Concord Carlisle Joint School Committee - August 11, 2020

001the zoom is being recorded [Music] and this is available online at minuteman.media uh in the uh also on comcast channel 99 uh we're expecting a fair number of attendees we are in webinar well no we're not in webinar mode but we would ask that if we do get to a number of 500 which would be really unusual but if we do if people who are not here to make a public comment might be able to switch over to minuteman media that would be helpful um i suspect we will not reach that number so while there's a fair amount of background noise can people commute themselves yes please send everybody mute um and uh excuse me the court we'll call the concord public schools school committee to order i'd like to note that we are needless

002to say living in unprecedented times with unprecedented anxieties that really run the gamut uh we are uh sensitive to this range of concern and uh uh this desire for more certainty than we might have today uh we are going to ask for everyone's continued best efforts at civility and respect as we sort our way through this together we are in this together we want to appeal to everyone who is participating to uh assume good intentions on the part of all parties including people with ideas very divergent perhaps from your own or mine uh because this school committee thinks that uh we will be the better for it if we can continue to honor those kinds of traditions of public discourse as we as we navigate the the tough days ahead if you listen to superintendents

003around the nation uh a a common phrase that is uh very frustrating to uh many is uh the best answer to the question is that's under discussion but i want to assure you that uh we say that here too in concord and concord carlisle and it's not a dodge it's the truth and so if something is under discussion we would uh submit to you that there's a reason for it and uh uh there will be uh the best possible decisions emerging from those continuing discussions so with that we want to thank you for participating today and appeal to your continued goodwill working with us with this these school committees thank you thank you um let's do a roll call uh ready here wilson here stuffy here [Applause] so our first item on the agenda is

004public comment uh i'll ask that uh people who would like to make comments use the raise your hand option on uh and i do want to just say a couple of things before we get started uh one typically we have three-minute comments on comments uh if we get a significant number of hands up somebody's got uh some sound in the background if you couldn't hear your uh thank you microphones um if we get a significant number of hands raised we may very well uh lower that to a minute we'll just wait and see uh if you are speaking and uh comments you plan to make have been made previously please just indicate your agreement with those and add anything new to help us move things along i do want to say that we are getting

005input from many people many places um a lot of parents a lot of students a lot of teachers the school committee does not feel any undue pressure from any one of those groups we test court just said welcome people's input we will be the better for it and we when it comes time for us to make decisions we will do so uh having the full understanding of everybody's input uh i will assure you we read what we get from email and we we listen to people who reach out to us in the community um so i i hope you can trust that your voices are heard um i do want to make a comment that uh t there's some conjecture about teachers applying undue pressure or heavy pressure on us to go remote i certainly

006don't feel that um the teachers have been working with us in lockstep to prepare for teaching options in the fall uh whether they are remote which some will be absolutely or hybrid and you know as many of us hope a combination of both um and uh our hope is that we can continue to all be uh civil as we approach this and recognize that you know we're all working toward the same thing which is what's best for our children and uh we would not be here doing this if that were not the case um we may differ in opinions but we all i believe have the same end goal um so with that said um i don't see a lot of hands um but i will we uh and if i get somebody's name uh

007wrong please correct it and i apologize uh melinda gambino hi uh can you hear me yes okay is there going to be video or is it just going to be the audio uh i'm not sure i think you can put your video on if you want oh okay i wasn't sure how to do that from the options here if it may you may not have it if you don't then we certainly can hear you and everybody else can okay great yeah it doesn't it doesn't look like there's a video option um i would love to say hi that way thank you excuse me we're going to promote you to a panelist for a moment and we should be able to do that all right we just don't want it there we go okay well great

008to see everybody and thank you um mr chairman and uh good afternoon to the school committee um i have a comment that's basically um from uh several parents sent a letter earlier today um and so i think that i just want to convey some of the sentiments that were in the letter and um it was signed by several families i think that you should have received it by now and i was going to ask that it could be entered into the minutes of this meeting um so the purpose of the letter really was to encourage the school committee to vote to move forward with the school reopening plan this fall that proposes the hybrid model within classroom teachers and then there are some additional suggestions about safety measures that could be considered but first i

009wanted to say thank you for the tremendous efforts of the administration and the teachers and the task forces that have been working all summer to put together this plan and to carefully address safety so that students faculty and staff could come back to school this fall so the students i can i can tell you um students so part of the other reason i wanted to make a comment today is i the school committee should know how excited and eager the students are to get back in there into the classrooms and families are very eager to um to see their kids back in school with their teachers so you know really i i understand how difficult a decision this has been to decide what to do in the fall um we're forced to really find the

010best option amongst a set of less than desirable options um but honestly the remote learning option which we experienced you know this spring out of necessity it was really um it was really tough for when teachers and learners were thrown into that situation and large numbers of students became disengaged under those conditions and really the most highly motivated students can do okay under those conditions but we found you know all over through talking with each other parents and families that you know it was hard to thrive under the remote learning conditions so really what we want to say is you know that we haven't seen an explosion of cases of povert 19 and people in concord and carlisle have been relatively diligent about following the safety precautions the virus is not going away in the

011foreseeable future and it's going to take some time for all the risk to disappear completely so in the meantime i think it would be really detrimental to sever students and families from the essential service of providing public education it needs to be acknowledged that educating our young people is a primary and vital function composed of many much more than just acquiring academic skills without the personal interactions and the ability to engage meaningfully with teachers and other adults in a school setting our young people will not fully realize their skills identities and interests and we must remember that our commitment to you know also our commitment to mental health and the well-being of the of our young people so i think the continued and prolonged social isolation um that goes along with remote fully remote really

012threatens to undermine mental health and chances for success in our school community so i know that there's been a lot of careful attention you know to considering safety of students um the letter that we that was sent also outlined some other steps that i don't know have you know probably been discussed possibly i know the task forces are working really hard to incorporate you know any ideas that that could help so i won't really talk about that but i'm asking you know when families are asking please don't abandon the school reopening plan that involves in classroom teaching and learning in favor of a remote option um i think it's just far too detrimental for you know for the students and so that's basically the um the content of the letter and i wanted to just

013add from a personal note um you know as a former school committee member in carlisle one of the things that we would always remind ourselves when an important decision or discussion came in front of us as you know what is best for education and for students and you know i think that we need to ask ourselves that question here too um undoubtedly the pandemic presents special circumstances that in unique circumstances um but at the end of the day you know we're really here for students uh and for education so thank you for listening thank you thank you i will note there were 82 people signed onto the letter we received so um thank you for sending it um and it'll be uh i just want a couple of things that come up here as i'm

014looking at q a and stuff like that um we will uh all letters that we get email or physical or public record um and we'll note in the minutes that we received correspondence probably by the numbers of which currently is about 35 emails about this topic um and this is public comment it's not a forum so uh we won't be answering questions i've seen a couple of questions pop up here if you want to make comments to us that's certainly welcome um and uh you know some of those things i'm sure may get answered as we go through the meeting here today um samantha jojo probably butchered your last name i apologize we can put her on screen for a few if for her comments and as as wally said before we are listening intently

015hearing intently and we would ask everyone to not perhaps belabor points that you think have been expressed very well already during the meeting but certainly the floor is yours hello samantha hi i'm glad to be promoted thank you for promoting i want to make a couple of quick comments uh one is that i i have been kind of glued to the news to the you know to the local government data as well so uh but not everybody is like you know you guys or or people like me so i feel like uh it's important to send out constant reminder how important it is to not let our guards down in terms of social distancing wearing masks and all that um when dr hunter did that right and and in april march april may time frame

016i felt that was very effective and i you know me and my friends read every single one of those emails number two is that um let us know how we can help you know if you we we only have about a month for um school reopening um i would like to find an opportunity to volunteer if we need to configure new computers you know just train us on that um if we need to make masks you know facials all of these things let parents know how we can help to make this possible thank you thank you thanks for the effort uh next would be zoe jackson and i think zoe should be on if we have her correctly okay hi zoe hi my name is zoe jackson i'm a senior at cc and i'm the

017vice president of our grade um i'm here today because i'm hoping to share with you um the comments of hundreds of students and just voices view some of the things that we have done as students during this sort of reopening time so back in july student government sent out a survey to students to ask them their concerns and their opinions on the reopening plans specifically the alphabetical hybrid of the plan itself and then after that 150 seniors signed a petition to ask for some other plan to be considered and then voicing their similar concerns and then last monday 105 students emailed the school committee to further voice these concerns and i'm just here to explain that the voices of um the majority of the students are saying this the reopening plan that splits kids alphabetically

018is isolating them from their support systems and it's not just about friendships i think it's important to note that we are concerned about safety and every capacity of that but we are just trying to make sure that our voices are being heard and we come up with a solution that meets the needs of students as well as the safety concerns for teachers and students governor baker has led his response the covid response using data and today he said that the majority of towns in concord should be going back to school at least at a hybrid because of the data and what we have done as students is try to give you data to voice our concerns and to come together to try to come up with alternatives what we are asking right now is that

019you do the same that you please share and allow us to help in coming up with solutions to try to get us back to school in the best way possible and we are truly trying to push that when we are arguing that this split either alphabetical or a complete virtual option and how damaging that is to our mental health being isolated from our support system at the very least we are trying to argue and sort of offer that we are allowed to switch cohorts if that is the plan that just moved forward with sort of like you know one from the first half of the alphabet and one from the other half just so that students aren't completely isolated from their support systems we are trying to work really hard to have the best year

020possible especially seniors because this is our last year we thank you for everything that you have done and to ensure a safe return to school but we want to make sure that our voices are heard because i think that is that is the reason that we have a school committee and teachers trying to voice and advocate for our needs so thank you that is what i've had to say but um yeah zoe thank you very much and we hope you convey that to your colleagues at cchs thank you thank you zoe and uh you're absolutely being heard um the input from last week's uh prior to last week's school committee meeting prompted some additional thinking about things we can do to uh we certainly went back and looked at uh if there was a better

021way to do something about cohorts um the uh we're still working on that but you know i'm gonna say the same thing i said last week because it doesn't look like it's changed i don't know that's as much we can do about that in particular but we are looking at several ways to allow students opportunities to spend time with with their friends with the people that as you say your support system and we know that we understand that and we want you to have the best year we can possibly provide um in these really challenging times um so i hope that i hope you can convey to the to your student body that we we do hear you um we are here uh first and foremost for you and uh we are doing everything we

022can to balance the safety necessary the ability to teach necessary and your ability to to not only enjoy this as best you can but feel safe be supported and and get through this very difficult time as best you can and we will be very focused on that ladder piece throughout the year regardless of how we pinned up whether we get the hybrid for the whole year or part of the year if you're remote we're going to be doing everything we can to the best way we can to support you thank you for coming up today thank you thank you zoe don't see any other hands um molly i just say there's a few questions in the q a and if people want to email me i'm happy to answer those um i don't think we'd

023do it right now but i'm happy to answer them good thank you so uh and i think uh to that end if people want to keep sending us questions uh because we'll we'll have them recorded here and uh i'll know what they are but please if you could also send an email to uh dr hunter that'd be great wally like just say something that i think so um the director of the national zoo yesterday was talking about the reopening plans for the smithsonian and phrased it really nicely that i think might might help zoe might help other people understand that there's not an on like the way he said it is it's not an on off it's a thermostat right and and we have to know that we're going to be making adjustments and and

024we're going to learn what works and uh and that you know this is going to take a collective collective understanding that we need to start somewhere and work towards adjustments as we move forward thanks yeah and we you know one thing we do know is we'll be making adjustments for a long time to come i think we do have one other hand madeline poehler [Music] i'm helen hi how are you okay i'll be very brief um i'm speaking as a concord resident and teacher wearing i guess all those hats but these are my views only um i am very willing to go back hybrid because i believe fully um in the hybrid model i want to see my students i miss them and as a parent i know that when i got the news from

025my kids colleges that they were in person i was so happy and i want to do that for my students what i want to ask i guess of this committee is perhaps to partner with police the town government as i drive around town and i go i'm working like crazy um this summer as a lot of my colleagues are i have an 89 year old father that i'm probably not going to see a lot of this year and i'm willing to make that sacrifice for my students um and i want the students and their families to understand that in-person learning is going to take a lot of sacrifice on their parts too to make it work um and i want that to be an ask of people i see too many parties happening in town

026i see too many people gathering without masks without social distancing and i understand i have three teenagers as the mental health piece is important but there's a difference between going to a huge party um you know with 50 people and maybe having a couple kids with masks in your backyard six feet apart and we need to change that narrative that that matters um and so i just find myself as i drive around town and go out for runs by white pond and see tons of people um feeling really disappointed i guess i want to be focusing on teaching and learning i want the people on this committee and our unbelievable administrators to focus on teaching and learning and we need help to make all of this reopening happening because i think it is sort of

027pure luck that we aren't falmouth and chatham when i see what's going on in town among the teens and i have a pretty good read on that and i love them to death but we need to do a better job and we need help thank you thank you appreciate that input and hear you loud and clear um kerry patel you think you're on carrie hello thank you hi i'm kerry patel i'm a parent from carlisle um very new here i have been uh serving on um the operations uh committee for the um what do you guys call it we have the i'm in carlisle whatever the task force is a lot of names running around but uh so i'm just gonna have a bit of a different view than most of the other people i've

028heard but so i'm just going to read a little thing i read at a while um one first thank you for everybody who's given up their summer um especially the school committee as you know you're all volunteers i know this has been a i personally have been in a lot of zoom meetings so i can only imagine how many you guys have been in um this has been a difficult year to say the least and i honestly believe there's no good or right answers to the dilemmas we are currently facing as a nurse i've worked in the carlisle health office for years as well as over 13 years in a hospital setting and i have a bit of experience dealing with infectious diseases and because of that and i cannot in good conscience send my

