001okay it is march 8th welcome to the joint concord concord carlisle school committees meeting this meeting is being recorded and we will call the meeting to order and take a roll call please and call the concrete school committee meeting to order as well oh do we actually have to no for we actually do not we're all here we don't need to do a roll call so we are all here and we are ready to go uh just a note about tonight's agenda that we are having a very brief action item right now followed by an executive session exit this meeting and we'll return at six thirty are we still at six is it do our best yes um and then we will resume the rest of the agenda at that time okay yeah and so
002dr hunter great thank you so as you know the last few weeks six weeks really we've been searching for an assistant superintendent of finance and operations to replace jared as of july 1st it's been a very inclusive process we had a committee that screened resumes and then candidates which a few of you served on and included a number of staff other leaders really a nice range of stakeholders for a lot of feedback and input we did that on zoom three weeks ago or so last week we took the finalists that were narrowed down and had them on site for a day each there were two they then were able to meet with the entire administrative team they were able to meet with a wide range of business office and other groups of staff that they
003would interact with we got out to a couple of schools and in small groups each of you had a chance to dialogue and then send me feedback individually so i spent the weekend after doing reference checks revealing that whole process taking in my own thoughts as the days went by really taking the feedback and aggregating it and then the really great news there were two really really strong candidates so it was never about capacity and competence it was about experiences that might move us forward fit for sure and just other nuances which was a really good place to be that's i think the best case scenario so after a lot of input and deliberation i am bringing forward to you tonight robert connery um as the recommended candidate for assistant superintendent of finance and operations
004um just a little bit about him he is currently the business director in berlin boylston regional district in central massachusetts he's been there for about six years pretty extensive private financial history before that including 10 years at harvard managing their philanthropy uh benefactors of quite substantial amounts so we we're looking forward to what he can bring to us and i'm excited to bring him forward for consideration tonight great great thank you um so i guess we take a motion for a vote and then have a discussion at that moment unless anybody has any comments to make before we begin all right i'll entertain a motion to accept uh the technically the appointment the recommendation the recommendation yeah i'm going to make a motion um i can move to approve the recommendation of the superintendent on
005the appointment of robert robert conrad ray um to the assistant superintendent of finance and operations contingent upon the negotiation of a mutually acceptable contract correct sure discussion they're great yes both of them yeah it's good good couple of days okay um so all in favor okay and it passes okay thank you for for our members of the public who are here with us right now uh we will return uh 6 30 to open session so we'll see you then thank you you need a motion privilege oh yes yes absolutely all right i hope that the concrete school department in the concrete carlisle school committee will enter into executive session under purpose three of the open meeting law to discuss strategy with respect to collective bargaining with the cchs tutors and cps cchs bus drivers unions
006and purpose two of the open meeting law to conduct contract negotiations with non-union personnel assistant superintendent of finance and operations and return to open session at 6 30 p.m no we do need second call exactly right usually that is oh okay and we will uh we don't need to roll call right we do need the roll call executive session am let me play it safe i'm not sure tonight yeah okay well we'll double check for both no we don't have to roll call right i think we do have to resolve our executive session oh anderson sorry we'll have to check it it's been so long yeah but we'll cover our bases yes we'll cover our bases okay must stop the eye for regen it's my turn oh okay no rainy rainy hi for both sorry
007frank and i we're both and wilson i for region okay all right thanks goodbye [Music] we're live we're live hi welcome back um we will return to our open session and would like to welcome our um our student update now i'm going to log in so i can see i know we have harry here yeah we're about here fantastic i'm just logging in so what's the presentation for this week i'm just not sure that i'm able to screenshot him aaron will have to give you permission just a minute harry how do how do they be oh i know everyone has those spotlights during their time okay [Music] yeah here we go is that better yes let me try it oh yes i could do it now perfect great um sorry okay so yeah it's just
008a quick little update we have this week um i could take the first slide so obviously this past monday the big thing the school adopted like a mask optional policy and i think the change was pretty dramatic at first i mean darcy i don't know how you felt like went to school a block on monday it was definitely a weird feeling especially being sophomores you know we hadn't been at the school without masks before um but i think people got adjusted to it pretty quickly and i also think that people who are still wearing masks um don't really feel like they are looked down upon or like thought of differently and i think it's also really helped by the fact that like i would say a great number of the teachers more than half of
009mine are still wearing masks and also in almost all of my classes teachers have asked like if anyone feels uncomfortable with the teacher not wearing a mask and they've offered to put it back on and then also like february break i think provided a nice reset for everyone um leaving most people ready to learn kind of i think we needed that after sort of a tiring midterm schedule and stuff like that and one thing a quick little update we mentioned this during the last meeting but we're still looking to connect with the cms student council just to get some feedback from other schools besides the high school and we're hopefully going to do that this thursday so at our next meeting we should have some feedback from that and darcy i don't know if you
010want to take this next slide yeah um yeah so kind of what harry already said but um we've actually had a pretty smooth transition to um mass optional i would say majority of the students um aren't wearing masks but then the students who choose to i feel like rb are being treated with respect um which is good and then sort of some ideas looking or some events happening looking ahead um so next um this coming saturday is the st patrick's day luncheon and it's an event hosted by student government and it um allows kind of us to get back um and do like a volunteer work um and then next wednesday is the dodgeball tournament because we have a half day wednesday um student government is starting a big dodgeball tournament the following friday is
011the boston children's hospital blood drive we host a blood drive twice a year student senate runs it and it's great we um get a lot of blood donations which is great especially um at the start of last a start of 2021 um or this last fall when we were very short on blood um it was great to kind of organize that and then um monday march 21st the start of spring sports season so right now it's currently off season but pre-season for a lot of athletes um so it's great um that next monday we're gonna start spring sports or sorry the following monday and then um march 22nd and march 23rd we have grade 10 mcas and we're the only grade level that does mcas so that's a big thing um and it's their final
012year doing mcas which is um cool yeah it was just a quick little update there's not too much going on in general great thank you for the update thank you thank you thank you i beg to differ i mean there's always a lot going on as we'll see in the recognitions and i think if you receive uh mr masterullo's emails you'll see there is a lot going on there are debates there's writings there's equestrian stuff there's uh and all these activities that you guys are are organizing in every club and it's just so nice to see just vitality coming back in full force it's great great thank you thank you so much um okay so now we are at the public comment section of the first public comment section of our evening as a reminder
013we have public comment from the public in person with us and then we'll follow that with people on zoom so if you're on zoom please use the participants tab to raise your hand but note that we do have members of the public here so we will ask them first if they'd like to speak um the webinar can have people raise their hand they're raising good things i have a participants tab on myself no that's like yeah i think it's okay and um and so it's not the um i just finished the little spiel right yeah when you speak you have to give your your if you've never spoken with us before you give your name and your address for the minutes that we have to record and it is not the school committee's practice to
014it's it's a time for the members of the public to share ideas concerns thoughts anything raise questions um but we don't tend to respond during meaning and we love to give everybody their opportunity to speak so please uh join us in the audience here um okay so what do i have three minutes yeah okay great all right so um so my son is a first year medco student who's currently in the sixth grade despite a lottery system we went through what was perceived to be a rigorous application process to gain access to concord's high quality education and enriching opportunities since joining my son has endured multiple experiences of implicit and explicit racial discrimination from educators and other students i followed up on these incidents of which i know of which some representatives of the school
015have ignored and others do not have the cultural competency training to properly address to date my request with the meeting with the school district leadership has not been acknowledged by the superintendent's office and the absence of resolve has left my son feeling singled out as a child of color who must endure all these incidents of racial hate and racial bias as well as racial discrimination throughout his educational journey having reviewed today's um presentation um i appreciate the stated conscious effort to provide culturally responsive practices as well as the stated filtering of every policy no don't worry okay filtering of every policy and practice decision through an equity lens in recent conversations with another parent also new to the district i've learned a similar lack of outreach regarding the district's work around inclusion district stakeholders and
016administrators must engage in uncomfortable yet desperately needed conversations about race racism diversity equity and inclusion it is impossible to work collaboratively to identify priorities and co-construct an educational equity treatment plan that will lead us to just outcomes and experiences for all students it appears the quantitative and qualitative data that is seeked in the presentation who's going to be presented later on today all that information is currently in your hands and while the 37 quotes that has been presented suggest that the school has their hands on the pulse of the issue the district's current response to ins incidents of hate racist bias and racial discrimination suggests lip praise and performative activism i am concerned that the current discipline and rest uh restoration policies for hate racial bias and racial discrimination are not only reflective of a
017culturally responsive district furthermore there are 34 emerging themes outlined in the presentation which suggests that there are many goals in which need to be prioritized we are demanding that the responsive the response to hate racial bias and racial discrimination in this incident be among those in in the forefront that said the first step in the restorative process is to acknowledge that a number of complaints and open issues have gone without resolution we are demanding that concord come up with an immediate plan to address and resolve all open complaints of hate racial bias and racial discrimination thank you can you just give your name an address for the uh my name is my lisa frederick i live at 108 spencer street in dorchester mass fantastic thank you can you please start with your name and address
018the for the record how are you guys doing you guys feel good being back in person yes yeah that's good okay so my name is domingos de rosa i live at 1569 river street boston mass we are a collective group of boston parents and concerned citizens who are committed to the education of our children our mission is to be a supportive and collaborative entity that can work directly with the school system on significant outstanding equality changes we are also an advocacy group for the other mecca families whose children are experiencing trauma due to the lack of racial harmony microaggression and systematic racism that they face while attending school here in concord we like to congratulate mr nietzsche on his position as director of diversity equality and inclusion we commend the concord public school system for
019making the significant steps in creating an anti-racist district we know that throughout the history of mecco the issue our children face as if as it relates to race and discrimination have not changed over the past 25 years we want to fully be transparent while assuming good intentions we are concerned at the presentation while addressing many of the issue our children face has no details as to the policies procedures and practice that will change in the school the data you are seeking in the first phase of the plan is already available to you as it pulses in the plan itself in readily available and you have a pulse on the issues excuse me the district cleverly responds to incident of hate racial bias and racial discrimination is inadequate the lack of responsive from the title now
020coordinator is both out of compliance and illegal we must we must excuse me we request a clear time frame to change occurrences including not limited to biased response to current parent concerns the district and the school educational equality statement should be more than just words education equality should be your par excuse me it should be at the heart of what all schools says and do this if this is truly a commitment to educational equality for black and brown students it will be evident in what you do see and hear and feel with every aspect of the school life in human a simple check of pulse provides vital information on how we how well the heart is functioning if the pulse is irregular it is indicating that the heart hasn't functioned properly and this can be
021negatively impacted other parts of the body as well the same holds true to how the school is committed to the education equalities we are we have a list of demands i'm not a guy that likes to send us email this is what the group put together so i'm gonna speak a little bit from the heart i shoot from there there's a lot of things happening in the concrete there's a group of us parents in boston who have noticed this over the years my son's been in the program since kindergarten has gone into his junior year same issue still occurs we bring the concerns to the school itself and now we're bringing it to you the body that governs the school we have tried every avenue of communication this is why we drove in from boston
022to make sure that you we see who you are and you see who we are because we will be present at these meetings to make sure that these policy procedures that you that has been written and again there's an empty seat here i would like the city to see so we can't work on the policies together doesn't have to be myself but an individual who represents the group of parents coming from boston with their children the issues that we face in the classroom when your child is put in the middle of the class to to to to kind of gain control of who he or she is doesn't sit well our children are lacking because of the way they're being taught not because they're not able to compete my son's been here since kindergarten he's
023never been a kid that wasn't adventurous he's in concord he lives in dorchester you got to have an adventure getting here traffic starts it right so let's be mindful of these children we're a different group of people right we're moving into a better world we got a war on the other side of the country and we're fighting in our own backyard we can't continue to teach like this i'm an educator too i spent 30 years working for the city of boston working with at-risk youth which every youth in my eyes is at risk because when we send them to school you don't know what can happen right so we're asking for you to take the notes the emails that we're sending to you and read them and come up with a plan give us a
024time three minutes is not going to fix the issue but i know we can work together to make it better for all of us thank you thank you who do we have we have uh nia wilson nya you can uh unmute yourself and if you care to add your yep video thank you hi everybody hi hi we're good can you hear me yeah because we can definitely hear you here oh good okay so my name is dr neya wilson and i've been part of the concord mecca program for 22 years i'm also an urban educational leader both of my children my son graduated um in 2014 my daughter currently is in um cchs she just broke 300 uh record for the school so proud of my baby abby nice um throughout their time they have
025experienced hearing educators who have supported them both academically and emotionally they have also experienced racism at its core the impact of their experience forced me as a parent to have the same exact conversation with them that my parents had with me when i attended brookline public schools over 40 years ago so i asked where will the cycle end fortunately my children are learning to be proactive advocates for social justice but unfortunately i have tried and i'm working with my children they have adopted a hardened view of the world with little hope of racial harmony after reviewing mr namichi's presentation we we at the group became really hopeful when we read the stated commitment to recognizing the need to redistribute access and opportunity to our historically marginalized students employees and families i was like that's amazing
026we understand that in order for all of our students to have true access and opportunity it's the gatekeeping practices that have to stop the data shows the dispersion proportionality between children of color high needs children in their white counterparts and gaining access and opportunity to advanced level coursework which practices and policies will be evaluated to support the closing of this gap is the question that we ask we also recognize that you had made a commitment to professional development we believe that optional or one-time professional development without accountability for implementation will not impact the student experience adjusting the current curriculum or even adopting a new innovative equity-based curriculum that provides more mirrors windows and doors for students requires that all teachers have multi-year professional development focused on equity we are interested in hearing more on how
027you plan to address this challenge this is very adaptive work and it's very challenging so there's programs that you already have in place like the calculus project and when these programs are well funded and implemented with fidelity these programs are models for bridging the gap in the opportunity they provide a direct pipeline to advanced coursework and motivate our students to consider lucrative stem stem fields which historically have not been asked accessed by black and brown children so we require that programming that leads to the elimination of disproportionality and access to advanced coursework so my name is dr maya wilson i live at 51 evelyn street in matapan i'm currently the principal of randolph community middle school and i was a boston principal for many many years i have a long history in concord and we're
