Concord Carlisle Joint School Committee June 10, 2025

001Good evening. I'm not ready. There we go. Good evening. In a moment, I'll call to order the conquered school committee and then to be followed by the conquered Carile School Committee as this is our meeting to receat um new committee members and to reorganize. Uh prior to that, I asked for a few moments to speak on two different topics. Um first, I'm gonna ask for a moment of silence. Earlier today, we were deeply heartbroken to share the news of the passing of Dr. Robin Shaeti, our beloved librarian at Conquered Carile High School. Robin died peacefully on June 9th after a recent illness. She was surrounded by her beloved husband and children. She's a pillar of the conquered public schools and conquered Carile Regional School District for 26 years. She began her career at Willard Elementary

002and has been a cherished member of the CCHS family since 2007. Robin was more than just a librarian. She was a mentor, a guide, and a friend to generations of students and staff. Her passion for literature research and her unwavering dedication to fostering a love of learning and her warm welcoming presence made the CCHS learning commons a vibrant hub of intellectual curiosity and discovery. She touched countless lives with her kindness, her wisdom, her warmth, and her infectious enthusiasm. Let's take a moment of silence to remember Robin. Thank you. Tonight I also want to comment on um information shared last week and much to our dismay of swastika being found on the high school campus. Tonight I speak on behalf of the school district, school committee, and administration. We emphatically denounce all acts of anti-semitism and

003their implied hate and threats. We in the conquered public schools in the conquered Carile Regional School District will not tolerate these acts. Our actions of the last week include reconvening with local religious leaders in the Jewish faith, reconnecting with the Jewish Community Relations Council of Boston, and reviewing our long-standing bias reporting protocols. We are deeply committed to a safe environment for all students in the schools and members of the community where everyone feels they are included and belong. So now to the business at hand. The first order of business is to seat the new conquered school committee to elect its officers and make other necessary appointments. After a call to order of the committee is made, I will request that a conquered school committee member move the motion to seat the conquered school committee members

004by name. That's in your linked document. Following this, a request will be made for nominations for chair of the conquered school committee. Once the election of the conquered school committee chair is conducted, that individual or design will ask for nominations for a vice chair. So, we need to first call the committee to order. I think we've officially done that at this point. We need to seat the conquered school committee members. Is there a motion? And I'll ask you to read what's there. I move to recognize Andrew Herchek, Tracy Morano, Sandee Pashardi, Carrie Ranken, and Michael Williams as members of the Conquered School Committee. Second. All in favor? Well, discussion. All in favor? I I I election of the officers of the conquered school committee. Nominations will be accepted and voted on for chair of the

005conquered school committee. Are there any nominations? I will move to nominate Andrew Herek, chair of the conquered school committee. Second second. Any discussion? Thank you. Welcome to being chair. Wait, you didn't vote yet. All in favor? Hi. Hi. Hi. All right, Andrew, you're meeting. Is there a passing of something? Yes. The enthusiasm? Yes. Great. Okay. Need to Yeah. Not vice chair is your next task. I move to appoint a vice chair of the conquered school committee. Uh I move to elect Carrie Rankin as vice chair of the conquered school committee. One second. All those in uh discussion. Congratulations. All those in favor? I I And then you just need to appoint Aaron Higgins as recording secretary. Uh I move to appoint Aaron Higgins as recording secretary for the conquered school committee. Second. Any discussion? Thank

006you, Erin. You're amazing. Yes. All those in favor? I Thank you. Okay. So, we need to call to order the joint school committee. I request that the chair of the conquered school committee. You ready? I don't have my computer. Call for the seating of the conquered carile school committee and for the election of officers for the conquered carile school committee. Other appointments can be made at that time if the committees have worked out assignments, which I understand we are not ready to do tonight because one more Carile member needs to be seated. Other the appointments that require a vote in addition to the chair of the committee are the appointment of the treasurer for the region which we're going to do all that at a subsequent meeting. So Andrew, you need to ask for a

007nomination. Well, let's first seat the committee. Sorry. Okay, I have it. Yeah, I'll just keep going. A motion will need to be made by the conquered school committee chair to do you want to make the motion one of you? What's here on the regional? I move that um we seat the conquered carile regional school committee. We recognize Andrew Herek, Tracy Morano, Sund Pashardi, Carrie Ranken, and Michael Williams, and Brian Wat as a Carile member of the Conquer Carile School Committee. Second. Second. All in favor? I. Now, we need to nominate and accept a vote for chair of the Conquered Carile School Committee. I move that we elect Tracy Morano as chair of the Conquered Carile School Committee. Seconded. Any discussion? Yeah. Thank you, Tracy. All in favor? I Tracy, you and Andrew in charge. It's

008here at the bottom. We didn't get that far yet. All right. So, at this point, we will accept um a nomination for a vice chair of the conquered carell school committee. I nominate I I nominate Brian Wat as vice chair of the regional school committee. Sorry. Any discussion? All those in favor? I All right. And I would accept a motion to appoint Aaron Higgins as recording secretary. I move to appoint Aaron Higgins as recording secretary for the uh Conquer Carlo School Committee. Second. Second. Any discussion? All in favor? I. Um, so I accept a motion to appoint Allison Latizy as treasure of the Conquer Carell Regional School District. So moved. Second. Second. Any discussion? All in favor? I. Thank you, Alison. All right. So, moving on. Just give me one second. Got that one. I