029boys back to school this fall these are very challenging times and more often than not what is good for us is not always what we want and i know we talk about carlyle and concord as being bubbles and in many aspects that's true we are a bubble we live in a bubble here in these two towns however viruses don't care about bubbles and as a friend of mine just beautifully put it we are all dry under this big umbrella of ours but it's still raining out there and if we take that away a lot of us are going to get wet i personally am not willing to see anyone in the cch community as well as the carlisle community get wet we ask a lot of our teachers and they give a lot of us

030every to us every day but asking them to risk their lives so our children can go back in person is not what they signed on for and it's not what i believe we should expect from them i know a lot of people were not happy with how the remote learning went this spring but please don't let what was put in place as emergency measures measures cloud your judgment about what a wonderful what our wonderful and creative teachers could do with our children this year online to ensure that everyone is safe in our community thank you thank you carrie thank you thanks for your work on the task force so i now see no hands wrist so um why don't we move on comment and uh uh we have minutes to approve from uh her joint

031session minutes from june 30 and uh july 13th so kind of a motion to approve those minutes so move by for both districts thank you um and any comment to our request just does there note that there were two corrections and two occasions uh our faithful scribe referred to dr hunter's possessive and we dropped in uh an apostrophe so that's how carefully we checked the minutes with that one exception i think they were perfect great thank you did we have a second wally uh i don't know that we did so i'd be happy to second for both it's just joint uh well it is trying to just both isn't it sorry um yes we have a second anybody else so roll that um oof all right for above mustafi mustafi for region vote um correspondence

032um as you've heard we've had lots of correspondence it's our last meeting and we had a lot at the meeting before that and we welcome it we know how challenging this is and it's important that people are able to speak to us and that we can speak to you um the we did have just to give you an idea on numbers uh 35 emails since our last meeting which was monday last uh around school start um and smell you know both sides of this sort of discussion we're having um there were three emails uh focused on anti-racism uh one which was a personal matter and a miscellaneous uh email so something needed here but we did have a letter one of the 35 emails was a letter from uh signed by at the time it

033was sent to 82 um parents cheers liaison reports um somebody want to talk about the finance committee meeting i can do it if you want synthetic the keyword there you want to um i'll just give a quick update here um there was a final finance committee meeting last week after army we actually excuse me presented at it laurie presented uh and jared and uh uh they were effusive in their praise for the work that's being done by the administration and the teachers and everybody involved in this effort we have going um and recognize the fluid nature of our financial situation this year um they did recognize uh after we were done presenting and after they had had some further discussion about some things the you know the challenging situation for taxpayers uh at this point

034in time uh highlighted some numbers i do not have them written down but uh significant numbers of unemployment among concord residents and the difficulty of merchants and other businesses in town and with that best of tax rolls um we will talk a bit later but they are attempting to keep the tax increase on you know at or just below three percent for this year um and as such have a request of us uh which we'll talk about as we get into uh into the budget uh numbers um so that was primarily theirs uh they will their series of hope of uh hearings public hearings coming up i would recommend a view at the concord website to get beat on when those are and they're all zone meetings when they will be i will add uh

035it's not income related but uh you may have noticed governor baker uh put the 50-person restriction back on meeting sizes that does not include legislative bodies which is what our time time meeting is uh uh exists so at the present time time meeting is still scheduled for um um and everybody should have received a flyer from the community in the mail outlining some of the details of that and i believe it's september 13th i was i stand corrected wally september 13th thank you um and uh it's worth taking a look at that because there will be some some differences i would urge people who want to see presentations to tune into the public forums because that is the only place that we will be giving presentations we will not be giving them a town meeting

036um there'll be materials there to review but there will not be presentations well am i correct uh the public hearings will be next week monday tuesday wednesday with the schools tuesday all three nights at seven can somebody fact check me on that does that sound right uh that's correct we might need to look at our start time or something for the 18th right you mean for the school committee correct in light of the seven o'clock public hearing correct and everything's available at concord math.gov for information on those hearings sorry to interrupt wally yeah no i just pulled it up here um we will be we actually will have a uh our budget public hearing uh at the beginning of our meeting next week too so yeah there is a supplemental public hearing on the 17th

037select part and finance committee uh in our meeting on the 18th and then i think the ninth year is the finance committee supplemental public hearing so we'll want to be done by then um i might we might want to talk about forcing a little earlier meeting for ourselves on tuesday and then uh landing board town meeting public hearing on the 19th if we are done with uh fincom while uh i'll move on to policy if i might yes we met last week you have a first reading coming up later in our agenda on some covid related policies we decided to prioritize those and we have our next meeting this thursday at 4 pm and for a link to that meeting one would go to the school website school committee section policy section and one would

038find our agenda and the link information to join us that's a public meeting thursday at four o'clock thank you courtney any other reports yeah can i just jump in quickly and mention um can you hear me okay great um mostly my thanks to court for stepping in for a couple of weeks as chair well i'm less accessible than usual um which goes along with a an apology in advance in case i in case i lose you or anything i'm in a place with a lot less reliable access than i thought i was going to have all week so um just apologies in advance in case i end up uh missing you all for part of this but hopefully this will my connection will last for the whole discussion so thank you court for stepping up

039i really appreciate it our pleasure pretending to be away things are pretty quiet here that's right not much going on right now i figured it was a good time to disappear you guys can handle all my requests um okay any other comments but meetings okay let's move on to the superintendent's report you know wally i think we can combine my report with the reopening updates um i think that probably makes the most sense given where my time is going let's go right into it all right so i did put a few slides together to hit cover some of the highlights of the work of the last week essentially obviously everything is continuing throughout and we're working at both the district and building levels now so let me uh [Music] it's very hard to do both

040so give me one second here um what we what i want to do is and this is going to feel a little bit eclectic but that's kind of the nature of the work at the moment um let me just screen share so i can hit the presentation button uh so that we're bouncing between topics because we have so many different balls in the air at the moment so sorry about that i lost my screen share it's switching on me now [Music] all right so these will feel like i said a little random but they're they're not they're all connected around the reopening plan so the building-based task forces are operational and meeting constantly uh weekly essentially with work going on in between they're working on arrival and pickup making maps of the building for student

041travel lunch at the middle and high schools schedules are being reviewed lockers backpacks all those types of processes are getting discussed supplies and materials we're certainly strategizing that and how kids will be managing those pieces we did put out last week the individual remote learning plan option for families as of last night when i pulled this you can see the data coming in to us with a fairly even range to it um that remains open we had asked for a deadline of today so we're going to capture it today and really use that for our planning purposes it's very synced up with what we had for soft data a few weeks ago so that proved to be quite predictive of where we are we also put out the requests for help with transportation and have

042had a very positive response as of last night also when i pulled this you can see this is per student so certainly some of it is families but um 100 1052 students have transport available to them through their homes or otherwise so that's going to be substantially helpful to us especially at the elementary schools where we're bringing all of the kids in so once we get probably through the late part of this week we'll be using these numbers to build our roots and rework our our transportation process the hvac consultant has been to all of the schools uh over the course of the last week we are expecting the report very quickly jared's had a couple of question and answer sessions with the consultant as he works through it we'll be able to turn around

043also very quickly to take care of the recommendations that he makes and we also had an industrial hygienist in the schools today to work with us on collection of air quality etc [Music] we've been eagerly awaiting as says everyone updates to the athletics uh miaa based on information i got today through some of the leadership of miaa there's a bit of circular piece going on deci's supposed to be giving mia information and things just aren't getting totally planned yet at this point they've officially postponed the season until september 14th we do know there's a lot of moving pieces here they've put out hypotheticals so we're awaiting decisions before we can act on anything um including moving seasons around going with the sports that are allowed now and postponing the others so we just have to

044stay i think open and available and attentive to this um there is an mia coveted task force that's been meeting and then they meet with the board of directors and there's a loop through um with the with the jesse leadership as well so a lot of moving pieces there and perhaps hopefully decisions coming shortly this has probably been the biggest time i've been spending this past week is working with the staff in terms of what their options are their level of need and really getting pretty creative um in an effort to meet everyone's everyone's hopes and even more than hope safety requirements so just i think it's important that we name how some of this is going to play out um all of the teachers will not be able to return as normal that's a

045fact of their own situations um whether it be medically related or child care related or whatever so we're going to need to work through a lot of pieces here in the next month so that we're ready to roll some folks are taking leave of absences that's certainly within the choice that there's more legislation than ever both the traditional legislation and coveted related legislation that allows that we are a little out of the box here and giving teachers a remote teaching option where they can be at home and our really high quality teachers are still accessible to kids even if they aren't at a place where they can be in person with them for whatever reason that isn't a fit to their personal uh situations and i will say i'm not just allowing this for anybody

046and everybody and i um i'm working through a very tight process of documentation and pro and procedure with them as to who gets this option but there will be teachers and this has really been something i've offered at the secondary level because i don't believe there's a way for elementary kids to access their teachers if they're at the school and the teachers are home but we're gonna we're gonna work through some of these options at the middle and high school um because otherwise we're gonna be finding a lot of long-term subs and that's not the best for kids i don't believe um and i also think we'd be putting ourselves in some fiscal challenges there for sure so this is this has proven to be an interesting decision and one that i think is going

047to be very positive but it is it is outside the box and i think people are going to need to know that there will be some remote teaching going on no matter what we do here um so we did have participants in the early retirement package we offered thanks to your approval a couple of weeks ago essentially at the elementary schools and whether we're unfortunately we have had already to lay off some cafeteria staff at the middle and high school because we're we're just overstaffed for what we're expecting to be serving and providing the hybrid model only has half the kids in the building each day so naturally there's not as much opportunity so this is going to move um throughout i think and we're trying to take it a bit at a time knowing

048that the big picture could change as well and um been really intimately working with teachers based on what their own personal situations are it seemed to make sense to me if we're going to give families that choice that we work as hard as we can to try to do right by teachers in that mode while still serving the kids well i've been regularly meeting with the concord health officials and i just wanted to provide some updates on that at a high level we've been working through thresholds and scenarios you'll see the bottom note and obviously was already mentioned the governor is releasing more enhanced community data in terms of covert rates at the very very local level that by all means is meant to help inform school-based decisions we met with the commissioner earlier today

049we've also been working with the concord health officials to look at scenarios of what happens if we have a case of code of it in the schools we have deci guidance we have cdc guidance we met this afternoon with the nurse leaders and the principals and really talked through how this all plays out and we are being more conservative in some places than um desi would even recommend in terms of days away if kids are um or staff are positive covet and some other processes and protocols which we're we've got those in draft form we're going to have the principal share them with the task forces tomorrow for feedback and then um we'll be making our way to bring those to the staff and the parent community and of course the school committee um it's

050a very long never-ending cycle of review of the protocols from all of the organizations that govern us reviewing of the positive coveted response and contact tracing the health officials will take over the contact tracing if there's a positive case we will just be collaborating with them reviewing the quarantine protocols and what that's going to look like that also translates into remote education or teaching perhaps if we have people being quarantined so we're working through all those the health officials are going to be developing and maybe this will now be in conjunction with the governor's data um a local data dashboard that we're going to be able to post weekly that gives very specific counts and numbers as to what's happening in concord and carlisle and probably most interesting and something i definitely wanted to put

051on the committee's discussion tonight was uh the dis the option to ask for covet testing prior to the return to school i met yesterday at their invitation with the emerson administrators and the health concord health officials and we really were just bouncing around how emerson might be able to support us i think i've mentioned a few times that there is no state plan for testing it's not a desi discussion at the moment um and yet there's a pretty big interest in having better information and testing ahead of school starting at minimum so we have an opportunity um one's an opportunity the second is an option uh the first is an opportunity to work with emerson they are collaborating the broad institute in cambridge um who has become a a go-to locally their testing capacity is

052significant they've been working with the universities and a number of other institutions they have reached out to school systems including us but to manage it on our own is very very expensive so emerson's using them to process their testing cova testing um so we do have an option that we could work with emerson to set up testing for staff most insurance according to emerson is uh really collaborating and positively responding to the cova testing i do think for staff we could afford to cover any that isn't insurance covered and have all staff tested before the return to school we really bounced around at length the wish really wish for students to be tested before coming back emerson's very interested in partnering with us they don't know that they could take on all of that capacity

053of 3 400 kids however we could ask that of kids i've worked with our local district council she's been writing draft policy for other local districts desi is not mandating the test but the local district can and really the language in the policy would reflect that without a a coveted test in hand um the family or student would end up working remotely until that was provided so i think it's worth discussing i know it feels it feels dramatic to me but i also we're in a health crisis and i want to set us up for success and i think at minimum everyone being tested prior to return would give us a much higher likelihood although the rates are low but it would certainly increase increase the likelihood of success so no decisions tonight i just

054wanted to put that on the discussion table and ask you to bounce it around a bit we can continue that over the next week or two but a new opportunity is there and uh emerson's support would make i think a big difference in in options with broad they are able to turn testing around in 24 hours generally which is very different than what's happening in most of the other settings of almost at least a week to come back so so i pose that with their blessing i bring that to you and with district council giving input for us to just start discussing [Music] thank you lori committee members um questions of dr hunter so uh just going to testing first because that's what we we stopped i'll work backwards um i'm very excited about the

055prospect of testing both students and staff and i would even like to talk about testing not just the beginning before the beginning of school but after the beginning of school we've got significant amount of cares money both on the town concord side and on our side um and i know we probably have needs that maybe have already exceeded the amount of money we have um but i think we should talk about it as an option um because i think the the fact that many people are returning from out of state and or taking their college students outside of the safe zone and coming back people are coming back from being away so i think it's important to probably test you know 14 days into the cycle if not sooner so i just i'm throwing that