028asking um this this group of people that we're working with um we're really looking at what you're doing so thank you thank you dr wilson thank you thank you thank you all okay um are there other members of the public um we can we have time for one more comment [Music] if not we return to public comment at the end um if other ideas arise okay thank you for the members who joined us in public for those who joined us virtually and we will now go to uh recognitions with this we have i believe tonight members from the cchs nordic team a little early but hopefully they're on yeah that's we told them seven well we can i'm remembering somebody else's seven yes they said they're gonna be on at seven okay we can quickly
029do the minutes yeah okay perfect if they're not here yep okay um is there a motion to accept the minutes from the open session of february 1st so move my second then second okay all in favor hi hi okay uh and is there a motion to accept the minutes of the executive session of february 15th a second all in favor aye okay the minister approved we can move forward i've uh i think conquer public schools received two pieces of correspondence okay that's it all right um and we received a correspondence we received a correspondence um what maybe it was one and you have one yeah yeah we received one today um about um about uh students um okay so yes well that's uh or guess it's correspondence so yes i did receive correspondence from the
030chair of the select board they voted last night at the board meeting to convert i believe it's a different level of a parking lot so that they can provide more enforcement of parallel high school students parking at the bb lot so i'm sure the superintendent and the principal will be in contact with the kate hudson no no i'm not saying that they can tick it in toe now so i'm not sure when that will commence but i want to be sure the students are aware that that's a possibility i'm not sure how it would be handled in terms of payment i don't know that would that will be between the police and the family yeah right i just want the students to be aware i think they're going to post new signage etc but yeah
031we haven't heard from them exactly the next steps okay correct me wrong we had correspondence that was consistent with what we heard tonight correct yes yes yep thank you and can i just make a comment that all school community members receive every piece of correspondence that comes from the school committee and it's been read by all of us yes absolutely and by the superintendent yes yeah okay so now it's those things don't take as long as they usually do i've i tried we're having a technical glitch let's see if i can fix it okay yeah okay because we're not gonna have time for liaison leads and support definitely not time for discussion or any items that we have there we go yeah oh sure we do not read the correspondence into the minute that's not
032we've never read all the correspondence but the public comment will but the public comments this will be posted online probably the next day or two this will be posted online the public comments uh there's one make sure it's not removed oh yeah no the minutes will record well that's why we need the name and address also so we have the name of the dress and and a synopsis of what was said by each speaker um who who joined us is always added into the minutes yep we do try to record with fidelity [Music] but not in the entirety fair enough [Music] shares in um report right yeah okay do we yeah we can move to we can do at least one of those i guess is there yeah just let us know when they become
033available sure okay so uh for liaise um i can report on a couple of items one three in number uh the concord sister city nanai group uh met again on sunday and they're planning for a resumption of nanai japan and concord massachusetts exchanges where the high school sits with that is a bit uncertain as our previous two teachers who were leading those efforts are no longer with us so we're in a bit of transition on the school side but conversations are ongoing with the principal the public access advisory committee met last week and they continue to discuss the efforts by minuteman media and the school department to uh outfit this room such that minuteman media wouldn't require quite such extensive physical setup each time we we come on board the monies in the current town
034budget for that upgrade are probably not adequate to do what mark paulie and peter kelly will ultimately recommend to the superintendent and the town manager um but we'll see how close we can get and then finally we had tentative plans for a policy subcommittee meeting this week that is not coming to pass we will set a date in the very near future to continue work uh that is already underway and then we would also note that we have received an advisory from the massachusetts association of school committees and their guidance through the attorney general civil rights division advising us to look at and potentially update our non-discrimination policy and uh harassment policies there's been some changes on the legal side that might enter into our policy side yeah of of our works yeah they worked
035with the did you they worked with the attorney general to the top paper policies yeah so that would be uh on the docket uh for the for the future okay good sure thank you there you go yes um so we had imdei chair we went to the eye meeting last week that we had a little zoom bombing in the middle of it so we had to get an extra link so we are working through that technical difficulty there andrew gave us our presentation we had members of the public come and comment at the end and we had the ability of andrew some feedback oh i'm sorry um we gave andrew some feedback on his presentation for tonight so you all receive the presentation ahead of time and should have seen that and then he's going
036to present to all of us um you know kind of a the same presentation but in a little bit different format with some of our questions in there and our next meeting i believe we have scheduled 2013. and our di meetings are posted on the school committee website um so you can find links to those they will continue on zoom for now we might go into hybrid at some point i don't know we haven't even discussed that um and then in terms of our school committee training we are really working through those dates we have two out of the three that are working but you know again important to make sure we're all available for those so we may need to move one just given the fact that we have town meeting and other things
037coming up in april and may we might have to move one the last one to the summer so just bear with me on the schedule dr martin and i are working on it i think the 15th is definitely a go um we will be in this room four to seven and then dr martin and ed burns will be with us on zoom so we'll be present they'll be on zoom any questions about that no i think our meeting was april 13th we couldn't do the first week yes because we had a conflict and we need to i need to get back to dr hunter and check with aaron to make sure that's a possibility because we were trying to change the time due to the half day k5 but i think you have a pgg
038meeting that might conflict with it so i'll just i'll earn an email right right so that's why it was because normally we meet the first wednesday yeah we usually meet right after the ptg meeting but the idea is to move to a different week different day and then we wanted a conflict but i will double check with your calendar on that before we get that posted and then it is march and we started i feel like i'm the unofficial liaison to school committee coffees that um i'm trying to remember we have to go back to carlisle in march we made that commitment to do that and i think we should talk about maybe having some public coffees again in the spring now that everybody's back and present and you know gathering i think the weather
039will be nice we do outside we do inside because i think it would be important to get that can go inside we can go inside so it'd be important to get back out with the community absolutely um yeah you know if you remember we had three i think we three two three we had medical systems we had library yeah we had cchs yes right and so now we need to do carlyle and then maybe we just go around again just to give more people opportunity to come and traditionally we almost always have a couple of copies before town meeting just to have people going to talk about the budget and or what articles okay all right so more to come on that yep tell meetings i should say can i cpac did not meet um
040since last we have all met but um i did speak with um the president earlier this week and one thing next time i come to a chairs meeting they're just i just want to make sure that we iron out some dates for um their annual presentation to the school committee their and they'll start working with you about the um awards and then um just firming up when the when the literacy presentation might be yeah all of that so we just have to confirm them up okay great awesome so that's it right so should i um should i just give it maybe i'll give a quick update uh we had a meeting uh cpac um parents um and uh cpac members had a roundtable discussion around diversity equity and inclusion uh with um uh debbie dixon
041and uh our interim director of student services president and andrew uh it was a very um a very good discussion um uh very helpful to to parents to learn about the needs of us students with special educational needs um to feel um to bridge some of the um the gaps of inclusion um parents um uh of students uh there are placed out of districts or also were present and included in a conversation so that was very helpful um we heard some wonderful uh feedback about uh stories um coming from middle schools of the program uh the body program uh from one of the families so um definitely making impact grateful too and everyone was very grateful to uh andrew for leading such discussion and including parents of students with special education as well thank you
042[Music] thank you if um if everybody from the north team is here please i see coach campbell so there's so many people here i'm i'm scanning for names but i don't think i'm keeping up with when they move you have students on there do we have coaches from the team we have two coaches and three captains okay if they raise their hands does that help they're on yep just so tonight we have members from the nordic ski team that would extend a fantastic congratulations on a wonderful season before we welcome you guys i would like to quickly share my screen or if erin if you can share that slide that i sent you [Music] is that possible perfect yep we can make that big that's great i just want to acknowledge all of the coaches
043um and all of the the volunteers who have made this winter season um are first back to normal-ish i think real season um and um kudos to everybody for an amazing effort all around and um so i just want to take a moment to appreciate the the the amount of of um the contributions of you know who who goes into making all these seasons great um and we do have one additional team not on here which is gymnastics because it's a um like a consortium team and so i will just say bill kane is the coach of that nice thank you very much and i think and i'd love at some point just to kind of note all the clubs that we have and the the teachers who lead these clubs the adults who make
044all of this uh help all the kids with with these because it's very much appreciated i think uh coming out of covid we appreciate this more and more so with that uh nordic ski team please coach campbell why don't you start us off and give us a few more details all i know about is a mosh pit so yes the mosh pit um the mushroom dancing we take our skiing seriously we take our dancing seriously um i could go on for a long time way beyond the time allowed to talk about this year's team and i'm i've got to be very careful what i say because we're here three years ago in the spring over the ripley school and i said you you were looking at members of a once in a generation team back
045then in 2019 when both teams had won the state meet and um it's only been a few short years since we've come back here so in nordic time generation is three years enough time for younger siblings to make it into the high school um but a team did wonderfully this year and i give the seniors a lot of credit um they they put up with two hard years with the pandemic very hard times in terms of but you know i think nordic was a was a nice outlet for them during this time we were able to train outside even last year but take precautions but for the most part it felt like a normal year this year and i'm hoping next year feels totally normal but we had a wonderful season i'm really going to
046let the captain say a few words i prompted them that you might be curious to know how it is that they continue to bring home trophies from the nordic state meet um they know the answers as well as i do um but it was a gracie there's one person missing today isabella senesvet who was our single women's champion at the state meet um which the women won she's competing this week in what's called the junior nationals out in out in minneapolis minnesota so she was part of a very select group of about 30 skiers from all over the northeast who are competing in a competition for the whole week she's taking the week wow anyway we'll circle back i'll i just want to say thank you to the school committee for the invite to aaron
047junckers for all the support he gives us week in and week out we are the high maintenance team with the transportation department for all the changes we throw with them responding to weather and um seriously we're very grateful for all their support um well let me just introduce we have three captains tonight here they're all seniors and maybe i'll have bryce lublin say a few bruce lublin say a few words he's graduating senior captains competed for four years league all-star had a great race at states to help the boys get to second place bryce awesome thank you jeff yeah um i think jeff said it really well the team this year was really awesome you know following the legacy team we had a few years ago was really great to see how he performed this
048year at states um it's really fun season it's good to have a final season as a senior and to answer jeff's question about how we bring home the trophies it's really the amazing coaches we have jeff and cass do an amazing job coaching the team and bringing everyone together helping everyone learn the skiers but it's also just how fun the team is we make sure we have a lot of fun while we ski it's not really it's competitive but it's not super competitive that we're not really having fun make sure we go out ski have fun with friends so it's always a really good time with everyone thank you thank you thanks bryce um siri do you want to say a few words on behalf of the women's team yeah sure um we're just so
049lucky to be at a school in a program that has the resources to get us on snow every day possible um it's i know this sport's really special to me and all the other captains it's really exciting to be able to see skiers of all different abilities coming into the team and being able to compete together our girls team was super deep this year we had what like eight people in the top ten in most of the league races um maybe i'm a little yeah is that right that's right yeah okay um and that was a variety of years people who just started a few years before people have been skiing since they were born basically i don't know it's just a cool place for everyone to get together and work hard and have fun
050thanks jerry kaylee do you want to add to that yeah siri and bryce said it excellently um i mean just adding on to the access to the equipment that we have is just amazing um and thank you to everyone who makes that possible us being able to go to weston every day and even in pre-season our um access to roller skis which is basically just fancy roller skating um everything that the school does to make our team stronger is just amazing and thank you for that and thank you to our coaches great thank you thank you for joining us thank you for joining us yeah really appreciate it it's great to hear the stories congratulations on your susan thank you and i'll just like to shout out give a shout out to to our assistant
051coach kat johnstone who's on the call tonight too she's an amazing coach um she uh she's the mom of a former state champion henry johnstone who's also competed at a very high level and is now skiing on the williams ski team we have a lot of talented skiers who will go on and compete in college um which is great and which is a goal for some of them but not for all of them we you know we just really cherish that we have a no cut team walk on and we have a lot of um kids that just come on for the first time as novices and really pick up pick up the sport and they're just as an important part of the team so again very grateful for the invitation to be here and
052um we look forward to coming back soon yes not once in a generation or maybe maybe next year maybe next year yes thank you thank you for joining us have a good night thank you thanks all right are there any other chairs in liaisons reports or did we close that out no i think so fantastic okay dr hunter back to you with a coveted update please thank you aaron's gonna pull up the data sheet with a couple of new recommendations for today we actually had a pretty successful week last week you know we held the masks to get past the vacation break we recorded 21 cases last week which was a tick up from where we had been but thankfully not excessive and i think we feel good about waiting that week to get that
053behind us we have four as of this morning we have another three or four this afternoon but again everything seems to be fairly moderate and under control which always we're watching for spikes or changes in the patterns and you can see the grand totals that are there for this year i'll update the pool testing data as that comes back over the first part of this week so really the main discussion tonight if aaron you can scroll to the recommendations at the bottom is to look at the extension of the mask optional practice right now we are still masking on the buses over very recently over the late part of the break in early last week the cdc changed the guideline to really clarify i think more than anything else that the recommendation to be masked
054is not pertinent to school transportation so i am in support of that recommendation and suggesting that you change that immediately we have a little you know it's a challenge to mask on the bus and not mask at school and we probably would be better to be consistent um we have had an extensive conversation at our last meeting about preschool i'm looking at and that should say march 21st it's a monday instead of this 22nd my recommendation after a lot of time with the staff talking with the leadership of the preschool hearing what other preschools are doing in neighboring districts and watching the data we haven't had a preschool cova case since january 24th that's pretty amazing since they aren't vaccinated it's pretty great good stuff so i am very comfortable having had the two weeks
055to study the patterns and talk with other districts with a mask optional policy um to to go ahead and recommend that we move to that as of march 21st the coming week and a half will give us time to communicate with families understand obviously the little people can't speak for themselves so we need to really stay close with parents on what their wishes are and who wants to remain mass and who doesn't and really be sure we're aware and on top of that so the week and a half would give us that but that would be my recommendation to move to that march 21st those are really the two priorities tonight is to look at extension of the masking masking option i don't even think it's not really it's not a recommendation i think it's
