Scituate School Committee Meeting - 06/13/2022

001so i will call the june 13th school committee meeting to order we'll call vote randalini yes yes sparkowski yes long yes yes okay the scituate school committee is committed to providing an environment of respect during meetings we ask all members to interact in a polite manner even when there is disagreement we value the participation of our community and want all participants including marginalized and minoritized communities to feel welcomed and respected we ask our committee members and all who participate to commit these standards to support and respect our community the meeting will be recorded and posted following meaning public comment will be available by zoom remember you can also email me at endgrandeleme sip.org and any correspondences with the district or school committee available through the public public record or everyday live requests build by law

002and not include the private information staff and students all right so first what our business we are are just going to have a discussion on um reviewing school committee operating protocols so i'll share my screen so anyone can see that but i also provided the committee and superintendent burkhead with a copy a hard copy too i don't want to go too deep into it but i just thought that it was kind of a nice time for us to just refresh on this yes nope let's try that let's try that again you are under nicole brandolini yes no oh what are you under i'm under the sps zoom i changed my name but not my signed in through the spf zoom i don't have to share i don't want to pull this up really um i

003just wanted to kind of review our operating protocols these are available on the sps website under the school committee tab for anybody who was interested in reviewing so just a few things that i just wanted to re-establish that the goal of our committee is to establish a vision a set of goals and objectives to create and review policies and ensure accountability to sustain continued improvement in teaching and learning leaving to day-to-day operations to the superintendent and staff so i thought that was an important bullet point for us to sort of um just kind of review um clearly defining success in district goal setting assuring accountability during a superintendent evaluation process advocate for the achievement needs and interests of all students and place needs above all else in the decisions we make and provide fiduciary oversight

004and fiscal transparency and responsibility um so as we've had more participation mostly because of covid which we i think we all agree is awesome um i think even as you know i kind of go along it's kind of good to educate and sort of put that out there for what the role this committee truly is and what our responsibilities are um professional conduct is important so of course um you know keeping things respectful and supporting and upholding the decision of the majority once a vote is taken and um familiarizing and adhering to policy bca which is our school committee member athletes policies um i think the next section is more about you know how we hold and conduct our meetings and this is probably the most important one um for tonight going forward that school

005committee meetings are business meetings held in public not public meetings we will strive to hold efficient effective meetings and conduct business through a set agenda we will always solicit input on future agenda items at each meeting and follow robert's rules of order so i think that if anybody on the committee has any comments they want to add about our operating protocols if this is something that we feel is more liking and we want to maintain or is it something that we would like to review more kind of open to your input feedback on that but i just want to make sure that we know that we encourage and support community members who attend meetings to participate during public comment and that it is not a q a session the school committee meeting is a meeting

006that is held in public and not a public meeting so we want to get everybody the answers to questions that they want we want to make sure that we're respectful and open to feedback and also efficient so any feedback from the committee on that i just um make a comment kind of a little bit about where these came from um was it two two years ago when superintendent um birkin came on um and really for me personally we really leveraged the ability to um benefit from our relationship with mass mass association of school committees but they offered lots of workshops and so on and we took that opportunity to meet with them and one of the items that we talked about that we i don't think we either had or we weren't aware we had

007but it gave us the opportunity to create these operating protocols um i think also it was at the beginning of the pandemic and we were trying to figure out how we could maintain doing business while also including including the public to participate so that's kind of where these came out um i think that as our committee evolves which every year we have a new chair the chair can choose how to operate their meetings but this is the basis of which we do that so i just want i'm just in full support of it i think that obviously we can always look to um potentially edit these in the future i think that we're going to have a workshop at some point this summer or fall maybe we can do it then i have no issue

008with any of i think it's great and again it just provides kind of a reference point if there is question as to what our role is and how we operate and also if the public has questions about why we operate the way we do we can always refer to that so those are my comments it's pretty standard for school committees to have operating protocols um in general so this basically part of it came from mass oh say the mass association of school committees originally and then we kind of made it scituate but uh and also i did provide the committee with a copy of public participation uh so that might be helpful and for public participants tonight i have a coffee at the table for a public highlight as well if you wanted to read

009that so i just want to make sure that we're clear and transparent on um kind of how this works because i think it could be um intimidating for people to as you know as people that speak in public it can be certainly intimidating so i just want to make sure that everybody has the information so that they're best informed you know when they do want to make a comment because we want comment anything else before we march on anymore next on our agenda is the recognition of retirees uh good evening everybody um that's really special people uh a handful can make it tonight it's been tradition to invite our retirees to this meeting to honor them in person uh by the smallest gift um and to other principals say some um that's some nice things

010about that they deserve so we've got 11 retirees uh this year from the entire staff and representing hundreds of years of experience and commitment to the profession but also to specif specifically in most cases to situate a lot of years spent in scituate to our kids devoted to our families in the two years i've been here um knowing these individuals they've had a really huge impact on a lot of people's lives but i personally want to thank them and want to call off each of our principals to introduce each one of these say a few words about the sweet little flavor of them as individuals and wish them the best in their new journeys excitement we have plenty of substitute openings uh you really miss it over the summer so i'll call dr long go

011back along um so thank you for having me um i am very excited to acknowledge first um theresa derksmeyer she is here this evening um she has been a paraprofessional in our school for 22 years um she is always willing to jump in and support students anything we need anything for our colleagues she's flexible she knows our students she builds relationships with them and she is committed to supporting the individualized needs of our students which we know have a great range educational social emotional um she has just been outstanding and i've gotten to know her very well the time i've been here um i knew she's looking forward to traveling and spending more time with her ground to open her retirement so i'd like to congratulate as we call her terry d mr dirks meyer

012on your retirement next we have miss back in island she has been 11 years as a paraprofessional she has been a reliable member of our jenkins staff she's performed several roles including a role in the language-based program she's worked with upper grades she's worked in kindergarten she always forms very close relationships with our students she's always eager to learn more about the students she's with and also see their progress progression as they leave jenkins and so it's knowing that she's made her mark and help them along the way so we often have students that speak highly of her as well i want to thank you back for your commitment to our students thank you miss island [Applause] miss denise fairhurst she's been in our district for 22 years she's been our library paraprofessional she started

013in scituate in september of 2000 at the happily school she has worked in three of our four elementary schools her commitment and commitment and collaboration with the best interests of our students is just modeled daily through her actions um the way she implements new ideas in our library working together library online um she's just really led the charge with that it's been great her colleagues across the district look for her for advice support collaboration um and she really has just been a great tremendous addition to the library and she looks forward to spending more time with her family um in the summer at the campground so we'd like to thank denise you will be missed and last but certainly not least ms kathy harris has 15 years plus of scituate in scituate she's our cafeteria

014hostess she knows every student's name um she knows um their siblings she really builds a relationship with them and that's such an important part of our student's day she's always enthusiastic she's always positive she's implemented the golden trey awards where pbis is extended to the cafeteria um the students are very excited um and she will be greatly missed so thank you miss kathy powers [Applause] and we talked about years of experience i would just like to acknowledge that between the four of them about 70 years of experience at the jenkins school so we are grateful for their service there will be tough shoes to fill um but i'd like to congratulate them all on their retirement and i wish them all the best in their next adventure i have the pleasure of honoring three of

015our um of our educators and our staff at coaching school tonight uh the first that i'll start with is lori randall um for the past 16 years lori has been a highly respected and dedicated educator at cushing school um during that time she has focused on what's always been best for her students and she carried as she currently maneuvered them through the fifth grade curriculum as well as the social emotional challenges that come with being a preteen she has dedicated she's dedicated she's committed um and just very very caring not only to her students but as well to her to the colleagues that she works with during that time that she's been with us she has connected with hundreds of students and has positive positively influenced them um and they really have reached the benefits

016of her association with them she's taught with six different teammates and under two principals and all of us have the utmost respect for her um she's definitely going to be dearly missed she has a great sense of humor um sassy is the day is long so it's always it's always a pleasure to interact with her but we're really excited for her to watch this next chapter in her life unfold her intelligence her work ethic her sense of humor and and just all that all of that becomes her more has really had a powerful impact for for us as a staff and as a community so she will be definitely missed um but she's earned it she's earned it and we wish her the best and the she has to come and visit us often so

017that's not how good so um so the next person that i have the honor of um recognizing susan slichman now susan's been with us for over 20 years and she's been a treasure to the scituate public schools her peers describe her as an outstanding colleague um she's she's a true friend and she's an inspiring mentor as one of her colleagues had actually um described her as being a wizard where she has magic that you know that happens every day in the classroom um she taught her students with never-ending energy enthusiasm and creativity her relentless determination to unlock every child's potential both academically and socially was always the foundation of her philosophy susan inspired students by bringing a deep love of learning directly to them and even when they were a little bit reflected it was

018those reluctant learners that susan had the most success with with and she's instinctively knew how to reach them her insistence and dedication of teaching is genuinely honorable susan enriched and indeed loved each and every child in her class and every one of those students are going to be better people because of your association with them although we still miss susan's creative ideas good advice and humor stories we're so happy for the adventures that have been perfect lastly i'd like to honor rose fortier rose has been a member of future public schools for 25 years plenty of those she had spent pushing school as a parent professional during her time as a parish she built many strong supportive relationships for the students her commitments to the students has always been complaining for happy nature and you've

019got this attitude along with her versatility flexibility and patience helped each of them grow academically socially and emotionally she positively influenced dozens of students search term times paraprofessionals both as an in-class paraprofessional as well as one-on-one when i came on board as principal of pushing school rose became our 10-month student support secretary which is about five years ago now despite the fact that she was not the most tech savvy person when she took the job she was very honest about that rose did what was necessary to learn with a little help from her friends those teachers we called live in the dorm room of our specialist um they went above and beyond beyond help trying to help her go from cutting haste with full proficiency on our saturday system and all of our online software

020programs she grew by leaps and bounds the most powerful attribute that rosie has is her ability to develop nurture and sustain positive lasting relationships with students families and staff rose gives you a shoulder to cry on words of encouragement and stories and jokes that make you laugh when you enter cushing school rose it's the first smile that greets you we are so happy for our next chapter and our life has retirement in retirement but it will be hard to fill her shoes she is the heart of our school our friend and our professional mom you better make room for at the dinner table rosie because on sundays i think the christian families stop by and have a little dinner so we want to congratulate all three of our members on their retirements and their national

021factors [Applause] i have to say the first time i've met you all on first time i have a little like i don't know i'm a little looking back like it's like i feel like i'm meeting some celebrities for two years so so thank you for having me um wampa talk is saying farewell to three talented and highly respected educators all three of these women have dedicated many years to central public schools and have made a difference in the hearts and minds of our young peace learners palette mourinho joined the central public school system 15 years ago as a school social worker and then a school adjustment counselor for 12 of those years she went between two schools she supported students staff and families at cushing aids jenkins and walkertown colette has dedicated endless hours teaching

022the students a scituate how to manage anxiety how to navigate friendships make good decisions solve problems and be a kind and supportive friend she's worked tirelessly with staff always willing to model social emotional lessons share advice on how to mediate student relationships and provide a listening ear whenever needed families have been blessed to have her she is a wealth of information on community resources and parenting advice paulette will be remembered for her advocacy and her passion for ensuring that every child feels loved and included not only in our school but also in our community we would like to wish her all the best as she begins her next adventure carol sousa has been employed with situate public schools for 23 years she has worn many hats including volunteer pto parent school council rep substitute teacher

023one-to-one paragraph care professional long-term sub classroom teacher and finally a reading specialist at monkeytime carol's passion for early literacy skills is infectious she has supported and taught more than 700 students to read at wright laying the foundation for them to grow into strong independent scholars carol has been a leader in scituate advocating for school classroom libraries early literacy curriculum and high quality instruction for our youngest readers and writers she will be remembered for her dedication to all the students and staff at wonkaton we would also like to wish her the very best for retirement and finally izzy silvia she began her career here in scituate at wampa tuck where she has been a teacher for 33 years she started as a k-5 bilingual teacher in a self-contained classroom where she had upwards of 20 students

024at all different grade levels after five years she became a third grade teacher and eventually ended in the second grade where she spent most of her career izzy has educated and positively influenced well over 600 students who lovingly describe her as funny silly kind and smart she will be fondly remembered being a collaborative colleague and for her love of all her students who would also like to ensure her very best i am here to celebrate nancy marshall this evening nancy marshall has worked as a paraprofessional for 21 years almost all of them at shs really cares about and believes in the students that she works with especially in history where she supports students most in their history classes and also one-on-one she's organized and full of great learning strategies and life lessons that she's willing

025to share with students nancy always lends a hand when she sees someone in need her students come to love and respect her because of the strong relationship she builds with kids she's willing to do whatever it takes for our school and for our students we know that nancy is excited to spend more time traveling and relishing in her role as a newark grandmother she does plan to take us up on the subbing offer and we'll be glad to have her back in a different role but we wish her all the best in her retirement and in this new chapter congratulations to nancy we have two people that are going to step up who are going to be presenting tonight um mandy henry and kate pescatoria work to talk to you about our social emotional learning

026um at the happening school kate is part of our sed team and it is part of our pbis team two separate teams that then merge so that we can have um we do part of the social emotional with the sed team and then it goes whole school with the pbis team and as two extremely important people who really run this school thank you i'm going to project my voice sorry the allergies have gotten the best of me and share my screen as well good evening superintendent birkhand and members of the scituate community um welcome to the celebration of learning for athele elementary school um as juilliard did our introduction my name is amanda henry i'm a first grade teacher at happily i'm part of the pbis community for those who don't know that is stands

027for positive behavior interventions and support um and i'm also part of the instructional leadership team uh i'm kate pescatore i teach fifth grade at hatherley and as you mentioned that part of the std team and um let's see as well we do so thank you for allowing us to celebrate the amazing things our students and staff have been working on this year during this evening's presentation we'll be discussing the collaboration between our pbs committee and our social emotional development team and the many accomplishments of our students and staff and integration um so it kind of all started a few years ago with um we started to do the holistic uh student assessment uh that was developed through the pear institute and for the hsa and um initially the first two years we only did fifth

028grade but this year we introduced fourth grade into it as well so we have some additional data um and in a more normal environment somewhat although it was the survey was completed in the fall um so in case people don't realize the parent institute was developed by dr gnome and started at mclean hospital and now branched out and what he kind of did was he developed this idea of how can we make kids more so resilient in terms of social emotional skills and so their goal as an organization is to help teach how schools teach and support students to become more resilient in the four active era the four pieces of the clover so assertiveness active engagement belonging and reflection and as you can see there's ages there and that's just kind of when that

029specific area is more pronounced in a student's development okay um and then so with this they developed this hsa survey and it's a student self report that measures the kids social emotional health and so our school assessment counselor gave the survey to all the students of the same environment and then once we got that data back in i think it was about the end of december we started or then in november we decided to join make this sed team and that team consisted of our psychologist our adjustment counselor our school nurse and then several classroom teachers and the first thing we did was we looked at all of the strengths and challenges as a whole of the school and the three that really popped for strengths for halloween were empathy um relationship with peers and

030then also that school bonding that feeling that they are connected that i care about my school community and it was kind of interesting because once we looked at it globally for all of the elementary schools these were the three that popped in all elementary schools across the district and then we also needed to take a peek and look at our challenges and our challenges that came up were relationships with adults and reflection if you think back to the reflection piece like they're still in that development stage um it's a little older so that's been later for them the relationship with adults is not only relationship at school but also in their whole life so how they use for relationships with all adults um so then once and again once again these were the three things