056out there as a you know i'd like to get the pricing on that option and if it's all doable when i met with broad a few weeks ago they the number they gave me which we'd have to confirm and i don't know the scale at which emerson's able to use their scale and scope of how they get the number down to a test what they offered us at the time was complete testing of all staff and students regularly um at 45 dollars a test just because of the volume of people that's a pretty big price tag for us to manage we get a bit of we get some of the benefit by using emerson without having to own the whole process all by ourselves did broad want a long-term contract in order to offer that

057pricing broda's doing um probably yes they weren't look there was wiggle room there to talk on options which we didn't totally pursue at this point um the pricing is about scale so i would leave it at that without having any more direct information yet now the tests are these is it the names is it the swab is it the saliva test which kind of yeah it's the swab but not the one that goes way way it doesn't touch your you know brain it just goes in your nasal um and it's not the antibody test which have become kind of a mixed viewpoint of the medical folks so is there any option for you know that sometimes people sort of cluster groups together and take a say take like five people's samples together to yeah we

058could talk on that i asked yeah sir i asked brode about that they really didn't direct us in that way but that doesn't mean we couldn't revisit the conversation let's hear tests so families get tested would it be in school or would it be done privately at emerson at their physician's office yep uh so if we were to work with emerson right now they're running the tests without a doctor's note at their urgent care centers and through the er which is obviously more complicated they have hopes in the next few weeks to get an outdoor drive-through testing capacity set up so right now that isn't in place but that's on their list to do they were going to do 4 100 tests for us would they try to do something on one of our locations

059well it really depends on whether with this the staff we could work with them to secure a couple of dates at one of the walk-ins or at the er with the students it's much more complicated for the vas for the size uh i think we'd have to talk about whether we want to try to ask emerson to take all of that on it sounded like they have some capacity for some of that i don't know that they could do that regularly so i guess the committee would have to give me some direction on what to go back and ask of them it sounded like they'd be willing to consider it as a startup plan but i don't know if they do it off all the time just with the number of kids that would be

060yeah test it's 185 000 right exactly which is what broad offered us and brode would come on site but at 200 000 a week that's a little unaffordable um just in terms of affordable or not if we work with emerson and we're asking families to do this do we have a way of providing financial support to those for whom that would be a problem absolutely you know if we have families have three or four kids and then they have to do this a couple times that can add up pretty quickly sure yeah of course and i guess that's the gift of emerson is with a partnership with them um we'd probably even be able to arrange direct billing to us um i think there just correct me if i'm wrong but uh the question was

061posed to the commissioner um about requiring this and the thought back is that we're operating in public school and it's a right and we would be unable to require as a prerog as a tube and free to the building for instance they test the our legal counsel because we have a remote option now which wasn't always the case as long as we provide access to the remote option um you we as a you as a school committee can make a local policy and prohibit access to in-person learning if that's a direction you want to go good good news so laura you said that uh we might have uh two weeks or a couple of weeks i think you said to work on this in that time could we ask of you if committee members agree

062that you with emerson sort out in a very practical way what timetables would look like for decision making because to cynthia's point if there's a pre-test and a uh a post-test a after we're underway test what would the prior work require of us because we're going to need time for decisions and then lots of communication even before all the logistical uh challenges occur for those 4 100 people so they're in any testing they're going to coordinate with us they ask for um depending on how many people if it's the staff it's probably a little less if we're trying to do a bigger scale event it's probably two weeks that they would need for their their end so we could back back up from that and we'd have to make decisions in the next week or

063two at the latest and then if people were to get tested you would want the test to be within a certain acute like short time frame before they enter school right for their performance for what those hours would be like 48 hours before 72 i believe you could talk more on that i know the governor's travel order is a 72 hour window and then i have another question where would this data go it would go from emerson to like jared um yeah i don't know i don't think we'd be housing the data i think people just have to have proof of the negative tests so okay got it yeah and uh lori the positive test if there were any they would follow they would follow the uh tracing and they would end up in our

064public health nurses for conquered and carlisle uh hence to follow up and communicate that information yes yes which happens through the software automatically other questions i'll just i'll just comment i think this is coming out in the discussion anyway but i think this is well worth considering and i think it's worth us all putting some time and thought into it um to madeline fuller's point when she said if we want to get everybody into everybody back into school it's going to take commitment and sometimes giving up things on everybody's part and this is certainly it seems like it could be a realistic ask of people um if we want to get back into school this could be a way to enable it more effectively than we've been looking at so um i'm i'm not saying

065definitely because obviously there are a lot of questions out there still but i think this is well worth looking into so thank you for bringing it lori now i'm going to say thank you the emerson administrators reached out to me because we had been so generous with ppe in march and they wondered what they could help us with so it's been a real community would we be effort of dr hunter following up as early as tomorrow simply or you know as soon as possible to let emerson know that we are favorably disposed to looking at all the practicalities of this to inform decisions in the very near future and i i just wanted to add there is uh there is that psychological part to bringing testing and even discussing testing because it makes that re-entry

066to the building and the obligation that we all have as the community members to keep each other safe it's a very good reminder that we will be arriving we will be testing that we really have to make sure that we make the right choices as families and and students to make sure that we all safely reenter that teachers feel safe to come into school to teach and other students can feel safe to arrive in school so it it not only gives you the baseline of whom you know how our community is behaving and doing but also it brings in that additional reminder that uh we have to really uh make this as a concerted effort to to do well as a community yeah for our students who are not coming from concord or carlisle um

067do we want to think about how providing transportation or somehow organizing um facilitating you know yeah i'm sure we can work that through um mr namichi's here for one of our later items so we would certainly support them in that make sure they have the same operations easily available to them harrison has a lot of partnerships with um hospitals in the city too that maybe they can utilize pretty substantial ones point uh and i just wanted to add that carlisle also brought this up as a question in our school committee yesterday so it's not just conquered thinking about testing okay thank you any other questions so i have questions not related to testing um just in regards to communication in general uh you know we published you know you presented an incredibly detailed plan but

068now there's going to be new information how are we going to communicate that are we going to start putting up a q a um so we've got the website's built so we're building q a's we've got drafts going at different levels that should be ready over time each building's also beginning to really put out communication whether it be their own web page or otherwise the handbook handbooks are getting drafted so that'll be the that's really the tool that we're going to use primarily but we would want to give some process updates along the way so um we will continue to put out information as we have it and make sure that it's a work available to everyone as it goes so the q a is probably the next thing um i think at each level

069we're going to have a different version of that i've got a couple of items if i might wally um one i i want to note that you you said the words we all dread which is that uh some layoffs were necessary um and uh we would want uh all staff and notably those who have been laid off to know that we're deeply in their debt and this is uh something that pains us as i'm sure it does you laurie oh very much and through all of the other moving pieces with leave of absences and remote teaching and all that there may be different opportunities so we're doing one thing at a time we knew the cafeteria wasn't an option for them but it could be there's another opportunity we're still not that far along yet

070we're gratified you're thinking that way yeah thanks um in terms of the uh concrete health protocols uh would you anticipate that the school committee would see some of these drafts in the coming days or would that be in a week or two or in the coming days no i think we met right before this meeting so i was going to share them all with you after we got off tonight and then um i think by next week we can probably bring them for some public discussion and i'm certainly not somebody informed very much about air quality but i'm curious about the uh analysis that's being done is this a standard hvac uh analysis or is there some coveted rubric that gets used or can anybody speak to that i don't know much about it but

071i'm curious sure jared's been speaking the most to the consultant are you able to do a high level view of that um so what he's done so we have two basically two consultants one's putting together a report and one right now is working with russ um a um a hygienist um so what they're doing is they're going through every single building and just giving us ideas on um what is needed we're doing a bunch of tests in addition he's doing sort of training so once the report is done he's going to give his recommendations on you know air purifiers um or you know exhaust filters and then what he's gonna do is he's gonna give us an outline of what we need to do to to to keep this going um it's going to be

072in a powerpoint um and uh it's we had a conversation with him a week ago and he hit the ground running um he's probably already put 40 to 50 uh 40 to 50 hours into it so we should have something concrete by the end of the week uh that's that's my guess and then you have that other report to repeat compare would it be because you've got a hygienist involved as well as an engineer is it's safe to say that there's going to be some uh purification perspective as well as turn air turnover perspective to this analysis yes thank you okay thank you wally thank you that's all i've got uh dr hunter uh while we are uh still on that ventilation question i don't remember and i um i don't remember what the um

073regional high school building looks like it's a brand new building uh often enough uh there is no possibility to open windows uh do we do the teachers are able to open windows windows to allow for fresh air during the september october months as we are re-entering the building and that's exactly the work that he's doing is looking at what the system is built to run with and then looking at what the options are so i expect that'll be part of the report that we get back um you know the newer buildings probably the high school in willard especially are really built to run without the windows open so we want to know the quality of the air given that that the systems were designed that way and i'm sure he will weigh in as to

074whether working with the windows closed our open is best in those environments and and in all the schools he'll be giving us that same feedback yeah and the newer buildings he's recommending actually not to have the windows open right uh in ripley potentially you know to middle schools that might be an option and there's a lot of good science behind that and because of the nature of these air handling units and what they can do today right so we'll see all of that soon i'm delighted thank you very much for being so proactive about that thanks there's another question i have another question so as you were going through a very quick presentation um the teachers that are remote um uh and and will be uh working from home is it um just a clarification

075would that be for the teachers while the students are in a hybrid model or is it for the teachers when we are in remote uh just remote learning that they will be able to work from home um all throughout even if the students are not in a building in the high school building yeah so we're we're going to try this we're going to give them the option to work remotely while the kids are in the hybrid model um we can always change our minds and go to the long-term substitute plan if it doesn't work that's where we would go if we didn't have any other any creative interest in this but given the quality of our teachers and the work that they've done this summer and remote learning and the fact that half the kids

076are remote anyway we'd really like to give it a go to start the year again we can work on long-term subs if for some reason we don't feel like it's working so successfully people are really excited to to try this these teachers didn't want to just go take leave and not stay engaged with kids and so for that we're really grateful um fiscally it's a better option as well otherwise we'd be probably paying double salaries so it feels like it could be a win-win it's a little bit of an experiment trial and error we're gonna have to stay really close to it and and dr hunter that's not to imply that adolescents are going to be lacking adult support in that moment no so we're looking at that now both the middle and high school

077administrators are reviewing those needs we may need to bring in some other support staff just to help with supervision but again it's it's hopefully best for kids in terms of academics and fiscally it's still positive okay um if we have no other questions on that topic um we have uh kristen and andrew are with us for item d and i was uh i'd like to get a motion to move item d to uh consideration now um for both jack and for both any discussion uh oh uh we need to do a role so uh booth i for both i for both stuffy eye for region wilson i for region rainey hi for both john's tonight for both thank you and we'll move to that item d so i'll open it up and i'm going to

078do the slides for them as well um in trying to be sure we're sharing updates and information on our cultural competency equity and anti-racist work uh kristen and andrew are here to give you some of the highlights of the work um related to the strategic plan talk on what's even happening this summer because it's been a busy summer on all these topics and then uh foreshadow what's to come so i will get the slides up for them and kristen i don't know if you and andrew want to yeah get open while i do that yeah i'll start and then andrew's going to introduce himself as well so uh most of you know me already um as the director of teaching and learning and this is a topic i'm so happy that you had us come

079to to speak on it's been a professional passion of mine for the 30 years of my career and in concord i've been leading the cultural competency pre-k to 12 um committee for the uh maybe five years so it's very exciting for me um and we work with a lot of great outside consultants on this topic uh dr paula martin has been one of our speakers to talk with parents and and just been consulting with us over the years on all kinds of issues uh related to this topic and gene thompson grove also has been working with us um and i i also just wanted to mention uh very atypically for me i come to this work professionally but i also come to it personally which might be kind of surprising seeing as i'm a white

080woman standing in front of you um but i have two adopted children who are non-white and it's been really eye-opening for the last 17 years to watch how they are treated differently than me in the same situation so you know that as long as my professional interest has really become my personal interest in improving the world um and i'd love andrew to have a similar what brings him to his work he's he's been doing our uh mecco director um for a number of years now and doing a fabulous job at it andrew are you there good evening everyone and uh thank you members of the school committee for allowing us to share some of our uh district work around cultural competency and uh anti-racist uh anti-racism work this is i believe i'm going into my

081third year as medical director for concord public schools in concord carlisle regional school district and you know i think from a personal standpoint i guess you know what brings me to this work um really sort of dates back to um my childhood you know growing up in ghana um just the idea of of racism um really didn't exist for me uh my neighbors were from holland where white and just the idea that they were different than me and you know based on their skin color really was something that never crossed my mind until i came to the united states um started school in seattle washington which is a very predominantly white state and and you know lived in bellevue washington and i remember you know fourth grade first day of school you know i started

082a school day being introduced to my peers and then later on as all the uh as all the kids you know um went out to the playground uh you know i made my you know my way to the playground as well and immediately noticed um just all the kids you know he had white kids in one corner black kids in the other asian kids in another pocket and i just remember feeling so confused that i ran back inside in tears because i really did not know at that age i was 10 years old i did not know how to fit in it's completely new to me and and since then really i've just been fascinated uh with this work and just really understanding you know how you know how folks can really um get to

083get to a place of understanding uh that we have more in common uh than than you know than our differences and so this work you know is definitely personal for me and and and uh since the start of you know me being involved with mikko it has definitely been uh life's work almost at this point uh you know this work never ends to be honest with you um and you know each each time i engage with folks around cultural competency work and anti-racism work it's it's a level of excitement that that i um that i have towards this work so thank you for having us thank you thank you thank you uh andrew and kristen both for your personal stories uh we only hear uh the the surface but we can well imagine some of