056an action on your part at this point because we yeah i of course wanted to bring it here first just just maybe they're just saying for protocols yeah thank you yeah i think that's correct we don't have that face covering policy correct you've rescinded the policies so i think i'm here to thank you tell you the plan and hear any feedback before we execute yes so i'm just curious for elementary school and i don't think this is possible at middle or high school do we have parents who are telling their classroom teachers my son or daughter needs to wear a mask certainly at the elementary school yes and then they enforce it oh yes i don't think that's possible at the high school or in the middle school i don't believe so but there are
057some kids mastered high and middle um yeah elementary the teachers are very engaged good good anecdotally i mean i asked my kids there's there's a real mixed bag there's a real mixed bag i think across no i'm saying but those parents who want their stuff that are yeah who and then they don't wear the mask yeah at elementary the teachers are staying right ahead of that for sure that's good thank you okay yeah and so now it is time for andrew he's there i know that [Music] there he is good evening everyone good evening all right so i'll get right into it thank you before i get into my presentation i just want to say and acknowledge the fact that today is international women's day uh and of course as you all know there's no
058shortage of inspiring women in our society uh just last week i shared uh in a twitter post and i'm sure we all learned that judge uh katanji brown's nomination uh to the supreme court making her the first black woman to be nominated to the supreme court and then there are women like mary wilder whom i'm learning about who was the town of concord's female anti-slavery society's first president and the wife of the famous very famous john brown the abolitionist leader who led the slave rebellion at harpers ferry proceeding a civil war miss wilder if you read about her you will learn that she spoke out aggressively against slavery along with our famous henry david thoreau and ralph waldo emerson so a lot of great anti-racism history right in the town of concord separately i want
059to offer an appreciation to our boston resident parents who just spoke courageously during public comment i know uh and i speak and i think i speak on behalf of our of our district when i say that we value your concerns the experiences and the expectations uh you have shared with us this evening like mr derosa said i too very much want to work together to ensure our shared vision and the dei and anti-racism actions come to fruition in our schools as the african proverb reads if you want to go fast go alone if you want to go far go together this work is not a sprint together we have done so much work to influence this this you know to influence this work in our schools and we have so much more work to do
060i can say this evening that we are at a point in this work where everyone our educators our students our parents and guardians our administrators even the school committee in our in our dei sub committee where everyone feels we need to put our values and commitments into real action and so this evening i have prepared a dei presentation that is really you know focused on qualitative data from my dei roundtable discussions the information in this presentation will provide you all insight into the areas of dei anti-racist actions that we need to address in order to move in order to effectively lead rather everyone in our school district and dei practices and anti-racist actions go ahead andrew so at this moment i'm going to share my screen and i'll get right into my presentation so give
061me one second to get set up here i'm also very cognizant of everyone's time i know it is 7 20 and so i will be very efficient with my time there's a lot of information in this presentation so i ask that you bear with me taking into account are the demographics of our school community based on the department of elementary and secondary education's annual accountability report diversity is all the ways in which we welcome embrace and represent the different identities and perspectives of our students educators staff and parents for example in just our school in just our student population there are over 51 nationalities represented k-8 and over 17 nationalities represented at cchs 26.6 percent of students in concord public schools are students of color compared to 25 percent 25.1 percent at cchs who are
062students of color our high needs students uh who belong to the following subgroups uh former english learners current english learners students with disabilities and economically disadvantaged students account for 25.7 percent at cps and 24.7 percent at cchs overall cps and cchs accounts for just under 9 of educators of color respectively our current efforts in diversity equity and inclusion since the adoption of our strategic objective on inclusive culture five years ago our shared understanding and commitment to increasing the cultural competency of our educators staff and students has really shaped who we want to be as a school and the values of dei and anti-racism competencies we want to be held accountable we are making conscious effort to promote culturally responsive practices that allow our students to make personal and authentic connections in the content we teach
063we've been dedicated to hiring a more diverse staff we are beginning to filter every policy and practice decision through an equity lens that ensures everyone in our school community has access to opportunities and advancements regardless of their race ethnicity culture gender ability or disability sexual orientation and socio-economic status and in doing so we recognize the critical critical need to redistribute acts as an opportunity to our historically marginalized employees students and families who do feel their interests have not always been prioritized our dei strategic planning process so when i assumed uh my role as di director in july 1 i shared my entry plan and timeline for how i will deliver a strategic plan uh focused on dei and anti-racist action to our school district tonight's presentation fulfills just phase one of my entry plan which
064is the uh um which is the assessment phase this phase has involved utilizing a cross-section of internal and external resources to assess where our schools are faring well in our dei and anti-racism efforts to begin identifying areas of improvement and really to gauge our preparedness to want to take this very large scope of work in our school district so really since the fall i have met with educators parents and guardians school leaders including the school committee students support staff through a series of group discussions and individual interviews as part of my dei roundtable discussions all of these stakeholders share their experiences perceptions factors contributing to their interests and concerns as it relates to dei in our schools their feedback is critical to determining what our goals um initiatives accountability measures will be in advancing our
065long-term strategic plan on diversity equity and inclusion and anti-racist action in our district separately you must also know that the equity surveys and the subsequent focus groups ran concurrent with my dei roundtable discussions with the purpose of identifying the common causes of racial inequities in our schools and feelings and experiences on inclusion in our schools as well through the equity survey process we administer surveys to faculty and staff pre-k through 12 students grades 6 through 12 and to boston concord and carlisle parents additionally a total of 10 focus groups were held lastly uh in the coming months the quantitative and qualitative data from the equity survey uh will be entered will be interpreted by me and then presented again to the school committee uh sometime in late may i believe the date is may 24th
066and so you know be on the lookout for that presentation in the coming months the priority areas and emerging themes this is a summary of qualitative findings from all of my roundtable dei roundtable discussions doctor darnissa armanti jackson is an educator and racial equity strategist who is actually currently working with the massachusetts association of school superintendents to frame how districts uh really begin to uh to frame this work around dei and anti-racist action dr armante jackson says advancing racial equity diversity and inclusion in a district should not look like a brand new district initiative rather it should be an extension of a core value and or district strategy already in place after in-depth summary of really all of my dei roundtable discussions i held since the fall i was able to identify emerging themes which
067have been organized into nine priority areas that you see on this wheel chart those priority areas are as follows cultural competency school culture culturally responsive and inclusive classrooms racial equity and student achievement belonging and psychological safety student engagement family and community engagement diversity in hiring and institutional accountability in the next nine slides i will expand on each of these priority areas that you see on the wheel chart i want you all to please be mindful and respectful about the fact that each of these priority areas were informed by what i heard directly from students educators and staff school leaders parents and guardians in our school community during all of my roundtable discussions and so first increasing the cultural competency of every member in our school community as you all know this work begins with ourselves
068examining our own unconscious biases identity privilege and social position the general consensus and theme from my roundtable discussions is that we have to continue providing institutional support for our professional development paths because it does reflect our commitment to become competent in the cultures of those with whom we work learn and interact with in addition we have to make our professional development opportunities accessible to everyone in our school community from the staff at ripley to our tutors to our parents and guardians to our food services and custodial staff and especially our bus drivers we have to continue to build capacity by leveraging affinity groups and professional learning communities to really shape how we approach and lead this work in our schools departments and in our classrooms some direct quotes and again you know as we we
069endeavor through this presentation i won't share every single quote but i will touch on a few uh training on microaggressions one stakeholder said we have to create a professional learning community of general education and special education teachers to better understand special education services school culture as you all know culture is something that surrounds us all our communities influence the makeup of school of our school culture because our students educators and staff come to school come to us with a wide range of cultural backgrounds experiences knowledge and beliefs teachers experience of the school culture is very different from that of a student of a parent or even the school principal in our efforts to ensure a more welcoming and respectful school environment that embraces all identities we must model behaviors that center inclusion equity advocacy and
070social justice in our schools here are some emerging themes for my roundtable discussions number one we have to create opportunities for employees and students to build connections with each other students reported that they only feel connected to other students of similar racial backgrounds while on the other hand educators and staff reported that there are that there are less opportunities for social engagement between colleagues to build stronger relationships number two we have to normalize conversations about race racism microaggressions and acceptance of members who represent the lgbtq plus community students reported that while while the majority of their classmates do feel comfortable having these difficult conversations around race for example the school culture does not normalize these topics enough for these conversations to happen organically and then lastly uh sorry number three we have to ensure that
071disability is included in the same conversation as we do with race gender sexual orientation etc many of the stakeholders i met with reported that dei efforts should be inclusive of the interests and needs of special education students and families lastly we have to embed belonging in diversity equity and inclusion as the missing piece and the fight for inclusion if members in our school community don't feel accepted and valued within the culture of our schools they will never feel connected as individuals in our school community nor will they feel safe enough to bring their full authentic selves excuse me to work or to school and so you know a direct quote from one of our stakeholders if we felt safe to if we felt safe to embrace ourselves publicly then coming out will not be such
072a big deal in our schools not closing schools during the george high holidays feels anti-semitic we need to change the narrative that this district comprises of educators who do not care about social justice the level of assumptions that are made toward me simply because of my accent is traumatizing culturally responsive and inclusive classrooms teachers because of their role in authority have considerable control over the curriculum they teach and how they foster inclusive uh and how they foster an inclusive uh classroom environment at its core cultural responsiveness and inclusion is really about educators and staff welcoming and intentionally learning more about diversity in all students our district's effort to ensure our curriculum is fully inclusive and reflective of our students identities continues to be a priority uh for us under the leadership of assistant superintendent of
073teaching and learning kristin harper here are some emerging themes for my roundtable discussions number one incorporating continuing to incorporate more windows and mirrors that culturally validates and affirm our students identities lived experiences and and aspirations actually motivates our students to learn number two we have to incorporate more historic realities of violence racism and oppression against marginalized groups in the content we teach our students in particular are becoming more inclined to seek out classroom experiences and opportunities in our curriculum that can affirm their own learning around social justice issues and they expect their teachers to support their their curiosity to learn uh to learn by incorporating these issues in the content and lesson plans that they deliver number three a lot of dialogue was centered around how we normalize conversations about race and other social justice
074issues particularly in the classroom students parents and even some of our educators that i met with emphasize the need for teachers and administrators to model for students that it is okay to talk about race rather than avoid or ignore it completely students felt that many of their peers actually feel comfortable talking about race and other social justice issues however they feel many adults in their school avoid engaging in these conversations when it comes up again particularly in the classroom and it shows to the students that the adults are not comfortable with the topic which in turn causes some students to become uncomfortable and upset with engaging in that conversation some direct quotes from my roundtable discussions some classrooms are are welcoming but others are not the anticipation of which students or adults are genuinely respectful
075and welcome in ebbs and flows depending on the classroom environment you're in teachers should introduce their pronouns with students it will be helpful to build trust and inclusion in the classroom equity in student achievement dr zerereta hammond author of culturally responsive teaching in the brain says equity is about making sure every student is a powerful learner that's the equity goal we should be shooting for equity really ensures that students parents educators and staff in our school community have access to opportunities and advancements and that they are treated fairly regardless of their racial identity ethnicity religion gender identity or expression ability or disability sexual orientation or socio-economic status here are some uh some emerging themes from our roundtable discussions number one to create equitable classroom environments for all students to have successful outcomes we need to
076identify disrupt and eliminate the obstacles that are contributing to race and ability-based disparities between our students particularly with our students of color and our high needs students we have to liberate these student groups from the strongholds of policies and practices such as tracking and ability-based groupings in math for example that maintain a system of inequity so that the barriers that are placed before them no longer determines their academic problems and success let's take our partnership in the calculus project as an example in just one year of our calculus project partnership with dr adrian mims our current eighth grade cohort current eighth grade calculus project cohort under the support of math teachers raco fanaki and kristen callahan have seen marked improvement to the point where 19 out of 22 calculus project students in eighth grade are
077currently recommended for enriched geometry or honors that is two to three levels above our lowest level of math where they where these students would have been had we not made the investment to partner with the calculus project and unlevel our math program at the middle school so we've seen again great improvement there and dr adrian mims will be presenting that information in in the coming weeks to come number two if you were to ask me you know again we are uh you know in in in the in our partnership with the calculus project we are beginning to intentionally reallocate resources to make real progress toward racial equity by analyzing disparities in our student achievement data um through assessment and standardized uh test scores enrollment looking at enrollment and honors and ap courses and you know
078really just being honest about the the the the disparities that really exist between our students of color and their white peers or between um or between students with disabilities and wealthier and economically disadvantaged students we know these disparities exist in our own data and when you look you know at a national standpoint these disparities also exist in schools all across america so concord is certainly not immune to the disparities that that our students particularly are our historically marginalized students face in our schools and then lastly we have to ensure differentiation of instruction across all our classrooms we can't assume we cannot continue to assume every student is benefiting from the same supports being provided in and outside of the classroom we need to provide students with with the supports they need individually so that they
079have an equal chance at academic achievement and success so a couple of direct quotes from my roundtable discussions one particular stakeholder said differentiation is not happening across our classrooms some teachers think students need an iep in order to uh in in in order to differentiate and some teachers think they need permission from administration in order to do the same we don't have enough time we don't give enough time to boston students english learners students to understand our school culture and the academic expectations the level of support and care we give to general education students feels less than the supports we give to special education students so let's look at the 2021 mcas data now we know the 2021 mcas data the test results showed that scores dropped in english language arts and especially in math