031that popped globally for all the the school for the schools so um then the next thing we did as the sdp team um was we looked at can we identify the kids who may need more support so using the response to intervention tomorrow and we address the you know analyze the scores saw the kids who be addressed as tier three tier two tier three instruction was a school psychologist adjustment counselor kind of helped their planning and then we took some of those ideas also into tier two and brought them into our classroom with lessons in conjunction with our school adjustment council and then we looked at that tier one piece and that's when we kind of worked decided to work together and identify the challenges and how our pbis team helped us our cd team

032did an amazing job in deciphering the data from our hsa survey once challenges had been identified the pbs committee was able to create monthly fees based on these indicators we developed these monthly to be our sole focus for our all school assemblies our goal was to focus on strengthening our identified challenges today i get the pleasure of showing you just a glimpse of what we have been working on these past few months our goal with every assembly is to define a theme provide real-life examples that are relatable create an interactive space for the students in our meetings and then have students complete an activity during each month students will also put on the announcements and discuss the theme and provide insight as well so in february students were introduced virtually to our first seed which

033would connect with it we thought this was the best way to bring back our all school meetings as themes which if you remember looking back at the positives of hsa school bonding was one of them so this was the perfect way that we thought to bring these back um this theme not only helped students feel a sense of belonging but really helped us within heavily to create that home away from home in this we looked back to a time where connectedness was a little bit different and for us that was the beginning of the shutdown in 2019. for those parents who um of having students you know that the students received videos of the teachers doing we're all in this together um and we discussed the lyrics the lyrics with students um and discuss how

034it connects to being together we discussed that no matter the circumstances we were still in it together we are expected celebrating differences and being special in our own way yet that we still belong as a group so students enjoyed watching their teachers dance and they really understood its purpose so the activity that this month we created a word chain and their task was to write how they felt connected to how they're like on those chains whether it's word or phrase and mrs burton being our wonderful amazing our teacher she created a wall of hearts to spread love with each classroom as well you can see some of our students doing that marsha's theme was relationships with adults this indicator was one of our top challenges for students grades four and five this was our last

035virtual pbias we were able to collaborate with important adults in our community to discuss how relationships are important to them and how they've had an impact on them in their lives we're able to create a video from influential community members um people like the lighthouse keeper bob gallagher mr jamelle adams officer sherry mr kuzengar principal petey and our fire chief mrs board as well the students for the activities students then wrote about adam they're an important adult in their lives and how they have helped them and support them april's theme was empowerment in an effort to increase students assertiveness which was an indicator our april all school meeting focused on building empowerment students groups such as the lit group the recess club our student government and our newspaper club presented to students about the ways

036they show empowerment this is a way to get our students involved in these meetings i would show how they could have a voice in our school students were introduced to power empowerment statements like i am brave and i am strong and i can do hard things and the power of those which they all love as a tool to build empowerment and then helping the activity on when they could use their power poses these are some pictures of some other different groups i showed empowerment this month and here was their activity is that i need to use my power pose when blank and because we wanted them to explain why they needed to use it so they and done it in may we focus on rent even though this was not a top challenge the team

037thought it was an important theme and a great way to tie and growth we reflected on empowerment and how that can help us to work through things that are challenging students learned about the risk and perseverance through some disney characters between bits finding nemo fabulous shows we had some open discussion during our school in an in-person assembly and practice our chance to connect to previous months you can see we added i have written at the end students completed an activity that would help them demonstrate grit this is the activity that they did they had to brainstorm things that they couldn't do yet and then the idea was them to think about the steps that would help them accomplish that so every grade level added differences as well for our final month we tied in our

038last indicator of reflection we took the students outside to learn about reflection and its importance we discuss tools that can help them reflect in their daily lives like mindfulness activities yoga journaling art and just being in nature we did an all-school stability tree and began a metri activity to help us further understand reflection here's a picture of us outside doing our civility treaty they all connected to each other reflected on things that were important to them and their order truth and this is the tree activity the meat tree is an idea where they were to reflect on things that they were i am able to describe themselves and how they were supported so they used the branches the trunk and the soil to represent things that they were reflecting on so we wrapped up this

039year in reflection in this month with we made memory box but students look back on their entire school year from academics to all of our pbis scenes and create individual rocks which reflected their favorite memory in school we took these rocks and we created a wave of reflection we added it into the elaine shea garden which is outside of our school we thought this was an appropriate space as it was initially created as a place of reflection and now our current our future students and our teachers can use this as a place to reflect here is our breakthrough classroom with their memory rocks some of the examples said don't give up the ship if the sun shines you will too smile versus jesus be yourself don't be someone else and these are things that they

040all thought of we helped brainstorm the things from the past curriculum but the idea was they found something that they really wanted to reflect on in each grade from k-5 all did a rock together here's our k classroom one of them and their rocks and this is our final project this is our wave of reflection so if you're ever at heather lee please stop by a reflection space and take a look at our student memory box thank you so much for listening to our celebration of learning at hathaway we are so proud of our students this year and they have done amazing always telling me to be more positive and i'm trying to be more positive i really appreciate that this is this is just a positive not only did you give a great presentation

041and a great overview of what's going on at hadley but it was a positive theme and you addressed it and i feel like something that students are proud of the staff is proud of everyone involved seems to have at hand and to me that's just exactly what elementary school and our district is about so i appreciate bringing positivity to this meeting which we can always use and make people believe that things really are positive in our town so thank you i just want to say that's another example to me of um how there's so much more going on in schools than basic you know teaching like jesse can tell you to teach and there's so much more that looks into the education of our students than what jesse is telling us but i did have

042a question about the results of the peer survey since you said across the district it was the same in all the elementary schools so do you have um work with the element elementary schools um with these projects that you did like do you kind of uh do they are they doing similar activities or is it each each sponsor each well with hsn i think that is more of a school driven how we presented and we just took the hsn results and just uh these themes would be the perfect way to address in that tier 1 structure to explicitly teach all of the students and then be able to group them appropriately in the older grades their team choose oh i would just love to jump in also just say that we have a member of

043our sed team and a member of our ebis team that's on the district 5 to those people that come together look at all the variables so i found it so interesting as well yeah so i'll let go peter and janice with the positivity i can say without getting too personal that i've had lots of face time with mrs henry i know we get lots of emails about frustration so i want to publicly say what a fantastic experience our family has had with henry and hathaway in general so i'll first say that i do of course have some questions um i don't know if these are these are probably more this district level but if you have thoughts i'd love to hear it first i know nicole you and i have talked about the administ ministering

044of the pair and i know it happens in the fall and you got the data in november i'm curious is there any talk of readministering so we can see like a pre-post and sort of how students are growing and changing as a result of some of the fantastic interventions that are being done i don't think that there is a double right right heidi's because like they mentioned students possibly get individual support we want to be there for them and we want to get them hooked up with our adoption counselors so that's sort of in one opinion here and each year they do compare the grade grade level in november and our district-wide sbt team um right for mary last year i actually maybe it was more like april he presented our district results and i'd

045like to commend both of you and our district team because they really have used the data in a way that we're driving activities at every single building based on not well based on actual information just two one quick question and then another question the first one is um and i'm sorry if you've already said this is this data i saw um that there was a slide up there on the results is this available to parents like at a high disaggregated level that parents could review care data for the district is this available somewhere or could we make it available we have de-identified aggregated data by building perhaps that's something that we have to look at i think looking at data on the context from your experience so for example should give a wonderful example relationships

046with adults when people read that is that teachers if that's the parents it's a lot more information maybe in the future there might be some more parent education around the administration of the survey and what we do after that i think that would be something that the district team could talk about yeah i mean i think just in the spirit of our transparency and educating our community would be good to think about ways to share some of the even if it's a report right it doesn't have to be all of the data making a report with some context the last question is more of a curiosity i noticed that you added grit into and i know there's lots of work on grit and sort of the the results i've grid are the discussion great is

047sort of there are multiple camps around grit and so i'm wondering at the district level if we're talking about not just preparing students their resilience but also thinking about the system in which this is happening and whether or not teachers building leaders are thinking about what in the system is creating a need for resilience and is there a way to address those barriers i didn't know if those conversations were being had i can go just my perspective i think of it as something to build upon you know that's okay to make mistakes and when you make mistakes you want to push through them so it ties into those areas of that group it's okay to know how to do it yet but i do definitely agree with what you're saying and how we can present

048it in that i just want to echo um as i see kids you know my own kids and kids that they're hanging out with i mean they talk about this outside of school you can see the difference so you know you see it in the school you get the lots of different things in the classroom but they're taking that type of classroom pushing it forward and you can see the enthusiasm for this so it's doing a lot of great work thank you elementary school thank you for having me um so tonight i'll be speaking about our state of the diamond school we i'll begin with our mission um we really have strive to provide environment where we're educating the whole student and we know that is so important especially re-acclimating students re-engaging students connecting families

049and you know what goes beyond the walls of our classroom so really just engage re-engaging our jenkins community so that's been a big focus this year and something that we have been very passionate about i'm very proud of the staff at the jenkins school for reaching out making those connections and the ways in which they know their students is just unbelievable our state of the schools we have our pillars that are connected to educating the whole child we have a culture of collaboration personalization and personal excellence so this goes right back to our district by pillar set forth by superintendent our culture of collaboration highlights our data teams we have implemented with our literacy and math specialists where we collect data at our benchmarkings beginning mid and end year we use this data to really

050drive individualized instruction and it allows for us to better know our students in order to meet their needs again as the whole child not just math and literacy but also the social emotional development and learning of our students we have our jaws program our jenkins awesome working students this is our personalized check-in checkout program for those students that might need to check in with a preferred person to start their day and their day it is focused goals for each student whatever their individualized needs may be students have a sheet where they will take with them throughout the day and whoever their teacher is whether it's a specialist teacher classroom teacher we'll fill that out and the students get to check out at the end of the day they track their progress and when some students

051really get into it they end up tracking it graphing their own progress so they can see how exciting it is and then they can cash in and earn rewards so that's a way to get students on track maybe if they're reacclimating from being out maybe if they're having a tricky time in the classroom just different ways we can support our students there and that's in collaboration with our school psychologists and also classroom teachers as well as our adjusting counselor and then any preferred adult that a student may want they might want to check in or check out with a custodian they may want to check in or check out what the teacher they've had in previous years um so it really is range and shows to the commitment that all of our staff have to

052the development of our students also our lit team those meetings have been weekly they've been on thursday mornings in order to allow equity for all students to participate so some students when they get dropped off by car or by bus or they're walkers there's an opportunity for those students in grades three through five to collaborate and really promotes the right opportunities to celebrate the diversity and inclusivity of our community and then last you've heard a lot about positive behavior intervention our pbis we have our sharks we have our shark tickets we have jen and ralph our two sharks that the classrooms can earn and it's really exciting to promote the students we also have the fantastic shark awards where we celebrate staff and it's really important for students to also see staff acknowledging one another

053so we not only acknowledge our students we also acknowledge the staff and they acknowledge one another and so they kind of pay it forward with the um the trophy and then they get their coffee and their parking spot out in front of jenkins which if you know jenkins it's nice to have a designated spot in the front but it's just nice to be able to celebrate everyone and focus on different character traits throughout the year um students can then turn in their if they win that month they can turn in for rewards that are not materialistic but there are more bonding reports so it might be last from the past you get to go visit a former teacher you've had or maybe an art teacher um you could be the teacher's helper i could have

054crazy soft day but just all different ways to really engage students with their community and have them bonding with other staff throughout the building so that's been nice next we have our culture of excellence highlights we have our universal screeners for number sense our foundations has been amazing we've seen great you know data results we're getting our end of year results in so we're really excited about that foundation integrity again this is all information that helps us to grow our students it's systematic it is a great approach for students to really engage with words and really understand the foundation's integrity with what words mean how you break apart words and so they're very excited about it to the point where we had a teacher homesick and one of the students drew a picture of them

055doing foundations but they missed their teacher so that was in the picture um but it just speaks to the excitement the students have for it and what a great job the teachers have done and then last for culture of excellence is our student engagement academy our c programming this year i'm really proud of the jenkins staff that have really put on some wonderful programs this year we had about 45 students per session anywhere from five to eight programs um from team games um focusing on sportsmanship with our psychologists which is nice just a nice way to see staff in a different light we had our music teacher had our younger students parading around the building um just really exciting to engage our students art music we had a rock band um at first i didn't

056know if they wanted to decorate rocks or they wanted yeah um they had their proposal and they came and miss mckenna worked with them and they recently performed for the talent show her son also got involved so what a great way to also involve students vertically so that was really a great way we talk about reconnecting and re-engaging students um that's been really exciting and there were also some you know math support authors at work so writing reading so there was such a wide range of activities we were really excited to be able to support that this year and then our personalization our wind blocks this year driven by the data i spoke about in our data teams have just been amazing it's a block of time during the day where the students receive their

057individualized interventions and they're grouped accordingly we have our benchmarks three times per year but we are progress monitoring students in between so we're not waiting for the middle of the year to maybe reassess the student check and see how they're doing have they mastered this area we could move them to a different group so that's really been an all hands on deck approach within our building to really target all students so working to advance students working to support students with specific challenges and everyone in between so that's been really excited and i commend all staff with that that's been our professionals teachers reading specialist math specialist megan gregory and heather allen are elementary coordinators that's just been wonderful and then pair which we spoke of really allowed for us to personalize we dropped back down

058to the fourth grade this year so we had more data starting in the fourth grade and really share that out with all of the staff because we know that what we do from the moment they step foot in the door and students matriculate through our building it's important for everyone to own that and all students are all of our students so we really embrace that sharing of information to really learn more about students personalize if there were students that you know that popped on the survey individually that we didn't know about or weren't aware of we're able to better attend to them or reassess based on their scores um getting to great we are excited for future ela programming i know you've heard about different leading pilots um so that's been very exciting the teachers

059have been wonderful and gregory's done an excellent job leading that we had so many teachers that wanted to pilot which is very exciting for the teachers wanting to be involved um and really setting a stage for everyone to have a voice in that and healing those the next piece which is so important is connecting our community we have families that have moved in through the pandemic and we're trying to work to connect them i know our pto has also been working hard to just have events to get to know families bring people together um at no cost so i've been trying to do just a wide range of things that just can bring people together and something as simple as afternoon speed at our playground so they had by grade level each week um kindergarten

060one week incoming kindergarten current families to come and just what a nice way for the kids to play together parents to engage and families to just feel like they're part of that community and then our cultural proficiency continuing to learn and grow work with jamil adams our tpi director we are very fortunate to have a mental program here it's wonderful with daryl david wonderful so just working together to really grow and learn together and really enhance what we're doing and make sure we're really including and mindful of everybody's needs thank you that's our overview great things are happening at jenkins as you can see here in the garden we painted a map out on the laptop that was a nice activity we had all ages from ages three to 73 out helping us paint that

061was just a nice way to bring people together our ship shape day um we have mr adams coming to visit for lunch to connect with students in a variety of ways in the classroom as well we have maggie so the students enjoy reading to her and engaging with her the therapy dog we have and it's just been great to see kids back together playing engaging and really embracing new families as well thank you dr law questions and comments from um because i think that congratulations to you on your new position thank you um i just i'm not sure exactly what is the grade level here it could be principal high school or government um it's grades two through five all right perfect leading to my um obviously there's great things going on at jenkins um

062i'm wondering kind of what initiatives or what things that you're doing here are you going to bring your new job like what things should we do in situat that you might want to implement at your new school i think that elderly speaks to what what we're doing and what specifically we're doing today right i will say that we are leading the charge i think in our dei work and our cultural proficiency i know when we meet um with i was on the literacy council meeting which is the great thing about zoo we could meet with people across the state and how do you do that how do they invest in that where are you with this and it's just very exciting and proud to be able to know that we have um these supports in