084the pain that uh underlies those stories and the fact that this was your your american experience andrew i think pains a lot of us to to to hear and to to own so thanks for saying it so we wanted to make sure that the students voices were present in the conversation so andrew pulled uh this quote he's done lots and lots of meetings with lots and lots of students as the um violence over george over the violent murder of george floyd has occurred um and so here's a quote that you pulled right andrew yes i did and this is from our uh rising senior joseph and he goes on to say you know over over the course you know any and he's a student that actually has actually been in our mecca program um for

08511 years now and joseph says you know there have been many times where i've been the only black student in the class i remember being in english class and they were talking about slavery in a video and i felt so uncomfortable because i'm the only black person there at the end of the video my teacher was like okay well joseph how do you feel about that about the video i would have loved to speak about it but i just felt so put on the spot and felt so isolated because i know because i knew no one would understand what i have truly said and i can't look at my black friends and say what i want to say because i'm in a class full of white people i didn't feel a connection like they would

086truly get it and you know i you know prepared a little brief statement and i'll try to be brief but you know it is said that you know a high-end community awareness and engagement can often sort of uh help break down barriers dispel stereotypes and provide opportunities for education and activism as you court booth i believe you so eloquently put it two weeks ago at our roundtable discussion and and that often you know our students of color find themselves asking the question how can you teach me if you don't know who i am often students sort of find themselves sharing experiences like what joseph described you know our hope as educators and parents is for all students and especially our students of color to feel connected to have a sense of belonging in your school

087as educators we must acknowledge who our students are explore the way they think about themselves the way they feel they're viewed by the world around them and the characteristics that define who they are in the last couple of months we have been reminded that racism in this country is still very much alive communities are not immune to acts of racism educating our faculty and staff students parents and the community at large to be active anti-racist in their daily lives i believe remains a priority and a critical undertaking for all of us for all of us if we want a more inclusive equitable welcoming and anti-racist community we have heard um dr hunter reiterate over the course of the school year that our district's commitment to anti-racism work and cultural competency is very much ongoing and

088you will hear more in the presentation kristen and i have prepared for you this evening in addition our district's effort uh to creating programming and initiatives for educators students and the community helps them to explore their own unspoken biases or at the very least connects them with others who are deeply committed to anti-racism work and the work of cultural competency lastly you know i truly believe that we're all capable of being change agents allies and accomplices it is my hope that we continue the conversations around cultural competency and anti-racism so that we may develop a new level of consciousness towards how our everyday behaviors around race and equity impact the ability of students to thrive kristen yep so we have a four pillars of our strategic plan and the third pillar of that is to

089create a collaborative and inclusive culture in the schools and community that values diversity and recognizes the contributions and uniqueness of each learner and then within that we have if you could just advance the next slide we have five strategic initiatives uh to try to reach that goal this is a five-year plan and we're in about the third year of it uh or we're about to start into the third year of it um so the first one is to develop a shared understanding or a vision statement of what diversity means in concord and concord kaila public schools and develop district procedures for applying the understanding to our work the second piece is about professional development for our staff with a focus on cultural proficiency and inclusive practices that meet the needs of each individual student the

090third initiative is to increase our culturally responsive curriculum and students knowledge and understanding a wide variety of perspectives and learning styles the fourth is the one we probably get the most questions about which is to continue to actively recruit and maintain a diverse staff in the district and the fifth is to partner with students and families from boston to increase opportunities for them as members of our community so um we're gonna go through each of those five areas there's about a slide on each one there is so much to say um on each one of them so if we leave something out please bring it to our attention and i should say while andrew and i lead the district-wide pre-k to 12 committee each of the schools has initiatives working on cultural competency within their

091uh within their faculty meetings and and so forth so you'll you'll see a lot of events that happen um particularly at the schools so here is our shared understanding as written by the um pre-k to 12 cultural competency committee in the first year of the strategic plan we strive to be a more culturally competent community we support our diversity of race gender religion national origin gender identity color ancestry sexual orientation and ability by our choices and actions we promote all members to feel recognized respected and valued we have set our intention to be responsive proactive and empathetic to all facets of culture and diversity the goal of continuously developing our cultural competency is that it will enable our students to develop the values skills and behaviors needed to effectively interact in a culturally diverse community

092both locally and globally so uh the next initiative is on professional development and this is uh one area where i feel like for a district of our size we're really hitting it out of the park because we have over 20 courses that we've offered internally free to all of our educators there's a link there to all all of the different courses that we've entered some of them are teacher-led book discussions others are experts coming in and working with staff so there's lots of that we also have um two we have met more than two but two uh compute community partners that have really helped us um one is the ideas which is um out of edco which is uh the empowering multicultural initiatives they run courses for us and um we have at times required

093people to take those courses another is uh another partner for us is primary source and they offer a lot of especially i would say culturally responsive courses on students who don't have english as their first language uh different holidays are celebrated and so forth so um and i just in terms of this slide i thought well what's the big bang like what's the really exciting thing that we did so um not last year but the year before we got a big grant from the um concord education fund and we brought in three enormous speakers um for all of our staff so our opening speaker that day was dr beverly daniel tatum probably one of the best-known um authors in this subject because she wrote one of the first books that addresses schools um and it's

094probably the most famous why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria so she was phenomenal speaker and then towards the middle of the year we brought in principal baruti caffele also an educator author and really focusing on at-risk students and black males and then lastly who i actually went to college with dr derek day i didn't know it at the time international consultant on issues of diversity cultural competency and global citizenship and he really helped us sort of challenge a lot of our narratives about ourselves so we are really happy about uh what we've been able to offer and just as a little aside we um put back out a um message to all the staff to anyone who wanted to join the pre-k to 12 cultural competency committee and now we

095have uh about 150 people coming to meetings regularly so it's a pretty big initiative and a lot of people care deeply about it so um our culturally responsive curriculum this is uh really again a hard there's so much going on um but let me just serve start at the top we have outside experts who help us look at our curriculum and uh on a daily basis if things are coming up and we need some extra support or help to to think about that we have that and we are using them right now and we have been interested in since the strategic plan came out in doing a cultural competency audit um and we wanted to do it last spring but things were a little busy um so we're now we're talking with the kingston bay

096group they did a good cultural competency audit of the wellesley public schools um and we're also uh interested in what menco inc is offering to us so uh that's one way for us to go um and then uh a big thing that we did as you know sort of curriculum is overseen from the district level so that we have coordination and um we had maybe two years ago the social studies review and what we did was look at our curriculum and say how are students of color who live in concord or boston or carlisle how are they represented in our curriculum and we found it really wanting so we partnered with um both the robin's house and the concord museum to create especially when we were looking at pieces of conquered history boston history and

097then american history in in grade 8 and grade 10. we created new curricula there and as many of you know there's trunks that are brought in in eighth grade they're called the abolitionist trunks and it's about the the movement uh to end slavery um and it's really powerful for the kids to um i'm glad i mentioned my kid earlier so that you weren't surprised when you walk anyway so the abolitionist trunks uh so the kids can actually look at and see actual artifacts making that history come alive uh so we're really thankful to the robin's house that funded most of that work and the teachers of course who did it and then uh we have a social emotional curriculum at every level um as you know at elementary it's open circle at middle school it's

098the home base the advisory program at the high school it's also the advisory program um and so in that all of those curricula have recently i would say in the last three years added um lessons on how to have those difficult conversations about race or religion or culture um in a way that the person asking a question can feel safe and and the person who might answer that could also feel safe so to try to move us along that continuum of understanding and then the last area that we often get questions about in terms of our curriculum is really about the literature that we provide to kids for their reading both free reading and whatever are chosen for books that we follow so we've had i would say five years of restocking and reviewing our

099libraries to make sure that we have a diverse books um with both diverse authors and diverse main characters um and so that our goal is that every child feels represented that they can see themselves in some uh hero or heroine in a book so that's kind of the curriculum in a nutshell um yeah thanks right so you know as a district um we are proactively you know recruiting and of course um having discussions on how we maintain a diverse staff and you know i shared you know this quote here is by uh leah schaefer who is at the harvard graduate school of education and she conducted a very small focus group to capture sort of the experiences of teachers of color and in her research she concluded that one of the most powerful supports a

100school can give a student of color is a teacher of color understanding the experiences of teachers of color is crucial retaining these educators from year from one year to the next requires superintendents and principals to be intentionally inclusive to hold high expectations for all staff to provide excellent training and support and to actively appreciate the extra mentoring and support and support work that teachers of color often do kristen and i have created a district level hiring committee that also involves dr paula martin and uh yolanda volpe who just retired from cchs last year and a lot of our discussions around how to best sort of you know go about recruiting the diverse staff happens in this committee we know that the work is not is not easy um you know when we post our positions

101out most of the time we are it's hard for us to really get a pool of of of candidates of color and we know that you know concord is not the only uh school district that has these challenges other other districts of course have this challenge as well but really you know what we have begun to do is take a very creative approach into how we go about recruiting candidates of color and one of the three things that we have done actually with just within this past school year is we have we have some three key partnerships with nabsi which is the national alliance of black school educators nemnet which is the new england minority network and handshake which has more than 200 000 employers who use handshake to find qualified students for a variety

102of jobs and partnerships now our goal with sort of these three partnerships um you know is really to again expand sort of cast a wider net in terms of in terms of our candidate pool nabsi you know was founded back in the 1970s and they currently is the nation's largest network of african american educators in addition nemnet was founded back in and their mission specifically is to help schools to help public schools um identify attract and retain teachers of color now with handshake it's it's it's a little bit different because what happens is that you know say we have a post in for a grade one teacher right we take that post in and we share it on handshake once we share it on handshake we actually become connected to colleges and universities all across

103the united states now we can also within handshake target hbcus historically black colleges and universities who are able to view our posting and usually the the person who approves our posting for that specific university is often the director who oversees um the career services department for that university and so our posting can pretty much be shared you know across states and again when we target those specific historically black colleges and universities we're able to then really target you know um educators or candidates of color who might be interested in applying for a position for vacancy that's available in our district uh so again so you know we're going beyond so the the traditional uh sort of uh protocols and and how we go about hiring candidates of color and and this work especially i'm excited

104about because you know i definitely see the impact uh this this can have in our district and you know i heard a little bit about um sort of the impact from from a conference that kristen and i actually attended that was hosted by desi uh back in the fall and um the town i believe out in uh western mass um actually had a very similar sort of program and where they brought in graduate students of color from new york and these graduate students of color were able to spend uh a week's worth um of their sort of um towards the end of their of their of their graduate work they spent a week in in the in the in the school district and they were able to be paired up with another uh faculty member

105to really expose them to sort of how how the community runs how the school district runs and also to be able to be exposed to sort of what happens in the classrooms now the graduate students who who came to that community again you know being completely new to that community were able to at the end of their experience were able to share with the with the community that they were actually interested in some vacancies that that were available at the time and there were about 13 graduate students who went through this experience and this particular town actually ended up hiring 12 out of the 13 graduate students to come work in their school district and so they sort of went above and beyond on you know the normal practices and and another fact that that

106was shared in the conference that chris and i went to is that the the town actually provided uh housing for those 13 candidates to be able to have them remain you know in the in in this in the community in the school district and really get that full experience and i think that's you know i think that's something that we can explore um in the in the in the near future i'm just going to pipe in as i turn the slide i've hired three teachers of color in the last two weeks so we're some of our efforts are starting to pay off absolutely student engagement and this work is it's very exciting to me because you know our students are uh you know the next generation of of young um young men and women who

107are going to hopefully you know change the course of you know some of the historical um events that have happened in our past right and so i have a quote here from khaleese winter who's also a rising senior and she says you know this is a time where the youth needs to absorb anti-racism materials so that we can prevent these examples of racism from happening we need to teach our youth so they can learn i think kristen mentioned our open circle uh curriculum which uh happens in our k through five and in our elementary schools um in addition to open circle we have our annual echo and ideas student leadership conference that students attend every year let me see here a little bit about sort of the echo conference the conference which is uh happens

108annually engages students from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds in conversations on issues of racism stereotypes discrimination and allied behavior through the conference students build community within and across racial and ethnic groups recognize stereotypes different forms of discrimination and racism in our schools and society our celtics playbook initiative which we launched principal cameron justin cameron our middle school principal we launched this program two years ago and we initially trained um roughly 30 middle school student leaders to really engage in an anti-discrimination and bias prevention program the celtics playbook initiative uh really is a program which resulted in the creation of a social playbook per se which inspires students to engage in dialogue on race religion gender disability and sexual orientation and ultimately it equips our students with the tools to intervene in challenging social situations now

109our first year we were able to train 30 middle schoolers and this past school year between myself principal cameron and gretchen carr who just graduated cchs we each actually trained roughly 25 students uh on our own and so you can imagine that you know going into the next school year our hope is to increase uh you know that exposure to to be able to train more students through the celtics playbook initiative and i think our students that are now rising ninth graders you know at the end of our training this year uh those students who are now rising ninth graders were more than happy to sort of come back to the middle school this coming school year and and be student leaders in the training which i i think will be phenomenal uh let's see

110here so this is a long list and as you can see we have our rise club at the middle school which stands for race identity social empowerment and this is at the middle school um this club is open to all uh concord middle school students who are interested in having discussions about race and equity in our school community and the larger world students usually show up on wednesdays for about an hour and engage in conversations around set topics we also have our adl three-day peer training program at the high school and similar to sort of our celtics playbook initiative last year i believe we were able to train roughly 35 students this year we were almost at 50. and so it's it's very incredible and this picture um at the top there top right hand