080due to uh school districts having to you know simply adapt to the uh covet health pandemic which completely interrupted student learning however this mcas data from 2021 last spring does give us a glimpse into the racial disparities that really have long existed between certain student subgroups so i looked at for example our middle school uh as an example particularly uh with the grade level eight math mcas while 49 of concord middle school 8th graders are meeting or exceeding expectations on the mcas as of 2021 when we look closer at the mcas results when the data is disaggregated by subgroup we see a different story when only we we we see a different story with only nine percent of african-american students in eighth grade who are meeting or exceeding expectations on math this is in comparison
081to 42 percent hispanic or latino students who are meeting and exceeding expectations on the math mcas 58 multi-racial non-hispanic non-latino students 68 asian students who are meeting and exceeding expectations on math now i know we all want to erase we all want to eliminate the 2021 mcas data some will argue that it was not a great reflection on on on student achievement due to the uh learning laws that students experienced during the uh during the covet health pandemic so i went back and looked at 2019 mcas data pre-coded and found that 72 percent of concord middle school 8th grade students were meeting and exceeding expectations on the math mcas and again when that data is disaggregated by subgroup we see that only 10 of african-american students in eighth grade were meeting and exceeding expectations on
082the math mcas so 2021 mcas data only nine percent of african-american students meeting and exceeding expectations we go back in time to 2019 african-american uh black students meeting and exceeding expectations of math so you see that disparity there while this is grim data to digest i do have some positive news again looking at pre-covet 10th grade math mcas data we see and again this is 10th grade mcas data we see that 71 percent of our african-american students are actually we're actually meeting and exceeding expectations on the math mcas in comparison to 96 of asian students 75 hispanic and latino students 90 multi-racial non-hispanic non-latino students and 89 white students who again were meeting and exceeding expectations on the 10th grade math mcas additionally a large uh population of our african-american students are enrolled in our
083meko program and i can confidently say that when i was medical director by the time our boston residence students graduated from concord carlisle high school they were scoring in the advanced and proficient range on the 10th grade mcas so a lot of credit uh is is definitely due to our teachers k through 12 whom i know uh worked tirelessly to to ensure our historically marginalized students aren't meeting benchmarks not just in math but also in reading uh through um really through literacy interventions before they graduate high school on the flip side i i also looked at advanced placement data when we look at the the the dse 20 uh 2020 2021 advanced placement participation report we see that while the roughly you know we see that you know roughly 13 ap courses uh that are
084accessible to our students um are available are are really available to our students we we see that there is a disparity between and the enrollment levels of particularly our students of color and again focusing on just african-american students while 92 percent of african-american students passed their ninth grade mcas only one african-american student was reported to have taken an ap math course in statistics again this is based on the 2020 2021 ap participation report from the dese okay so one african-american student was reported to have taken an ap math course this is in comparison to 88 white students who took an ap math course in either calculus or or or statistics 17 asian students 10 multiracial non-hispanic non-latino students and seven high needs students and two just two hispanic latino students overall four african-american students were
085reported two have taken an ap course again in other areas not in math that is in comparison to 15 hispanic and latino students 37 asian students 16 multiracial non-hispanic non-latino students and 197 white students and of course that's understandable because 74 you know close to 75 of students at cchs are white so um so the large enrollment of white students taking ap courses is to be expected but again i just want to say that with our partnership with the calculus project again our students of color are low income and high needs students or multiracial students will be recommended appropriately in math moving forward and so what that means is they will have the same opportunity to reach honors and ap uh level courses definitely by their 10th grade year and certainly by their junior and
086senior year we will we have started to see the fruit of our labor per se in in disrupting tracking and ability-based groupings particularly when it comes to our math program and so you know again as i said before in just one year into the calculus project we are already seeing um you know some of our equity work and disrupting some of these disparities come to fruition so moving on to our next priority area belonging and psychological safety kelly greenwood who is the founder of mindshare partners a nonprofit organization changed in the culture of workplace mental health says we really need to think about mental health as being the next frontier of dei because mental health and dei are not mutually exclusive belonging is all the ways in which we make every individual feel accepted valued
087and connected as members of this school community some emerging themes from my roundtable discussions number one we have to make belonging a conscious effort being diverse and equitable will never be enough if our schools don't foster trust inclusion and a sense of psychological safety that allows our educators and staff students and even our parents and guardians to feel like they belong in our community for example providing a safe and inclusive space for our muslim students to observe their their islamic prayers during school hours is just one way we can uh is just one way to make belonging intentional in our schools number two we have to create opportunities for students to establish stronger relationships with their peers through a home base like initiative at cchs old school parents if you're familiar with home base it's
088very similar to homeroom students at the high school spoke a lot about designing something like that at the high school level again that's an opportunity for our students at the high school level to build stronger relationships not only between you know not only between their peers but also with you know a trusted adult that they can go to before they start going into their classes in the morning we have to continue number three we have to continue to leverage the pair assessment data so to provide students with tangible strategies and resources to help them regulate their emotions and improve their social interactions students supports rather supports for students who are transitioning due to their gender identity or expression students who are experiencing who who have experienced loss or trauma physical and or emotional including racial
089trauma from racism and microaggressions all need social emotional supports to ensure that they feel emotionally safe when they are in our schools and in our classrooms some direct quotes from idi roundtable discussions number one i feel there's no sense of safety at school for me students assume that if you know too much about queer issues that you are gay or assumptions are placed on you and what sec and what your sexual orientation might be i feel only connected to students who are who are of a similar racial identity as me high school just feels transient our students are here and then they're gone we need to prioritize student connectedness and it needs to be organic moving on student engagement student voice must be a priority if we want students to feel like they matter we
090have to establish common spaces for students to come together to lend their voice through advocacy so that they are able to make the changes they want to see in their schools and beyond their schools in their communities number two we have to create cross-cultural and immersive learning opportunities for students such as visiting historically black colleges and universities hbcus as a secondary as a post secondary option for our students not just our black students but all of our students in addition to taking a field trip to diverse neighborhoods and cultural sites in boston if my good friend chris gothier social studies teacher at the high school was here this evening he will tell you that hbcus especially have a rich very rare civil rights and social justice legacies that can expose our students to the different
091to a different learning environment and cultural experience that is very different from their experience here in concord and in concord public schools in addition cross-cultural experiences in general can help students to become even more empathetic and compassionate individuals who value diverse perspectives in a world that is increasingly becoming more diverse number three we have to encourage students to form affinity groups affinity groups is one effective way to foster belonging in our schools a lot of parents i met with were very very appreciative about the fact that our middle school and high school really empower and encourage students to form clubs and student organizations all you need is a faculty advisor some some some direct quotes from my roundtable discussions are there inclusive spaces for muslim students to pray privately during school hours are we safe
092to embrace our gender identity and sexuality publicly if and when we come out we need to learn different cultures and ethnicity don't assume that a student that a kid from boston does not have involved and responsive parents who care as much about their child and their education as white or asian families do in concord and carlisle family and community engagement how can we ensure that we are learning from families in ways that support them to help shape the work and embrace it some emerging themes in my roundtable discussions number one we have to develop and communicate professional development opportunities to the parent community number two we have to create opportunities for boston concord and carlisle students and families to establish relationships [Music] long-standing last-in relationships and then number three we have to ensure families especially
093families of color are included not as an afterthought in all school and community related events one particular parent shared with me how for example we should think about the times we hold parent conferences or late afternoon and evening athletic events she goes on to say that some black and latino parents especially are more likely to work the type of hourly jobs that would cause them to lose much needed pay or even risk losing their employment altogether in order to stay involved in their child's education and be available to attend nightly nightly eventually events for their child some direct quotes from my roundtable discussions there needs to be more integration of the mecca program in our community the schools and the ptg needs to consider the needs of families of color in our towns when they
094plan events elementary students are identifying earlier with their gender identity and expression we need more training how do we alleviate the pressure of the pressure from teachers so that the work of educating our kids and the community is a collaborative effort between teachers and parents diversity in hiring if we say we are committed to diversity then representation of racially and ethnically diverse educators need to matter as well at a time when students of color account for over 50 of school-age children in our public schools nationwide more than 80 percent of their teachers are white students of color with teachers of the same racial identity are less likely to develop negative attitudes about school are more likely to be referred to gifted programs such as a calculus project and more likely to complete high school and
095go on to college some emerging themes from my roundtable discussions number one in an effort to achieve greater parity between students of color and educators and their educators and staff of color our district continues to prioritize hiring ethnically diverse educators and staff in teaching positions across our district number two we are working on creating hiring incentives for attracting more educators of color to concord public schools and conquer carlisle high school this is an effort currently underway with the teachers union at the high school the ccta the ccta has also created a dei subcommittee that is looking at making recommendations to dr hunter and the school committee about again how we incentivize our hiring process to recruit more diverse more educators of color to our district number three we have to actively support our educators of
096color and our tutors through affinity groups even in a district like concord that has every intention of being diverse equitable and inclusive sometimes the reality is we fall short to retain our educators of color or really any employee for that matter because they don't feel supported or or that they don't feel like they belong in our schools so some direct quotes from my roundtable discussions there is a lack of diversity and counseling in the counseling department students of color need more counselors who look like them it feels like we work in silos it is impacting our culture and our staff isn't diverse enough nationally concord is not immune to the challenges educational institutions are facing around diversifying their faculty let's look at massachusetts for example approximately 40 percent of public schools in mass approximately 40
097of public school students in massachusetts are students of color while this is true for only 9.2 percent of public school educators and staff this is based on the 2021 deci accountability report in comparison to concord public schools in concoct high school again approximately 26 of our students are students of color while this is true for less than nine percent of our educators and staff of color however we have been making strides to improve this data if you look on this chart right here this shows a progression of how intentional we have been in diversifying our educators our faculty and staff particularly this school year over 30 percent and actually we are close to 40 percent at this point of all new hires this school year this 2021-2022 school year where educators of color that we
098hired okay and this is again this is a progression this is from uh four years ago when we really started to look at uh how we diversify our staff and each year that number has increased so again we are making very intentional decisions in how we recruit hire mentor and retain our educators of color so i you know in terms of in terms of uh the impact on our hiring efforts i took a snapshot from our equity surveys eighty-one percent of students from the class of 2021 so students that graduated in the spring said their school should hire more faculty of color this is compared to over 70 a little over 70 of parents and guardians current parents and guardians who share the same sentiment [Music] institutional accountability accountability in this work requires action and
099action requires leadership parents students educators and staff are looking to our school leaders our school committee our superintendent our administrators to model and affirm our core values in dei and anti-racist action they want to hear directly from their principles from their superintendent from the school committee about how we collectively sustain this work as one stakeholder said to me administration has a lot of power to make changes and they do some emerging themes my roundtable discussions number one we have to hold ourselves accountable we must to hold ourselves accountable we must be able to identify what our collective vision is in this work and show measurable and tangible evidence of how our dei goals and initiatives are going to benefit stakeholders in our school community perhaps it is an annual climate survey that tracks what folks
100sense of inclusion and belonging are in our schools perhaps it is showing examples of how we are actively closing uh achievement and opportunity gaps in our district perhaps it is how we are increasing representation of ethnically diverse educators and staff year after year and across teaching and leadership positions across the district or perhaps it is showing examples of how teachers are incorporating culturally responsive teaching practices to meet the needs of historically marginalized students number two we have to develop a plan to respond to hate and bias motivated incidents equitably across our schools one stakeholder said they feel that there is an insufficient amount of time spent addressing homophobic incidents compared to race-based incidents in our schools number three we have to ensure timely and transparent communication and outcomes about hate and bias-motivated incidents this was
101echoed by not only parents but by students and educators in our school community one particular stakeholder said parents are only able to address hate and bias motivated incidents when their children with their children at home if there's timely and transparent communication provided by school administrators and then number four we have to provide professional development opportunities on restorative justice framework one stakeholder said what is the goal of discipline if it is not reparative holding the offender accountable for their actions repairing their relationship they have harmed and reintegrating them back into the school or the community is the goal of restorative justice practice some direct quotes from my roundtable discussions i'm going to share one with you the first one we need pd professional development to learn more about a bias reporting tool how would we use
102a bias reporting tool who would fill it out what would be the outcome of decisions and consequences how will we measure its accuracy and effectiveness again i went back and looked at some equity survey data and here's a snapshot 72 percent of current families and 80 percent of students from the class of 2021 again students who have graduated back in this back in the spring said they do not know the formal procedures on how incidents of hate and or bias are handled in their schools however both current families and students from the class of 2021 felt that their schools would respond appropriately if they were to report and i quote racial harassment or discrimination so again this is directly from our equity surveys so what are the next steps in our dei strategic planning process
103what are we going to do with this information and the information to come in the equity survey data author yujima ullo who is the author of so you want to talk about race i'm sure many of you are familiar with her book says the truth is we live in a society where the color of your skin still says a lot about your prognosis for success in life this is the reality right now and ignoring race will not change that we have a real problem with racial inequity and injustice in our society and we cannot wish it away we have to tackle this problem with real action accountability and we will not know what the needs what needs to be done if we are not willing to talk about it so let's get a little uncomfortable
104the role of leadership from the school committee from dr hunter as our superintendent to the admin team to department chairs supervisors to set the tone for this work is essential to defining for everyone in our school community why this work is important the value in which this work brings to our schools and the impact it will have on all of us we have to leverage our external stakeholders equally as we do with our internal advocates who work across our schools to advance this work and so really as i am ending this presentation as i was putting together this presentation rather and summarizing all of my dei roundtable discussions i really started to think about what are some tangible goals that we can focus on um as we endeavor through the school year and into into