063place and so i think advocating for these roles that can do that work and get the job done in a collaborative manner because we want to do everything and we want to do everything well and i think it's we're very fortunate to have the supports in various areas you guys wanted them another area is our structure for our wind blocks we have a great structure with um you know maggie gregory and heather allen with our math and literacy and really working with that model of literacy specialist and math specialist to then work with the teachers so it's having those supports for teachers the coaching of teachers and really just being present being able to be in the classroom with them so that's something i've been very proud of very excited to work with our data

064teams that contributes to the wind blocks and just different things our pto has done to engage i'm just very excited and fortunate to have had this experience here um it was a really hard decision but i look forward to my next adventure but there's certainly lots of great relationships and so much that i've appreciated thank you yeah i want to just thank you for your service as well wish you the best in your next adventure um i'm curious if you had an opportunity to give us some advice moving forward um where would you like to see us spend our time in the next year where should we vote where should we be focused we talked about reflection in the last right presentation i'm asking you to reflect on your experiences and what's a lesson or

065two you've learned that you'd like to see happen in the next year i think we have absolutely amazing staff in every area from paris custodians teachers the investment and the commitment to that staff the excitement of rolling out for example in your reading program that is so exciting we're excited for that i just think that will only enhance the work we do and i would think continuing to pull the four elementary schools even closer together we've worked very hard um since we've come together a few years ago um and then we welcome tracy and we work very hard to provide those consistent opportunities for our students without taking the culture away from our individual buildings and so that is something that i hope will continue um but i we do value that culture of individualized

066buildings so it's important to find that balance but we've worked very hard so that's something i'd like to see continue to grow and i know they'll have to be working very hard oh my gosh but well done on navigation [Laughter] um you know you um one of your last comments was about how nice people see all the kids coming together yeah you know the picture and i had a flashback and you gave me a tour of james what it would look like you know how desks are separated and like this is you know how far we've come right um so yeah great presentation thank you and i wish you all the best yeah i agree i feel like the community building you've been doing has been looks like unexpected work over the past two years

067but i feel like individually i totally agree that your answer carries questions like individually you've all had to climb that community building hills from nothing to where we are and then the next step is being come closer for elementary so i appreciate that thank you so um i want to thank everybody for their patience they thought exchange was i thought a while back and it was our first one and i'm sure tonight i'm very impressed with the response and moving away from the traditional survey to a more interactive uh model which seems proved to work very well so it's nice kind of the first step giving a high level overview of what we found in the survey and um a first step into us to start that conversation about you know what what's important to

068us how we face that first question is personal traditions we want to keep here with some new things we'd like to start here uh and the things we'd like to stop yeah so we're going to ignore this tutorial tonight and share that and on wednesday we'll be sharing the uh breakdown with our principles for building we've breakdown many ways he'll be using this information to make decisions on the school improvement plans or goals all those types of things really decisions there's some low-hanging fruit that we can cooperate right away for example a number of things kids said moving against next year student responses some examples there district bill the same thing be using this information over the summer in our conversation retreat to help us better decisions and even from this this will allow us

069to get what more refined uh questions can be asked you know it's one question a couple of questions that i'll share some of the results with tonight and on thursdays this is thursday's thoughts but we're going to send the whole thing all over to the community so we'll give them the breakdown and you'll have all the results so we'll spend some time on it it's pretty fascinating to see and just for those that aren't familiar with it may not have a chance to participate encouraging the future to do so um it's an opportunity for you to go in there and respond to a question um and then to write other comments on there that allows us to kind of see the validity of something someone makes comment uh 10 12 people respond to it it's

070all one star that that doesn't have a big follow-up to it whereas cream rises to the top we found that let's share tonight's our top responses on what our community thinks at least in this particular exchange felt were the most important things right now so it's really good stuff it's fascinating again um whole concept here is to get this conversation going as we move into our strategic planning next year we want um everybody's input help with a community plan for our district it's a great timing so it's a good first soft launch into that so uh turn out just to show here again by far our highest turn on participants 142. uh see even more thoughts were shared some people don't you don't have to share thoughts you can share as many as you want

071that ranges if you look at the ratings that's pretty incredible i think that's where this software this kind of mode really taps into people's ability to kind of participate and share what's important to them so almost a 100 000 of those that's pretty fascinating i want to thank everybody that was took the time to do this because it's a really important information to have for us here's the breakdown again really balanced you know community members obviously when we start talking msba things the building project have a higher number there it's more focused on the narrow school group still had 20 participants but that was great students high number that was our middle school high school students we did this during the school day so that we give them the opportunity to have take the time

072to participate so that's why that number's so high and so important to us and again the current caregiver and staff are over 50 responses i'll just go back real quick because you can see that that's the breakdown by um respondents you can uh can you you'll have a copy of this everything well is uh so this was an interesting question we wanted to you know this wasn't a major question but a very important one that we wanted to put into the sub question that you know get our best bang for a buck and we've talked a lot about belonging especially about clovid and you know so much depression and sadness out there we want to get a pulse for um what the community and students felt about the sense of belonging safe including the fast

073you know cornerstone we're really working spending a lot of time so these numbers are good it can be better and that's our goal is you know asking the same question next year and seeing the increase in these numbers you know uh are the respondents again almost a 900 here we are strongly strongly agree which is uh 66 percent the neutral category we'd like to see that move up to the agree strongly disagree and although they disagree and strongly disagree are lower numbers there are two any any numbers there we want so we wanted eight percent to be zero you know moving forward so um again we could break down and see we answered those questions in-house just to start focusing on that that's a really important one for us this is kind of a word

074cloud on some of the words that most common in this just to get an idea look at that so this is an interesting one here like the top three thoughts conversely receive the highest mark you can see the rankings one two and three uh continue emphasizing value of kindness and empathy we have the ability to help our students be more than scholars we can help them become responsible caring people that's huge and that's the whole child that we talk about that's so important and i think we need to model as adults not only as staff members but as community members so that one really stood out you can see a lot of people felt that way and that was number one so we'll be working on continuing that demonstrate respect for students and staff again

075another kind of respect one feelings one was number two which is very important so again we'll continue to work on that but we're going to share that with you and then uh shout out to our highly qualified teachers uh that's that's really great to see that in the community that was number three top choice and we want to keep our great teachers and keep supporting them so those are the top three then here are just some of the different ways to show some of the trends that were coming out and i think when you get this yeah so these are some of the um the generated themes that came up um the automatic intelligence that they pull those out sit through all those comments in a way that we cannot and it was determined that

076those were the most common themes out of the entire thought exchange so when you get your results your own report of it in the thursday thoughts you'll have this image and you can click any one of those and see every single thought and its rating that goes along with that yes i won't do that tonight you'll have the ability thursday to dig into these backpacks are important too middle school kids and their parents that was big there you'll click in you get to see that so a very fascinating way to do that uh so you can spend some time in there and seeing all the thoughts but labor day was another interesting one we had talked about that we start school before after liberty i would say it's close to 50 50 split so it's

077a good way for us to know right we want to tackle that in the future it's going to be a split down the middle you know what do we do with that so pretty good information i guess that was a question to share with us so here's some unifying things they do take a ven diagram you're not familiar with those you've got some outlying things on each end and what are the things that are kind of overlapping common in a lot of the things the responses these float into the top of those these are things that people in general pretty much in unity behind professional development was a big one for our staff uh deciding professional development inspires teachers to strengthen the content knowledge and craft motivation getting fired up getting excited again you know

078so point well-taken working on that that was great to know um going down we should continue to promote community acceptance for all safe harbor in which all students feel comfortable to learn and grow acceptance on all fronts from hp lgbtq plus developmentally those with special needs can all lead to happiness and successful understanding so there's an inclusion one and the communication is key again a goal of ours next year moving forward to even communicate stronger more openly and now the two ways to have feedback ongoing dialogue to build trust and transparency a lot of people believe that to be true the last one we must continue to invest our facilities with two brand new buildings um we need to ensure maintenance innovative and technological advances buildings need the system let's not waste our best good

079point as people may or may not know we started our first uh along that line first maintenance line item in the history of the schools 125 000 a year ago this year we've doubled up to 250 um on the school side to do just that take care of our things they break you fix them so that we're not going back to the town to always kill us out of different buildings all right so i just want to share that people that's good information to have and that we are following up on that so our next steps i give a little bit of insight into this at the beginning uh develop our strategic strategic plan to drive our school and district initiatives chair breakouts by building with principles for analysis consideration and share this community through

080our thursday thoughts and then i just welcome the community as you type justice and see this if anything sticks out to you that you want to have a conversation about with your teacher your principal office we're very open to that conversation um to make that district you know the best it can be that concludes my presentation so when it has um are you able to um see why those particular um like parent caregiver like what they want yes they can break it up separate students from parents and teachers and um the student belonging i'm just curious if who like answered those questions like because there's a lot of 114 percent strongly agree so just curious you know yeah so we'll have that detail here and that's one that's going on to the principles we're looking

081at the district level in general how many kids said they were stronger than the nurses and their parents make out like that so we'll do that dive into it make decisions and then and that's also very important we have all access to all so i'm just curious like if we have a community member that doesn't have students in school you know do what is their thought like do they think that you know what yeah what is the perception no that's i mean that was one of the questions i had was i'm not sure i i'm not sure what we're learning from that question without breaking it out the 14 22 those are unique participants yes yeah and then the other question i have is when it says key unifying themes do you know what criteria

082is being used to determine that these are unifying some versus theme that might so you have that yes so for example bill um he shared the labor day issue right so half of the people said love to start before labor day start after labor day a unifying theme is something that two groups of people who disagree on a particular topic all agree on so those unifying themes teams that bring groups that disagree on other topics together so those were pulled out for some of our common themes that you saw in that chart that you dived into so each of those had a category so is that when you think about how you're going to use the data is your priority unifying games i would say it depends on the building this is such a huge

083uh i mean it's a gigantic amount of information you need the principles to sort of digest it and break it out and ask questions and this is just the global picture so right now we know this will inform our strategic plan we know there will be more specific thought exchanges so in the future we may have a thought exchange like superintendent court had said specifically on items about the building project specifically on feelings about certain decisions we need to make and what's great about the thought exchange is if we do a survey when we get the survey results without fail we say we wish we would have asked this question now that we're analyzing it we wish we would have heard this the thought exchange allows everyone to give their actual unique opinions um about

084whatever the topic is so we really think that using this and finding our stride with it it's going to be really helpful to me everyone's voice is hard to make a really great decision my comment was about finding a stride i think um in terms of it was really neat and innovative and it's fantastic that we're using it um personally i thought there were like some thoughts that came out that i felt i wasn't qualified to give my opinion on like well you know if it was like a teacher-related pd piece i have an opinion on it but i'm not living that that's just not my you know i was kind of complying as a parent basically um and i know peter actually helped me figure out how to skip it basically like you could

085say or whatever it was but maybe i don't know maybe it's just me but maybe others felt um you know a little so if we could do kind of finding a stride then now i think now that we've done it once i understand that kind of stuff before you're working on it but if as we get to those more specific questions like things on school building project i feel like if we could do more soft ones even softball ones that would help the community parents everybody get a feel for how the system works more because there definitely is a learning curve because this is ten times better but yeah it's a lot to learn so that would be my thing that's not positive feedback yes but sometimes so we shouldn't be answering those questions i

086might just run the phone i don't i think are there any other districts that are using this kind of technology plans the team his presentation but then we'll share so good evening good evening and this evening we are going to present together just rebecca just dr horn just did her state of school's report and it's pretty amazing to sit and listen i feel like the havoli school has its own unique culture and i'm sure that cushing and warmer tech is jenkins feels the same way but that the information that was all presented we tried to give you a little spice so that wasn't all the same exact but we really worked hard to be consistent so last time as a team um we will be presenting our school movement plans together so um just some

087pictures from all of our schools our kids are really cute yes and don't you love that they all they all have simple things similar pictures new activities that they're all doing when we worked on our school improvement plans we did a two-year plan and we followed right along with the improvement plans for the district we worked we always worked together to try to make sure that our goals and all of our action steps fall under the district plan if you then look at our old personal goals you can see that those also fall under us our school improvement plans um in that we for instance we speak every monday morning um and that is just to calibrate for the week and be like okay this is what we're doing right um we keep saying we're

088gonna have coffee out we get to have some coffee but we have a lot to talk about every single monday morning um so the last piece is just we each have our old school pencil that we work on um we have each of our old school councils our school councils are made up of uh school staff as well as parents community representative and one of you sits on each of our um councils we are ensure that we have the same number of staff as we do parent involvement because it's important that we have a balance when we're making decisions that school council is a place that we can go to to make sure that we are discussing things that are happening within our schools and that is really when we talk about the goals for

089our school improvement plans um so the first pillar of culture and collaboration personalization dr long had gone through her state of the schools we've all done our state of schools and it you might have heard some very similar themes and you know mirrors of what's happening in each school so this is going to be somewhat of a repeat of what you've already heard but we do consistently do this across all of our elementary schools um we do you know to grow a safe and welcome environment for all students staff of the elementary level where everyone feels comfortable valued and included as equal members of the learning community we talked a little bit about our hsa and you know and data that we do use for that some of the other things that we have incorporated

090into all of our schools is our lit teams we may try to do a lot of some of the similar experiences across the elementary schools but also being understanding the unique cultures of each of our buildings and our communities our students have really worked very closely with dr uh jameel adams and um and like in cushing we have greg uh megan gregory who and aaron camden who worked very closely with us so each of us have staff that work with our students and it's really our students voices that come through for our lit teams and um are able to provide some um cultural experience or some understanding versus some education that's directly related to what voices are of our children it's been very unique and also really interesting to hear what's important to them and

091then be able to bring it across the schools we all have weekly wellness meetings that take place we meet with our on a weekly basis with our school psychologists our adjustment counselors um our nurses often time we'll have some unique or individual educators or support staff that might attend those meetings because what we're doing is we're talking about children and and really focusing and concentrating on the whole child how we can best meet those needs always making sure that those children might need a little extra support in some areas are on our radar while also celebrating successes we've been having with these students throughout the year we have each of us has members of a member from our staff who are on the social emotional school-based teams we have an sed team within our buildings

092and that also expands um into the district level and it really is communication back and forth on all levels so that we're promoting social emotional well-being and development of the students and that we're doing it whether we're a secondary or an elementary model paired data has been shared by our entire staff you know it's what was nice is when we received the pair data um our school adjustment counselors those who were responsible for really taking a look at it we all kind of disburse and talk specifically for children who might we might have you know had some flags on to address those needs for those kids right away having uh conversations with our grade levels um and then of course bringing it out to the greater population of our staff because even though this the

093data the survey has taken students from fourth and fifth grade ultimately they are their thoughts and their ideas and what they're they're sharing with us goes down to the k level and we want to make sure that if we're seeing children in fourth and fifth grade who are um maybe struggling or having challenges that we're also working with it on a caterpillar to avoid um maybe future problems so all about you know this is incorporated into all of our school improvement plans um and it really is something that as a team as an elementary team is first and foremost for us in our school adjust our school councils have been imperative in helping us to build these our goals towards underneath it's just something that's really important too we all have we each have it

094in our buildings again it's our own character our own culture of our buildings with that but it is something that really has brought our students together and staff and just re-engaged everybody so the second pillar is the culture of excellence and so i just want to reiterate that when you look at our individual schools you'll see that the language might be a little bit different but really the big idea the goals are similar so the goal is that we're going to continue to analyze a variety of data points to deepen our understanding of students individual strengths and challenges in order to meet the personalized needs of our students a win block work in conjunction with tier 1 instruction to show growth math reading that's measured by our start so um at each building you will