111corner there is sort of towards the end of our training program where students were able to take a ball of yarn and sort of spread it out in a way that connected all of their experiences and it sort of brought all the students together at the end of that training new this year for the 2020-2021 school year our intersections club have been extremely engaged with our students utilizing our local radio station the w i q h radio station where they have held a number of conversations uh recently actually on culture procreation colorism and these students have just been phenomenal in the sense that they have also held a black lives matter peaceful protest in town that was widely supported we had over 60 volunteers to help these students with that peaceful protest and really what's

112exciting about this group is how diverse they are and that bottom picture is is is the group that that uh began this intersections club last year and the membership within the intersections club has grown tremendously and they continue to meet um every friday over zoom with with pretty much any student who's available to join them on zoom on fridays and so they're doing phenomenal work our black student union is also going to be a new club that is formed by khaleese winter who is a rising senior and she's also a boston student our unified arts initiative is an arts initiative to provide sort of a sense of inclusion around around the school building tracy dunn who is an art teacher has partnered with michaela francois who is a who is also rising a senior and

113a student in our in our medco program to really introduce some new art that can be placed in and around the school that speak to sort of students experiences their identity and of course they are also partnering with the intersections club to put up uh country flags in the high school so the intersections club conducted a survey last year where they surveyed all students and we found that there are over well over 60 countries that are represented in our school community and so we are working with principal mistrillo at the high school to order those flags so that it is ready uh to be seen when school reopens second to last our roundtable discussions um which our first discussion actually occurred about two weeks ago um was again a discussion that was widely attended and

114again all student-led you know really just engaged in the community engaging students engaging parents around uh anti-racism work and and having those uncomfortable uh conversations about race about equity and of course you know allowing our students of color to really have a voice at the table and to share their experiences i know the student leaders are already gearing up for another roundtable discussion and so i won't share too much about about what they have installed in the coming weeks and then lastly raisin the bar is a very brand new initiative that myself and a concord parent by the name of bianca taylor have started um raising the bar allows students of color to hear from and interact with the voices of people of color on success overcoming challenges and following your calling the mission of

115raising the bar is to shine a light on possibility and to cast a long shadow on stereotypes and limiting ideas about race um we held our first uh discussion about three weeks ago with uh a gentleman by the name of clinton killian who is an attorney based out of california but clinton actually grew up in the south and so as you can imagine he had a lot of experiences to share with our audience and if folks are interested in sort of seeing that discussion it was recorded and i can definitely share that out to the community we have our second raising the bar series actually next week and that information will actually be shared out by the end of this week and we have um a a leader i guess in the in the industry

116in the food services industry as well as the diversity equity and inclusion sort of world who will be talking with our students and with anyone really about sort of her experience around this work and so more information to come on that all right community engagement promoting a welcoming and advancing dialogue on race equity and anti-racism efforts in our schools and in the community i believe that you know over the course of the really over the course of two years we've done a lot to really engage the community in this work as well i think my first year we held a community screening called on the line where sacrifice begins which was a medical documentary that was produced by a mecca alum by the name of mike maskel now this film is actually available to the

117public as well and i'll be more than happy to sort of share that that the the link uh to this film to anyone who's interested our conquer carla human rights council held their annual dr martin luther king jr celebration back in the early winter and we had our keynote speaker by the name of ron jones who has a small theater company and he sort of travels all around the the country and you know his message really was that you know as a mecca district you know we are sort of part of a historic legacy of school integration and he really you know spoke about folks you know coming to this event and sort of rediscovering the grassroots movement that brought students of color from boston to the suburbs at the peak of the civil rights

118movement and so um i'm hoping that we can actually invite ron jones again in the in the near future because he did a phenomenal job in his presentation let's see here we also host our annual multicultural food festival which is widely attended and this is really in large made possible with the efforts of our student government and mr ray pavlick as well who's a teacher at cchs i talked a little bit about our celtics playbook initiative in addition to training students last year we actually invited community leaders parents and teachers to sort of engage in this work with us and and for us myself gretchen carr and priscilla and uh and uh principal cameron to share with those those those adults uh the work that we are doing around the celtics playbook initiative and i

119think you know given given how successful the night went i believe that we can expand uh this training to the community as well we also have uh dr paula martin who is our instructor and she runs the can we talk uh series through the conquer colonial adult and community education and i know this is a class that many folks in the community sign up to attend and have found it to be um very uh time well spent mr joy was another programming we held back in i believe march um and again this is just a great event that was made possible by mecco headquarters as well as the arts emerson mr joy is a play that explores issues of race and class in america it is written by poet called daniel beatty and it is

120directed by david dewer dower excuse me and performed by deborah walton um who is literally a one-woman show she's the only person on stage and she goes through about nine different characters again all around the issues of racing class in america it's a phenomenal phenomenal show and i believe actually that our multimedia uh uh network our tv network actually recorded this play so i believe there is a video out there to share with the community and then as i mentioned earlier our intersessions club uh continued to hold radio segments called cue the culture through our wiqh radio station and folks can actually search wiqh in google and it's the first link that will come up if you go under the sort of schedule lineup for the radio station all all of their programming uh specifically

121for the internet specifically for the intersections club is noted on their website so the the students in the intercession club are doing phenomenal work as well and then this is just you know three uh sort of pictures that i found uh you know one picture on the far uh left there is mike maskel who is the producer of on the line where sacrifice begins and mike masko is a former medical student of lexington the picture in the middle there is the night of our annual dr martin luther king jr celebration and the gentleman to the right is ron jones with our concord carlisle human rights council chair members shari and louisa and of course the last picture there is of our multicultural food festival which hopefully will occur again hopefully in the spring of 2021

122so thank you so i'm just realizing that we we left one event off uh in june uh right after um george floyd joy george floyd's murder um we had evenings for parents online with a lot of great colleagues lori and andrew and paula martin and gene thompson grove and they were evenings structured on how to talk to your kids about race um in in a way that they can really hold on to so we did them in developmental levels so questions yeah thank you very very much kristen thank you very very much andrew um i think what you're gonna hear from us is uh how impressed we are with the the broad-based efforts that are so required for systemic change uh i think you're gonna hear that we're impressed not only with the adult initiated

123work but really impressed with the student-initiated work and at the same time personally i want to say i don't want to be too too impressed because i think you're here asking for continued support and these efforts are going to deserve a lot of uh continued support uh this is uh you're capturing a moment in time for us and uh it's one that's hugely encouraging i've got a couple of questions for you later on but i'll wait on those if others have have remarks court i just also want to say i don't think we mentioned the community chest but you know our speaker series this summer was completely supported by them so all of our community partners have been so generous when it comes to this topic i think everybody wants to see change and improvement

124um and and in the topic i just feel uh that we're moving forward with a lot of support thank you can we open it up to the committee observation comments questions yes i i had a question i wanted to commend you guys on um a lot of great work done and also say that the roundtable discussion i was so impressed with the students participating there um how wonderful they how eloquent they were at uh presenting uh the challenges that they meet and um and and convey the messages to the wider community i uh i had a question uh i know that you know success for students um and i'm speaking about high school students um about the region so success for students really uh is not just the school but it's also the the mentoring

125of the families and the structures that we're uh you know that we are providing and that institutional knowledge that comes from uh from success and um are are you guys uh connecting with um other community members to uh to find opportunities to mentor our students of color uh to show them the paths that um uh that will be open uh specifically to them uh or you know their their approach in that sense yeah i can i can i just want to point out one thing um which is that often our metco program is uh equated to our students of color so in um in our school system we have about 16 percent of our population who identifies as non-white and our metco population is not that entire amount so it's it's pretty equal um but

126based on if somebody's a concord or carlisle resident or if they're a boston resident so um you know we have and we'll have andrew talk about the um the uh opportunities available through the metco program um and we've also recently i would say in the last two or three years really work to include the kids who identify as people of color through those programs yeah and to your to your question um ava um in terms of mentoring i think that is one area that i that i feel that we can um definitely expand on and i think you know in my conversations with the conquered parent that i that i mentioned bianca taylor i think that's that's really our goal for for the raisin the bar initiative is to provide some some way where not

127only are the adults sort of mentoring our students of color but also find a way where we can create a network of students who come together on a monthly basis because our initiative actually is going to run twice a month but to to have a space for those students to come together on a bi-week you know by monthly basis to share you know experiences you know their thoughts around their futures perhaps and really begin to to work with those students in addition to that i think you know one of the programs and ideas that i had that i was hoping to actually start this past spring was a program called mentoring young minds and the goal was that you know we would take our students of color who are at the high school primarily in

128the 11th and 12th grade who would go out to to alcott and really mentor our students of color who were at alcott and then possibly expand to willard and thoreau i know the team buddies program was in existence in existence and i believe the person that ran that program and uh has relocated uh since and so you know i met with uh a teacher at alcott by the name of kerry delaney to really begin thinking about ways that we can go about mentoring our our students and and we felt that starting with our young ones um would would probably make make a huge impact um you know just having an older student coming in uh to to meet with a younger you know a younger child i think you know speaks for itself and i

129think the the the younger kids appreciated that but thank you it sounds like a great program because uh you know the students that um there's we often see that the same students that are doing exceptionally well um and uh are are offered leadership opportunities right so um uh offering um you know building up uh offering more opportunities for the students to to feel reward rewarded and having those leadership opportunities uh for students that uh in minority is is is a great great idea i hope it works out thank you other comments so uh this is cynthia rainey i want to thank both of you for all this work um am i listening to some of the broadcasts of wiqh one thing jumped out at me and please correct me if i didn't uh take away

130the right thing but it seemed to me like uh curriculum and classroom experience was sort of the um overriding theme um and in my mind again i don't know that this is correct but it seems like we need to take much more bold steps toward looking at our curriculum and training our teachers and all staff in fact than we have in the past because i think we thought we were in a much better place than we are to be honest um with our curriculum anti-racist anti-racism and anti-bias and i as a person can say i need to do a lot of work in that area um so i just uh you know what were thoughts about this year and because i don't think we can have a 10-year plan i don't think we have a

131window an opportunity to address these things in a very bold way i think um for all of our students um and i think your uh quote from the student who said we need to teach we need to teach so that in the future these things don't happen as frequently as they are now um so i i i can oh yeah um so yeah unfortunately when i listen to those um the students comments i think oh boy if they were only in second grade or fifth grade or eighth grade now most of the kids that are talking are juniors and seniors in high school so they wouldn't have experienced like the new uh trunks that i was talking about the abolitionist movement they wouldn't have experienced you know when they're looking at walden pond the african-american

132population that was living there they wouldn't have experienced many of the changes that we've already put into place and you know very likely if they were our junior and senior in high school they would have gone to the elementary school or the middle school library and not seen books that really reflected them and i it so it's for me it's like oh you know missed opportunity but uh not to be missed in the future so the kids who are experiencing those things now i would say are in the in the younger grades and the only comment i'll have there is that it's not too late in high school and some of our kids haven't gone through the curriculum in concord yeah high school so i think we need to you know make that a big

133part of the ninth grade academy so that we do dipstick and figure out we are in a good place by the time and i know we're doing that at the middle school too but as i said we have new students who come in in ninth grade and it's you know not necessarily everybody's going through rk curriculum yeah well i think that also uh speaks to the the research that's been around for a long time that says beliefs about race are uh uh in place at the age of three four and five uh so uh yes to uh kristen's point uh we can do some heavy lifting there uh but uh to cynthia's point uh that that doesn't give the high school a pass on on these goals that the district has yeah um i think

134it's important to to say say it publicly here uh if i'm correct and i think i am andrew's work uh lori's work kristin's work that of many many educators and many many people in the community is not new and their commitment is not new um uh although we have been affected and horrified by recent events that's true but why are we spending more attention to this now tonight at the school committee when we could say there's another crisis uh that that uh is getting our attention and my answer to that is we've been asked to we've been asked by this community to to have a school committee pay more attention to this um so yes it's coming from the the long commitment of kristin and andrew and laurie and the strategic plan objectives uh but

135the extra time and attention which is very necessary is also in response to a community demand for that attention and so i i want us to recognize that really court i would just add there they're simultaneous crises really so i think that's the other reason thank you yeah yeah um yeah i want to ask a question i don't know if this is a school question or a personal question i guess it's both um if we're going to encourage people to think differently and believe differently about how we can appreciate differences and if some of that work starts with acting differently so that we create our own evidence that acting work acting differently toward others works and it benefits us then we begin to truly think differently so if that's true then those of us with

136a lot of work to do and myself included are going to are going to make some mistakes along the way white students are going to make some mistakes along the way black students are going to make some mistakes along the way certainly teachers are going to make some mistakes along the way how are we supporting them and giving them some some uh what's the word some space and some support to to do this work and stumble and get up again because some people might consider it a pretty scary time to get called out on on our inadequacies around respect for differences and how we manage our relationships and how we put forth microaggressions and don't even know it how do you help us how do you help other educators that have the the courage to

137step out more than they have and go where you're encouraging them to go yeah i would say three answers and then um everybody else please jump in the first is i mean we're we're changing culture here we're turning a huge ocean liner and uh just to give you a little example all of our professional development on cultural competency is optional so people sign up for it when they're ready for it and that's really important and as i've watched over whatever it's been six or seven years you know there were the tried and true people uh who signed up for it right away and went to everything and they're still there they're still on the bus turning it but what i've seen from our faculty and sign up in professional development is more and more people