105the next academic year and so number one and there are ten goals here number one is in the coming months as i said before i am going to um and actually before we get started on drafting a strategic plan i will interpret then present both the quantitative and qualitative equity survey data that we have since received from our two consultants dr khalif warnham and dr carl blake this data along with the information that i have presented to you this evening will inform our vision initiatives and goals for our long-term strategic plan on dei and anti-racist action number two i will call upon some of the individuals from my roundtable uh from my dei roundtable discussions to serve on a dei strategic planning committee the committee will be tasked with drafting our strategic plan on dei
106they are going to review the emerging themes and priorities that i have identified in my presentation this evening in addition to looking at the data from the equity survey to inform our strategic plan on dei number three many in our school community do not know this but our school committee but our school committee is preparing to participate in professional development that is focused on dei and anti-racism the school committee is making this commitment the professional development opportunity is being provided by the ideas organization also known as initiatives for development equity and achievement for students they are currently housed under the massachusetts association of school superintendents the school community's role in this professional development opportunity is to build capacity amongst their membership and leverage their understanding to advance and influence our collective work in dei and
107anti-racist action in our district number four i am going to collaborate with faculty who serve as advisors to the various student clubs and organizations the council uh this advisory council will engage with will engage specifically with student representatives of dei related clubs and organizations with the goal of collaborating together with a single vision in mind that guides their collective work and advocacy in dei number five since the start of the winter i have been working very closely with our pre-k through 12 cultural competency committee in addition to our school committee's dei sub committee to develop an anti-racist racist framework the goal of this framework is to define what it means to be an anti-racist educator or school district and provide essentially a road map for any student any parent educator or staff's journey in this
108work no matter where they are on the continuum of becoming an anti-racist themselves so more to come on that work number six in addition to develop this anti-racist framework i am personally going to empower and work with the school committee to issue an anti-racism resolution we have to understand that anti-racism we have to center anti-racism at the heart of our shared dei vision and agenda and here's why if we are unwilling to stand by our values in this work to define what our district's commitment to change and and and at what lengths we are willing to go to see this work through we will fail to sustain this work for the long term and as i quote from again from sandra um harbor petroleonis who is a professor of english and american studies at penn
109state she says concord massachusetts has has gone into the historical record as an anti-slavery hotbed largely through the words and deeds of henry david thoreau and ralph waldo emerson in addition to the woman i referenced before my presentation mary wilder all three of these uh individuals spoke aggressively against slavery right in this town of concord that is the kind of anti-racism history that exists in our town and i think we should learn and embrace it and and help define what our vision is for this work number seven we have to embed belonging in diversity equity and inclusion being wholly accepted and included by those around you in our school community remains one of our district's priorities in this work number eight i will finalize my dei budget to reflect our values in this work number
110nine i will submit a strategic plan the goal in all of this is at the end to submit a strategic plan on dei to dr hunter our superintendent and the school committee as we begin the 2022-2023 school year and then last but not least my goal is to organize a dei anti-racism summit and that is because i want to identify other levels of of of influence that exists beyond the walls of our schools such as parent organizations like core our local faith-based organizations the town's dei commission the league of women voters to really come together to advance a shared vision for what this work means in our community the goal of this anti-racism summit will be to build community to build consensus and share best practices that operationalizes this work of dei and anti-racism beyond
111our schools again i appreciate everyone for their undivided attention i know that was a lot of information to digest and i'll be more than happy to answer any questions or comments that you may have i have included some additional resources on my presentation here if you go on our district website right at the top there is a tab there that is that is dedicated to dei there's a lot of information there the equity survey presentation that we received from dr calise warnham and dr carol blake which they presented on um last winter to the school committee is linked here and then if you go to this last website very well mined this is probably one of the best websites that i have seen that clearly explains what anti-racism is all about so again thank you
112everyone for your undivided attention thank you thank you andrew this is my second time seeing although a slightly different version there's new information here so you threw me for a loop because i was just processing what we had seen last week and uh so now i've got new stuff to add to it but thank you just want to go around and ask if any uh school committee members have any questions or comments [Music] i can go first okay i'd love to go first andrew i feel like you and i have been um talking about this so much so i feel very thoroughly prepared i really want to thank you for a thorough presentation something that's been available to the community if people weren't here tonight this school community meeting is recorded i think it's important
113for people that aren't in the room or aren't on the zoom call to watch the presentation because it really it was excellent and i think extremely thorough it illustrates the work that you've done for us all year and obviously this as you said it's a marathon this is not a sprint we are going to continue on in this work and it's not going to happen overnight but the only way we can do it is by doing it together and i guess the three things that i really pull out from your presentation and and you say this all the time which i feel like your voice is in my head that all of this work is very intentional um it shouldn't just be you know this is a new initiative at the district it is intentional
114work and when you're talking about having everyone be their true authentic self it's important for our students it's important for our educators everyone should come to work or to school every day just being who they are and who they want to be and then just you know the concept of belonging and at the bottom of everything we do everyone needs to feel like they belong so i appreciate the effort on this i'm looking forward to the work we've had many discussions about it in our subcommittee meetings if anyone would like to join us we'd love to have more discussion and i think that we have some positives coming out of this so thank you i'll go next yeah um andrew i came with several thoughtful questions and you can't see them but they're all x's
115through them because you answered them all in in all of your additional comments that supported the presentation but there was one that isn't so much a question but just um i'm wondering on your initiative number eight where you talk about your budget that's one thing but um building out a staff i was encouraged to see you talking about that specifically and i'm wondering and i know that you're not quite in this part of the work yet but do you see that as having like building-based representatives that become sort of your collaborators and your outreach and i don't know i hate the term boots on the ground but i guess it sticks for a reason um is that sort of what you're seeing there yeah that's a that's a great question you know i uh there's
116there's more to come on this because i'm i'm working with the with the cta and the ccta to gather some some some input on how to best frame um what this the support is going to be from a personnel standpoint because as you all know i'm only one person and so the added support uh beyond just me uh beyond like kristin beyond our principles and beyond dr hunter is is going to be needed and so what i've been looking at is is really creating what i'm calling dei teacher leads and so the goal is to um is to really draft a a job description and share it out to all of our educators across all of our schools and really um be in a place where i can essentially hire um a teacher who is
117culturally competent and really is dedicated in influencing this work and advancing this work in their school right so we have what six schools in our district so essentially i'm gonna need six dei teacher leads to support me in this work in their schools i won't get too much into what the position is going going to entail because again i'm currently working with the cta and the ccta to gather that input um because you know again it's it's a lot of work right it's not just it won't just be this di teacher you know looking at pd right there they're gonna be facilitating some conversations as well they're gonna be encouraging uh affinity groups to be developed uh they're gonna be part of of hiring committees that are in their buildings and so again their work
118is gonna be very intentional and i just want to be mindful of the time that is going to be needed for a teacher to step into that role and so more information great thank you andrew can i just interrupt for a second because i think that a member of the public is unmuted and maybe a webinar can meet that person also i'll take a turn if i may yep andrew number one of course thank you thank you very much um and specifically uh i think we benefited from a few different uh data sets that you added to the slides um which which i believe really strengthen uh the cases that you're making for us so thank you for that uh i'll echo what uh alexa said about the budget we're in the throes of the
119fiscal 23 budget preparation so a deeper understanding of that budget through the quote-unquote dei budget lens would be useful so that we know where the resources lie and whether they are going to be adequate i believe that your next steps are going to be at some point very soon embedded in the larger strategic plan so i look forward to that i'm sure my colleagues do as well um and i believe that your your reference to pd around bias reporting um is something that should uh be considered a a time-sensitive priority as well so i hope we can uh come back to that one in in the near term thank you absolutely thank you court and i think as you heard from many of our boston uh resident families uh during uh public comment they also
120echoed the need to to devise a plan on on how we respond to by hate and bias motivated incidents and i think you know in my conversations with folks in the community um you know the the there is a split there's split consensus in terms of um whether or not an incident reporting a bias incident reporting tool would be you know i don't want to use the word beneficial but um let's just say there's there's a lot more discussions to be had to really get folks to understand um how we would effectively use a bias reporting tool in our school community um but i sternly do echo your your sentiments and and wanting to have more more conversations about that and if i heard you correctly last week um correct me if i'm wrong i
121think you heard that not everybody is aware of the tools and policies that we have in place right now correct okay thank you if i may just add one last thing in regards to my budget here's what i'll say and and and it's this not many dei directors um that i know of in our you know across our neighbors across towns here in massachusetts have a dedicated budget um that support their work and so i want folks to know that my current dei budget was approved and supported by the school committee and dr hunter and jerry stanton who's our assistant superintendent of finance and operations so i'm i'm very grateful to have a budget that i can that i can work with and those dei teacher leads that that i spoke briefly about are included
122in that budget so again i'm very grateful and i think it's important folks know that that that my dei budget is is fully supported um by members of the school committee including dr hunter and jared stan so thank you [Music] first of all i want to say thank you to andrew i have attended many of the listening sessions and and the table open table sessions um with an elite and i appreciate the very candid and open um discussions um i know that special education parents were particularly grateful for having an opportunity to participate and be listened to my question to so thank you again and then my question to andrew is what can we do to ins institut institutionalize some of the work that you are doing currently um example um building some of those
123affinity groups mentoring groups that maybe with ptg or any other organizations so next year there is a structure there there is a go-to person for um for our families to go to yeah i think you know thank you for the question ava i think what what you're getting to is you know i i'm specifically with the dei um the strategic give me one second to go back to my presentation here um [Music] particularly with the strategic planning committee right they're going to be tasked with helping me draft that strategic plan for our district right but the goal of that committee is to going into the next school year is to actually fold that committee into a dei advisory council that is going to comprise of parents students an administrator school committee member very similar to
124how our current school advisory councils function and so there's going to be sort of a central committee that a lot of these discussions around affinity groups um around mentoring and hiring and recruiting a lot of these conversations are gonna happen within this council um and and they're gonna be tasked to really again take on some of these big goals and initiatives and ensure that they are actually being implemented in our schools um and so that's sort of that's sort of how i'm thinking of structuring the way in which we we from from an advisory committee for example the way in which we help all of our schools really implement some of these initiatives that are to come thank you hopefully that answers your question yes thank you [Music] sorry um andrew i just want to
125say thank you so much this has been an incredibly thorough presentation um and it's very clear just how much work has gone into this at this point and this is just phase one of four and and many more so thanks for um so much incredible work here i am i wanted to say that i love the inclusion of belonging to dei work i think that ought to be at the core of who we are as a community and our culture um so i i really like that inclusion and i like that language a lot um and lastly i just i i look forward to this the training that we as a committee are going to be doing i think that's an important first step that we can do um at least for myself and um
126i look forward to being a partner to you in all of your work both through each of these phases and then in the long term so thanks for everything and um and i look forward to partnering with you thank you carrie look forward to meeting in person yeah so andrew thank you so much for this thorough presentation it's a lot to digest and i haven't had the privilege to have seen it before and i didn't have a lot of time to spend with it before the meeting unfortunately so i have to sort of digest this it's a lot um that's the only thing i feel like we have to be careful to just not to do too much and perhaps focus in on some things that are really at the core of some of the
127work we need to do like we said intentional so i think um i want to thank my colleagues on the dei subcommittee i know they've been you know working toward this um presentation today um so you know i think i still feel like we have a lot of work to do i think everybody agrees um and i just think we have to be um there's a lot of things on on our educators plates and we just have to balance this all out and you know have a successful journey um so i just think we have to continue to be careful and mindful of how we can squeeze this in in a school year um and um be successful because as you know this year is almost over it doesn't feel that way but you know
128it's just there's not a lot of time so i think we have to be intentional about how we then structure this work the next year that's the only thing i'll ask the di subcommittee especially the school committee work right so i've heard a lot of mention of policy and i want to know um how we would have an equity lens on all of our policies so i personally the school committee member don't know how to do that um so i would need some training on that but thank you much work to come thank you great thank you andrew yes you are only one person but we are very lucky that that we have you in your entirety um i think one of one of our public speakers used the word fidelity and i think that
129that really that word has resonated with me all night and i i like how that ties into to your statement that this should not look new right that this all should feel authentic it should come from it should come from the community um we're lucky that we have you who has been in the community um for so long and comes into this position um with that that font of knowledge that that those experiences those interactions that i think are absolutely critical um to making this work authentic and to make sure that the work has a sense of belonging right so that our so that the people who benefit from it really end up um having a sense of belonging um so i just want to thank you for for everything that you know i've really
130i've enjoyed being a part of the dei subcommittee and getting to know you better and um and just appreciate your work more and more every time i see it thank you thank you sir can i just address something that cynthia has mentioned um the policy with the lens of the lens on uh diversity inclusion and equity uh we've already i just wanted to say that um in this court can speak to that in our subcommittee policy subcommittee we already started doing that work um i remember looking at the policy around the bus buses and actually um sitting there with administrators and really carefully uh looking how this policy would be affecting students coming from boston what can we do to make sure that we are sensitive to to their needs as well so that work
131has already started and and the policy subcommittee was not waiting um [Music] hit the ground running as the needs of the students are already there thank you thank you and i think that two out of three of us on policy also sit on dei and that's purposeful and so it does always come up in our discussions well i'm saying is i don't have a more well we don't yeah we don't have a blueprint for it other than to pause and say and ask each other uh what are the equity implications uh what are the equity issues that might get touched by this policy just to just to try to pause for for those questions and answers yeah maybe i'm saying something that if the policy subcommittee could come with that information will we discuss the
132policies this whole committee you know i'm saying that what you have just in so what i would let me jump ahead what i'm hearing you say is when the policy subcommittee brings you something add to it information about the nature of our discussion the vis-a-vis equity yeah yeah if that's what i'm hearing i i think we would be happy to do that yes and i do think that in some of our training we will explore some of that also how you know should we be looking at our policies so yeah okay yeah okay all right um 8 30 yes continue on right now with the onto the warrant can we take a five minute break maybe sure yes okay thank you you want better five-minute resource minute recess uh anybody in the public head yourself