095see and you know we've talked a lot about this that we are working on adopting a new reading program which has been much needed upon time and just like rebecca said to try to continue to try to pull our elements together this is going to be a big hole together so that our all of our elementary students will have a similar experience regardless of which belief they're in when it comes to academics and specifically in reading and writing instruction for students we've also as you know adopted a new math program which um last year was the first year with that program which we were in a very unique lab here last year right so so we need to continue to review and calibrate that program and make sure that our teachers continue to just deepen

096their understanding of how the program works it happens into the massachusetts standards so we don't just because it's there and in place we don't want to forget about the need to continue to calibrate that we've also all are working on collecting feedback from our students we're all using the same universal screeners this year we added um universal screener for number sense which is a one-to-one interview with students i know we've all talked about that in our state of the schools it's exceptional it's a great great screener that gives really really interesting data on how kids think about problem solved math we're also using all the foundations we're all using foundations we're using those screeners um and i think um rebecca just talked about that earlier first day of schools we're all using integrity we're all

097using star um and symphony and we're all using things so we're all using the same scriptures at building we are using data meetings to ensure that each and every student's growth is closely monitored this year three of us participated in a testing training on the tiered system of support and how to um effectively use data meetings within our buildings um rebecca talked a little bit about this i keep referring to her because she did their state of the schools um but i found it very refreshing that in that training sometimes i get a little reluctant about going to these trainings without feeling overwhelmed and like oh my gosh there's so much we need to do but i really felt like you were in a great place so um we participated with um over 100 people

098from across the state and i really felt proud of how far along scituate is in that process but it was great because three of us participated and so we've had a lot of conversation about what that looks like in our buildings again to make sure that we are using data meetings and using data consistently across all buildings um and then of course the wind blocks we've talked a lot about that i know you've heard a lot about that again that's building that's a great way you're targeting students with specific learning goals what their needs are those groups are all flexible they're fluid they're changing all the time teachers are on board teachers have embraced it um and really seeing a lot of effective growth in that way and then um i will just say one

099last thing here is i know for me when i presented my state of schools um i was asked what does excellent look like what does that excellent look like i think we've all been asked that including superintendent burkhead and it's something that honestly i've thought a lot about and i do think about it every time we do a or a grade level meeting and i always come back to because i like to keep things simple and not too complicated to me it comes back to that every child gets what they need so that when they leave our elementary schools they are all meeting the standards and they are ready for sixth grade so when they enter gates everybody is on grade level and prepared to enter that next chapter so to me that is what

100excellence looks like and i feel like you're in a good place better recalibrate the better we can support going into the sixth grade when you know it's more equitable for all students and we can just support them because we have more common data points which is exciting thank you all for that i think last i know it was one year we had all the principles together this is great you just never really see you all forgot it or two-thirds of our principles oh thank you together um i guess the question i haven't i i'm totally fine with it i'm just i have to ask the question i know that there's focus on having students um meet the standards in grade five but what are we doing for those students who are outperforming the standards already

101how are we supporting that bin block is set up so that we are also helping um students who need to enrichment who are always ready meeting those standards go higher for instance and getting on this year we had a group of students who worked um in a chapter they were writing there were books that they could handle so i mean i can speak to that as well i had several teachers just in their goals for this year their goals focus on that students like those students that that need to go publicly on or need to accelerate public standards then i'll give you an example in second grade he has kids that were in a pre-test in the eureka mass program they on the pre-test they had scored 80 or higher so um they still participated

102in the tier one group they actually pulled from multiple classes so those kids work together and then they did a presentation and it was exceptional so they're working on the same standards right but they're going um kind of taking a step i further it and obviously we don't need to focus on all students but we do spend a lot of time and discussion on supporting those that are mostly so it's nice to hear that those students who may not need the supports but have the opportunity to to progress because i think at the elementary level um our educators are really experts in differentiation so you when you think differentiation you're often thinking intervention but that the differentiation goes from those children you know who might be in one level and those on the other and

103then expanding it's not as if we're trying to go to the next grade level we're really expanding and helping them think outside the box but our elementary educators are really that that's their forte that they're really really good at doing that so it is nice the wind blocks have really offered us an opportunity to do that and then you know even though it was an outside of school program and after school program to see you know situated education academies who are instrumental in helping to address a lot of those children are ready for more than they know maybe some others so that has been just a wonderful offering for us great a couple of progressions so please expand a little bit just on the process with like this pillow too because you're going through just

104having kids and musical and jewish hey focus on this one in the summer if you're getting started on the specific skills i know that our curriculum coordinators right now from working with our town library um they just recently sent us some emails in order to you know get our feedback on some of the initiatives and things that they'll be sharing with the public to help our students to continue their learning so people have been traditionally thought of as a summer slide where um you know you might there might be a loss of learning that's much a lot of learning just coming back yeah so um our curriculum coordinators work very closely with us to be able to help support that i also know that they work with our public librarians to again provide some extra

105support or ideas to help further their um their students you know their students experiences during the summer so there's that we have there are games and what's nice is like our math specialists have come up you know with with games and activities and things that are just things that parents can do to help to support the mathematical growth and learning of students it's the same thing with literacy and writing and they're just grateful ideas and snippets but um you know that's something that's been posted onto our webpage as well as shared you know wherever it needs to be and you know even during the summer um there's always somebody that might be able to be dealt with some questions so those are some of the supports we're already putting in place and we've already begun

106um getting everything ready for that last year of school when we shipped them off yeah it's a great interaction that even like at the house car last week there were a lot of stations in the cafeteria and i think my kids are on five things we can do some math programs and meeting programs and it's like what we can push that out is options from campuses right it's going to prevent that scientist right and i think it's really important for parents to understand that it is not it's not a hard thing it's not school it's not like sitting down and all of a sudden you know we were on the pandemic and we were teaching parents where they spent a lot of time doing a lot of the teaching but there's a lot of fun

107wonderful activities that can be done with children just on the fly that's going to help to support their learning so we want to also make sure that families understand don't have to be hard push for that so it's not a big part um why don't we also talk about just the conversation that happens as fifth graders complicated before the communication back with students coming up we're just feedback in the first couple of months you know he said that our new sixth graders are doing interesting or uh like we go away putting it like here's some things that we want to make sure that we focus on make sure that as kids friends middle schoolers in high school yeah they're prepared to succeed in this program so are you talking about just the transitional conversations you

108have prior to them getting to the sixth grade yes um that is actually something that all four elementary schools do on a regular basis for a coordinated principal meeting with lesnia and the school adjustment council counselors over there but they have standard meetings with our grade levels um and we start those conversations you know i can speak from pushing that where you know we'll have our our google doc and you know you've got the initials of the children and maybe some just something to keep forward but those conversations occur naturally probably starting may is when we start having those conversations we talk about um you know not only the academic aspect but we're also talking about some of the social emotional needs of our students and some of the students we you know are there

109some good parents help some positive relationships with some of the things that we're doing and although we don't necessarily talk about specific teams or teachers we always try to make sure that we share with um with the gates team you know what are some what are some of the instructional strategies or the types of personalities that a child can be successful with so those are already ongoing for children for um you know children who might be on ieps um those are going to be discussed in an annual meeting as well um and our school adjustment counselors often have those personal um conversations or meetings with families and maybe with these teams so those of you know for students who might have a lot of anxiety had students who've gone up to gates and visit with

110our school adjustment counselor our school psychologist and family and in principle his team they've been really great about doing everything that we can to help the comfort and transition from the elementary safe harbor of elementary to um gates which is it's just a big school with a lot a lot more kids okay thank you um i just want to comment that it's just so you know there were many years that we started the conversation was why aren't all the elementary schools doing the same so it's so great to see them for you here presenting how much plans are mechanical yet you still have the individual outdate of each school um pushing i okay thank you so much [Music] all right so thank you for having uh me tonight uh to share the gates middle school

111school improvement plan um this plan was developed by our school council so i wanted to take a minute to thank lauren vitale elizabeth horn julia swindler julie dumas meredith nelson celine bowden val baker nancy driscoll jay gillespie amy heffernan mike long tammy rundle and my assistant principal sam lesnian uh we began drafting this plan very beginning of the year uh and what we did was we took the two district pillars here uh the culture of excellence and the culture of personalization and collaboration and we said what egg gates uh do we want to do what is the work we want to do to further the work of our school that align very nicely with the pillars of the district so our first goal that we drafted and came up with was by june of this

112year we will have examined and restructured our systems and past practices aimed at promoting excellence and improving learning and growth to meet the diverse needs of students and so we looked at various systems and structures that we have in place we collected some data to say what's working and what's not working and then we made refinements to just make it even better so the first process we looked at was our response to intervention process we used the presentation delivered by special education department special education director dr michelle philbert and we said how do we take our existing rti process and make it better we worked this year with our faculty every member of our school is a part of a response to intervention team and our goal through this process is to design interventions academic

113interventions social emotional interventions to target growth in a specific way over the years we have focused more on the process and less on the outcomes and this year we really took it to the next step and said what are the outcomes that we want 82 students as a result went through the rti process in grades six through eight and i don't have necessarily summary data because each intervention is different because each area for growth is different but we have developed kind of a response intervention bank of resources so that next year when we're working with an individual student we don't need to start from scratch because each student is starting in one place kind of moving to the next the next system we looked at was our ela and math literacy program and we wanted

114to provide more individualized support to students who needed extra support in both literacy and math and this was the topic of our school mini presentation in march so if you recall back to there we had our literacy and math specialists discuss that we adopted a new progress monitoring tool this year called ixl ixl provides us kind of a snapshot of where students are with the grade level standards when they take the assessment itself we are right now in the process of looking at at our year-end data but at a quick glance every student has made progress in the areas of math and ela the 128 students that were part of this program made growth in their ela and their math and on average all of our students are either at grade level or exceeding rhythm

115um on the average so that particular piece is nice because we have not had a program in place to progress monitor and um that has helped us with conversations that that data has helped us to say what do students need what small groups do we need to put in place and when can we provide students with that extra support to kind of close the gap to the best of our ability the last piece for our systems targeting excellence was our adoption of the acceleration academies and we worked with the district to come up with 12 different acceleration academies that we could offer at gates ranging from spanish culture and heritage all the way to math and robotics and we had over 70 students participate over the course of the year we're very grateful that we

116could offer this we're very grateful to the staff that ran these programs and we know that these were effective just due to attendance but also some of these workshops to do a creating a post assessment to see what are our kids doing and i think um mr along your question of how are we also not just supporting students that need to kind of accelerate their learning to meet the expectations but how do we help those students who already are here and kind of go to the next piece these were a really great vehicle for that and these allowed us to say okay you're here we want to provide you something to push you even further and so 70 students took advantage of this and we're hopeful that we're able to offer some form of this

117in the future in terms of the culture of collaboration our goal was by june 2022 we will have strengthened our connections with students and families to improve their sense of belonging by increasing opportunities for collaboration and engagement the first piece that we did was we created a student council since we've been in the new building we've had all different ways for students to participate and take on leadership roles but we wanted to go back to a very old school student council so we had 80 students two from each home room that met monthly to share what their classmates were talking about to share their concerns to share their ideas um and then to implement and kind of come together to create some of those solutions for that so we've been very happy to have that

118back that has provided kind of a voice and then has allowed us to say all right we can call upon the student council to see what their opinions are and that has helped us to kind of make some changes and to increase that collaboration between students and our school we also have created targeted opportunities for family in the community to be involved in our school we introduced our coffee with caregivers program each month between 10 and 20 parents and community members and caregivers have come to discuss certain topics we always have a theme that we like to talk about and then just open discussions so we've had conversations most recently just about transition and what does it mean to transition to a new school what does it mean to transition from grade to grade was

119it meaning to transition from a you know 12 year old to a 13 year old and these were kind of we each month had a different speaker and the speaker was and someone within our building or within our district we had jameel adams come and do uh kind of an overview of the dei work that we're doing and to hear parents and hear um caregivers share their thoughts and ideas into that uh we have had uh anne marie galvin from situated facts come to talk about uh just different opportunities that kids have different things that we as adults in their lives can do to keep them healthy and safe um and that has been you know just a great way of getting people into the building to collect feedback and share some of the work

120that we're doing with students our parent expert panels which we discussed at our state of the school piece was we have asked parents and caregivers and community members to tell us who they are because we need lots of people to do good work at gates so um we are asking people to share their passions their occupations and then we're calling upon people um to come into our classrooms and serve as experts or serve as you know people who can kick off and then make organic chemistry excitement as a real life piece and so that we will continue to use that and continue to bring in as many people from the outside into our schools as possible to open doors and expand possibilities we've worked with our pto to create twenty thousand dollars worth of cultural

121enrichment opportunities for our students um and we're very grateful to the parents uh who have stepped up and done great things with our pto because they provide wonderful opportunities for our kids within the classroom um we've expanded our extracurricular offer offerings our interest-based clubs um and we've also had different parent caregiver workshops focusing on student anxiety focusing on executive functioning among other topics that we've offered at night to bring people in and to hear kind of what their concerns are and to offer our support and partnering to create good kids uh finally we implemented some school-wide challenges uh some some not challenges some tactics uh to engage students and families um and so we kind of phrased them as challenges and we challenged our staff at the beginning of the year to make sure that

122every single member of our school community got a welcome back call by the first day of school and i'm proud to say that 100 of our students and families got a welcome back paul um in terms of february to october to february we said we wanted 100 of our students to receive um some type of acknowledgement of their achievement or of their efforts or of their character through writing a postcard so we're proud to also say that 100 of our students received a postcard from a staff member acknowledging something that that student should be proud of and finally um our we challenged our parents and our families we wanted 100 of our staff members to get a personalized message from a parent uh or a caregiver acknowledging their efforts after a long year and 100

123of our staff did get a personalized message and so i think our idea of really finding ways to bring people together through collaboration um through students staff families everyone uh it's been a really really great year of gates um it's been a really great collaborative process working not only with our school council and our school but kind of connecting it to all of the great work that's happening across the district and in your backup package anything on here that is a hyperlink you can see the actual artifacts and data just explaining kind of where we are with the process and this allows us to then say for next year you know yes we may have accomplished something but what is the next step of that we're excited to start thinking about our right hand here

124now how do we get to here next year so that is our school improvement plan for 2021-2022 um so thank you for your participation i have to say i just love this idea of getting to know the community and then calling on them to contribute i feel like that's me that epitomizes the equipment right now i'm wondering mr b what can the school committee do in this upcoming year to support that expansion of that sort of work that you're doing what do you need from us and i think what we need is just your continued support as we work on developing curricula that's where it starts what are our state standards where does that begin and then how do we make this uh how do we provide authentic opportunities for learning within our building and

125so kind of that idea that we're collecting data we care about safety we hear about achievement we care about growth all of that is absolutely essential and i think just the idea of continuing to say and how are we making this authentic and engaging and meaningful for kids is a great question to be asking everyone that talks about teaching and learning because when kids are engaged when kids make meaning from from their experiences whether it's reading a book or hearing an expert speak that's where their learning is going to take place thanks um it kind of applies to quality problems because i feel like when i hear an improvement plan if something was wrong you're trying to improve on it but you know like i almost it should be like continued because everybody's doing such

126good work and you continue to do such great work so and we can always get better that's true i just commented uh i guess personally you benefited from the um improvement plan or things put into place directly our family has so i just want to i think that the culture of the school is just second to none and i think that that includes students and families feeling as if they're a part of that school so i want to thank you for with that i hope that that can continue and the future has appears thanks very much thank you sorry you know i could make it for a certain reason or that's going with these uh has just been a great window into a lot of things you have going on and i mean your point