138um who i would have classified how you were sort of classifying yourself like i have a lot to learn you know and i'm a little bit scared and i'm scared of making mistakes i've seen more and more of those people feel safe and sign up for our our professional development our committees and so forth um so to me that that's like oh the ocean liner is kind of it's it's moving you know it's not gonna happen overnight but it's definitely moving the second is um you know i i think i can't say enough about our hiring practices um you know what we've learned in hiring more teachers of color is that you have to give yourself a big bigger window to hire people so you know you can't hire someone in like a month if

139you want to activate all these networks that we have plugged into you got to give yourself like two months or something like that because if you hire in a short window you tend to hire people who you already know like student teachers or tutors or something like that um because because you know them um and then so to give us so just having more people at the table more uh educators at the table to have these conversations i think is going to really um help us uh make that make that shift um and then uh the last piece is um to really support our educators i mean we lauren and i were just talking to some educators today um they really really want to grow in this way in their curriculum and that's going to

140take some some risks to do it so we want to do that the last piece is really around i think what you said about how do you how do you allow people to make these mistakes because people are going to make these mistakes especially kids and it would be called restorative justice that's in the literature what it's called but basically you have consequences you acknowledge that it happened and then you have consequences who did i hurt by whatever i said or or or did and how do i make amends for that and that's basically the underlying um tenant to restorative justice um so you know adopting more of those practices as we go along i think we'll do a lot but i agree it's emotional no one wants to be called a racist and uh

141it's really hard to do [Music] i'll simply say i'm impressed not only with your answers but with your facility with the answers you were ready for that thank you court i'll just add on to be able i to to realize we're starting to create a place where the kids feel safe enough to speak so authentically to us i am so taken by their words to us which are it's so much better to have the conversations and not get it right all the time than to not have the conversations at all so um the fact that we're creating space where they can say to us what you're listening to them say on the radio i'm like still processing sometimes this summer with with what you know it seems like we're creating a community that wants to

142be part of these discussions and we are going to make mistakes but that's better than pretending it's all great when it's not thank you do you have the do you have a date yet for the next round table so i do not um again you know part of my involvement with the student leaders is i'm really there to you know almost be a cheerleader just cheering them on they really are the ones that are doing the legwork on this and i try to leave myself out of it so whenever they're ready with a date i'm sure i'll get a facetime call for them to let me know but i do know that they are they have already sent me a very uh rough draft of what they plan on on on discussing and and this

143you know this roundtable discussion is going to involve even more students which i'm excited about students who listened to them that evening and reached out to to those student leaders and and and just you know they want to be part of it and so i'm sure i'm sure they i'm sure they have a date in mind but once i know everyone else will know as well they did a phenomenal job with it other comments i want to um thank uh laurie christian and um andrew and everyone involved this is very uh dear and uh there's my heart and i i get really uh emotional whenever i'm involved in this conversation um because it's something that i have lived throughout my entire life being on the receiving end of discrimination and um i've been very involved

144in this [Music] because you never get over um because you live with it day in and day out um and i think i mean as hard as it is for me um i'm in a better place than so many others because i try to change it it's still hard but i i try to change it um it helps me sleep a little better at night but my um concern is about those that are not speaking that are um afraid of speaking or um they just want to fit in so they don't want to talk about them being different or um being discriminated against um christian you and i have had many conversations over uh the past few years and um i i would like for us i'm really impressed i'm really happy and encouraged um

145with what we have been doing um but i i think what is missing is is is this conversation um with the parents because there are like i said there are these leaders that are stepping up and taking leadership roles with all the different initiatives but um my concern is about those children who don't even realize what is happening to them they are internalizing this and normalizing this and growing growing up with that complex of being different or being less than the other um how can we bring those in and these are all optional um programs how can we find a way to reach these families whether their parents and their their children and bring them into the conversation start asking questions and court when you ask about you know how can we start to act

146differently um let's get to know our community um there's a lot of discomfort um around minorities in in this town and it's been very welcoming um i i stayed here because i've been welcomed um but i still see and feel the discomfort we are afraid to ask the questions we are afraid to hear the answers to those questions so i encourage everyone in this town to start asking questions getting to know these families that are different that are immigrants children of immigrants or low income instead of looking at them as a tax burden versus you know taxpayer let's get to know these families know their stories and see what we can learn from them how we can better ourselves from these different people that um we think are inferior to us um so that would

147be a first step that's missing that's missing in our um in our community uh and i would like to to see that wall fall down and it's it's we are very blessed to have this diversity in our community but we are not allowing it um to give us its full potential um and um there's so much to say about this and we have so much work to do and we are on the right track and i'm very hopeful and very encouraged but it's extremely difficult and painful and i want everybody to know that thank you madame what you say is so important um and i just have you know a concept that i want to share i think you already know it but since this is uh being broadcast um concord is and carli are

148predominantly white and uh so 84 right of our students uh identify as white um and um so there's this concept that's really helpful and been helpful to me in being brave which is the concept of ally hood and so i i know now it's my professional responsibility even as a white woman especially as a white woman to stand up and say something when it's wrong when something's wrong when there's a practice or a policy that's wrong and not wait until a person of color or a person who's been marginalized because of religion or ability or any of those things wait waits to do it because in this society right now i have more power so it's not just that you know i'm standing up i'm standing up for and sometimes and i know this is

149the the idea that's taught through most of our professional development um is that you know we don't want to wait until a black person says there's a problem with this particular issue or how something's implemented we need to be able to recognize it and stand up and be allies and speak for those who are marginalized and you know you're just making me all upset about this but um i've had something really encouraging um data to share with you um in june right after the the murder of george floyd um we held those two parent nights that i talked about we did them five days after five days and within that time for the elementary one we had about a hundred parents um who signed up and took that course within five days i think they

150changed their schedules just to come to that evening uh and then similarly for the secondary i can't remember the exact numbers but i thought this is such a sign of what an opportunity we have right now like all of us have been working on this for so long but right now is the national spotlight on us so we have that that opportunity and similarly you know the course that andrew mentioned the can we talk series having difficult conversations about race and culture um that's been taught now twice um by dr paula martin in adult and community ed i think that's widening that community conversation and what i've seen through both of those is that there's a real yearning to have more of this so i i love your comment i feel like supported and encouraged

151to keep going thank you kristen um we i think as a school committee i can't speak for the entire committee but i'll guess that we will not require uh hours of your time each month to continue this dialogue but we will ask for continued uh dialogue albeit briefer because uh keeping this right in front of us is i believe important uh i suspect uh the committee does i know you do kristen i know you do andrew you've been uh rather explicit about it as you should so i don't think we're going to demand lots of your time because we learned tonight how you're spending your time uh and you're spending your time in what you know 100 different arenas with 100 different groups so that anywhere you look in this school district you're going to

152see efforts being made that are to your point kristen uh sending messages about expectations about hopes about a a very intentional cultural change effort you know you're not you're not timid about saying it uh and in so doing you're implicitly asking the school committee for its continued support so uh thank you for being so so generous tonight and so thorough in in your your report um and for allowing us to dialogue about it we appreciate it i'll jump in quickly and agree with you court um in in terms of what we're asking for and our support and anyone who knows me knows i'm extremely supportive of all of this work i think the last thing that we want to put out there um is the opposite of what we're asking you to do and put

153it out there that we are open to support you in whatever way we can so please let us know what we can do for you in these efforts and how we can support this i think that i'm guessing i speak for the others on the school committee that we want to know how we can support this effort so please keep us posted and let us know what we can do as committee members uh fatima we desperately want our kids to grow up and live happy lives uh this is part of the work and i'm here to help with that thank you we know you are thank you with that i think we might turn to we'd love to hang on to this even longer but we'll be back to it um kristen and andrew we

154thank you very much uh lolly i think we might move on yeah and um i think we can move on to uh budgets um or you kick that off or is that jumping right into it i think jared's been waiting for her his turn we're gonna let him jump right budgets don't feel very important after that no they are without those none of the rest of it happens so don't don't all right um can you see that yes okay uh let's give me a screen okay okay so i'm going to be brief um so we're just continuing did i lose you yeah i think it takes a little prompting tonight okay uh so i'm gonna i'll be fairly brief tonight uh it's just a continuation of the the budget conversation um my computer doesn't want

155to here we go okay so if you remember as of 727 our budgets were for cps forty thousand seven hundred and seventy seven thousand one ninety three which was fifty six hundred less than the old budget and then the conquer carlisle budget was thirty five million one forty four um just under three hundred and one thousand less than the fy 21 old budget also at the time our projected revenue was 325 000 less than the budget that was voted in the in december i reduced chapter 70 by 200 000 in chapter 71 transportation by 125 000. what i wanted to do i was getting a number of questions this week about just some of our revolving accounts and the cares act money and this is all always in my budget books but this is uh

156right here is the actual revenue we received in fy 20 for cps in these accounts what i'm estimating next year and then preliminary ending balances as you can see circuit breaker is only 000 i'll explain how i think that's going to be a little bit higher to date i'm estimating these amounts for the cares act at the fincon meeting last thursday i carry kerry lafleur um reported that of the one million six hundred uh one point six million ninety two thousand four hundred and eighty eight dollars and allocated at that point to the cps uh what that is is 78 000 was spent in fy 20 for covert related expenses that they identified and then they uh gave us another 14 000 for fy21 covered related expenses the 78 000 will then become available um

157once they move that monies to the grants and i will move that 78 000 to circuit breaker to increase that uh and then the 14 000 in any additional monies that they had planned to give us uh we'll have a conversation with them uh here's the grant periods uh this 468 000 that should look familiar and here's the deci emergency relief fund that i pushed off to fy21 um and it actually there's a deadline there of 22 that's an error so it goes um so that goes until 22. that is the only one that's really not restricted i can use that for um a lot more than uh i would on the cares act money same thing at the high school here's our revolving accounts here's what i'm estimating is the ending balances as you

158can see circuit breaker is extremely healthy there we were able to put back food services it's about three months worth of expenses give or take i do have tbd's here because i don't know what to expect for next year so i left that to be determined parking lot down to 25 000 um etc and here is just the the numbers that you saw before the fy 21 old general fund revenue versus the presentation on the 27th to what i am expecting now the only difference here is in chapter 70. everything else uh has not been updated or is updated and that's what i'm estimating here is the cares act money as well as the emergency relief this 26263 is actually based on title 1 funds so that's the formula that we that we received so

159that was what we expected to get okay so if you remember at the high school we prepaid uh six hundred eleven thousand eight hundred six dollars in tuitions as well as laptops i just wanted to uh remind you all of that so currently our our gap for the the concord finance committee is 310 000 over their guideline but because of the way that the assessments work the real gap is four hundred and thirty two thousand three hundred and thirty three if you remember um to quickly put this into context this is not the traditional guideline uh of the fincom this is indeed something that happened less than a week ago correct so this was from last wednesday thank you okay i'm sorry thank you sure um so the reason why the number isn't 310 is

160due to the assessment formula in addition um if you remember i we reduced the cp the regional budget by 300 000 but because we reduced the uh the revenue by 325 we still wouldn't make up that delta so that 24 000 and change really became 36 000 and change um so my recommendations to close the gap the first thing would be to increase the chapter 70 by the amount that we're expected to get which is 247 217 more than what i presented on the 27th uh my next recommendation would be to create a budget offset in our general fund of 185 116 against the covert 19 cares act monies other recommendations could potentially be tuitions in laptop those are not my first recommendations the reason is is because this is one-time funds and we can

161remove that from our budgets a little less easier than than the tuitions in the laptop lines so that would not be my recommendation here is the budget uh as of 727 if you see right here you can see my state aid is the 2.5 million and my budget number is 35 million 144.00 here is the um assessments as of 727 this 712 0155 was last december about 688 000. so we had to make up that deal because of the revenue uh that number went up because our revenue estimates were down so here is the revised budget with the increased chapter 70 and 185 116 offset here is the increase in chapter 70 and here is the decrease in what our budget number will be here is what the assessments would look like conquered overall uh

162if you include debt is 1.73 but the number that they want to get down to under three percent um is this um uh comparison with uh without debt carlisle would further benefit um they actually do include their debt service in their numbers i believe so they would have an overall decrease uh assessment by 2.86 percent and then overall assessments are going up 0.6 or just under under that and that is the numbers um sort of short but i think most of you are familiar with them and i welcome any questions clarification um the chapter 70 number at 2.7 is that number is at uh that's not a firm number from the state that's just an indication of uh that we've i mean you can explain it better than i how we've heard about it but

163it's really not i would not view it as a reliable number yet um can you explain sure so it hasn't it hasn't gone through the the the full could you stop screen sharing there we go thank you sorry to interrupt you sure uh yeah i have too many screens here um so the governor's budget has not come out yet they did um these numbers were released um in normal years with a huge increase i would not necessarily say that they're reliable in a year like this even though they do have a number of steps to go through for an approved fy21 governor's budget that might not happen until october many of my colleagues in many of my round tables are going with this updated number they feel that uh and i believe mars as well

164as masbo but more mars feels that this number will hold it is only a slight increase on fy20s numbers so it's not a huge increase um but there is some risk with it the commissioner was very encouraging today with the superintendents so i would support what jared just said just to rephrase that we're somewhat confident that we'll have that chapter 70 money yes which would easily close the gap and more which would help close the gap because you have right now what is your budget line item for chapter 70 uh it went from 2.5 million to 2.747 million okay so that is the expected number um can so a couple of things i don't see the mecco monies anywhere oh that was in there can you just i i missed on the side then sure

165um so we are expecting about uh at the high school about 390 000 let me pull that up um and we offset that offset that was salaries i believe was about 190 000 that i spoke about in my 20 my presentation on the 27th um and the rest is in transportation so we are expecting um it's at the at the yeah so it we are expecting about 389 000 at the high school from mecco grant and then at cps we are expecting um the same amount oh i'm sorry thousand [Music] 396 region or cbs so jared why did you send it to me after this i do have other questions and i just you know we can we can actually get a little confused about the revenue um at both yeah so um yeah and