133difficulties all right hi welcome back thank you for staying around and we are now resuming our march 8th joint concord mechanical carlyle school committee meetings just as a reminder this meeting is being recorded and uh we are on to discussion c concord finance committee public hearing warrant articles jared [Music] take it away let me share my screen here so i'm going to be very quick uh what i'm going to do is basically um just sort of point out some of the changes that were made um from the fine uh from the uh january 11th meeting and what i'm going to be presenting to the fincom on thursday night i will be this is still in a way a draft we are putting it into the uh the blue format and there we go so there
134was no change in the budget timeline so i'm just going to really fly through and let you know some of the changes um as you know right now our budget is uh 36 million 540 1807 which is 174 172 dollars under the concord finance committee guidelines so one of the things i need to point out um if you're comparing this slide to the one in january as you know a lot of things have changed there's also some footnotes that i had on the january slide that i took out of this because they're really not relevant anymore they were relevant to the school committee's discussion but not the discussion that we're going to be having with this income so a couple things that may have uh that you may remember that has changed since the january
13511th meeting the first one is we had the dei director as a .6 in the january um 11th meeting that was about 85 hundred and twenty four dollars since that time we reduced that to a point four which was about fifty four thousand hundred and forty nine dollars so that impacted a few different drivers that i picked at the impacted the teacher's drivers and impacted the the admin the admin salary drivers so if you try to do the apples to apples comparison without that slide that i actually presented on january 18th it won't you won't be able to and i'm happy to go into that further um you know later this week if you if you uh send dr hunter an email um so that was really the biggest driver change teachers and in the
136admin also it's really important to know all of our offsets in this budget are only general fund offsets there are no salary offsets to grants that are included in these numbers the ones for tuitions in the in the budget we include uh an offset in the budget that's why the tuitions are showing as a decrease and when i go into the offsets you you'll see that there were no changes on the cost savings ftes a couple quick things the i did transpose a few uh two lines it was the uh drivers in the principles so i did switch that in addition the salaries at the top for the teachers these now include longevity in stipends when i was redoing this i probably should have looked exactly at the chart that i used before but i
137redid everything always trying to improve it so a couple of the numbers may look a little bit different first being the salaries they they do include the longevity and the stipends also the drivers the drivers include the athletic transportation drivers which which does not have any ftes i did not include it before but i included it this uh this time so the 495 000 is actually an increase of around ninety five thousand that's only because i included the athletic drivers line that you'll see in the uh in the general fund budget so that's why the fy 22 budget looks like it increased by quite a bit that's pretty much the main reason for that i no changes in the grant and revolving offsets there was a bit of a change here in the uh circuit
138breaker uh we went up 35 235 dollars as part of our recommendation to get to the original guideline therefore our tuition offsets uh increased no changes in the tuition numbers no changes in our end no changes in the retirement or opeb or transportation or health insurance debt stayed the same cares act again stayed the same sr3 stayed the same uh transportation might be two times there okay i'll change that okay so the the i included a slide a couple of slides actually for the the capital article for the repaving and the lighting one of the things i think it's really important that we stress and here's a quote here from the concord town manager we've performed the field review of the pavement condition of the access road and estimated that the pavement condition index i
139gotta switch that lies in the range of 40 to 55 which is considered poor in the system we currently use for the town's public streets the estimated costs were a million 53 665. the school committee voted to use 200 to reduce that amount by 200 000 using using the capital stabilization account therefore the the capital article is for 853 665. i've also included some pictures uh pretty self-explanatory here this is the thoreau street entrance here's the front of the bd center here's the walden street entrance these are new and i actually got a few today that i did not include that i can send over to and put it into um the presentation for thursday because now the snow is gone it's showing quite a bit more believe it or not right on this uh
140the picture right here on the right if you look back at some of the older pictures i'm sure there's been even more degradation than when this was originally proposed um it could be an idea to put in like this is how bad it was when we first thought we needed and like this is how bad it's gotten right what's going to happen if we wait longer because that's really what we need people to think about right yeah and since this is a dry run for town meeting will we have two separate presentations for the articles yeah this will you'll have a separate presentation for for town meeting yeah okay yeah just sort of the hearings are supposed to be town meeting presentations yeah no they're expecting separate ones for each yeah each other i mean
141for the hearing on thursday right yeah and um can we just provide a little more detail about paving versus lighting and how much those cost not the whole spreadsheet with all every little just you know a couple more and um a question might come up with this so is um who's doing the lighting versus the paving like the town is are they going to take care of everything or uh we'll bid it all out but uh okay i'm sure the lighting will be separate okay thank you [Music] jared does this come out of this the whole is the 200 000 just from the school committee a budget or is the whole project paid for so the 200 000 is coming out of the stabilization account yeah and then the 853 will be assessed to the
142two towns probably over 10 years okay yes as a little background at the end of last fiscal year so may of last of 21 um we jared had recommended that we had the possibility to put some money towards a stabilization fund and at that time we had a robust conversation about what could we use in the money for because we didn't want to hold money without a purpose right but at the same time we knew that there were some big ticket items coming down the line especially this one and so we had voted at that time to in fact utilize the money into a stabilization fund and they still are not comfortable with holding stabilization money for long periods of time because it is it's money we've been entrusted with we should use it for
143our students we you know the money that we are given should go to a purpose um and this is what we think about the overall expense comes it doesn't come from the town at all it's just from the school's budget no no no no okay it's we put the two we put the 200 okay so we put the 200 000 to off set the total because the total is a little over a million dollars yeah right um and so in order to have a less high um warrant article yeah he presented at the town meetings um your i decided to use that 200 000 to offset it to reduce it down to the 800-ish um that will then be distributed divided between carlisle and concord on a proportional basis to our enrollment got it okay
144and it's also important to stress not only do does it have to pass a town meeting it has to pass it down as well oh okay yeah and has to pass at both town meetings both yep so the way that it works too carlisle is actually first this year if it doesn't pass in carlisle then it's justified okay yeah but it is something no matter what that we're gonna have to do uh we're gonna keep patching it but at some point it's just we're gonna have to figure it out yeah just some last uh walden street entrance pictures so the general fundraiser estimates uh two things changed here we increased chapter 70 by approximately 312 000 in chapter 71 which is the regional transportation we increased that by 75 50 000. so our total revenue
145went up 362 000 based on the governor's budget [Music] and just so you know that comes out the fourth wednesday of january here's just an updated revenue chart and then lastly the final assessments and again we are 174 172 under the concord finance committee budget guideline so what i'll do is i will continue to um turn this into um the format that the town wants and make sure it's separated by the two articles great jared could you go back to number six for a moment please um i want to anticipate the the driver is getting flagged by fincom three people at something approaching half a million dollars two questions one how do we apportion driver ftes across the two districts um where does three sit within the larger pool of employees and then secondly i
146think we should be ready to distinguish between school runs and all of the extracurricular to help people understand that otherwise they'll get thrown by that i think sure yep um so we do and we do have a slide that we break out exactly how we we we break it out based on based on the runs um so i'll absolutely be able to answer that and then the we also have about a 95 000 give or take that we have for athletic runs um that um was actually level funded this past year when that gets identified i think people will be reassured okay thank you any other questions you when you guys are just so i'm not like a total ignoramus when you guys are talking about runs you're talking about like the bus running from
147a to b you've got it okay making sure yes great yes making sure report i mean it looks it looks like a lot the budget drive you know the difference right that's what you were saying it'll catch there it'll catch people's attention if they don't have background right but it's i mean it's it's a three and a half percent increase and so a big chunk of that is just attributed to to the colas yeah as it is right so it's just probably a good thing to remember that you're adding four f you know you're adding a little over well you're only three ft e3 change ftes right and the three and yeah 23 23.7 to 20. but i thought these two figures would catch people's attention without some explanation for for drivers specifically the 15
148000 difference um three ftes with a number of 490 thousand dollars next to it that's the request exactly so the point i was trying to make was that will require some clarification because people will do fte division and come up with the wrong conclusion about what it constitutes yeah yep that's the that's the first salaries what's the principles you might be looking at we've got what we've got emails yeah it's been changed that's the one i caught those two numbers uh the categories are transposed there okay i'm sorry i thought i'd pull this from a link but you did yeah you did yeah you did this is the cod this is okay all right thank you very much yeah okay yep there were some lines that were changed yeah i know he me i'm sorry
149when you said that i thought i was looking at the thing it's not it's not three drivers okay yep okay yeah thanks very much that will make things clearer i still stand by my i think that it's worth pointing out the three and a half percent increase given that you're adding ftes and most of it is uh related you know that's in the biggest driver is the truth is the special intuitions okay great thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you um okay so facility fee policy we've come back to this and i think i mean my my idea for tonight was just to talk about right now do we given that we know that there are going to be no increases we've already committed to no increases until after september 1. um
150do we think we have a conversation about it seemed that there needed to be some kind of conversation eventually at the board level um about our general thoughts on facility use on um community right on on what we envision as the purpose of the use of the facilities right um to what extent and and i think i mean looking back through some of the old policy subcommittee meetings i i got the sense from the three policies subcommittee members right that there was um kind of a commitment to the idea of um that that you know we're not we're not we're not trying to just we we want to be useful to the community um with our facilities right we don't want to jeopardize our facilities in any way uh we need to protect our facilities
151and um but overall we welcome community use of the facilities is what i got from right from from so um i don't know if right now is the time to have a a deep dive into any of these things or right now we stay just sort of do we you know is is this a pressing issue that needs to be dealt with right now um or do we just put it on pause for a little bit um and come back to it um at some later point when uh my only concern is firmly in the public's awareness that would be my chief concern with putting it on hiatus just because it's it's received some attention at the public level um and i think there's i don't know i don't i don't see i i understand
152that there's no specific urgency because we've we've decided to table implementation of new fees and a new policy until september 1st but apart from that i don't i wouldn't see it necessarily a good reason to table it and i guess sitting on policy the policy committee we spent an extraordinary amount of time talking about this so i thought we were going to come tonight and just talk about um what our intention of the policy is because i think that discussion needs to happen we've had a lot of discussion about fees but the actual intention and community use and when you go back to you know you know dorothy's recommendation to us at the policy level was to look at what is the goal and you have to come to consensus as a committee as to
153what the goal is is it for the community to use the facility you know what and we have to decide as a committee what that is and this is you know i went back through agendas i went back through policy subcommittees from you know two years and i think at some point we need to move on past this and um you know take a recommendation and vote on it because i i do feel like tabling it again then we're saddling a future committee with this because we can't come to consensus there was a clear pause you know there was definitely it came to committee in 2020 none of us knew a pandemic was going to happen there was a clear pause and so i'm just concerned that we're not going to have the cl that
154we're not going to move forward on this so i think we have to decide what is what is our intention if it's coming to the committee level i feel like i know that we're talking about right now if it's coming to the committee level i think we're just trying to figure out what are we doing like what are we doing what are we doing right now right right where does it belong i don't know i would love if uh if policies subcommittee had a consensus on uh you know that you wanted to share and and and prompt a conversation at our level um and again i don't know if tonight is the right night for it right or if we say okay let's come up with you know does policy subcommittee say okay we'll talk
155and say this is what we envision as the goal and bring it i mean or maybe you guys are already i did send some document i don't know if anyone looked at what i said just of some options just for discussion so do are we discussing or are we just going i guess i'm confused as to you know where we're going right now i don't think we're vote we're not voting on anything today i don't think we're talking about any numbers today um because um i think we've received some new information recently that you know that helps us figure out a little bit more budget implications like yeah i felt like we needed we ended up in a policy that we needed more of clarity what is what are the goals of uh of this
156policy uh when it comes to uh increasing uh the fees what is the purpose so this way we understand how we approach the the fees and um and the police policy itself so um it was definitely we've spent a lot of time and discussions and at some point at least for myself um there was an evolution of thinking that it brought me to a place where i was asking myself um is the reason why i thought i was reviewing this policy is the is the correct reason that would be shared with you know with everyone else on the committee um what is the goal are we um to include more uh stakeholders that would be able to use the facilities are we you know what what is what is the purpose i'd be happy to
157speak to it um my my opinion really hasn't changed over a number of years i think we have a duty and an obligation to open up the schools to community use i think it enriches community life in endless ways i don't frankly personally consider that really debatable i think that's our obligation um where i think uh we have a secondary obligation that is no less important is to see that that happens well protecting the sanctity of the school day for the educational program and i think we've been able to do both for for many decades what prompted the review was the simple passage of time 2009 was the last time we took a look at it [Music] i would propose that we disabuse ourselves of the idea that this is a fundraising mechanism [Music] just
158put that put that aside uh we have three tiers of users which makes sense to me one is our own internal use after hours and we absorb those costs fully whatever they are yep uh second one is uh locally based nonprofit organizations that are uh holding a non-profit status and are here for some form of civic good i believe those should continue to receive a fee that is very very modest but not so much that it is so wildly subsidized that we replace or supplant other other facilities it's not our primary mission um but it should be uh easy and attractive to those users in my opinion where the term you've heard me use before cost recovery comes into play for me is i believe that uh outside groups and for-profit groups should be cost
159neutral to us now this is endlessly difficult you know if you if you open a door 20 times on a cold february day you know uh how many how many boilers fire up on the roof that wouldn't otherwise we're not going to know that but we've got to make a reasonable effort to be i i think cost neutral for for those users um and cost neutral uh for the users not only relates to uh the use of the of the facility and the subsequent upkeep that's necessary but also the personnel costs that are directly related to the use that is building service workers not a chunk of jared's time or kristen's time or anybody else's time but rather just direct costs i think that's a very defensible responsible position for us so i think that
160a reasonable guide uh is number one um what are our historically our fees we have inherited those from 2009. uh number two what are surrounding districts doing uh because they do their their homework as well and then number three the uh the the uh reasonable test you know we ask uh uh what does this mean in terms of costs that actually get assessed um is this something that uh is going to be harmful to any one of those tiers of users but notably the cost recovery users in that third tier the outside groups because we want to be cost neutral but not in such a way that we're a huge disincentive but frankly a large gym is not a cheap piece of real estate no it's not the turf field is not a cheap piece