009got it. Thank you. All right. So at this point we are going to go into public comment. So just as a reminder a public comment period will be a period of 20 minutes. As a reminder this is a meeting in the public and not with the public. So if you are in the room uh the school committee will not be responding to any comments. If you're in the room and you'd like to speak you can submit a blue form to me and you'll be called to speak. If you're on Zoom you can use the raise hand feature. When called to speak, please state your name and your address before you speak. And we'll go every other starting with comment in the room and then taking a comment on Zoom. And you will have a limit

010of three minutes. Looks like I have two blue forums. So we will start with Robert Grom. Uh, Robert Grom, Mildred Circle. Thank you. Um, as a former member of this committee, I want to thank our two METCO representatives and the other school committee members for volunteering to further enhance the excellence of our schools. Uh the reason for my comments uh today is to provide positive food for thought hoping some of my suggestions might in my humble opinion improve the functioning of this committee. I encourage all of those involved in our school's metco program to bring your efforts to a higher level. Concentrating on improving the educational services will hopefully result in increased participation. The sooner the better. It is my strong belief that restarting a budget subcommittee would have a very positive impact on providing

011financial stability. Most towns school committees have one as we did a few years ago. Another uh suggestion would be to schedule a workshop uh sometime in August. Uh and I have to believe that would bear very positive results. Uh there are many potential agenda items for such an open meeting. The central one to me would be to discuss and implement improvements as to how the school committee communicates with the residents in Boston, Carile and Conquered, how the superintendent communicates with all stakeholders and how the nine school committee members communicate with the superintendent. This would be a very important discussion in my opinion and could lead to some real progress. A prominent example of a meaningful and positive change in my opinion concerns protocol number five, which in my opinion should be deleted. To require that

012non-chair members can only communicate with the superintendent through the chairs doesn't make any sense to me. Uh this committee has three very important duties. One of them is evaluating the superintendent and his or her performance which should come about through face-to-face discussions and meetings and not by emails or messages or a possibly gatekeeper as as the chairs would be in this case. uh I have to believe some of the finer points would be lost in having a gatekeeper uh involved in this process. Um in closing, it is very import encouraging to see that diversity, equity, belonging and inclusion are embraced by our community as reflected so convincingly in our last town election. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. All right. I'm just looking online and I don't see any raised hands. So, next we have Mark

013Germalleti. I don't know if I said that correctly. Close. Close. Sorry. Um, thank you. Uh, as many of you around this table remember, I was here in March uh to talk about anti-semitism uh becoming kind of commonplace in our schools. And um first off, I want to thank Dr. Hunter because she immediately reached out to me and we started the process of sort of what we can do, what we can do as a community, what are the next steps. Um I do need to stress that this is an incredibly long road. Um it's going to take time. It's going to involve all of us. Um, as I've stated uh in recent emails to all of you, um, I have zero expectations of the school to solve this problem. This is a communitywide problem. Um, I

014do appreciate Dr. Hunter, your mayor culpa in your email last week. Uh, I must also stress though that our community is capable of holding space for multiple concerns without diminishing any of them. It's hard as the father of a Jewish child to see the photos uh of a swastika in our skate park. Um what's also hard is the fact that I've openly communicated with others in surrounding communities. Um in particular Wayland, uh Actton Boxboro and Bedford. Uh Wayland right now has gone sideways. Uh they had a swastika incident of their own. The conversation has now led to so much coded uh anti-semitic commentary in emails and public comment uh that they're struggling to handle it. Um if anyone knows what happened in Actton Boxboro and since my last comments here in March um they've had

015a student seek hiling Jewish students inside the school. That is a traumatic experience. Um, most recently, Bedford School Committee had nine people step up to public comments to share their individual stories of their children inside of the schools running from elementary through middle through high school. I encourage all of you to go watch that. It is on YouTube. Um, the stories are horrific. Um, extremely traumatic and I can't imagine what it's like to be a parent to hear some of those stories. So to me in our latest incident and knowing that this is going to happen again, I will accept that. I don't expect it to end, but I expect us all to be on the same page. Most importantly, I expect communication to be immediate and swift uh because that allows us to start

016our conversations at home. And then when we can start our conversations at home, we can now bring it outside of the home, potentially into our faith-based organizations and then to the rest of the community. And we can start the process of all hopefully getting on the same page and working towards a better community and handling incidents as tense and high level as this. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Um looks like we have two raised hands online. So Wilson Kerr will promote you to be a panelist. Is that what we do on here? Yeah. Okay. I'm trying. There he is. Can you guys hear me? Okay. Let me see if we can get that. I'm going to try and turn it up a little bit louder. Can you come turn the volume up? Wilson, can

017you say something again? Okay, we can't hear you at all. Wilson, I'm here. Can you guys hear me? I think it was coming in. We still can't really hear you. You guys hear me enough? Or just unmute him and use a microphone. You can try it. Try it now. Wilson, can we try the other person? Yeah. back. Wilson, uh, we're gonna hang on with you for one second. We're gonna promote JG and see if JG can speak first. Okay, no problem. Oh, now I hear that. Okay. Sorry. JG, you guys. Sorry, Tracy. Do you want me and Wilson to speak? Um, I think so. Okay. So, Wilson, yes, you can speak. We'll try you again. Go ahead. You guys can hear me now? Okay. Not really. Not really. The committee can hear you. Um, but

018why don't you try? Okay. We'll concur. 20 Damon Street. I just wanted to take a minute to commend the school committee and the superintendent for all of the work they did leading up to the town meeting. For the last several years, the town meetings have been marked by uh discrepancies in the budget. Uh and this year a lot of work went into fixing that and making sure that the that the uh various parties got together and that the budgets came in uh at guidelines and there was not equal uh acrimony and tension leading up to it. Wilson, can I interrupt you for a second because we really can't hear anything. Um it would be great if you could send your thoughts in an email. Okay. We will consider that public comment and then the whole