127about the assembly students and the c programs with you guys that's great it's in something beyond your hsp or yelling staff okay it's a great program to be able to if it's excited to be a part of their schools that they're excited about that some of those might also you know the park fans or you know whatever it may be it's it's a great i opportunity that's going to uh give first of all the the learning needs i mean last week you know like 73 kids around the junior society and it's a great number to be able to practice i mean that's still an amazing percentage of the number of kids that not only qualified but were chosen by the staff to you know be a part of our program um it's really just a

128great testament to what's going on so thank it helps it's just a good program it seems to just hit all the parts um okay so uh anybody else at the end of the final thoughts here hello again so we also at the high school made our school improvement plan with our school council so i'd like to thank parents jackie samaritan nelson amy tarsal and patty thompson students victor velgar delena gaber hewitt molly ryan and our educators kathy hall alvarado zoe ryan and patrick for their work this year this is our plan that spans two years as well and i think that a lot of the work in here won't be new to you and i think that um this is a two-year plan so we're really excited to and the district pillars so goal number

129one is to increase educational um under excellence to increase access to a participation in advanced coursework and advanced placement opportunities this is our work with mass insight grant with the ap bhs stem expansion that we did and as i said in the state of the high school a couple weeks ago we have come to the table to look at our practices to look at our handbook to look at our policies and to get kids excited about and interested in ap that's been year one so as we move forward it's to start digging into the data who's taking ap how do our scores look how do we increase the access to all of our students across the demographics and to give them the support and um structures to take the ap courses and the courses that

130are right for them and that they want to take so this includes items like participating in summer bridge programs for students our mock exams um having the group the steering committee work with our teachers having our teachers work with educators across nationally and professional development and also monthly meetings and to spread just awareness about what ap means for colleges and universities for students in high school for the balance the whole picture around this area being appropriately challenged so again we're really interested in the data from year one who's who's registered for next year what our scores look like and then being able to follow those trends through the next couple of years with mass insight the second goal is to prepare students for 21st century careers through high interest concentrations of coursework extracurricular work based

131and service opportunities so these are pathway designations that we're looking to develop in global studies business health and human services or biomed biomedical and then environmental stewardship which is our engineering model here and over the next two years this year we're looking to pilot local studies in business and continue to develop our stem areas so that over the next two years we are offering these pathways to students that includes developing how do students learn about these tracks starting in freshman year exposing them to different areas being able to have those those inroads into the floor areas if they so choose and if they don't knowing that that's okay as well but if if these are areas that we know our kids are interested in there are also high high target areas for the mass workforce

132we want to prepare our students to be competitive and prepared in these areas should they choose to do that for college that this work has included our department chairs teachers working in our compass group that's a team of teachers that works together to move the goals of the high school forward it we've connected with other high schools who are doing pathways and really looking at our our paperwork who tracks our students how do we mentor them through this program and then what what comes of that and that really is about that designation upon graduation so this is in progress um again starting through the freshman advisory we want to have that that whole plan articulated so that we can add that to the program of studies to roll out two and then to pilot two

133of us our third goal is under collaboration and personalization to support and motivate students to achieve their highest potential through individual flexible and structured educational and support experiences so these are the areas where we're really looking to target that individualized personalized experience for every student whether they're going to a four-year college two-year college military straight to career we want them to have a plan we want them to be supported to do that that's from our highest accelerated learner through our struggling learners who are you know it's a true fee to make it to graduation one area that we're looking forward to starting in the fall is is working with our counseling staff to develop a curriculum scope and sequence this is an area that we've identified that we want to have more clarity and transparency

134out to our families and our students to know what our counseling staff does and when be able to share that so we have those supportive resources and that they build through the four years of high school this year we underwent a change in our h-block advisory time where we're using the software to individualize that experience for students and teachers i give students and teachers the opportunity to to schedule in with a teacher or to schedule a student that you need to see so for three of our days of the week teachers are able to do that students are able to do that um more efficiently get the time that they need together with groups of learners or one-on-one with individual students for extra help and support or with a whole class if they're looking to

135extend or engage with the group our academic mentoring programs are split up so that the needs are are met both at the 9th and 10th grade level which is really about self-advocacy and self-efficacy in the learning process and then 11th and 12th really expanding or what are your goals and how can high school support you to achieve your next goals so leveraging relationship building targeted interventions and personalized goal setting we also had c academy offerings here at the high school that helped our students expand their skills in areas like had um and science fair we have not participated recently in the regional science fair our students started that process and they're excited to continue uh to do that and to compete next year at the regional science fair and then really coordinating and promoting our

136supportive structures the nhs tutors we just had 89 students inducted into the national honor society this spring we have an after-school intervention called lift learning is fun together for freshmen um and and then again our age block so being able to have a plan for every student and being able to support every student to achieve their goals this is also where pair falls within the program and and our goals we've been working with pair over the past several years and our teachers are really interested in moving to how we um own that data and be able to use informed decisions in the classroom so we've been using it at that higher level that pd to faculty the the data back strengths and weaknesses of what we can do on the whole school model and uh

137would like to along with our our middle school and elementary college start to really implement that at a more deeper and individual level next year as well and then finally um goal floor is also collaboration and personalization that all stakeholders will work to create a safe welcoming environment relationship building where all students staff serve achieve invest and learn those are the highest high schools core values so our objectives are to coordinate and leverage our groups and activities so that we build one cohesive school culture and to increase the two-way communication between administration and students staff parents and community members so this includes opportunities between our boston resident and scituate resident students and families our school council felt very specifically that we wanted to call this out because we did historically have stronger connections between our

138families boston residents into resident families and through more formal processes and when that became that um more organic it felt like some of the relationships fell apart because people didn't know how to and where to and when to forge um those connections so we want to be really intentional about offering those opportunities to bring parents together to bring students together whether it's eighth grade orientation eight to ninth grade or um expectations night that we build in the way that we want to do this next year is to build in opportunities within the social events and the school events that we already have scheduled so that it's not an add-on but that it's an added feature to the to the events that we're already offering in addition we work very hard at outreach to our staff

139so so administration to staff administration to students like the student advisory council i met with a couple groups today we're talking about starting a club's council with representatives of each of our 38 clubs for next year just like athletic director kane has the captain's council that he's working towards um and really just continuing that that culture building and that relationship building coming out of wolverine students uh we're here and then um you know also doing that with our caregivers having those opportunities for in-person conversations getting information out to families and being strategic and deliberate about that we all know we can be inundated with with information across schools and across the district so we want to be very intentional about the work that we do here um and transparent with the work that we do

140and again um just as principal beatty just mentioned that outreach to families that's something that we also did here at the high school and we want to be respectful of parents not necessarily getting seven or 14 calls on the first day of school because the high school structures are a little bit different but that every uh student and and teacher is able to make that connection in the starting peaks of school and that they understand how to get in touch what the expectations are where to go for support and that everybody has a shared ownership of that um that welcome to school that that sharing of information and how to find here at the high school that includes our club fairs that includes our counseling staff that includes our transitions into ninth grade we work

141closely with the counseling staff counselors to counselors the special ed team eighth grade to ninth grade and the administrators to make sure we have a smooth transition um i'm not sure where this falls perhaps in the district um i guess district land strategic plan going forward but no there's been just there's always discussion every year we talk about where mcas falls relative to our district and i couldn't have asked to print all the other principles the same question um and i don't know the right answer just want to throw it out there we don't another school improvement plans maybe that's not where it goes has any reference to mcas know that obviously the goal of all of our schools is to make sure that our students need grade level standards does that mean that they

142successfully or have successful scores or on mcas or is it something that we don't necessarily utilize as part of our school improvement plan i'm not sure you need to answer that um i'm not sure if it will come out later but again every year we talk about mcas the results but we don't talk about how it fits into our strategic plan or our school improvement plan so i'm just not sure how much focus there should be on them and if so where does it fall into each level of our education you don't have the answer i just thought of it now if you were the current city sure i can say at the high school we know that the buck stops here right so we're graduating students all of our our grades are supporting through

143to completion in 12th grade we look at our mcat scores every year i think that the conversations we've had around educational excellence and kind of where's the data is our next step is really to start sharing that information more regularly and clearly that's to our staff that's with our students and families being able to say here's where we stack up here's how we performed here's where we're looking to grow and what we're looking to focus on with our department chairs that's work that we plan to do as part of educational excellence and moving our whole building and district forward whether it's in the plan or not no i think that ultimately probably the answer that i wanted to hear which is that is that everything we're doing is is hopefully ensuring that we're working towards

144successful passing or whatever whatever the scores are on end caps to that we yes had since 2018. um it's the percentile rating of each school yes so what happens is every school in the state is gets a percent of revenues from 1 0 starting again in this next round of accountability so it's a lot to sift through like sipping water from the firewood but one thing for sure that is solid to the fat for each school i'm curious to hear um so um yeah so when we started talking about the pathways you were looking at um there are innovation pathways grants in the state there are high high interest areas and so we wanted to look at the high interest and high growth rate jobs in massachusetts specifically and help prepare our students for those

145careers and for postgraduate study in those areas if that's what they choose we also wanted to do what we do best in scituate and we wanted to be true to our school and our programs and so for example we don't just have engineering or manufacturing which is one that the state is really interested in we have environmental stewardship through the lens of engineering because that's what's special about scituate and they're still going to get the exposure the practice um and the application in engineering to be able to go and pursue that um and whether that's our kids participating in robotics to design something that meets a need or a device or our biology kids and our engineering kids working together to identify um an issue in the community with regard to ecology and then they're

146designing and developing something that then they go out and they use together so in these four areas we determined that there was interest in scituate uh interest with our students and our staff there's in there's high growth area in these floor areas in that we would be able to offer our students some sort of recognition for concentrating and focusing and going above and beyond in that area so does every student have to do this absolutely not i still believe in the you know liberal arts um the general list all of those things and that's okay for kids but if you come in and you say i want to go into business i want to go into medicine for example our kids will go into this and learn that medicine isn't just being coming in md

147there are so many careers and so many pathways and so if we can link them up with the club for example the future healthcare workers of america that just went and had three straight days of meeting professionals across a number of different careers then that's it's that exposure it's saying if you're going to do community service as a situation for graduation let's do it in this area that you're really excited about and partner that so it's giving them internship opportunities capstone projects and really just a scope and sequence of coursework and and other volunteer of work experience outside of the classroom to say at the end yes you've earned this credential you've gone above and beyond in this area and we can say with confidence across those four areas that you are a standout scholar

148in global studies in business or in the two-step areas we've seen it over the years but i think it's great that we've been back up with what we do and the service and the student exchange tips that we have just an exposure for our students is great one of my favorite things every year is watching the students walk into regulation watching the cabs because it's not just use a local room going but some of the creativity that's in there it's just it's great for watching you can see get a little bit of a of what they what they've done in their education now you know congratulations giving the staff also you know all of these students according to last week um it was a great um graduation um congratulations to all of them um i

149think i expected this every time i see you but um as we talked with the different programs in the schools and the caring as much of that on my network that i know his friend will really help because that's continued but in college because i haven't really taken this class for the end of their career a little bit more or if i had a little bit more earlier in my life you're coming and i know there's a lot of work going to that but hearing feedback on how that impacts either we've been playing a curriculum maybe here at some point um i'm probably going to ask this poorly so i apologize but when you talk about the apa um working your first goal is there any any talk about okay we have ap classes we

150have big state but either kids that don't feel that they're ready or hard to appoint them to take an ap class we look to take either some of the rigor or some of the process that you do in ap classes and bring it down into the honors and cp level classes and you know you can see ways to maybe help those kids get a little bit more prepared in the next year or when they recover absolutely so some of the things that we have done is looked at our course titles and our course offerings to align with what uh desi calls advanced coursework and we want all of our students to have a minimum one advanced course before graduation so that's part of that some of our operating math courses counted to that um we're

151adding that idea of that three ap with some of the younger courses and the bridge programs and exploring what are ways that we can give access to all students to this idea of this college this is college level work um in in an ideal world every student could have the opportunity to take one-on-one classes and so that's what we're looking for what is your passion what is your interest what is your skill set and then how can we develop that in you it doesn't have to be 780 courses but if there's something that you're interested in and passionate about that you can dive deeper in school we want to help you be able to when the representatives here it's just obvious her esteemed situation just felt like it was a good partnership from that end

152too so i think that's worthy too because it has to be you know a good fit probably something that um want to give some structure so that's good for that thank you it's time for them to share their story too yeah so you know all the great things that they're doing in the programs that you developed and that they share out to families and students all right if there's no other comments or questions i'll entertain a person or at least all in favor all right thank you [Music] so i did get some feedback from a few committee members on uh well some people were excited to take on some roles maybe and others were kind of open minded to end so we've got advisory so peter was our advisory phase on i'll update this document

153as well uh okay so advisory was peter for 2041 2022 does anybody feel passionately about the liaison for the advice um this year i think off without blocking this kind of people but um i think it's helpful to understand the level of commitment yeah it means committing i will say that that level is minimal um yeah so this is the advice this is the liaison to the town advisory committee in reality i just went uh when uh superintendent and dr dutch um reviewed the school budget i went as a supportive of them other than that i didn't necessarily choose to attend although i could get all the invitations um that was it it was pretty easy but now that everything's kind of back flowing i think there was like covered jam up with you know

154virtual meetings and i just want to make the comments say yeah like let's do let's try to attend and then report out whatever transpired okay yes okay here we go here's our list um select yeah um financial forecast so peter was on this past year peter expressed an interest to remain i was open committee of anything in town it dictates the budgets to the town and to the schools um it takes a long time this is this is a heavy lift this big uh i don't know if i'd be like six sixes five to six times throughout the year as we run the budgets um they're not long meetings but they're fairly frequent as the budgets are being dictated it takes a long time to get comfortable i think i've done this committee for three

155years and i get a little bit more comfortable every year so i'd like to remain on just because of the knowledge that i've built i also think it's important we do get one school community it's one vote on that committee i think it'd be helpful to have someone else if mike wants to do it to potentially join and just not be a voting member i think i mean anyone can attend those meetings they're not necessarily they're not that publicly their public dreams are not really they're not attended there's a couple of folks who do attend um very important so i i would actually ask i think it would be great to have mike or anyone else who wants to join and we'll just notify the committee that we're going to have there please have one

156vote that's okay and finally if you guys would yeah i know like five or six years ago make sure that we've shared questions as well sure janice you were on public building in the past did you ever have a public ability i'll do that one okay okay maybe now yes all right terry unless somebody really wants to take that position all right um foreign yeah i do feel like there's not supposed to be good because you're learning that like you learn about the town side i think it's interesting just kidding i i don't i'm actually okay all right i know we have one second all right recreation very good i like being on creation it's a good community interesting i'm happy to stay on record less company it's a good um i think recreation you

157know it's important and it's certainly ties to students and families great master plan advisory that's i'm on charter review okay because i am um and that that will be also kind of hopefully wrapping up so um anybody want to take sbf i have expressed interest in finance today and i've noted that it kind of goes about financial foreign all right the ddi um this kind of went on and on i don't i have human eye it was off and then i was kind of just like is it i guess the question is do we want right i think something that you have well here's i think i i don't know if it's a sub video yes um [Music] why we'll make sure we have a support or is it zoomer in person it's going to

158be okay janice needs to stay on because she's on the subcommittee to select the opm so um so just a question um why do we not have cc on braces we have less core yeah just curious what we can so um cities um okay council so um i reached out about high school hi but i don't know what just for consistency okay school council i could express with high school interest i i i would do pushing and gates but if somebody feels strongly about either of those all right uh you said you'll stand one time mike all right so you're required that's right so that's it i'll just check on that phase onto sister cities and add that and then so i'll entertain a motion to approve our subcommittee liaison assignments for 28-23 a second