161of real estate we have to recognize that so i'm frankly comfortable with the the guiding principles that we've been using but in recent policy subcommittees we did we did start to lose our sense of direction because there was a a sentiment that we should pause and ask is revenue generation even on the table here i would propose to the answer should be no when we look at the extensive use of that high school it's used the better part of 365 days a year no kidding really is to see a yield at the end of the year of a projected twenty thousand dollars uh i think would uh be very positive proof that we're not in the revenue generation business because it'd be you'd be hard put to say that that extra use of the high
162school has a uh a burden of less than twenty thousand dollars to the district probably it's quite a bit more yeah i think sorry i think that most of our discussions got hung up really on the field view field use that is very short it's only the summer months couple months in the summer so that was there's the other use yeah but you might charge them i sort of as i sort of think of this philosophically as we delve into what is in our purview and what is outside of our purview you know in developing the policy itself i first started questioning whether the recommendation of rates themselves 100 here twenty five dollars here were in our purview so i think that's sort of one question i have as to whether that should be under
163our direction at all so that's sort of one question and then the second part that i think is separate and apart from that is and maybe this is under our purview maybe it isn't um i think the part that i personally have trouble i guess with would be the the the classification of the rate so who falls into those rates uh those tiers is what i mean and so is that part of our purview so i mean i think there are two kinds there are two parts of where i think because to your point i think there's broad consensus about the spirit of the policy i don't think that is something at least i think um no one really is here to debate i think that i think the part that becomes challenging is how
164we then enact the spirit of that and i think that there are two pieces to that one how are we classifying the tiers of our users what and then and then the rates themselves my i feel like when i read things to the letter of the the what our roles are i think the rates themselves would potentially be outside of our purview what i think is more potentially in our purview is how we would classify the rates themselves or maybe they're all outside of our purview i don't know if people have opinion on that so can i just interrupt what is the purpose of the discussion tonight because we're supposed to get very quickly getting anything back into the week um yeah and uh so that's what i'm trying to how do we well i
165mean the problem is we we fundamentally we have some people with some members who think that we should just we should vote on you know we should package a package of policy or i don't even well like i mean because you're bringing a new a new option which is that i mean i don't know if anybody the the document that we got that gave kind of a sample of the summer usage um that we got last week from aaron with the schedule of use from the different users right i don't i know you guys have done a ton of work in terms of looking at different um fees and schedules and stuff i don't know if either of you dumped those into um that document i did and i was very surprised that um like
166that as jared said in the first school the first policy subcommittee meeting is we looked at the usage and you know this would be a non-significant impact you're originally proposed which i noticed are were actually reduced from the some of them at least looked like they had been reduced from the fees that were proposed back in 2020. is that correct right you guys actually revised them down so when i looked at what we what our big users actually used it did seem to it agreed with what jared had said was that it was not a major impact and so i was pleasantly surprised to have that new piece of information last week um so so again like this is you know like so maybe that aligns with you know the like that was a fine
167number to begin with or but um as for where we are i have i don't know we just keep we keep spinning around so i don't well i think that we have we have some things on the table that have been brought to us the policy committee has looked at sample policies from other towns and ours is modeled after another town so we've looked at that we've looked at multiple different fee schedules we have a recommendation on the table from dr hunter for email so now what are we going to do with it either we we cut it off and continue on um we go back to policy or we discuss it here and i i'm not certain what the right answer is on this and so in looking at the agenda when it says
168facilities fees i didn't know what to expect i'll be honest so i'm not sure i think we need a clear direction if we're going to talk about it at the committee level otherwise you know okay i mean i'm happy to share my my clear direction we're not going to make again this isn't we're not making money off this right we're just trying to collect something some nominal amount for every hour of use or every yeah i mean you can do it by number of people right or multiplied by hours because obviously if you have a group of 10 people renting a field versus a group of 100 people renting a field there's a different impact there right but that becomes a whole logistical challenge for them to manage so my goal is to make sure
169that we have something that is equitable and transparent and um dependable right like like that that are somebody who goes will not be surprised by a number um i would like to see less i don't think that there's much difference a lot of these fees five dollars here more like five dollars less right for me the issue is more the custodian fees and how are they applied and is there kind of a um is there an equity there that's a question that we that we haven't looked at and i think that's the only question that's remaining for me um what was your opinion what did you what did you perceive the objective of the what were you hoping to get from the conversation tonight well what i put in the planning memo is that we
170were going to have an upper level conversation about would we um you know would we continue the conversation right now or would we pause it um and and wait uh as we close out this year and and look at it with izanu and with the new business manager uh in the fall that was that was you know not nothing that's yeah um to pause or not to pause the question exactly okay yeah and i think that's what i think that's what i wrote in the the planning memo was exactly that like just you know do we move forward or do we uh or do we take a break from it as a member of the policy subcommittee i would like to get into more of the policies and not get stuck on this one um
171because i i think that it's been too long and these are things you know when i look at my role on school committee it is all centered around student achievement whether we're talking about budget policy or superintendent evaluation and facilities fees for me doesn't fall into any one of those things and so i actually question whether we should even it's very it feels very operational to me which is not part of our role but you know i think we need to move forward somehow thank you for those comments i don't see it is the same but i do think that the policy committee subcommittee needs to move on and you know get through some other much more student perhaps centered policies and things that we should be looking at um so i think we can
172i do want to revisit it but we can have that conversation maybe anew this summer so we can set the table um and and just see you know once we've had a little distance from sort of going at it constantly um and so that's what i think is we can maybe just um just have a sort of re relaunch or something and make it clear in the beginning of uh if we if we even decide to take it back up right um what we hope to accomplish so i just want to mention that yes it is a policy that in many districts is the low-hanging fruit most uh most districts have not been looking at that policy for many many years and we did not either tracy has done a lot of research in this
173area surveying the other districts i do want to i do want to be working through this in the spirit of getting things moving as uh we have many many policies that are waiting and i just want to remind um the members that i will be coming up the region uh next year so you will have a new member and you will be basically uh building this whole conversation all over again so i don't know if it's time saving if it could be a time-saving situation if we um give another week and go back to the table now that we understand a little clear the goals of this policy our current policy doesn't even allow for uh groups that are uh outside tracks definitely outside for profits oh so we're highlighting violation of our own policies
174and have been for over a decade so i don't think we should i don't think we should push it off too much longer i mean i would be willing as a policy committee to bring it back to policy and we come back to this committee with a recommendation we vote on something we have an option and the three of us work through that in a very specific amount of time whether it's you know 20 minutes of our policy meeting and then the rest moves on to the next policies like it has to be very specific come ready you know come with an option um and let's move on but in fairness to the full committee you know once you bring your recommendation you have to have a full sorted discussion and it can go back
175so it has to be very you know clear right so that just i just want to be you know it's so i don't want to set unreasonable expectations but yeah um and i do think many um districts that are regional so town policies are very different when you don't have a region because most of the fields are handled by the wreck after so you know region is different and our town does manage the fields at the concord public schools so that's just they're two different beasts so that's why i said initially i really think we need two separate policies one for the region and one for conquer public schools because they i think the conqueror public school policy you could knock out boom yeah anyway okay so is the consensus then that we will send
176it back to policy and they will meet next week is that what i'm hearing or well the next meeting we haven't set a date well i'm sorry your next name i'm sorry what's that and what we can do is decide where to prioritize this one and some other ones i think we're but we know there's there's a sense that we're not going to delay this uh beyond the summer you know i don't think they have to be you know if there's an urgency to updating the policy itself so that we are in compliance although i see that we're out of compliance when it says there's a substantial group of citizens will be benefited i think that's deliberately vague and when some of these for-profit organizations i think are generally comprised of nearly the entirety of
177them or our citizens or our town's folk or whatever so i don't think we're out of compliance i don't think there's urgency there wait what are you reading number seven metropolitan education or i'm actually reading the second paragraph use of school buildings and other facilities by organizations will be permitted only when a worthy educational civic or charitable purpose will be served or a substantial group of citizens from the community will be benefited right okay so we have to give these organizations enough time to adjust yeah okay so i think is that it or do we have that further discussion can you um have salon the email that i forward to the chairs the rest of the committee has that been sent out the one with all the different options just so when it does come
178back to full committee discussion that people have the background if they have questions for discussion okay do you want it as it was with the different options or do you want to you know i mean i can look at it but just generally just background because i think that what the committee is lacking um is the background maybe and especially kerry's joining the committee and she probably doesn't have any of the background so maybe it might give a little bit of background might be helpful policy subcommittee background or individual member background no i sent an email i sent an email back i think right before vacation with with those four different options and just things that i had learned and looking at other um towns facilities so my point is wouldn't you follow that through
179policies should we not funnel it through policy that's why i wasn't sure what to do because that's advocacy i i didn't know because i i got your response but i was just waiting on that so we i can i can share we can just talk about that again at the beginning i guess of our policy meeting yeah because i think anybody here i mean that's how that's how we do things with the deficit is you know we we channel and then and then you speak on behalf of uh of any concern right yeah people follow it into a given subcommittee and then it comes back out again yeah yeah right right yeah okay okay [Music] okay let's see where we are oh additional public comment right yep if you are a member of the public
180and you wish to speak now please use the raise hand feature we don't have any more members of the public in person with us on this note um and i don't i do see wendy harriet welcome good evening everyone um i am a boston parent my co-parent and i was actually hoping to be able to jump in um after andrew gave his presentation unfortunately i think i missed that window of opportunity i had a couple of questions i'm assuming that the school committee is comprised solely of conquered residents concord and carlisle honkin and carlisle so you would have to obviously be a resident of concord or carla correct now is that also the case for the school advisory committee because i think there was some mention uh during andrew's presentation or the advisory council that
181can be any appearance i believe it's an apparent yeah he did but he did mention a school um school advisory committee so i'm just i'm just kind of wondering what other requirements for that and and i'm asking you because obviously the existing ones yeah we're still formulating all of this but i'm sure it's going to be inclusive of apparently the existing ones already there's something called the sac which is the student i mean i'm sorry a school advisory council right which is made up of uh parent representatives as well as carlisle there's also a member from the community this is mgm administration um and that is open to any parent yes any parent or community member could certainly contact the principal of their school yes and inquire yes and then in addition andrew is forming
182a different advisory committee that will be focused specifically on dei uh work in the immediate planning process and that one is the one that dr hunter spoke about that's in the formation right now and will include a broad range of parents and there's no no uh nothing questions because the presentation that he made was great um but there are a couple of comments that i have um and i am um joining with some of the others that went previously in that you know medco has been in existence the medco program for over 50 years my son joined in 2011 somewhere around there uh i have a nephew who went to brookline and some of some of what was discussed or presented are some of the very themes that we've heard for many years um and
183you know it seems at this point we you know although we're hearing it and it sounds great i just i'm wondering where where we're going to get to a point where we're actually going to enforce some of this and and not have it just be what we've been talking about because all of the information that he presented as far as statistics this is nothing new to the concord community or i i would probably go as far as saying some of the other communities around this has been there's nothing new none of these um statistics are new uh we've all been aware that there have been these disparities there have been you know in equities and access none of this is new information so now having a sophomore getting ready to graduate when he came in
184in the fifth uh at the age of five i'm sorry in kindergarten just makes me wonder how many years does it take for us to actually get to this um it was nice to hear from some of the students on the ski ski team and um you know i was a little i think a little disheartened hearing that because um while it's great that they're you know bust over to western every day um boston parents we don't have the same opportunities or access for our students who'd like to be involved in sports and other uh curricular activities i mean i'm just wondering you know at what point are we going to actually allocate um you know some additional funding or maybe just during the times when we have the three i think it's typically around
185a three month stench well we have these uh sports and different programs that our students would like to be involved in uh and have them be able to participate i mean at the very least maybe have a commuter rail pass that they could actually take the commuter row home and not have to pay out of pocket these are some of the concerns that we as parents have and while it's great to you know i i mean i have to tell you that i was a little bothered because my son just went through basketball this year and we had quite a struggle and as you can imagine having a 15 year old on a train at night coming home by himself because i'm not always able to pick him up is not something that is you
186know comfortable for a parent so you know as we talk about these things and we talk about you know access we talk about equity we talk about opportunities i just am wondering even andrew being formerly a mecca director why are we not offering the same types of opportunities to these boston students this is not the first year this has been in existence and it just feels like we're still talking about coming up with plans um we're talking about the strategic plan and even as he mentioned a strategic plan i'm still waiting to hear exactly what that's going to entail so i think someone committee mentioned you know not taking on too much but we've known about some of this so i think we do need to take on a lot because it's been it's been
187overdue it's been long overlooked it's been ignored for many years so i i don't want to inconvenience and we're here to partner we're not working against you but i think to even say we don't want to take on too much is almost um somewhat kind of um and i'm looking for the right word right now it's like are we really gonna walk the walk we're talking are we just gonna talk about it because if you say it's doing too much well it's been a lot it's been a lot for a lot of us and it's been many years that we've had the same information we've known about these issues we've expressed concerns i'm not the first parent i know their parents that came before me and they'll be parents after me so at what point
188do we actually put our money where our mouth is we end the talk and enforce the walk thank you for your time thank you yes wendy harriet um looking at her yeah okay thank you thank you very much okay aaron fife [Music] um hi my name is aaron thief and um uh 174 hill street in concord and wendy thank you for your comments because i i was going to echo a lot of those and i really appreciate that um my comment is that the data that really jumped out at me from andrew's presentation um was the response to the question if i were to report racial harassment or discrimination at my child's school i'm confident that my school would respond appropriately andrew reported that parents said overwhelmingly that they agree or strongly agree with that
189statement however most of the families in our district identify as white and would not have experience with reporting racial issues and so the statements from wendy and the parents at the beginning of this meeting sort of run directly counter to the findings of this particular question in the equity audit um and i'm concerned that we continue to not listen to the voices we should be listening to as we develop the cei plan um i understand that andrew as we just mentioned will be selecting sort of people to take part on this dei strategic planning committee and my question would be you know how are members of the committee going to be selected in an equitable manner to make sure that the voices of all parents including the metco parents are included and parents of other