019committee will see it and we can read it at the next meeting. We do have improvements planned in here over the summer. A little dollar. The only the only thing I did here is he was thanking everyone for their work leading up to town meeting. So that's the general gist of it. But if you could just put that in writing, that'd be great. Thanks, Wilson. Um, okay. We'll move on to JG who is online. I don't know if it's going to work better. And you may start your public comment. I don't believe I think I think the invitation's being declined. Okay. All right. So, seeing no other public comment, um we will close up public comment for today. Okay. Okay, next up we have our CCHS student update and I'm not actually sure if our

020students are on with us. It is the very end of the year for those of you who JG accepted. Okay, we'll go back to JG. We're having some technical difficulties. Sorry. All right, JG, you will have three minutes for your public comment. Hello. Hi. Go ahead. Hello. Yeah, yeah, I would. It goes back to the question, I guess, on email. Um, obviously someone's going to be working on getting this up to speed, but my question was, when we send an email to the school committee, it's to the school committee. Does Superintendent Hunter automatically get copied on that or does someone vote it to her later? We don't actually interact during public comment. I'm sorry. Say again. Can you actually say Can you state your first name and last name and address? Yeah. Oh, I apologize.

021Yes. My name is John Grace, 70 North Branch Road. Okay, you can continue. Thank you. I actually want to address that too, but I don't want to tie up. Are you able to hear me? I know you had trouble with Mr. Kerr. We can hear you. Um, the audience cannot hear you, so I believe that anyone on Zoom can hear you. That's fine either way. Um, no. Because I've had this problem before with this. I'm curious how that's this is going to get rectified. And then, um, if I walked in off the street, no one would be checking my ID. So, I find a curious. I obviously when I speak, I have to be identified. But um my first question was when I sent an email to contact the super uh talk contact the board

022of se uh school committee does superintendent does the superintendent automatically get copied on that? Is she part of that group that goes to it? Do you have anything else to add to your public comment? I'm asking for that. I'm asking for a response to that. With public comment as I stated at the beginning of the meeting, it's a meeting with the in the public but not with the public. So, you can state your public comment and we can get back to you. Yeah. My my public comment was you need to assume we should be able to assume that when we send a correspondence to the school committee, it's in confidence and it's not shared automatically with the superintendent or or we should be advised if it is. That's fine if that's the protocol, but um

023it's not acceptable. Okay, thank you. All right, great. Now, how about fixing this? Is there a plan for that? I will address the sound in the room because it seems to be a hot topic tonight. So, there is a plan to address the sound system in this room over the summer. It's been a constant frustration of us this year. So, we will address that over the summer. And hopefully when we're back, you'll see. Yes. And I've had numerous problems getting this rectified. And I was told that that Minute Man uh the Minute Man television was a contract and then I was told they do it as a service. Do we have a contract with them? Okay. At this point, you're at the end of your three minutes. So, I thank you for your time. All

024right. Thanks for coming in. Thank you. All right. So, on to our student update. I don't see our students with us. So, our students just finished their exams. And I'll just take the opportunity to say today was the last day of exams for our high school students. The students also had their student senate election. So, we will find out who our representatives are going to be um hopefully before our next meeting. And Q5 at the high school starts tomorrow, which is very exciting to bring that back to our high school. And it is four days of electives that students have some choice in what they take so they finish out their school year instead of under the stress of finals as four days being with um different groups of students, different ages, different grades. and

025it's a really great program that maybe we'll hear a little bit about that later. All right, and on to our recognitions. I see I think almost all of our principles in the room. So, um the school committee has taken the opportunity to have its own recognitions this year. So, this is our chance to have our recognition. So, I had asked Dr. Hunter if we could recognize the leadership team. And given the fact that you guys aren't always recognized, we have teacher appreciation week. We don't always have administrator appreciation week. So, what we're going to do is just say a few quick words about all of you and thank you for your leadership this year, especially um I'm going to start with people who aren't here and then we'll do K to8 and then the high

026school and then our superintendent, assistant superintendent. So, um, I'd like to recognize Andrew Namichi as our director of DEIB and the work that he's done this year. We thank him for all the extra time and attention that he has spent um, getting the incident reporting system has been something that's been really important and we do have protocols on our website and they are also posted in our uh, schools. So, I'd like to thank Andrew for that. Angel Charles who is our director of student services who's not with us tonight. um she's built so many in district programs that we can't really thank her enough for that and really the icing on the cake I think this year was opening up the launch retail space and if you haven't seen it yet you should definitely go

027see it. It is over by Crosby's in the red building and possibilities is in that space. They've made some gifts for our friends in Nai. I think that we're bringing some things over there. That was the most recent thing that they've done. Are they open over the summer? During ESY, so the month of July pretty much. So if you haven't had an opportunity to go over there, they're open between 9 and two and they sell um Alcott throw Willard uh CCHS CMS merch over there and some Ripley. They do have bracelets too that say conquered or Walden. So if you haven't pen, I encourage everyone to go in there. Um Peter Kelly is part of our leadership team and he is our director of IT. Uh I cannot thank him enough for dealing with the