166i'm looking at my other sheet i put this presentation together i got all these numbers today and i might have i i might have i uh have identical uh medco numbers for both by mistake um so i'm gonna update that and i'll send that out as soon as this meeting ends okay thank you thank you jared so we're faced with on the one hand uh a need for greater flexibility with a budget and any other resource we have non-monetary so we can uh adapt we can uh accommodate changing circumstances and at the same time we're being asked by concord now carlisle earlier to look at the potential cuts from our original budget so we've got these two tensions uh one we need the uh the flexibility and more than we ever have before and the

167town understands this but the town in its appropriately conflicted position on this is also looking for some reductions because they have their own revenue concerns would that be an accurate simple summation of where we're at today that's a fair statement yeah um so just a kind of high level question um at a high level it seems to make sense if we're confident about this karzak money in the chapter 70 to to offset the budget um appropriately so that we are trying to hit those town calls also i guess my question is if of course they're not guaranteed and of course there's some risk every year but this year seems a little riskier what is our contingency plan or do we have a plan b if we offset the budget that way and then that money

168doesn't come through then what do we do just so that we're prepared for that possible eventuality so the when it comes to revenue um you can't spend more than the general fund amount but you can actually get less revenue than the general fund amount as long as you have e and d to cover that so e and d okay so our basically our e and d is our contingency fund yeah and what i do is you know through our cherry sheets uh every month ian and i sit down and we update our revenue estimates yeah this is one of the years that we're not very conservative we are expecting what we're reporting right now um and but every mo every quarter we go through it and if i know we're going to be short i

169prepare for that i can you know freeze the budget if i need to to end uh if we're a hundred thousand dollars short in revenue i can plug that hole by ending the general fund by a hundred thousand um there are things that we can do to plug that hole circuit breaker is also that was a million 65 that's a huge contingency that is the absolute max um so we we and as you saw at food service athletics they're healthy at this time right and of course this year just to keep it all on all of our radar contingency is important because so much is unknown and unpredictable correct um but given that with e and d i mean we do that's certainly enough to cover this difference if chapter 70 didn't come through as

170predicted yeah then we just have to hope we don't need the e d for something else we'll have about 1.6 1.7 in the ind million okay great thank you so uh i think we need to uh discuss uh what actual decisions we'd be making tonight uh is it a overall uh budget uh reaffirmation if you will uh or adoption of a new budget is it is the uh is the town request answered within that uh other decision what would be an appropriate approach i'm not sure what are thoughts about that so i did work with kerry and we just made sure that our numbers jive that i knew exactly the number that i needed to get to uh i always and i honor our auditors would be happy with any type of vote for this

171but because you're lowering the budget technically you don't need to vote it correct okay i guess i'll just follow up with a sense that we're still mimicking the typical process here so next week we're going to be at a hearing we're going to go to town meeting with a request i would feel better if there was a school committee vote supporting where we land here um i think it just formalizes a really we've redone the entire process from start to finish here since june so i think it would be the appropriate ending to this even though you don't need the legal vote i think it would give us all good standing in terms of where we landed and what we all agreed to and what we saw tonight was a very helpful powerpoint the actual

172budget we would be adopting a new would be the one in spreadsheet form that was presented to us two weeks ago and again a week ago is that right these are the newest numbers so you did not see those on wednesday okay so we we never saw those in the full spreadsheet correct got it okay so process wise then once we have those would we plan to take a vote are we meeting next week before the hearing when we take a vote right before then or do we is it more helpful if we vote tonight knowing we've seen the spreadsheets and that these are the edits to the spreadsheets so we would need to prepare the slides for the hearing we clearly need to give you a number tonight if you're going to work to

173vote it and use what jared suggested for offsets you could vote it before the hearing you have to have your own hearing next week as well so that could be logical that you'd open it up to the community for feedback before you do that final vote which we would then roll forward an hour later to go to the the formal hearing at the town level that all could sync up just fine um and we'll just do that one last round of discussion and put the voted number and you know the suggested voted number in front of you so you could finish it all next week so you'd need a pretty clear straw poll tonight yes court thank you yes if we're going to make slides for 7 p.m on tuesday and you're voting at five

174we have to just leave here with a sense of what those slides should say so it uh with that in mind jared bring us back uh if you don't mind the screen share again to the uh the two slides one of which uh referred to the guideline uh effort on our part and the second one that presented the two bottom line numbers for cps and region i think those would be useful one more time perfect and i did cynthia of great eyes i did correct the met code number um so my apologies there you're going to see a revised number for cps which is this is the cps 577 507 we received an actual and 549 390 is what i'm anticipating um okay once you spot a a thing for him to fix he has

175to do it right away i've watched that you cannot not move on till he fixes it okay so um starting with the region um sorry um jared i guess the the first piece of basic is that we would recommend the monies come from the regional budget and we're not going back to look at cps right now we would recommend you vote that line item budget would be the number we recommend yeah so the line item budget that you would be voting is 34 958 9222 that would be cps at i mean that would be the region and then at cps it is [Music] uh so it would be that number right there uh 40 million seven hundred and seventy seven thousand one hundred ninety three all right and these numbers uh got fleshed out in

176the earlier spreadsheets but on the region now the new number uh uh will incorporate the uh the uh offsets if you will uh can you bring up that slide then yep so what i'll do is right in the line as soon as we end this meeting if you vote it or want to see it i can update the line item budget thank you there it is this one right here is that you want to see court go back one uh now where was it there you go okay so this reference is where we're going to find the reductions that generate the new bottom line that speak to the towns of concord and carlisle correct okay and we understand the you know the worries they have and the sincerity of their request uh and we're we've

177got to be mindful that uh this increases our jeopardy uh that doesn't mean i'm opposed to it but it doesn't come without risk yeah i i agree with that chord and i uh um as cynthia said many times this is as good as it's gonna look for a couple of years at least and uh um i you know i frankly i was surprised at the request to lower this um and i think we've you know we are we've heard an awful lot from townspeople about the importance of doing everything we can to to educate kids in this very difficult time and some of that's going to require money so we over the course of this year that we did not plan to expend is my guess certainly i think the risk is greater there than

178that we're going to uh end up the year with some great big surplus um and i think it's going to be because the reality sets in of what we're up against i think it's going to be harder and harder to get to get the community's attention if we if we are running into trouble um so my inclination would be to leave the budget where it was um i don't think that's where the committee is um but um i would certainly be my inclination um i don't think i would make a total offset um effectively what we're doing is taking money from e and d um doesn't look that way the way we do the numbers that's the risk uh we've just uh you know through some good fortune been able to uh remedy what was

179a problem there and uh you know we haven't been talking much at all about uh [Music] about um so much so that i can't even think of the word right now um our uh open but you know that's still lurking out there um not gonna go away and uh i just think that we are i think we're being a little too a little too quick to to release these these funds from the region i do have one question uh it's you know somewhat important to my thinking here but what is the expectation for our uh enrollment data for next year isle to conquer are we looking at another year where concrete's portion increases yeah um and i have that um dave modell actually did a great um but it is declining for a few years

180let me find that i know i see like a big class coming uh in like a couple years i think that this this income the seventh graders of this year is is a bubble year that's bigger yeah that's only a year but still it adds up they're there for four well it's it's a hit right out of the gate you know um and then they put i'm thinking about the concord share versus i'm thinking about the assessment piece and does that affect us in a way that's going to be i mean you know a couple of years ago we had a really hard swallow for concord on the assessment shift and things were pretty good and we bring that sort of thing to the table next year and you know this is it's gonna be

181hard that was a half million dollar shift that was huge to you know i think you know as a regional district um you know we've got we've got some things on this equation that um don't exist at cps um and cps has been tight from the get-go so um you know we know i know we know um that there are other there's another sizable pool of funds that if the community is really struggling to get to that three percent 2.99 number that could be utilized um i would like to see at least some of if this gap is going to get closed i'd like to see some of that come from from there from where i'm sorry free cash concord free cash no i i can't cynthia state your reasoning for me just to help

182me understand because it's conquered free cash unless we went to carlisle and said let's have carlos contribute some free cash i don't think that's an appropriate task well the only reason we're having this exercise is because i understand the money i understand i just can't support going to concord free cash at this time okay well there's there's even saying the the and it's not apt exactly here so forgive me anybody i offend over on the fincom uh the the favor of today becomes the must of tomorrow we don't want to set the precedent to say we're going to start to strip away regional assets at the very time that we need them on the other hand i feel strongly that we have a really superior relationship with the the town governments in carlisle and concord

183and we can't predict the future but uh right now we we do uh seem to be working toward some mutual ends here um what we have not discussed and i'm fearful of doing this because i don't want to extend the debate a long time but uh we're debating this as if it's a uh a manage this request or say no whereas there might be something in the middle i'm not advocating that but i'm asking you all is anybody asking us to do that exercise anybody asking us to do that yes to say uh we were we're not going to uh take responsibility for uh a 430 000 cut that affects a uh three point three percent levied limit of concord we're not going to bear that uh solely at the district level but uh will

184will will help the towns move toward more austerity uh and more more control over the levy increase is that a conversation we're going to have i'm not going to propose it but if we're going to have it we got to start it now i might be more comfortable with a portion rather than the whole thing i mean it's you know it's over one percent of our budget so in terms of process uh how would this work is just the timing and everything is so different than our normal town meeting structure so we have a hearing vincon will not be again before the hearing is that correct they're not i don't know if that's good um think about this when we go back to the um to the to the old the old budgets that but

185there's so many iterations it feels at this point but uh the screen that shows the old budgets versus these revised ones i don't know do you have the three i guess like you know what was both for both for cps and for the regional yeah in this excuse me in this in this presentation or a previous one anywhere yeah uh here you had i think we focused mostly on the regional here right so here is this is the region this is the voted not voted this is the one i presented on july 27th yeah and this is the july 27th assessments here is the new budget with the new chapter 70 and then the new budget and then here's the new new assessments [Music] and then the the budget the july 27th for the for

186cps's yup that was reduced by 5600 okay so and um so that's right here yeah yes i think i mean i think it's worth you know pointing out that that all of that most of that ask is being put onto onto the region so that cps can keep its budget as it was um i just think it's worth worthwhile to acknowledge that correct yeah right it's not it's not it's not that tps is getting is getting hit and the yeah the problem with cps is contingencies contingencies we don't have those at cps we don't have we're just a as you know just a uh another department of the town so we the only thing we really would have is circuit breaker um as as a contingency we do have built in 150 000 contingency in

187there but it's a that's a very tight yeah and i'm not i'm i'm i'm not taking an issue like i just think that it's it's worth reiterating that and then what are the other town departments being asked to reduce by so when i watched the in cynthia i know you watched it as well the town they reduced over 600 000 in their lines but they did have the middle school exempt number that actually brought that up by 338 000 so they're dealt that was only in the threes because they had additional loss of revenue due to that but they cut capital um capital and health insurance were some of the big things for them significant for yeah significant cuts there and jared what were the numbers that we've uh of our these current for 21

188budgets versus the oldest what 21 budget what's the delta there what is the delta so um oh district it is this one sorry i just want to make sure that the number we're looking at doesn't include the bump in uh chapter 70. right um in the production let me pull up the um because i sent you all a report uh a line item budget that had fy 20 versus fy21 new i'm just going to quickly pull that up and just as a process thing do we have a are we arguing we discussing a recommendation or any like i feel like there's not even an emotion or what do we do i think what we do yeah we don't know i mean we're doing what we probably should do in the action item but that's okay

189um the uh i think that we've got a proposal from the administration about if we if we want to do this please do it this way okay so i haven't heard of and i think you know a conversation like that i think this is uh being left up to us and probably should be no i understand it's a it's a line item from the cares act right yep and then and what's the other item again it is the 247 in chapter 70 and a portion of the cares act funds that are unrestricted yep so we're pretty confident in that cares act number we've discussed that let's just say it doesn't come then we've got an issue uh so we're really just discussing the apportionment of the monies from the cares act is that correct kind

190of sort of i think also big picture it feels like the discussion is whether we are sticking with our original budget or whether we are trying to fully or partially close the gap with the finance committee um and and one question i would have to try to at least narrow that down from a high level and i apologize if you if you said this at the beginning jared because i was my reception was coming in that a little bit but my question would be in terms of these numbers and this comes back to what wally just said in terms of how we would do it are you looking at these numbers as a recommendation that you are comfortable with saying here's a way we could close this gap and i am comfortable with this new

191budget number and recommending it or or is this if we have to close it this is how we would do it but not necessarily recommend it and so i that would really help in terms of perspective yeah so my answer is simply i would never propose something that i am not comfortable with i i feel comfortable uh wally makes a great point about chapter 70 um but i just i know the budgets now yeah and i've done four in three years um so i i know the numbers i've seen i've seen the years close out twice now um i'm i'm very comfortable with our current position going into this i really am oh heather i'll tell you where thank you for saying that i'll tell you where this takes me and that is uh and

192i appreciate jared your willingness to answer the question um even though uh the politics are ours and the uh the technical wisdom is all yours um uh my sense of it uh is that if we've stated we can do this we've stated heightens our risk but it doesn't heighten our capacity to deliver for fiscal 21. correct maybe so maybe the assuming those funds come through yeah assuming the funds come through so maybe the bet is for lack of a better way to put it that we uh gain the credibility of the uh fish school watchdogs in both towns by doing our best to accommodate this request when we can heightening our credibility should look dramatically different a year from now and we say we can't or even have a big ask that uh that is