190historically marginalized commun people in our community um and then my final question is just will we have any more public dialogue around the results of the equity audit as wendy said you know we were all sort of hoping to to throw some more comments in after the end of andrew's presentation and i know this is not a forum for dialogue but i would be interested to know um as we get the i know that andrew said he would be sorting through the equity data survey but i would like to know you know is there room for public discussion of that data as it comes through because i think we can all look at that data in different ways and have it inform our work in different ways thank you elizabeth frank hi i'm elizabeth frank
191i'm at 1283 elm street in concord um and i also wanted to thank wendy and the other boston parents that spoke earlier tonight and um just really grateful for their comments um and for their showing up um my one of my points was um just to consider prioritizing when we talk about dei and prioritizing race and racism um and having the other things being more secondary i'm concerned that if we that when we it's very important to have lgbtq and disabilities recognized and you know accepted as well but i'm concerned that those might be a little easier to focus on um for white people than actual race and racism and just really wanting that to be at the center of the dei and kind of have the others maybe on the periphery i think one
192of the other parents might have mentioned this but the idea of having a non-voting boston parent on the school committee i think would be huge it could be a non-voting seat but just to have the actual representation in the room or you know via zoom to really have these people have them be represented better and then i would also suggest is there any way given the comments of the um that they've shared to accelerate implementing even one or two things like if we could ask what are the one or two things that would make a difference now understanding that it's going to be a long process and there's a lot that needs to be changed but since it also there's a long history what can we change now like what one or two things like
193mandatory professional development for all teachers or having a coordination between how the all the schools respond to hate or bias incidents and thank you very much for listening and for your time thank you thank you for coming thank you for coming i i do want to make a note that we have our dei sub committee chair here um and she may be able to speak about i know this is something that that's very imp that's come out through a lot of uh conversations but i just wanted it to be identified as something that we had discussed at um a dei subcommittee meeting two months ago that what are not their last one but the one before about exactly that question of how can we incorporate other representation on um in the school committee meetings right
194so it is something that we've been looking at um and we're and um we wanted to kind of get the equity survey results and then figure out uh how to how to move forward on some but it but that is something that's also it is it's a concern that's shared also by the school committee itself that um we believe there are new opportunities um that weren't necessarily yeah open to us uh before and i i do thank i don't want to be out of order and engage in any type of discussion but we there are other towns that have representation their school committees that we're aware of and how they can put it in their bylaws and then just in terms of professional development and we should maybe think about doing a presentation on the
195professional development that's actually happening in our district because our teachers are all going through rigorous um plans you know it's like 25 hours they go through it's not it's graduate level coursework specifically in the area of cultural competency and we're also going to do like a mini course on that so i think we can't say that enough um in our presentations and maybe we need to just you know get that information out to the community and yeah it's important to note i think that we before before we engaged fully with with andrew in terms of how to support i mean he had to process the the equity survey um but we ourselves felt that it was important that we go through that as tracy said the uh a modified version of what our teachers do
196in terms of dei training before we were actually prepared to um to engage more in this to figure out yep how to how to mobilize some of these ideas yeah great okay okay and that's our last comment i guess that's our last public comment and it was a different process than usual yeah i think it was good it is good nice very happy to hear from you yes absolutely certain people tonight yep so thank you for joining us everybody thank you for sharing your comments your concerns your questions um it's it's really it's a more dynamic meeting when when you when everybody shows up i really appreciate it um good um i think with that though action i don't know good try thank you that's why i could see you we're ready okay all right
197so um so we have a vote to approve school committee policy um athletic concussion regulations on my computer's debt so the one link to the agenda is the second reading this has been reviewed by the nursing staff by the athletic director by the athletic trainer the changes are very few they relate specifically to uh the parent who might uh or guardian who might bring a athlete home uh after a uh an event that was a potential concussion were that child deemed stable that was the only change in the document you read that it was last approved february 2015 so in adopting it tonight a new date would get on it we're not adopting it with the old date we automatically apply a new date to it and again this is a second read hi so
198it doesn't have a date but we will put one on there is that correct it has the old date on it oh that would be replaced by today's date should you approve it and uh i would move approval lose approval we just need second right no i'll second that okay all right yeah discussion nope all in favor that's an easy qualify we'll take followers oh yeah okay okay uh vote to approve staff children attending cpscchs dr hunter you should probably leave this comment sure this we've been gathering these so you're getting them as a batch right now they'll certainly still trickle in on probably the thing of note is that any staff member enrolling their children as the first for the first time we're going to shift back to alcott just to keep enrollments balanced
199if kids are already at willard we'll enroll the younger siblings at willard which is why you've got a mix of things there um so we'll just bring you others should they should they come through okay okay there's a there's a presumption here that none of these would tip our ratios such that we do hire based on no yeah i mean it may happen given as contractual yeah okay is there a motion you happy to read it if you wish yeah sure go ahead look i moved at the concord concord carlisle school committees vote to approve the following staff requests to enroll the children in the conquer public schools concrete carlow regional school district for the 2022-2023 school year and the tuition be waived mary desmond transitioned from specialists to cchs daughters to enroll in second
200and fifth grade at alcott bree gap a teacher at thorough son to enroll in kindergarten and alcott rodka grind a teacher at cchs son to enroll in kindergarten at olcott kendra katz teacher at carlisle public schools daughter to enroll in ninth grade at cchs lisa mulcahy teacher at olcott daughter to enroll in kindergarten at willard brian revell teacher of cms son to enroll in sixth grade at cms and daughter to enroll in third grade at balcony i'll second that all right all in favor no sorry discussion all in favor hi okay wonderful our third vote to appoint ccac advisory committee members court i think you might it would is portrait world no i think eva might help us too while i'm pulling this up that's right here as do i do that sure that's cool
201i bring them all so i bring emotion to approve uh that the concord and carlisle school committee vote to appoint the following at conquer carlisle um adult and community education advisory committee steve resneck to fill the current opening and kim klausman to fill one of the openings in june okay thank you for great volunteering is there a second yeah all right discussion no yeah thank you yes thank you for your service yes very important yep very important community resources this is one more mechanism by which the schools try to partner and service the needs of the larger community and uh we need the help of these volunteers for sure to achieve that there's quite a variety of offerings yeah so all right there are one to two openings for the carlisle position on that on
202this advisory okay okay so what were you doing i saw a few url names out there in the audience tonight just before we adjourn i just i really again i want to thank everybody for coming out and these are these are not comfortable conversations right and um the messages are hard to deliver they're hard to hear sometimes i thank everybody for their honesty for their courage in coming forward um and um i mean i think i think andrew said once like if it's not uncomfortable we're not doing it right yeah um and so i i am and yet despite that it's i'm not even gonna say it was uncomfortable like it's it there's stuff that you don't want to hear because you don't want it to be true to people but um so we'll we're
203um i'm glad i'm glad that we could have have these conversations tonight good thank you and uh with that i will take i don't think we voted on the cca no no that's what we just did did it just move no we didn't do it all in favor oh sorry oh okay oh all in favor all right hi thank you gary all right thank you okay and with that i'll take a motion to adjourn what show move second favorite thank you colleagues all right tonight and we continue on with the concord public school committee so first up is uh any middle school project update i don't know who would who's on deck for that i'm sure dr hunter may have something i can report that there will be a design subcommittee meeting uh week from
204thursday that'll be march 17 7 30 am when the subcommittee will examine its role function and responsibility during this new phase called design development and uh secondly that the full committee meets a week later march 24 again 7 30 a.m also on zoom open to the public please please attend and the contracts or contract amendments as it may be with the architectural firm and the owner's project manager opm are in the process of being executed right now okay i'm sorry dad can you say that the date of the next forgive me yes uh 24th no i i just yeah those are probably in the building committee website or will be yeah that'll they'll certainly be posted okay thank you absolutely oh and i can also report uh because i read this uh that uh and
205lori certainly can speak to it that uh the architect is doing another round of meetings with educators oh yes to drill down into even greater and greater detail on uh how to design how to design the building okay and i i don't know have dates on that but we're not part of that anyway but i know that that's underway all right mr stanton we're ready for your presentation very good yeah um so this would be very similar um not as many actual changes at the concord side great [Music] and i don't think we noted explicitly earlier the public hearing is thursday night cynthia correct my correctness i like hearing yes at night i'm not sure if it's the 7 or 7 30 start i'm not sure seven thank you [Laughter] thank you okay okay um
206so starting with the superintendents i guess we're still with the recommended budget that's going to be potentially voted tonight 43 million 148 899 dollars that is currently 312 585 over the finance committee guideline um the budget drivers this changed a little bit from january 11th the biggest one being the administration salary the dei director is now in this general fund budget as a .6 fte so that is now a driver next uh the cost savings actually did change we increased our circuit breaker offset by an additional 75 000. so therefore the special tuitions decreased um technically in an additional 75 000 and the total cost savings increased to 856 thousand 482 dollars sorry an interest but you informed us about that in february correct correct yeah yeah in february yeah um the only thing that
207changed here is the fte went up 0.2 from the january meeting in the administration and is that andrew yeah there were no changes in the grant offsets i am sorry actually there was we increased uh this by a special education mecco grant 90 000 and we charged um middle school guidance office uh guidance to that so we decreased that general fund line and moved it over to the grant here's where you're seeing the additional uh circuit breaker increase uh so it's now at 725 000. no changes in tuitions no changes in early retirement or transportation no changes in the preschool budget there was a change on this slide this was due to nursing we reduced we had a salary reduction in the nursing line not fte but salary reduction by about 35 000. 38 000
208there were no changes at any of the elementary schools or the middle school and then lastly the district-wide location decreased due to the special education offsets and the teachers going to the especially teachers going to the mecco grid [Music] no changes to the cares act or sr3 and here is a new slide um that was pretty much copied from the one that we presented to the um to the finance committee already and this is just the capital articles and that is it so i had questions on many of those eyes which you've now explained to me i just my computer's dead and i'll go back and just double check if i had any more sure when i get home and i'll send them to you if you do yeah i'm looking for um there's only
209so many times i can see this without i keep i miss things so if you see some numbers that look a little off or something please uh i'd rather you question me then sure fix it before the the finance committee get a hold of me [Music] so when do you think you might have the slides to them because it's more like to the public as well yeah tomorrow great yeah great great great and same with the budget books um i was just waiting for a little feedback there was just one very small grammatical error at the high school i'm just waiting for um any more feedback on those and then we'll post those we can always tweak them after the fact that we're not not printing a million copies yes in fact we're not printing
210many so if you buy one we can certainly do that because it looks a lot better um pdf on the website than it does print it no no i don't need to waste paper we don't need the waste paper and just thank you to you and your office on that because that is a tremendous amount of work and we recognize that um you know i'll speak for myself and i'm you know we'll see if anyone else agrees with me but i mean that is a ton of work that goes in during a stressful time of year so thank you for that sure we welcome changes thank you would you be good enough to repeat for us both skeletons sure um uh 174 um under are you asking it okay yep 174 172 under at the
211high school and currently 312 585 over um at the cps great all right any other questions okay uh so the next action item go to prove superintendents uh fy 23 recommended budget i do they cannot blow up the motion uh can i speak to yes before emotions um is it is it as responsible as we can be is it politically as astute as it can be to uh put a a formal recommendation on it tonight or uh after fincom so that's just an open question i i i don't know i think it plays different ways if we do it before or after the hearing well we can always change it up until 10 meeting so we can always if somebody has a strong desire to have come back at it at a school committee meeting
212they would contact the chair and that's that we have revisit this item so i don't think um i see what you're saying um but i i i guess i would say that we would need to have some options on the table or had this so um i'm not seeing those right now um and i know we don't it's not responsible just to unilaterally you know make a motion to drop the budget by x amount of money no i'm not proposing yeah what i'm doing is i'm being mindful of two things one that we've been experiencing changes in this um you know that are quite current um and two this uh somebody may have guidance for us i don't know well look no we all have to that's where i was coming from it is our
213duty and responsibility to listen to the feedback we get at the um hearing on thursday night so whatever that happens to be can you just clarify the question for me i think it's a little late in the evening and i'm like you clarify the question sorry um my question was uh should we formally approve the bottom line number tonight where should we do it after the hearing i mean we've had some exchange with the finncon our next exchange with the finicon where we bring them one delta under and one delta over do we need to are you proposing that we all weigh in on that um anybody who wants to i mean i i heard something it's part of the discussion and you know that's helpful to me yeah at the vincon's last meeting where
214they were aware of those two deltas right and they didn't and i mean i was there and they didn't deliberate on it is the suggestion that they may in fact deliberate on it at this hearing like would they weigh in just asking the question we don't we don't know the last number you voted was only different by 38 000 right this is just adjust for that one salary piece right the nurse we've been using it saying it's the new number not that we said you voted it but there was an assumption you would for the hearing so we're gonna be just have to tweak slides we're not gonna vote and i don't know exactly since it's a public hearing and not their meeting per se i don't know what kind of conversation yeah they would
215have anything but they will they will have a conversation i usually ask the most questions of anyone yeah at the hearing right of course do you typically go to the pincom with some type of vote of support or from the committee would i prefer you vote it yes yes yes i'm ready to vote yeah i'm prepared to move out okay does somebody have the motion in front of them i haven't really make the motion i have it okay the motion is i mow when i move i move that the town appropriates the sum of 43 million one hundred and forty eight thousand eight hundred and ninety nine dollars for the necessary and expedient purposes of the public schools of the town for the fiscal year ending june 30th 2023 and that the same be expended
216only for such purposes and under the direction of the concord school committee second any further discussion this is a very important part of our work okay i am ready for a vote all favor hi and he opposed we have unanimous okay thank you very much um and then i jump to the vote no i'm good uh vote to accept the donation from the concord children's center does anybody have i'm sorry go ahead no i think it's pretty clear what's there it's just really a fiscal agent shift the ccc had been managing the money for the playground through the build and raising and that's all over and so they're really just reallocating it back over the preschool account okay great great um want me to move it yes i moved the concord school committee vote to
217accept the donation of 3 367 dollars and 24 cents from the concord children's center to the concord integrated preschool enrichment fund second any further discussion all in favor aye any opposed it's unanimous and i so declare all right uh i think that is it for tonight do they miss anything colleagues okay uh i'll take a motion to adjourn [Music] all in favor aye unanimous i like it thank you okay you