159um next we will just discuss our committee meeting dates for summer um we're looking at july 25th august 15th august 20th and june 11th right the last days seven which two members are involved i don't even i mean all right so i'll entertain a motion to improve the summer meetings um and uh before we move on is relation to scotland i did talk to um dorothy pressler at mass about doing a summer retreat they called the workshop or she retreat and she's kind of said that jim hart would be a person for summer so he didn't come back for it but i'll be like trying to coordinate that check what our goals reflections those sorts of things going forward um okay so moving on we are going to do our leadership report superintendents thank you

160topic here is to talk about the business practice director position specifically talking does the increasing process put some light on appreciation for dr news but also how we came about hiring him and where we stand in the future i think a lot of people agree that it's kind of an outstanding job so if you don't know doc such as the retired superintendent uppercase tech if you want to see the awards he's blind things he did under that and there's leadership there so recruiting him and getting here was a huge challenge for us for me personally he was able to do that as a retiree in legislation reported the government's state of emergency the last few years was able to do so um under that exemption which um the law exempted limits for hours and money

161that retires to make that has since expired and so we had to post the position as a process um i had done a lot of research on it obviously it's a huge position for us there's just a shortage of qualified or any certified business uh managers and directors out there three other schools were posting a similar time for us um we had seven candidates we were certified one had to repost because they had no qualified candidates um so we did that and we had one applicant and that was not not certified as a business virtually had no app so fortunately there's a process called the critical shortage waiver that you can go through which you talk to the state about we've looked you can't find anybody we have somebody and i will be honest dr

162dutch has been was being recruited at the time by the districts i'm working on um so we put that through the state a few weeks passed and we finally got a response that um we were approved for that so dr dutch is a one-year extension so he'll be with us next year i wanted to make that clear that that was the process that's kind of how we've gone year to year just to highlight some of the things i think that in two less than two years on the job he's been able to his leadership be able to bring us navigating the very comprehensive labor-intensive msba process that we're moving through away from analysis transfer that the transparency we brought to the budget i don't think would argue that top priority when i got the job

163that the budget needed to be more transparent i don't think you'd find a more transparent process than to be out here in situate thanks to bob for that uh revitalizing capital projects many that were standing outstanding and prior administrations have approved and haven't acted on you're going to see a lot of action this summer it's covered and lack of supplies and people working out catching up to that patiently working through that um like it's doing a great job so we're going to start seeing some action for example the ice blocker project it's going to actually start weeks uh some of the other projects that the other schools the jenkins and that public talk are going to be starting so we'll be excited to share on that again that's a lot of work it's been done

164huge win for our community is the elimination of fees again one of the top things that i heard when applying for this job getting into the fees uh governor of the kindergarten fee which is kind of inequitable for our families in the community this year any student i mean the family that participates in athletics will benefit from not thank you we're getting there two things a popular chip huge influence and lastly i mentioned this tonight starting out our maintenance program 250 000 next year we'll have to actively um keep our buildings up to speed and be the best so going on extremely proud of work that he's led so two things i wanted to do tonight you know that we have a great one amidst that fortunate to have that process that we have that

165he won't be here uh much longer than the year and we're actively recruiting so if anybody knows somebody that's a certified business manager you know we'll be looking we can't keep answer any questions well thank you dr duxburg mine it's unfortunate that there's a shortage but somehow you are benefited this way take it for now all right uh next assistant superintendent frisco thank you for having me um and i want to thank all of you for extending me such great um the kindness that everybody is showing is absolutely wonderful everybody um what i have for you today is a presentation on what we looked at in a district when it comes to the moon process for the following fall yeah okay so if you have if you have questions as i'm going through you're welcome

166um to ask um so i'm just going to give you a quick guide of all the things that we look at it is urgent that we are flexible and attentive to our enrollment during this spring season because we have to give all kids what they need period um so the first thing that we do is we look at our our current equipment by school and by class and we project that those students will be coming back next year that's the assumption a big part of employment is making sure that kindergarteners or pet families of kindergartners register so we can have accurate kindergarten networks that starts in about january but there's a lot of kindergartners and those registrations typically come trickle again um there's also um the the caregiver registration process is something that doesn't shut

167down there's never like a deadline for that and that's for all actually the next group of students that we look at are students who are new to scituate so throughout the school year we have students who are new residents to scituate however we also have at this time of year our boston resident students that if we have available seats through our medpo program we add students to certain grades based on the application process process netcode where we have students and the thought process so what do we do to decide and support principles as we break up the different classes as we decide additional supports the first thing i think you saw that today was so nice to see all four elementary principles sitting together using words like calibration we want to ensure consistency in elementary

168schools across the district and sometimes we may reallocate resources as necessary to support student success so that means it's our job as district leaders to look district-wide at the resources that we have and prioritize based on and how we find that out is not only simply through enrollment numbers it's through communication with principles it's through our beginning middle and end of your data and it's ongoing communication through our district leadership teams the second thing that we look at is we prioritize key to three class sizes and i think some of you have heard us use this phrase before in k to three you learn to read that is the foundation of everything that for literacy and you heard we use hegerty and foundations of our adopting and repeating program that is the core to success

169in all other areas so pay to three you learn to read grades four enough that you need to learn so it's very important that if you are a student and you are not meeting grade level expectations we are utilizing those specialists that we are so lucky to have in scituate our reading specialists our literacy specialists our math specialists and that was one of the things i was most amazed with when i came to scituate that you have so much support for all students it isn't just if you're on an iep you get that support you were saying here by how allocated our specialists across the district and every student deserves that chance to take those jobs so thank you and the third thing is we need to prioritize tiered interventions and supports specialized teachers so

170it is very important not just to say let's have more tier one instruction if we have students who need to bridge that gap we need to make sure our principals are using their width blocks are using other additional tier 2 3 supports for those specific students and the key takeaways something that we need to talk about if the concern is class size and is that our goal obviously we've received a lot of comments about is the philosophy changing or what does this look like it is important that if our goal is to have small class sizes which it is right now we make sure that we are adding that as a part of our strategic plan and that we are planning structures throughout the district that will affect our decisions and initiatives um the second

171thing is we need to make sure that we focus on students so parents are encouraged to share their child's specific struggles and strengths with both teachers and principals so we can ensure that supports are targeted for their child's specific needs and i heard someone you might have been peter said you know there's a lot of talk about supporting the students who are most needy i would argue that if a student is needs that push to be above grade level and they're bored at school that is a student who is at risk we need every single student to be engaged and that's what our special is for and that's where we need to have those conversations with teachers and principals so that we can make those decisions for each student there was also a question about

172special education services depending on class sizes does that change special education services absolutely not special education services and accommodations are dictated by a child's i.e their non-devotion um if you receive a special education service that is what you get um so it is really important as district leadership that we have flexibility with supports and our key is to monitor enrollment and conversations with those principles as we move forward into the summer and bill has a couple uh he'd like to add and answer a couple questions your questions let's put a pre-statement together because i think practice conversations haven't happened the size students in the fourth grade had also followed up by questions on kindergarten numbers at cushing i also followed up the numbers by lc plc and so uh healthy single approached i wanted to

173answer some of those common questions that we'll have buses how do you get these questions answered what's the best way to do it so i'd like to make it crystal clear first of all that my personal philosophy district velocity as mr striskel had said the small class sizes that are consistent across elementary schools with a special focus on our ksb learnings what do i mean by that i mean by that when we came here there were certain schools that had 15 and 16 and 17 students where another small school would also get 20 22 23 the average looked good 18 19 but some students really had an advantage really low class size how does that happen what happens when you get one class that exceeds the average it goes 24 25 and you pop a

174teacher there to get that down to 15 16 but you don't have a coordinated plan for the next few years when those kids graduate where is that extra teacher so that created that problem so we've done a very good job hiring that out and our numbers across our grid and all the schools um pretty darn good they're low um again just one hour i think otherwise the numbers are about extremely low or short and our focus again kindergartens every year when they come in we look at those numbers and they're very fluid the question came up is why was this product not a budget question it's not a staffing question we allocate staffing during the budget season to accommodate our needs have the staff question a way to allocate them that's what we've been working

175on so it's not a budgetary issue right now it's an allocation of staffing as mr spelling explained we have a very thorough enrollment process where we look closely with our principals to ensure that we're able to meet the needs of every student every classroom so like we ask our parents to do is to speak to the principals and teachers first about their individual child for example in this case next year my child is going to be the class of 24. what's that look like how is his or her needs going to be met whether they have an iud or they're an accelerated learner or a solar employee we can answer those questions that's the first step to do um so we don't necessarily use a class size number of people like what's the magic number

176there is no magic number you start getting into magic numbers once we hit that number you have the higher snap he may not need it this is an example of that again that's that's responsible um so just basing it solely on a number and don't believe it's prudent so what we do is we don't necessarily use a class size number that's certainly important to look at not the only indicator we look at the total number of adults able to support learning in our classrooms and their ability to meet each student's needs so again scituate is probably is well in my 27 years has the most supports that i've ever seen especially at the elementary one of the few districts i've seen is the adjustment concern every building a school psychologist in every building that's great

177coordinators at the elementary level not common um and being ela and math missions special educators professionals not just the classroom teacher it's a coordinated support system that the principals work with the teachers to ensure that every student's needs are met that process did take place in fact i wanted to know that if i was going to stick my neck over here and say we're going to have two possibly unless the numbers change we have two teachers in this case i met with mrs this ward principal ward and dr bolbert we went over every single kid in that class i wanted to know how their needs are going to be met how which kid was going to be supporting that i got more confident to say every kid needs to be met like full confidence that

178trust me we're going to meet those kids needs if i took that step we met last friday with our very kids make sure that yeah right and we'll do that with every every large group parents want us to do that no problem as a superintendent today assistant superintendent director specialized principal to reinforce that we can meet the needs of those kids now principals and teachers and support staff do that in every class that's part of our process of uh for example we have highly qualified classroom teachers math ela specialists special education teachers school psychologists adjustment counselors and power professionals that are strategically utilized communities of students in every classroom that's strategically done by chance based on the needs of all those kids you know that principals are going to ask the parents with feedback on

179each of their children all that information is taking into consideration how we pick kids up make sure we do that as well we look at our enrollment numbers weekly and they change they're fluid especially in the younger grades over the course of time we identify increases or decreases in enrollment that call for staff adjustments we situation five and more kids move in when we sit down and say okay does that put us over a threshold likely that would let me do that we wouldn't do that last night we did that um you know we have to make a decision in august sometimes we're final numbers we also have to have some idea i'd like to thank our parents and caregivers for your passion determination do what's best for your child we all have that common

180factor we love our kids who love what's best personal philosophy is if that was my child how would i want you i'm confident to say that our class groupings right now i'd have my kidney those classes we saw that number three on that ranking very closely to the top one was we have the best teachers i think our two teachers and math english specialist parent professionals specialized teachers that push into that class and help out school psychology council handle that i just i suggest moving forward these conversations have their first building level with the principal and necessary staff about your individual child and how you i get or you don't like the response it means my possibilities that's just a chain of commanding you get the best results versus the opposite goal you know 50

181emails that's the best way in my recommendation to address those problems um school committee has hired me to make these day-to-day decisions about the school district i believe strongly we have form invasive experienced team to do so i maybe probably too much head in the door tomorrow but we've got mr here who's highly capable the principles of value make these decisions all the time it's not unique to our district and i'm confident that we're in the right decisions and over time we'll learn that trust if we don't have it what i ask for is that we take the time to sit down have these important conversations and develop that trust over time and also look to our strategic planning process mentioned so let me solidify some of these goals and priorities we have a little

182sampling on the uh exchange next year will be more focus groups more in-depth conversations very strategic plan uh on strategic thing that everyone will be able to use and we'll really see what's priority if one of those top priorities is class size okay how specifically do you want to do that i think that'll help us equal this conversation with input about that and i look forward to you know next steps and your involvement in that conversation as we move forward thank you so much for your participation um i have sort of a reflection and then a question and this is coming from someone who's very nude so as i think about our conversations around the budget and i i guess understand wonder if it would be possible to sort of do some progress monitoring if

183you will on having incremental discussions around enrollment what i was worried about as a school committee a new school company members when this information started to come out it felt late to me as a new school committee member so i'm just wondering in the interest of transparency and communication is there something we could have done as a group to talk about this a little bit earlier yeah that's a good question so essentially that's something we do all year long is a part of school operations um and we typically don't do that um in public meetings that on a regular basis but if we had let's say townhouses were built and we had five new families come in and they all had kids and now it happened in the middle of a year we would have

184to come have a conversation about what that looks like in classrooms of a support thing even if it respectfully do that all year long and i think something i'd like to i'd like to thank um cool mom excuse me nicole randy and mike long because as a part of understanding the details and the process that goes into this i want to say two weeks ago two weeks ago they reached out and god love you they were in my office asking questions for over 90 minutes and got into the weeds and and really talked about the process and um i think that that's something that if we have questions about it's important for us i know you're on about a thousand different subcommittees you know about other stuff but it's important to take the time to

185have those conversations so that we share together what we do as a process and what we do as a district so that can build that trust that bill is talking about yeah i mean i guess i think it's just to push back a little bit i think it's a yes and right i think yes it would be wonderful to spend 90 minutes a day and i happen to do that at is a great privilege i just don't think all parents i know my partner wouldn't have time to come to your office for 90 minutes given schedules and so i think me and the committee should also be thinking about how to strengthen transparency and think about maybe again for you as an expert in this area this is what you do all the time for

186me as a parent this is all new so i just think how do we just gradually open that door just a little bit to give us a community insight i'm not asking to show you know the whole deck of cards right but just maybe a little bit but again this is just my sort of wish list and wondering yeah well i don't know i would encourage parents to reach out to the principal that classroom teacher talk about what the class looks like because it's not all about adding a teacher necessarily like a classroom teacher to me i mean actually i don't know if you can see it but i have my kids up here right now i have three little kids yeah i'm passionate about children that's why i'm here because i want to do

187what's right for kids and i believe that's why we're all here um if we have kids who have specific needs especially in reading or in mathematics deficiencies we have to make educational decisions and not just put a band-aid on it say add a classroom teacher more tier one we really have to be thoughtful and take the time to work with those building principles to say here's the specific needs of my kids in my building and what might that look like does that look like another reading specialist does that we don't know because every kid is an individual every school has an individual community and we need to take the time to hear that and work with that it was i mean i don't know maybe it's kind of late and i'm a little emotional but

188it was so sad some of those emails they use words like fight and i was like i don't want to fight i want to talk please oh my gosh so it does it makes me so sad that that baby was the feeling previously that people have to fight to get what they need for their kids and and we just don't you just have to have conversations like you said and we need to hear what your child needs and and work together so that it's an ongoing conversation to build a school district that serves every kid yeah i think there's another worry absolutely and i'll tell you what i'll take a passionate parent or one that's uninvolved all day long um so it's great to to i love that but it was also i you know

189people we've never spoken to when i'm reading the word fun and it's like that we don't want to start with that we want to start with conversations and our common goal of doing what's right for our kids because i have consistency across elementary schools and kindergarten you talk just a little bit just for my education when you think about low low class size right i know that research is mixed on this and you said and if you've i've heard you say a couple of times that you reach the threshold i guess i'm wondering when do you as leaders know that you're at the adequate class size what what's telling you what evidence do you use to finalize that decision it depends on the children so we have a class where everybody's exceeding grade level right