028ransomware last year. So one of the unsung heroes. If he was not with us, we would really have some challenges. So there's a lot that goes into our technology. Um and then if we can start K to five maybe the row start with you Carrie. Yeah. So I have the privilege of recognizing Mr. Sparks. Um you have it's hard to it's hard to believe that you've already and only been at Thorough for two years. Um it feels like you've been part of the institution um forever and also it feels like you just got here. I don't know how that's possible. Um but you've had such a um you have you have such a quiet confidence about you. you fix problems and you don't um you make just make things go away and it's really in

029a wonderful way. You don't call attention to anything. You just you just make positive change and it's really nice to see. Um and then it's been really wonderful to see over the last year your leadership on the facilities updates and the playground committee um and um so just really grateful to have you um on the on the team. So thank you. And then I also have um the privilege of recognizing Naomi. Naomi, you wear um so many hats in conquered. You are a resident, a parent, and um a principal of note tonight, and you do all of them with such grace. Um so you are um I see you everywhere. I see you at um community events, at band concerts. Um I also see you in your leadership capacity um really making just positive changes

030at Alcott. you have um really done a wonderful job of um fostering such a wonderful METCO program and welcoming our um METCO students into the conquered community. It's really their first experience in this community. Um and I just really admire um the work that you've put into that and and everything at Alcott. So, thank you so much. And then we have Matt Lucy right down. Um, yes. I have the privilege of recognizing Matt Lucy, who is the principal for my two kids at Willard. Um, Matt, I just, you know, personally sincerely appreciate everything you do at Willard. It's such an awesome experience for my kids, for us as parents, everything from the programming, all the communication um, you have throughout the year. We feel really connected to the school. um uh want to thank you

031for your work with the shelter uh community and bringing them in, making them feel welcome and um included in the in the Willard community as well. It's just been awesome to see over the last couple years. And finally, uh your energy. Um anytime I'm in the building, you're high-fiving kids, they're running up to you, you're, you know, elbowing. um you know from your morning salute with the world language, everything from the minute the bell rings to the minute the uh kids get out and beyond. So um thank you so much for all you do and um my kids are really excited uh for summer, but they're really excited to come back to school and that's a big big part thanks to you. So thank you. And then for the middle school see him here yet?

032Justin is here. He is here. He's right in the back. inviting Justin Cameron, our uh middle school principal. Really, thank you for an unbelievable opening and smooth opening of our new building. We're looking forward to the ribbon cutting, which is tomorrow evening at 5:00. So, if you haven't heard that, please show up. We have lots of I I've heard from retired teachers actually that are coming. So, I think that we're going to have a real great community event tomorrow night. So, thank you, Justin, for that. And I did really enjoy um the Instagram of you on the DC trip this week. So if you haven't seen that, Justin is dancing on the bus with his students. So really going the extra mile for the kids and being really um just really a great leader over

033there for students and for teachers. So thank you for all of that. Um Justin's Instagram game is strong. It really is. I mean it's really strong. So I really enjoyed that. Um, and then for the high school, we have Katie Stall and Brian Miller, our co-principles, who are definitely our dynamic duo at the helm there. Um, I've known both Brian and Katie for a while. My kids have all been at the high school with you and really Brian is an expert scheduler if you don't know that about him. Um, no one does Aspen like Brian. Um, so he runs the schedules and and really is an amazing logistics manager. And when we did have I think it was a flood this year. Was that Oh, we started the year with the flood. Um we didn't

034miss one day of school. So that was all due to Brian Miller. So, thank you so much. Um and really just both you, Brian and Katie, your exceptional leadership these past six weeks. Um I I I I honestly don't know how you did it. Um and really helping our students through grief and our teachers and even today at the loss of Dr. to really be there for all of our students and teachers and parents. And I think that um no one can quite understand the shoes that you have filled these past few weeks. So, I want to really publicly thank you for that and for everything else you do, too. And and we are looking forward to Q5. Thank you for bringing that back. I think it's a really exciting time for our kids. So,

035and for all of our principles, really enjoy some time with your families in a way for the summer. You won't be here all summer. I know you'll be here part of the summer, but not all summer. And then for our central office staff, Shelley Chin, we want to welcome you as our official assistant superintendent for teaching and learning. And we've really enjoyed having you at the table with us this year and we're looking forward to our new reading program coming on K K to 5. So that was a huge lift for you. So thank you so much for that. Um and we're looking forward to great things and professional development and all those good things. But thank you. And then we have Mr. Bob Conry. And you know, you can jump in Andrew if you

036want at any point. Um Bob is is the man of numbers. So we've all spent a lot of time with Bob through negotiations and what he does in the back room with numbers and calculations and all of that and just really in thoughtful budgeting. It's it's a huge lift and we understand the lift that it is. We sit with you each week through budget presentations and all the way through town meeting and really thank you for all that time that you have spent with us and teaching us and I think that um maybe now that we're going to have two new members and a third Carlile member joining us another budget workshop it'd be really great to bring us all through um the budget process. I think that's what we're kind of looking forward to

037next year. That sounds weird saying we're looking forward to the budget process but I think it'll be an exciting new adventure. So, thank you for that. And then Dr. Hunter, and I'll I'll let um any members of the committee to really just chime in and thank her, but you know, really from the bottom of my heart, thank you for what you've done, you know, with this district over this past year. It's been really a different year. And, you know, I always hated the words unprecedented in COVID, but this was really an unprecedented school year. Um, we've had a lot of challenges. We've had a lot of crisis. everyone's needed emotional support and sometimes I think people forget that our superintendent's at the top of all of that. Um so any problem that comes up or