193is painful for us i think we've put ourselves in that place even though it goes against the grain to uh uh allow resources that we already have in hand for kids uh to go elsewhere and speaking of risks i think that is one of the great risks um the fact that next year we could be coming back with a significantly larger risk or maybe not but depending how this whole learning process goes so for me the calculation is is the 400 additional risk to schools offset by the preservation of the credibility that we also need uh from all the players in both towns we don't know you know that's a that's a guess to a future with committees and boards that we haven't met yet i don't even know that i call it credibility i

194think it's just you know we can we're all dealing with a set of with a set of assumptions right now that could try to change dramatically um you know i've sort of nebulously said what if we you know what if our expenses end up being higher than we anticipated here's a scenario um we know that it's uh they say 180 it's 184 thousand dollars to test let's say we go to school in early september so we decided to do that it was 184 thousand dollars per theirs it has to be apportioned to the gps to the region and maybe on going through this chair it could make that break up down but let's say we put is it so it's so our increase at cps is one million three hundred and eighty seven thousand thirty

195dollars and then if you reduce the cp uh the high school budget by the 185 116 the increase is only 271 1189 yeah well i guess what i'm point i'm trying to we're talking about the original budget so the 184 000 number is basically all of both districts students and staff being tested at 45 pop so the region piece is uh a bit less than that um that number would be good to know right now but let's say we go to school in a month from the day we start the governor shuts it down and that the experience that we see around the country is that the best way to get back in the building a month later two months later when we start to see it turn around is a full-scale test again if

196not two because oftentimes what we're seeing when somebody's trying to determine whether or not it's safe is two tests um so now we've if it's even if it's just one test the expense to the overall two district budgets is now up to three hundred and seventy thousand dollars and let's say we end up in the same situation uh before we come back after the holidays for whatever reason i mean giving given the cost just of testing we can find if we find that and we've we've just heard and we know from a number of surveys that it's very important to this community to keep kids in the buildings so wally let me just remind you that both towns have their own cares act monies carla does as well and i'm you know our next conversation

197with the select board and with the finance or the select board is i i think we should be exploring talking about taking some of those monies and adding and attributing them to testing but it's not a bottomless pit no but it's 1.6 million dollars i don't know well for the total total for the town for right now i don't know what carlos number is right it's cool the testing is should be a community conversation not just a school's conversation but i'll just we're going kind of around in circles and it's 7 18. so do we have any kind of a do we need a vote or you just don't need to vote we'll we'll we can do enough of the slides to get ready for next week i guess one just couple thoughts maybe to

198end it on just having lived the story with both communities to get to this point and i just offer it as food for thought carlisle originally asked for a five percent cut which landed as correct me if i'm wrong eva and sarah landed as level funding for the carlisle public school so they've already done their share of cuts initially the well initially the local revenues in concord were projected to be millions of dollars short they're landing on 1.6 jared as a projected decrease yeah one six we're only being asked for 300 000 of that so i do just frame that i think there's been efforts here to not have us take on even a full portion of it knowing all the variables i know it's hard because this is all money we might need for

199something i totally understand that i just thought the big picture might be worth while there was conversation in concord earlier that we would be asked to take an equal portion we're not being asked that because they know how volatile this is i feel like carl isles being really patient with us letting the carlisle school get settled and sort of waiting out what's going to happen here and i [Music] maybe i'm i don't know i've done this long enough here in these two communities think a little good faith doesn't go a long way so i just wonder if we've got a got to think that piece through because i actually anticipated this was going to be a much harder conversation this year than it's turned out to be i know next year is another a game

200changer but we have e and d at capacity we have circuit breaker at capacity the money you're debating right now is money we didn't know we'd even have to discuss so we are in as good shape as we could possibly be going into 22 knowing that this coven money is in play in a way that we didn't expect um so i guess i just framed that and maybe we need a week to think on it that's totally fine we can get ready for the hearing and have you do a final decision you know right before goodness knows i've been in worse situations than that around here um so i i think it might be fair to give it some thought now that you've got all the moving pieces and heard our recommendations before we delay

201it i i think it might be helpful just to take a straw here if i mean if if a majority of the committee is prepared to to meet this number then you know that i'm done talking about it so like you know let's if if you know there's a four better than four to two votes i think that makes sense let's see where everyone is i think we've heard wally give us a lot of cautions i think you've heard me share jeopardy but uh concerns but i'm prepared to support the request from the town of concord uh we've heard laurie heather i would fall in about where court is given that laurie and jared are comfortable with this i i want to reg red flag the concerns and the risk but at the same time

202feel that with those red flags prominent it would make sense to try to be a i guess a team player with the town and try to close the gap cynthia eva sarah yeah when i did my charting the course the massachusetts school committee thing there they pointed out the chapter 70 was more this year and the formula and all this and that was back in september of 2019 but don't you know be careful that's not a set in stone that's not set in stone the fact that they're still reaffirming that at this point um very easily been something that that i think you know was at least on the table for changing makes me more confident in those in the under revised numbers that jared without you know so yeah and i had a quick

203question for uh clarification how comfortable are um in uh the uh money found in the uh covered the cares act and uh those relief areas uh because the number uh the other two items that were listed were the tuition so uh special education tuition so is that a prepaid and also the um technology uh uh money right so and we are going to be heavily relying on technology going forward so are we confident that we won't have to slide down the scale to uh the less desirable um uh numbers and um if you can just clarify are these prepayments what is the uh special tuitions so yeah we prepaid um fy21s with fy20 monies um those will now carry forward as sort of a contingency and if everything goes to plan i can go ahead

204and maybe do the same thing next year to um and keep pushing it excellent if that if something very unforeseen were to happen you do have those funds in the lines that are available because you've already prepaid so there's another set of contingencies there to get through the year [Music] i feel very comfortable with the way lori and jared have framed this decision and i think um i think it will make the 22 conversation a little bit easier even though that's not our job to make things easier um so uh if jared thought this was going to be a big risk or you know we should put a big red flag out there then he would have told us um so i i don't feel like nothing's risk-free right now i wish uh so but

205i i think we're as laurie said in a good place for 21 so i would like to proceed with the proposal heather and wally are you comfortable if we ask our two not yet voting members to weigh in briefly no i think we should do that all right thank you all right i understand i didn't know protocol thank you so uh with that uh is there a motion we would entertain uh we should entertain about the budget um well it sounds like we would probably vote to meet fingcum's number right that is listed on our action items should we wait until we get there when we get there and uh sure could just double check the numbers between now and then this makes sense yeah um we might move on to uh the policies i

206know the hours late uh this might in fact be brief these is that okay wally um if it's it couldn't be proof i was going to recommend we'd move it to next week but uh we i know they're kind of time critical yeah and these i'm not going to call them boilerplate stuff because they're brand new but what i will say is that they've been disseminated far and wide through the commonwealth as suggestions from the mass association of school committees i don't know if anybody can pull them up on our screens but we have a very general policy the first one on your agenda uh that is simply called ebc supplemental ebc is a section in policies under the broad category of safety and what it does is thank you very much and you've all

207read this i know but the public can see it now and what it does is simply outlines the fact that there will be covert related actions perhaps numerous across many fronts uh calendar class size attendance time on learning grading and retention you're seeing them here graduation sped discipline and suspension that all could require a superintendent to bring forth uh uh administrative uh regulations uh and or policy changes in order to protect kids and teachers and uh what happens for people in schools including support staff so uh it simply says that uh this language is good here and representative the superintendent may suspend or amend current policy uh and then it frequently says that there's a expectation that she'll bring this promptly to the school committee did anybody have any questions or concerns about this rather

208intentionally general policy that tells the superintendent we understand that you're going to have to be nimble and in nimble administrative efforts uh you're going to have to be equally nimble about keeping us informed uh i don't have a question a question or a comment about that but i am looking for clarification i had a parent already reach out to me uh with a question about the supplemental uh policy uh page number three when it comes to the special education uh the local graduation requirements and the special education uh right below that they were not sure how those uh two re are those two statements are related to each other and how would they um impact the students uh i think they're intended to be independent would you agree laurie i i absolutely would agree yeah

209um it uh simply simply says that the uh the pandemic uh uh is gonna uh have us confronting many unknowns and in light of that remember this in accordance with guidance remember this that the school committee and superintendent should be mindful so some of these aren't traditional policies so much as and you'll see another example of this of pay attention is what some of these masc policies are saying to us is that adequate for now do you think eva uh well maybe i'll ask maybe for a little more clarification on uh the graduation and retention for the special education students because i know that the state is looking at um removing the mcas um requirements for four years so you know there there might be some some uh different impact that we are not for

210seeing right now at the moment and that's i think why i see amasd recommends these to simply put us and uh the world on notice that uh we may have uh state edicts for example or a deci guidance that uh would have us go back to our our original policies and have to say that the state is temporarily superseding them i wonder if we might turn to the next one this is our first reading we're going to come back to this next week face coverings uh and what this one does is really spells out uh very clearly uh masc's recommendation uh that is going to be put into school regulations and quite simply uh says what you i think would certainly what i expected and that is that people are expected to have a mask

211unless there's a cdc recommended or medical recommended reason why that wouldn't be the case and that enforcement is expected uh what's different uh in concord uh in concord is that instead of saying this was uh help me lauria grade two and up we said it's a k and up correct thank you questions comments if not we're going to move to the next one this is just a first reading but we want to hear them now because they're coming back next week thank you for your forbearance here remote learning so this uh actually uh so far we think in our analysis sits nicely with other policies that relate to uh internet use digital uh expectations and restrictions and so on and really uh simply puts puts forth uh in policy language the fact that there is

212going to be remote learning right and uh our study said there was no surprises in the language there it's an affirmation of what's already happening this one this addendum we thought was a little bit odd in our analysis because it's not a true policy you can see where it starts issues to consider and then some questions uh so we decided that uh we this one would be fine to bring to you and bring uh bring to uh our actual policy handbook with formal adoption but with one caveat and that is because it's more advisory for uh for administration and staff in the form of questions about what you should be mindful of the archavia was this is effective uh so long as the governor belie says that we're under a state of emergency because then

213it becomes sort of unnecessary after that so those were the four and uh if you have questions bring them to us quickly in some form or other uh uh no later please then the thursday policy meeting did i get it all sarah cynthia okay thank you i'm sorry that uh we're dragging this on glad we got through it thank you it was good thanks thanks for doing all that work um so should we let's move on to action items and uh we have uh staff requests they're mostly uh well i'll just go through this um you can have a motion that the conquer carlyle i'm sorry the conquered and conquered school committees vote to approve the following staff requests to enroll their children and conquer public schools coca-cola regional school district for the 2020 2021

214school year and the tuition be waived erica real teacher at cms taught her to enroll in third grade at willard jen thistle teacher at willard sons to enroll in fourth grade in willard sixth grade at cms um teresa reggiera teacher at ccs cchs daughter to enroll in kindergarten and third grade at willard and patrick cavane reading specialist at willard taught her to enroll in first grade at willard uh second for both thank you did you make the most of it uh cynthia did thank you uh just a a comment for clarification for new members when somebody joins the congress public schools uh we are recognizing right now that they uh are able to join the conquered carlisle schools and we thank them for their trust and faith in their own institutions that they contribute to

215and look forward to being entrusted with the care of their children so do we have a uh let's have a roll call vote why do you have it in front of you yep um uh rainy hi for both i for both wilson i for region mustafi i for region johnson and i for both and uh and if we wait a moment heather is going to rejoin us if we can find her in the list i just i'm back thank you hear me yes i fell thank you thank you thank you are you gonna join the executive session okay i'm gonna try i'm having trouble again i keep losing my connection here okay um we'll probably be able to survive if you can't but just wanted to know their way for you um okay so that

216passes and uh welcome to the district for those students no don't wait for me if you don't i'll do my okay you're on your own out there in the wilderness thank you heather thanks heather um so the next uh i don't know if i don't have a language i haven't here the yeah do we have a motion uh for the following the concrete school committee and the concrete carla regional school committee will enter into an executive session under purpose no no no no wait wait wait wait budget piece try to vote for the budget we're going to vote for the budget yeah no that's what i mean yeah we picked that up um do we just need to vote to approve the amounts i think so okay so can i have a motion uh we

217probably should split these we have a motion to approve this uh conquer public school budget uh at the amount of forty million seven hundred seventy seven thousand one hundred ninety three dollars for fiscal year 2021. so move for concord second for concord uh no discussion um so raw vote uh thank you um and uh can i have a motion to approve the concacal regional school district budget of 34 958 922 for fiscal year 2021. so i'll move that uh if jared can mount his head that we got it right because i'm not looking at it thank you so moved second second thank you um they better be right jerry give me like 10 minutes ago um the uh so uh no any discussion i think we're probably finished there let's do a roll rainey i

218for the region i for region wilson i for region mustafi i for region vote color vote she's president uh heather we're waving at you uh john's tonight give her a moment are you frozen on us we don't know if you can hear us heather we're doing the region vote which you straw polled in support of can you hear us now we want to be where he she is yeah [Laughter] oh she's gone okay well i think we're good we've got a that's a majority so um anakora so uh corey you want to do the executive session yeah having uh tried to do it earlier my mistake sorry uh we'd entertain a motion uh as follows the concord school committee in the concord carlisle regional school committee will enter into an executive session under purpose three

219of the open meeting law to discuss strategy with respect to collective bargaining or litigation if an open meeting may have detrimental effect on the bargaining or litigating position of the public body and not to return to open session do we have a second a second for conquered second for concord do we have a second for the region second for region second for region thank you sarah and uh wally do you want to bring us to a close sure um uh rainey aye for both oof bye for both wilson see you in a couple of minutes couple of minutes thank you especially for those intrepid 21 who held onto the you