190in reading and math that looks different than a class that maybe volunteered supports and looks different than kindergarten students than it does with fifth grade students it really depends on that particular i guess group and needs but i will tell you this right now we have the we have neighborhood schools over top we have neighborhood schools so that means even though let's say we have 11 sections of third grade that is not divided evenly across the district we have 11 sections but two are over here three are over here three are over here so what ends up happening is one school may have classes of 15 while another has 22 and superintendent burkhead emphasized this that gives the illusion that there is an average that is okay when in reality we have to look at

191making sure that all schools so what does that look like for the future in strategic planning if the priority is small class sizes are we looking at doing something different with our grade levels if we're all together we could divide them equally that would significantly draw everybody's classes but that's not something we decided 9 20 at night by a small community that's something much longer to think about and decide if we want to make sure if this is truly one of our top priorities long term what are the structures that we can put in place to make this something that is systemic constituent well well i also think though if it comes down to the student then that's in direct contact with consistency across elementary school so that that's the rough for me it's how

192do we achieve both personalized differentiated support for each individual student and arrive at like what do we mean that's what that's what i'm sort of well that's what everybody wants yes so that's why we have to think about is it are we grouping grades what are the strategies that we're going to use for our system is that neighborhood schools and everybody together those are big long-term decisions and that's the favorable school issue too because you don't know who needs what happens to particularly live in my neighborhood versus yours so that is another conflict for the neighborhood but i want to emphasize that none of this is a one-time decision this is something educational leaders at the building level and the district level are constantly looking at throughout the year it's not this class yeah this

193is good that's why the number is sometimes they're pretty you know they're pretty close with even within the schools this class might have 22 kids it's great for the same building might have 18 because there's higher need here more supports that's how we like that so that's what we call that is the building mr long has a question i just have a quick clarifying question um i think sometimes as educators there's there's so many acronyms and words can you just clarify tier one tier two two tier three for everybody sure absolutely um when you say oh tier one yep i think thank you um principal beatty mentioned it um so it tier one are supports that all students gets called multi-tiered system of supports which is sort of the next generation of our team so

194tier one supports that all students get tier two are groups of students um targeting sports look so like uh groups might get pulled with everything specialist so on and so forth and tier three are individualized very specialized supports made for one or two individuals and it isn't just with academics it can be for social emotional supports it's what that student needs now how can we push out information to help families understand the process they don't want to get into you know individual students or individual grades which is in general what do we do when we look at just generally what is that process um you know we heard in the thought exchange of communications um question mentioned about or even given examples here's the process because i don't think it's a lack of crap in

195the process of understanding it the problem is coming in um i think if we can do that at some points in the near future in september october it'll kind of understand well this is what our teachers are looking at um in june as they're getting ready to let's continue to another grade and then usually we have throughout the school year or many different programs that we use to see where these benchmarks are and then we follow through those individual students of the year and just understanding that process a little bit more might alleviate some of those concerns and at the same time if a parent does i fully agree with you i would take a passion um you know what's the process of going to and being able to then interact with this problem parents

196know this is the way that they need to go to resolve an issue this is how our teachers need to work is that they look any healthier or you know this is going really well that and maybe somebody could use across the entire history um i think getting to that point would be you can see here's the process and not necessarily asking every school community you can walk through the process time and time again i mean a great job you know what we're doing perspective i think this is just the next step of you know teaching remember here's how we at the same time and have students learn throughout school and they're very cool that i don't make sense but um i think so so i think uh teacher principal they built school they're like

197he said there's a change of community that is that is the most useful because people who work with your child on a day-to-day basis know your child the best and that's where conversations have to happen i think sometimes me and especially you might get bogged down in some misinformation um and that is when there is misinformation that is not something we're putting out so i think we had a couple of emails that said we have 75 kindergarteners at pushing um that's just not true we have no idea where it came from um and people and it's a panic right it's a panic oh my god that's just not true um so i don't know i uh i think we have to be very thoughtful about how we use and combating this information whether it's put

198out online or whether that is uh i'm not sure that's the best use of our time um not even saying go to facebook just you explain the process very well you know in a fundamental conversation there's 70 people on the zoom 30 in the world maybe 3 000 students you know we're obviously getting a very small group you would hope that information gets out and yeah nine times out of ten with information on facebook response nothing we can do to control that existing disparities but being able to control the narrative i guess if tonight yeah if there's anything that any of you would like us to present a leadership report on ever just like today we'll of course bring that um to help the teacher go through and actually you know either get the supports

199they need or you know know that all the supports are varying the teachers comfortable coming through day by day you know i guess comment though it's kind of a foster wanna care as questions i do recall in the past that we did have enrollment uh projections i don't recall it but when we got them around this time or maybe in september but i think it's a one different i think one differentiating factor was that the charge for kindergarten you needed to keep track and i got a moment to see if it was going to make revenue rejection so i don't think it was it wasn't neces it wasn't necessarily to show us class size it was to project how we're going to meet the budget based upon gravity now that we don't have tuition full

200day kindergarten that information wouldn't be necessary relative to generating revenue it would only be reflective of the potential class sizes does that make sense um but i do i i do want to say that at some point we did have enrollment projections at some point in the budgets in the past i think yeah yeah yeah how many sections yeah i guess i'm just saying that like i clearly respect the chance man 100 agree and anytime i get an email i say or if i bump into somebody maybe talk to them you talk you get that i guess the thing that i keep coming back to is what everybody here is saying is i think part of the way we combat this information and panic is making high-level data available to the community to say this

201is this is these are the numbers potentially at today but i know things can change at this point in time in may these are the numbers and this is how we intend to address it if you have questions reach out to your teacher that to me that is when you reach out rather than hitting the panic button because you don't know the number going to the teacher getting a number and you know how that telephone game works which is i start to janice and by the time it gets to peter it's 30 elephants in a room with you know a baby running the show so i just think having that high level data at the outset so that you can go in as an informed parent and have a educated conversation with that teacher just

202as a parent myself it just feels better for me but again i'm just one person with something with an idea so i'm just going to pop it out there so i know you know those emails were you know they were taught to me i can feel the disappointment that i think a lot of parents might be feeling that they might they thought they were being hear today but this is this is what makes it difficult for us because we want everybody to be happy and have what they want for their students but we also have to leave faith in what you and today that could change you know we watch presentation after fermentation of what the schools are doing to meet the children's needs in the classroom care of survey scl can i ask two

203questions just based on the some of the comments you've had um do you talk about the proceeds we expect to see a rise in my personal lecture because i expect um we have additional um medical students um currently they are assigned to um every year when students graduate um our medical director goes to medical headquarters gets applications discussed principles of the knife proceeds um they were hoping to take them at all students but there's just one thing i used more cases the moment medical muscle stays down your um monthly quarterly a lot of sources that actually feed us all right so it is a public comment on our meeting i would ask that meeting um if anybody in person would like to make a comment please come up to the table uh state your name

204and address or school affiliation and i did provide a copy of part public participation policy up there for anyone who wanted it just for ease and transparency and we'll kind of toggle between virtual comment and in person i just want to remind everyone that public comment is not a discussion debate or dialogue between individuals and the school committee it is an individual's opportunity to express an opinion on issues within the school committee's authority we like we want we do want to hear the wishes and ideas of the public for our policy speakers are allowed up to three minutes to present their material and please try to keep in mind um you know in kind of theme with what's been going on tonight with bringing your concerns and any kind of questions to the appropriate parties

205that utilize any chain of commands public comment at our school committee meeting is for topics that are within the school committee scope of authority so you may see us redirect you know to a different person or we'll allow public comment but we will be having public human angers so if anybody wants to make a public product just show me like a hand like the best way to do it maybe yeah i will not forget about our virtual anyone i'm up front um lauren shea 679 country place i'll keep it very brief um i really appreciate everyone on the committee i appreciate you mr burkhead it's a really hard job and i know that i don't like what i heard just now um i think it's telling so i think if we need to talk to

206teachers i'm glad that mr burke had met with mrs ward and striskel but parents found out from staff and that's telling to me they're looking for advocacy from us because they don't feel that they are being heard in that particular scenario and i think that um i think that we need to ask the teachers can they teach a class of 25 i don't i love our specialists but they don't replace a classroom teacher a licensed classroom teacher and there's lots of reasons i'm sure other parents will comment so i'm not going to say too much about it but you know 25 kids in one room it can be chaotic lots of kids have different sensory needs and i know everybody knows all that i have no idea how many ids we have i've heard it's

207a lot but then again i'm going to spread this information um and i think we need to look back at number three on that list it said hiring hiring and valuing our teachers and so i understand this ideal to have a teacher for two years and he or she does have a spot i didn't think of that and that makes a lot of sense to me um but it's unfortunate that it's my child who gets to do fourth and fifth grade one time and who was in kindergarten with 43 students two teachers first grade i believe 47 students two teachers we had to come here and ask for a para first grade was also coven no school for three months for you know at home second grade hybrid school third had three teachers this year

208has been wonderful three teachers and now we're back fourth and fifth grade so 24 and 25 in class so i really don't have anything to say if this nothing is personal um it's just i have to stand up for my child and what i think her needs are and i'm not an educator but i don't think anything can replace a life classroom teacher in any grade and that's it thank you for listening i really appreciate it school system it would have been great for a follow-up question to assistant superintendent about when those release dates since we haven't been for a few years it'd be great to know when that would be uh you mentioned chain of command uh superintendent burkhead in your discussion right now that is one of the biggest complaints i get in

209some of the parents groups that bring is we don't really know who to reach out to and then days go by before any back to anyone and i understand everyone's busy but it'd be great to have maybe a kind of hierarchy on that so people know where to go and there i think there should be a time limit on when you get back to people so they're now left out there that's one of the biggest complaints in all the parents groups ones i made and ones i love um so one of the things i wanted to really bring up tonight was i'm here for all parents on this topic and it is transparency and truth um mr burka and i have had a couple conversations uh i know the school committee members you talked at

210the seaside chat i was at the town forum and one of the biggest words was transparency kerry murkowski brought it up in her submission so did richard taft he brought up his submission and that's all really we want his parents and one of the things i discovered was there's a 8th grade civic class here at gates that is full of critical race there and i want to remind you you told me on the phone you mentioned it at various meetings here janice limbaum has been uh pretty active on facebook she has written to people where is crt well here it is right here in the civics class full of all the tenants of crt and you i'm sure you guys can get this class lesson from the civics teacher um and one of the things

211that you also mentioned uh you engage with people at the seaside chats like there is no critical race theory going on here well unfortunately it is going on here we got this through some kind of covert channels but that's a lesson plan that's going on and basically if you don't know the tenets of critical race theory you certainly can google it there's people who have been writing about it for about 30 years we've painted geraldo and what it does is it separates people based on the color of their skin it pits people against each other can you wrap it up yeah i'll wrap it up but you've been here for three hours so time windows should really work both it categorizes people as oppressors or oppressed but here in scituate i guess we're mostly oppressors

212because we're white it also assigns whiteness it designs white guilt and it assigns people to those groups i i think uh it would be better to judge people on merit and character instead of categorizing people like this lesson plan does okay and one other thing i think you should get an answer out within 48 hours to all the community because you said transparency and truth you said this wasn't going on i'll leave this here it is going on and one other thing you said in seaside chats you wanted people you want to know why parents laughed and why parents left the school system you wanted them back they're not going to come back if this is going please thank you anybody else in person or virtually you do have a hand you have two hands

213um do you want me to assist sure yeah um all right uh miss withrow you should be able to mute yourself and uh just state your name and your address thank you hi am i unmuted you are yes okay thank you seth hi laurie with rose 62 and vinyl road um i spoke at the last meeting three weeks ago about the what miss driscoll talked about regarding the class size and what i thought we would hear tonight is maybe a chart and that actually showed where we have enrollment the actual class sizes of each school no it was talked about a little bit but we did not see the actual data we did not actually see the transparency and you have parents i just heard that passion coming out of lauren shay's voice of you

214know these parents are sitting in that room these parents are on the zoom call and these are their these their children being affected with nine days left in the school year and it's just being confirmed this evening that these kids will be moved into classrooms of 25 kids at hatherly school and it's just a disservice to students to increase class size anywhere in the district during this post pandemic time this is not what is right for all children nobody should be in a class size of 25 kids after the past three years and i do know that people went through the proper channels they heard from their classroom teachers they talked to the principal at hathaway school that's where they found out about this they did not hear it at budget meetings where it should

215have been said that's why they had to go through the channels that they went through because it was not transparent and now with nine days left in the school year these parents are leaving that room emails are going to be going to each other texts are going to be going to each other because they're disappointed they're fighting for their children's rights to be taught properly after three years of a pandemic lauren shea just gave those gave that data of these children so i am definitely disappointed that we have not fought i still don't know why i did not hear why these kids are being put in these classrooms of 25 kids is it budget is it is it retirees what is it that was not answered tonight who's who's being held accountable for this there

216has to be accountability somewhere of why we are doing this to these young kids and then i wanted to speak about public comment we're four hours into the meeting and it's our first public three hours and 45 minutes into a school committee meeting without any public comment and yes i i am speaking about something that was just spoken about but perhaps we could have some public comment at the beginning of the meeting it seems like you know that you don't want to hear what we're saying what we have to say and that's why that's why foia requests end up having to be um done as well um so thank you very much i will um i'm not going to respond to her comments but i will confuse at this point um superintendent burkett and i

217have had conversations about public comment and where it is placed on our meeting and that was um we talked about moving it on this agenda because i mean if we wanted to we could put it first but we didn't think that was a chain we didn't want to change it for this meeting on purpose but i agree personally that public comment should be at the top of the agenda if since it isn't a q a it's an opportunity to get public publican speaks and it actually according to um consultants that i've spoken with through a mask it speaks to a more efficient meaning so i that's something that i think we need to look at in terms of you know the feedback from that i i agree i think that uh and certain school committees

218do run it that way many do i've looked into it and um mask doesn't give direct guidance on that because i asked for it they sort of say we're not that's your meeting you run it how you want but i am pretty strongly leaning towards it being at the top of the agenda because it does enable the rest of the presentation to be you can sort of get your questions answered to some degree potentially if presenters know what those questions are but when the questions are at the end we all walk away we're not going to walk away with any kind of a happy vibe so and i'm sure none of you will in a sense after we just had those great presentations i'm sure everybody can agree that you know the information we heard

219today from administrators was great but if you know if this is how we end our meetings there's something wrong um you know you might not get the full thing song or you know whatever you know fully completed but you know i i agree i don't think it's right that people have been here for four hours and haven't um but i didn't want to throw that like surprise it's at the top i didn't think that that was the right approach either um so i would love maybe committee feedback on that um but um i hear you on that one so that being said um moving on public comment wise any other are you are you sticking virtually with randomly i will um we have a uh in-person commenter perfect thank you go first our second um

220what do you think um rachel's way um my first question i don't expect an answer but just if you could entertain if the summer meetings could be please speak letters to the people in the back yeah see that's the problem i couldn't hear a lot of the meeting either it would be nice if you had microphones so then everybody could hear but also i was wondering if you would entertain having the summer meetings in the middle school it's a lot more comfortable over there than it is in this room and maybe the technology might be better too so that um printing is larger and people couldn't see it better one of the things that was said tonight and it's really important that children feel safe in school we've had so many um school shootings it

221can happen anywhere so i wanted to see if um you know on an agenda uh pretty early in the school year if you could talk about what the safety plans are for these buildings are all doors locked do you have school resource offices at each building you know what is your plan because um unfortunately the world we live in it's something that we have to um deal with um even talking about class size tonight i do see that as a budget issue but i just was wondering if on teachers if they can ever move uh between grades you know maybe there's a large fourth grade class a smaller third grade class can they move in between and also can they move in between schools if um you know one neighborhood school was going to have