038any good things that come up, they all go across her desk, she hears the good, the bad, she hears it all. So thank you for just being available to us really 247 because that really is the job of the superintendent is 247 and it's all year long. So I hope you have some much needed um rest and vacation this summer. she has not had a day off since January 1st. So, I just wanted to remind people of that. Um, so take some time to yourself and with your family. And if anybody else has anything to add, you can feel free to chime in on our recognitions. It's a little different this time, but very worthy. You guys are are wonderful. Thank you for all you do. Yeah, I think just appreciate that you noted us

039tonight when so many people are in the room because this team is extraordinary. I've never worked with a team like this before and um the strength of the district is because of the caliber at every level. So, um thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. Now, it wouldn't be a recognition if we didn't take a picture. So, we're going to have to take a picture of all of our principles and our assistant superintendents and superintendent. We'll do it really quick and then we'll come back to our seats. So, you know, okay, take the space over there. Come on up. I know you love pictures. You're wondering if I knew about this. She actually didn't. So, it's a little surprise. Kind of. Sort of, but not really. I don't know who's taking the picture. No, you're in it.

040Everybody's in it. Let's see. Wilson, will you come take a picture? There you go, Justin. Barely see you. There you are. Thank you. drop all the way in. Okay, we're gonna we're gonna um actually go back. Wilson Kerr has joined us because he was not online. So, we will allow you to make your public comment. I've conferred with the chair, the other chair. So, we're going to allow you to make your public comment, but again, those same rules apply. You have three minutes. Uh, state your name and address. Thank you. Wilson Ker, is this is it on this? Yes, it's on. I'll make it very brief. Wilson Kerr, 20 Damon Street. I just wanted to thank uh the school committee and the administration going into town meeting. Uh, for the last two years, the town

041meeting leading up to it has been marked by by tension. There was not an alignment on the budget. there was not alignment between the town and the school and the fincom and the select board and this year there was and and both budget articles passed the capital budget passed and that is no small thing and it's due to a lot of work and a lot of cooperation it's due to coming together it's due to meetings it's due to meeting in the middle um and people thought we just you know oh there's town meeting um it's a big deal and having gone through the two previous before this last one I can tell you it's a big bill and um just wanted to make sure everyone recognizes that and also the passing of of the article

042regarding the amenities building long overdue and it's due to a lot of hard work and a lot of cooperation by not only the people in this room but by the town and the fincom and everyone else. So congratulations it was a great town meeting and great job. Thank you. All right, so we'll move on to our consent agenda. Does anyone have anything to pull off of the consent agenda? U I I have uh when I look at the um joint school committee minutes from May 20th 25 there's some errors in that had me speak and I don't believe I spoke at that meeting I think that was Wilson and do you have a change that you can recommend because we could also just do that right now edit out Michael Williams and the comments were

043made by Wilson Ker okay as verified on the man media you. Okay. Um, a question on the warrant warrants and that the two new members of the committee don't have access to that either if we could postpone that or we have the option of abstaining. I guess um you definitely have the option option of abstaining and we would still have uh we still have four members that have seen the warrant so we can approve it. So if you want to abstain you can abstain on that. Okay. All right. So, um, would anyone like to make a motion to approve the consent agenda? So, would you then pull them out and vote on them separately? Yeah. So, let's pull out the May 20th minutes and let's pull out the um warrants and we'll vote on those

044separately. Okay. Okay. And just a note, that's transitional on the warrants. You will get them from here on. You just hadn't been seated yet. Right. Yeah. I move that we approve the consent agenda for June 10th with the exception of the joint school committee meeting joint school committee minutes for May 20th and the warrants listed in section J. Okay. Um and any discussion? And just to call out, we had a couple donations. One was to the Sharon Young Scholarship Fund. So that's very exciting. And we had another donation from the PTG. So thank you to the PTG. Okay. All in favor? I I All right. And then on the May 20th uh motion, I accept a motion to approve the joint school committee minutes from May 20th with the corrections made as discussed in our

045meeting. So moved. Have a second. Any discussion? All in favor? I I. And then on the warrants, I'd accept a motion to approve the warrants um as written on the agenda. So moved. Second. Any further discussion? Okay. All in favor? I I And anyone opposed? No. Any abstensions? I Okay. Yeah. So just so just for the minutes, um Erin is probably listening. So Sandep and Michael have abstained from that. um approval. So, thank you. All right, on to correspondence. So, I believe we only had two pieces of correspondence. One regarding the swastika and the vandalism at the skate park and one thanking the school committee and Dr. Hunter. And I think that's all we had on the region. Is there any on CPS? Nope. Okay. Right. All right. And then we'll move on to discussion

046of the 2025 2026 handbook. this as it was linked um it's been it's been linked again and so the second link that you probably have not received is just all the changes so the handbook from last year had a few changes to it not many there were some housekeeping changes and some policy change so I'm going to give it to Dr. Hunter to kind of go through that and then we can see if we can approve that tonight. Yeah. And I apologize for the technology glitch. We we lost the war there with Google Docs because the changes are noted in the comments that you see there and the view access we gave you didn't show the comments until we fixed that this afternoon. So, and we couldn't tell because we had access. So, the comments

047were showing for us, but they didn't show for you folks. In good news, the changes proposed for this year are very straightforward and simple. Um, so you'll see the comments are to update dates, to update names, um, where they may have changed. We're going to take out Peabody and Sandborn. Woohoo. And, uh, put in the new address at the middle school. And I think beyond that, some titles, the MECO directors need to be updated. update all of your names and then really from there it's policy updates that came through the school committee and now just need to be reflected in the student handbook. So the first one we'll note is your the new conquered public school cell phone policy needs to replace what's currently in the handbook for K8 cell phones. I don't think I

