank you very much you