222larger classes than another neighborhood school to try to um have some equity um also um a student is telling me that in a seventh grade wellness class that they were talking the teacher was talking about how um you know you could change um sex if you wish to many parents may just may disagree with that and i would consider that part of sex education so um you know more parents uh notified that they were going to be talking about this in the wellness class and um you know good parents opt out of this because i think it would come under uh section 32a and another thing you talked about tonight was uh kindness and respect and um you know do we have the same kindness and respect if you should just agree you know especially

223if you have a different opinion about something we want to treat everybody with kindness and respect even people who don't agree with maybe the teacher and i think a lot of kids feel that they kind of you know because you know the teacher thinks differently so thank you right staff if you could help me with our audience yep we'll go back virtually uh mr or mrs tibbetts you should be able to mute yourself if you want to do that just identify your uh name address in the school you may be associated with yeah hi uh jennifer tibbetts 179 judge cushing road in scituate um affiliated with jenkins school and um i just wanted to echo i guess the overarching theme of transparency um i think when um mr burkhead came on during the covert year

224i think everyone was applauding the transparency that was going on so we could all make the best decisions for our children um it just kind of feels like this past year the pendulum has swung maybe the opposite direction which i can understand being inundated the first year with so much um so many opinions on something that none of us had all the information for and now maybe just the pendulum swinging the opposite way it just the overall i feel like if the information was provided in more frequent updates um and frankly like for jenkins staffing changes it should be information that we're privy to and if it's not then that's a problem frankly um as well as for heatherly class sizes a lot of this information hadn't rolled out until after the early april deadline

225for parents to advocate for their students needs as a parent i put a lot of trust in the admins and our school committee and i'm really thankful for the time and commitments and education that you've put into making the schools that the best that they can and if you say you know staffing changes are needed i put full trust in that but and i will follow and support you but i do feel like transparency and is needed early on so that you know you don't have hundreds of parents requesting 90-minute meetings with you if the information was provided we could make decisions in march of whether do i need to write a letter like you know based off what's being rolled out like no why why give another three letters for my three children going

226in just to make sure that they're seated where they can versus putting trust in the process um that's that's just what i'd like to say is you know information earlier on so that you don't aren't inundated by hundreds of parents and so that we can make those decisions by deadlines that are given to us in the spring miss brandolini are you staying virtual yes sure perfect megan c you should be able to okay megan c you should be able to mute yourself you want to just do that identify your name address and or school you're associated with thank you hi megan cordero i am affiliated with fatherly i have two well i have a current second grader and then an incoming kindergartner um i will echo all the other parents and what they have said

227tonight overall i'm just very kind of disappointed in having like an unsettling feeling of not hearing exact numbers of enrollment um this evening it came from our principal's mouth at kindergarten orientation that there are 47 incoming kindergartners at hatherly which would make it 24 and 23 students with questionable maybe three kids aren't coming which would make the classes 22 even knowing what's going on with the current third grade class at hatherley it just gives myself and i know other kindergarten or new kindergarten parents um an unsettling feeling that you know what's going to happen with our kids down the road are they going to get another teacher are they going to have their teacher yank from getting from us so i'm just going to reiterate the transparency and the availability of num class enrollment numbers

228would be wonderful um and again it would help probably the more transparent you guys are right now the better and the less emails you guys are going to receive and when we say we're fighting for our kids it's because we have to fight for our kids we're the only people that fight for our kids thank you i believe there's one more uh virtual andrew yes there is yep kerry if you want to um carrie's iphone if you want to just identify state your name and um address and or school you're affiliated with thank you hi my name is carrie mason and i have two kids that are affiliated with hatherly um i i don't want to harp on the the class size and everything i think everybody else has really supported that and i i

229completely agree um what i do want to emphasize is my disappointment and the um in the discussion tonight and i thought like everyone else that we were gonna come to this meeting and you know four hours later when we get to this topic we um come to find out don't actually have any answers or any plans or any data to help us and that's what we thought we were coming here for and i i mean again i'll read i'll i'll say that the trans there is no transparency here i mean when are we going to find out what exactly the class sizes are and what we're looking at here the you know the week before school i mean this is this is not acceptable this is this is not transparent whatsoever and my other um

230the my other topic that i wanted to to talk about was the teachers um you know somebody mentioned before how the how did the teachers feel about this and they don't feel good you know what this is that we're in a we're in a a time of life where jobs are difficult to fill you know where is the support for the teachers and what about the retention we want to retain our teachers they are valuable to our kids learning and this is just not this is not supportive of the teachers and if i were a teacher i'd feel really disappointed in the support that they're getting in this thank you miss brandolini we do have two more hands raised you ready sure great jamie g you should be able to unmute yourself just once again

231state your name address and uh school you might be affiliated with once again james yeah hi can you hear me yes yes thank you hi thank you so much jamie jack and mosey 1980 edith holmes drive sorry it's a mouthful both of them my last name on my street and i am at wampatak um i first want to thank carrie for the hard questions that she asked during the enrollment um i can say that my children are not currently affected by class sizes because of the grades that they're in however um it came to light to me that their first grade and going first grade class at wampa tech will currently as it stands have 66 kids which means 22 kids to a class and that's before summer enrollment and i know my neighborhood and

232i see for sale signs all the time and i'm nervous for them something has to be done this can't keep happening my now freshman was in a class of 25 and it was the worst year of his life and second grade it's not okay we really have to do better for our kids that's all miss brennelly you have two more coming your way uh chris with the k i will i'm gonna switch i thought there was only one at one time there was only one more hand raised online so i was going to close that out but they continue to race so i'm going to go back to in person for a few thank you katie babadea i have two kids that hatherly and two kids at gates and i just want to echo what

233everyone else said about the transparency and more importantly just say how disappointed i am with the meeting tonight and the lack of actual data and enrollment numbers i think the person prior to me that spoke to this as well um i had been on school console at heather lee for many years and we had monthly meetings not two or three times a year and we had enrollment numbers we had you know someone that might be retiring we had incoming class sizes we had all that data so that we weren't finding out a week and a half before school that out that we're now gonna have two kids out early and i didn't even hear if that was officially confirmed like there was no actual data so i'm just here to again echo what everyone has

234said about the transparency and many parents including without i did meet with my child's third grade teacher and they did hear from the principal they did go through the correct channels so i think both having the enrollment process like mr long had suggested um for public viewing when you want to look at that flow chart or spreadsheet that you described how you analyze it that would be fantastic but also just to recognize like what exactly should we do instead of just bombarding you all with all these angry emails and upset emails because there's many other issues um and i have too many fish to pry right now but i'm just gonna say again that like more transparency and to speak with many fans we did go through the correct channels and i'm just disappointed in

235general about the lack of actual data thank you miss brandolina you give me the word you want to go back virtual all right is there anybody any other in-person participants that wanted to make a public comment like the last i stuart with her with 65 on the road and my childhood hadley and i have all the kids that also went through there or through the whole school system here um so not to harm one and everybody else has already gone through because i think they've done a good job what i want to bring attention to is we keep current transparency and trust was a great one that was brought up today and something that's come up and i i think we're gonna have to verify it i hope you guys help us verify this is

236that um through the high school that a class wanted to do a theme day that was usa based and the united states of america but i guess they were told that they can't do that because that's white privilege and they were told that that was a no and they tried to a patriot day theme and they were told that that was even worse i was i know we're going to verify where this came from but if this is going on you have no trust from anybody in this town as far as i'm concerned because i can't believe living in this country that we're having this conference they are happy to bring this to attention that principals and other people in this system are telling kids or what message they're saying to these kids that it's

237not okay to be happy and proud by the country so um you know we got to get our priorities straight here besides the academics and everything else everybody's brought up but if we can't have this transparency where whoever made this decision should apologize to everybody in this town for making that decision i think and if they can't then i'd like to know why why are they why what is the purpose of this message what are you guys trying to put to these kids is it bad that they live in the united states is it bad that we're citizens of this country in this town because i don't understand where this mindset is going because there's a pattern going on here uh i've been seeing it for a while now from january monday to king day

238i won't even go through that whole disaster uh no accountability okay misunderstanding i'm told well there's a lot of misunderstanding going on and i think people want some answers as to what the purpose is of this because it's ridiculous and it's it's faithful it's what it is so that's my comment i hope [Applause] miss brendalini do you want virtual um i just like to mention that tomorrow is flag day and all the kids are being encouraged to wear red white and or blue yeah but there was a black track it was a back track we want we just want to know who said it that's all transparency yeah well no one said anything that's why everyone's upset all right yep all right thank you so much chris chris with ak you should be able to

239mute yourself right now if you can just state your name and your address and school your affiliated with if you are hi can you hear me yes we can go ahead chris um my name is kristen fitzsimmons i'm at chetway and i'm affiliated with heatherly um i have four children my oldest is in sixth grade and as i think the schools always do a great job with you know the majority of everything um i do think everyone not just with in this particular situation um everyone keeps blaming the pandemic the pandemic the pandemic well i mean my oldest is in sixth grade and when she was in first grade um they had a substitute teacher for the year because someone was out on maternity and everyone in hatherly school that had children in that classroom

240were like disgusted with the lack of teaching lack of control there was probably 25 kids in the class it was terrible and from then on you know she shouldn't have even gone to the sixth grade she basically failed out of the fifth grade and um but back to back to going into my child going into the fourth grade i mean she's on an iep and i have three kids on ieps right now my fourth is going into kindergarten she'll probably end up on an iep i was on an iep and i had the same disabilities that they all had i went to hatherley school i had two teachers in kindergarten three teachers from then on there was three first second through fifth and i had co-taught classes and i'm i'm 43 years old so this

241has been going on for quite some time that the school has budgeted correctly in order to have the correct amount of teachers to uh in count of the children so i mean it's really really disappointing to me because i love heather lee i really do love mrs ward i love all the teachers there but it's just so disappointing that like these children not only mine but these children are really gonna be getting affected even if there wasn't a pandemic going on so i i thank you guys for tonight i know it's a long night but again i'm disappointed too so thank you miss brandolina you have one more hand raised do you want to take virtual yes or no it's probably on the same topic so let's just finish the virtual you've got it allison

242allison you should be able to meet yourself necessarily uh allison you should be able to meet yourself just state your name address and or school you're affiliated with thank you allison harrington 14 heritage trail i am affiliated with heatherly and yes i am um speaking on the same topic i do have um a comment and it was somewhat based on what the assistant superintendent showed with the importance of first to third really having small class sizes and as it relates to next year's fourth grade class at hatherley the fourth grade class at hatherley had first second and third really impacted by the pandemic i mean their first grade they missed out on a whole almost term being completely remote with parents were having to do the education in second grade that was hybrids this year

243finally at the year where they were in school so i think that has to be taken into consideration when you're looking at the teaching ratio for that grade you can't just look at it as their regular fourth grade class because the pandemic impacted first second and third grade so i think i i sure hope the administration is taking that into consideration when they are looking at having a class size of 25 children without move-ins over the summer i will say each time i have two older children each for each one of them i've had to advocate for an additional teacher an additional section my other two are now in gates and for my oldest there was a class in first grade they were a class of 23 and 22 and over the summer it bloomed

244up and in second grade they were a class of 26 and 27. so i hope there is a contingency plan in place should that happen with move-ins into the district for the fourth grade at hatherley because i can tell you a house in my neighborhood just sold and there's another one across the street with a for sale sign the one on my street has small kids i don't know what age they are but if they're a school age they're coming to hatherly all right thank you that's over three minutes i just want to be cognizant of people's ties it's almost 10 15. so thank you for your comments did anything you wanted to add to a wrap up for 30 seconds or so i apologize i uh muted her um um alice alison i apologize

245for sorry allison you want it to wrap up i'm just trying to be cognizant of the fact that it's 10 12. no problem i i thank you all i think you guys especially on the school committee for devoting your time so thank you i want everyone to go home thank you thank you all right back to in person or we're i think we're done taking comments online we're going to wrap it up and back to in person finish off my name is jack gates uh 60 times in the road um i have four kids who have just had the fourth thank goodness just finished up and graduated so uh they've all been through the system i think um speaking to some other folks uh uh addressing that that that situation that that we just they

246were just talking about i think one of the problems here is that in the you've heard this before i know but i'm going to say it again i'm going to make it quick in the school committees on their website anti-racism policy it says we commit this is the school committee all signed by you we commit to proactively uprooting the systemic racism that currently exists in the central public schools i think that's a problem i don't think that that scituate public schools are systemically racist and i think that the majority of this town would agree with that statement i think there's been some collective illusion that's been created here that we are a white irish catholic racist community it doesn't exist i'm sure there have been incidents i know they've been this i've been in the

247i've been a part of those but because of those instances you can't indict the entire town it is getting very frustrating and there is a path that started being created one other quick thing dr mcguire puts out a great newsletter for everyone news every week puts the newsletter out and she had a phenomenal point a piece on flag day uh which is very patriotic um i've been fortunate enough to be dealing with dr mcguire as part of the school council called the high school and um i must say that she is a very open um person she consistently returns emails she makes phone calls when someone makes the email she deals with my extremely lengthy emails um but she has been a pleasure to work with um she is an advocate for these kids uh

248i think that her her plan that she uh presented today was fantastic it was really centric on on his kids education and getting them into into a good place when they want to give this school school system uh so thank you very much for your time [Applause] 102 burning room my children no longer go to school my greatest joy is my kids and today i still even like seeing the kids that they grew up with and still watching i'm down here because of other parents and families and the feedback that i get for kids mostly to support these people who supported me in the past even though i didn't know them before i came to school i'd like to read the uh the votes this is from the town scituate just the voting call because

249i think it's reflective we're in a very politicized time not society today and i think you could say that dei is in that culture and sometimes it seems like it's minority that's speaking out here in 2008 obama got 5 800 votes became five thousand obama fifty five hundred romney fifty six hundred that's almost fifty fifty keep it within the purview of what it is it is nothing i'm just making a quick point real quick um last year donald trump the year before it was 74 so like 65 and the year after that 86 to 46. my kids used to come home here teachers that said stuff about the administration trump administration calling economy to hit i think it's reflective of and again not trying to get into politics but there's a large number of kids

250and that's what those number reflects of parents who voted opposite of the culture war let's just call it dei and so to sit here and think that there's a small number of pirates that are concerned that there is a large number that have conservative values and i would just ask you to keep in mind that you have kids coming in learning dei and going home in this against the values of their parents this board has consistently said when i first came on that we want everybody to have a seat at the table but yet then when i've watched the interviews for the recent committee school meeting you said we chose in that meeting to listen to the biochicken lgbt community all i'm asking you to do is say there's a large percentage of people out

251there with conservative values and to give them a voice mr burkett came down and thank you for those fireside chats but there's other people out there and you need to allow their voice under the board you need to allow their voice heard thank you all right moving on uh approval of finish may 23rd 2022 school committee management oh i okay s2200609 total amount 251 uh 164.87 from revolving accounts the school lunch account 27 369.35 for meals and for food and materials um non-resident tuition 11 402.76 we returned funds to a student who was an exchange student who did not come here etco thirteen thousand nine hundred fifty dollars uh to first student who was transporting our students on late runs back to boston uh ap exam payments fifty thousand three hundred and thirty dollars so

252that's because of the large amounts out of the revolving accounts large amounts out of our local funds private school tuition 85 508.50 the several different programs our gas utilities to national grid fifteen thousand four hundred and sixty nine dollars and nineteen cents uh and those are the only significant uh large ticket items any questions okay thank you thank you thank you all right um correspondences i did have a math um it's like wednesday thursday friday i don't know it's something to throw out there it looks like you could sign up for one you could change the committee member but we have those it's still difficult all right any other business future agenda items all right