048don't know if you want me to go through the rest. These are policies that we updated in the course of last summer and fall in that marathon Carrie and Cynthia and Julie did with me and brought to the whole school committee. So there are tweaks in each of these policies that are highlighted that the school committee approved earlier in the year and we just need the handbook to align with those. So there are really sub subnatively we aren't proposing anything dramatically different here. It's really just alignment with policy date changes and name changes. And just as a reminder, there was a huge overhaul last year. So last year was the huge overhaul. We went to a unified handbook um prek prek to 12 or just K to 12. It's everyone. It's everyone. So So in

049both districts, so there aren't any real changes except for our policy updates that we've all heard and then just the housekeeping in the front. What was the feedback from the community by virtue of now having a unified handbook as opposed to individual ones? Yeah, I can't say we've had a outpouring of feedback, but we haven't had any issues either, which I think has been helpful to know. Um, the test of the handbook is unfortunately when incidents or issues come up, we've referred to it and haven't had any concerns there. I think it's been a nice messaging tool that everyone's on the same page. Expectations are similar. Um with the caveat that building based decisions are going to be made depending on the developmentally age appropriate decisions of for the child. Uh but it's tested stood

050up the test of this past year in terms of keeping it updated and management wise. so much simpler to have it housed in my office and to have my and your admin assistant owning owning those updates. So, we've made progress. Might I recommend a couple of changes or is it too late for that? No, no, that's what you're here to do. So, pages uh 27 and 34. There are a couple of places where um the student is referred to just he she I I suggest we update that. Sure. Great. So, pronoun changes on 27 and 34. Uh, 27 and 34. Couple things on. So, here's where I need to ask for feedback because that is not it. It's worded the way it is in your policy manual right now. It's a student discipline. So, maybe

051we want to do the policies. It could be just like a clean clean up of all all the pronouns of Yeah. Yeah. And so, would it be he, she, they or just they? Or or just student is fine. Student. Yeah. So, I I'm not sure you want to change it here if you don't have the policy changed yet, but we could put that on the list for policy. Look at all the pronouns. Would it be reasonable to look at both of those and then come back to this? So, all of our handbooks need to be approved before school starts so that parents get them at the start of school. Um, we do have an August meeting, I think, that we're going to schedule. So, we could do it then or we could do it now

052and then we could update it. And if it's just if it's just student or pronoun changes, I think that's a quick update. But we could approve the handbook as written right now. And then the other procedurally, you don't have that in the policy. That's the only trickiness. Trickiness. Yeah. But procedurally, like are we could we I know it's not on the agenda, but could we change the pronouns like just make an administrative change to our entire policy handbook around pronouns? I think we have to go through the policy process if we were going to do that. I mean, we would have to have a first read, second read on every But we wouldn't do that on every single policy. We have like a thousand. I think you would at least need it on the agenda

053to say you were going to do that for the entire policy book. Yeah. Right. Okay. My personal suggestion is you approve this as is and we come back to the policy changes and then update this. You can revisit this year and those kind of changes and feel better about the pronoun piece. Well, that was just what you have other feedback. No, I think that's the great feedback. I'm just thinking yeah in terms of steps. In terms of steps, right? So, if you prove it tonight, then the timing can happen after we go through. You've got a book, but we have a hand that's approved to open the year and we can still work on it. Are you okay with that? Okay. It's a great comment. Thank you. How are you going to vote on this?

054So, we're going to vote on it now. Yep. We're going to vote on it in the discussion. Okay. I mean, I make a motion to approve the 2025 2026 unified student handbook. Do we have a second? I said second. Oh, sorry. I didn't hear you. I wasn't looking so I didn't hear you. So sorry shows my age. Um any further discussion and everybody's comfortable with this process? Just a question. Will make sure you talk it you especially because you're very if we make a change do we need to change the policies? Yeah. So that's the tricky part. You have to change the policy first and then you can change the handbook because these are exactly the same as the policy. But in this case, we'd be we would have to go back and do the

055policies and then do the handbook. Do the handbook. So, okay. Which we can do mid year. We don't need to wait a whole year to do that. Definitely not at all because it's largely a digital document. It's not Yeah. Okay. And policies are one one policy at a time. So, that will be a process to change all of those. Yeah. Doable. And because this crosses both districts when we vote this is a situation where um conquered members are voting for both and a car member is voting for region. Okay. So any further discussion? All in favor for both for both. Okay. Great. All right. This brings us to our best part of the discussion tonight which is our school improvement plans. So we have all of our principles here. We're excited that you're here. I

056know it's the end of the year and again this is a really hard time of year and we really thank you for your energy and being with us and are we going to go through all of them one by one Lori? I think middle and high school will come up separately and then I think the three elementaryaries together together. Great. All right. So first up we have CCHS. So Brian and Katie welcome. May need one additional chair. Maybe slide that one over. And and I will say the feedback from last year's committee was it's great to do this K through 12 on your first meeting because you really get a bird's eye view into kind of all of the school improvement plans at the same time. And thank you Brian for listening to our K

057to8. Um hi everybody. Hi, nice to see you. Nice to meet some of you. Welcome to the new school committee members. Thank you. So, you have our document. Um, but we just want to highlight a few pieces maybe from each of the different strands. So, one of the pieces we're really focusing on this year is this coming year is um the collaboration between the middle schools. So, Carile and Conquered Middle Schools and the high schools. So on the bottom of the page, grades 6 through 12 department chairs will meet for collaboration at least a couple times throughout the year. And so we're looking to have all the math, ELA, science, world language, and social studies chairs meet and really work on our vertical articulation of our curriculum. That's something that Shelley is really going to

058help us on as well. And we're really excited. We're going to be kicking that off actually um next a week from today, getting all of getting a lot of those people in the same room on our last professional day and laying the groundwork for um next year. And we also started that work earlier this year. We met in the fall with with ELA and math. And so it's something that our department chairs are really asking for. So I think that's awesome that they're asking for it. Um so something else in m in multiple paths to success that we wanted to mention was just um ensuring retention of our historically under represented students um and also increasing enrollment um in upper level courses for these students. So, students um of color, students who are low income

059status, and students on IEPs um to be in to be to have access and to be enrolled in more APs um and honors level classes. Um, this is something that we've been working on um, a lot this year um, in looking at student data, having individual conversations with students, encouraging them to um, enroll in some of these classes. And just this year alone for our um, MECO students in AP classes and in um, honors level classes, we've almost doubled the number of MECO students, which is something we're really proud of. Uh the last piece I'd highlight in um the first strand is this idea about a portrait of a graduate. So that this is a requirement of our NEAS accreditation process. But beyond that, I think it's a really exciting piece of the puzzle. Um

060this is our opportunity to identify the skills, attributes, and dispositions that we want our graduates to have as they cross the graduation state. So this will be a really big inclusive process including a bunch of teachers and students and community members and some of you probably and leadership and not just folks who are involved in the high school. Also including K8 folks um in developing these skill like I said the skills, attributes and dispositions that we care or we really want to be able to see and then measure our graduates having when they graduate. So the next section is um under well-being and mental health. So something that we started to do this year um was to kind of host some of these um faculty forums um for faculty and also some student fishbowls um

061for students to kind of to get feedback around different practices and things that have been happening in the high school um around wellness um mental health homework. Um and so next year we also we want to continue that. We want to continue to build that practice and also open it up to um getting feedback from parents um and caregivers so that we can also gain that perspective. Yeah, those have been really obviously we give out a bunch of surveys, but what has been nice about these is they're just in person and they're real time and we get to ask a follow-up question or we get to right it's different just reading something on a Google form verse really interacting with the people sharing it and the feedback has been really really meaningful um for us

062um on both fronts both from students and faculty this year which has been great. I agree. The other piece I'd highlight here is um we're going to continue giving a an SEAL screener to all of our nth graders. We landed we've done several throughout the past few years and we haven't liked any of the data. Um, but this year we landed on we gave panorama to all of our ninth graders and it was it's a short little survey, but it has our then the guidance counselors review it and then share sort of the most important or pertinent information with the teachers in the academy and it's been a great way to help flag some students who maybe present in class as everything's going great um but really maybe could use that extra warm touch or

063that extra check-in. Um, so our guidance counselor's feedback and sort of teachers in general has been over the moon about this. So that's really exciting and we're going to continue with that. Yes, we've tried several several screeners. So it's nice to have one that we felt like was actually meaningful. Um, so in inclusive culture, the next section, um, we this is really just a big continuation of a lot of the work that we've started and that we are doing. So, we're going to continue to collaborate with our DEIB director and HR director um to recruit diverse candidates. Um and also we're going to continue with our fun Fridays um and try to expand our opportunities for student joy and wellness because we know how well um those have been received by faculty and staff um

064and students mostly throughout the school year. Yeah. And then in the last strand in the academy piece, we've been doing the ninth grade academy for a while, but the biggest update here is that we are establishing a 9th grade onboarding course. So this is going to be all ninth graders are going to take it'll be one time a week for first semester um with a goal of to guide nth graders in developing the skills and habits of mind that they need to be successful scholars and members of the CCHS community. So it'll be it could be some very logistical things in the beginning sort of just like navigating CCHS, where do you go when you need help? How do you ask a teacher for help? How do you access Aspen? Right? Some of those things

065and then progressing to being like how do you become a member of our community and study habits and some brain science and time management and dig digital citizenship and how do you work well in a group? Um, some of the a lot of these skills are things that we are sometimes expecting our students to have, but we're not explicitly teaching them. I think that some of these things are taught elsewhere, but then they look different at CC. And so, how can we refresh and refresh our and clearly clearly explain our expectations as well? So I think those are some of the those were sort of the biggest highlights that we wanted to share in each um uh in each strand but happy to elaborate on anything else or answer any questions that might be useful.

066Okay. Anyone have any comments or discussion questions? I have a question. This this might be my um the first page I think it's 1.2 you you say oops 5% reduction in the number of referrals for IEP and 504s what's what what's that referral process is is it referral or I'm sorry is it what referral it's referrals for special education y um so we so that's really about kind of looking at our MTSS structures and our interventions that we're trying before students um are referred to um special education So looking at like the tier one, what's happening in the classroom, what can teachers do, what accommodations can we provide students, what strategies, um, and really building on that before it gets to a place comes from the educators. It it could. Yes. Yep. Yes. You're welcome.

067And and we are loaded with acronyms. So like MTSS, you can see the poster on the wall. It's a multi-tiered system of support. So So we'll just reference some things like that. So, if you're ever um wondering what an acronym is, we'll stop and Yes, lots of acronyms in education. There are lots of acronyms. Um I had a question about the ninth grade onboarding. Yeah. Do you feel now this is this is probably like a tough question, but do you feel as though pandemic recovery has happened in terms of just like that executive function, you know, how do you take notes? How do you organize yourself? Get into a homework routine. I it's probably a really hard question to answer, but I don't know if you're seeing any changes or did this come out of

068kind of that. I think this has always been something that this is something we've talked about even, you know, I was only at CC for one year pre- pandemic, but I think that it's a lot of it is just really like Brian said, streamlining these skills for all ninth graders because I think they come in with different with different things, right? we have kids coming from different places and just note-taking as he said in planet Earth might look different than it looks in English. And so really just teaching those skills the way that we want kids to learn them um we think is really important and we've been trying to sort of cram a lot of these things into the core content classes in the academy and it's just felt like too much. Yeah. Right.

069it just and the nth grade teachers have been amazing about trying to incorporate as many things as possible and it just feels like it's just like I said it's just too much. So if we can pull it out um so we're really excited to be able to do that. I think that it's some of both. Yes, I think it's pandemic recovery. I think some of these things we at least touched on when we had advisory a few years ago. So I think it's sort of pulling those pieces together. But we have four amazing teachers who are doing it, too. They're just incredible people. So, I think that it's going to be a really valuable experience um for our ninth graders. And and yeah, I I had one too. How do you schedule that? Is that

070during a flex block that I was like, yeah, I was like, how are you going to schedule this? It's just opposite their gym class. So, opposite P. So, you'll get credits and you'll just It's just going to be like pass fail, but you'll get I don't I couldn't I'd have to do the math a little bit on but yeah it's credit bearing I mean it'll be small because it's just one day a week for a semester but it will just sort of work it all well I'm done with the schedule but um it's uh schedule guy two days a week uh you have health and fitness one day a week you have this and then one day a week you have study hall you have a directed study and so it'll just be for the

071first semester um and then sort of along with your question about MTSS we'll probably identify by some ninth graders who, you know, they're not done at the end of the semester with some of these skills and maybe they need to stay on for the second semester or what does that look like? So, are you assigned to it either for semester or semester? No. So, everyone is going to take we we toyed around with a bunch of different models and right maybe is it more meaningful to take two times a week, but then we could only get half of the people in the first quarter. So, we we landed here this year. I think then we'll evaluate but what will exactly be but yeah so every ninth grader or maybe like 98% of nth graders will

072take this once a week for the whole first semester. Great. Great. Um well there's a lot of stuff in here. Do you feel like you have the support, the staff, the budget, everything to accomplish this? I mean it's stretch, you know, but achievable. I think yes. I mean, I think we do. Okay. Um, thank you for asking. I know that's a nice question. Um, we do. Yeah, I think that we will, you know, we went through our budget process in the fall and I think that these are all these are things that we've been working on. We're really trying to limit the number of like for us this north star is about equity. that is where we are driving and if it's not really helping us move towards that goal of well-being and equity, we're

073not super interested in doing it when possible. Um, so that's sort of the underpinninging of all of the work. Got it. That's great. Anyone else? And I should ask Michelle and Aisha, if you have any questions or want them unmute, you can feel free to do that, too. think they're good. Okay. Well, thank you for your time tonight. I really appreciate it. Yeah. Thanks for having us. It's nice seeing some of your new members. Welcome. Enjoy Q5 tomorrow. Oh, so excited. I know. It's exciting. I don't know. I felt Yeah, we're excited. Tomorrow it starts tomorrow. And the weather's going to be nice. I know. Finally. So excited. Thank you. All right. So then we have um the middle school up next with Mr. Cameron. And I should say to the principles, you know, you

074can leave whenever you'd like or whenever you need to. Oh, they're staying. I was going to say they're excited to watch they're all done. Okay, they'll all leave together. Hi everybody. Hi. Be gentle. I'm the only principal comes alone. irony has it for eight years I had the most buildings from two to three this year. Two to three but down to one. Down to one. It's exciting. Yes. And thank you all for that support. Yeah. Um, I guess before just highlighting some of the newer initiatives, um, it's hard not to parallel the amazing work Katie and Brian have been doing, um, in the ninth grade academy, um, and just naming the work that we've been doing now, gosh, for seven years in the sixth grade academy. um including, you know, not to get you lost

075in the jargon again, but you know, the onboarding course that CCHS just introduced um parallels what we've had in place for six years for sixth graders. It's called a tier one intervention, which is a tier one is sort of like our advisory program home base where all students have access. And what we're doing in that tier one is making sure that students have the support um to know how to succeed in school before say parents or educators um share any concerns about gaps in learning and race to the special education process of course. Um so our tier one uh fundamentals course uh sixth graders take from end of August all the way through Thanksgiving every other day. Um, and it is exactly the course description that you just heard from Katie and Brian. Um, but

076at a sixth grade level. Um, so just love that concert and that parallel um, between the two levels of course. Uh, the other one that I'll just name that has been, you know, in place for a good number of years. I think we're on year seven is the Playbook initiative. Um, and the support that all of you have had with the playbook initiative. Uh, playbook initiative of course is a bias prevention anti-discrimination program. Uh, and it's a train the trainer model. Um, where anywhere between 110 and 120 students are trained in recognizing bias and hate and knowing how to report that and knowing how to safely intervene. Um, the playbook student leaders gathered, we gathered for lunch these last couple weeks and we were doing some numbers. You know, we're at a place right now

077that one out of every five CMS students um is either a current playbook leader or a former playbook leader. Um and that feeds up to the high school. Um right now, because we started the model of um 100 to 120 about four years ago, so one out of 15 CCHS students have had the training in middle school. um which as I'm sure you recognize is the most essential time in a child's life is is middle school when that brain is kind of rewiring itself um in the midst of puberty and all that. It's a last best chance to offer um intervention. So those are two just quick highlights um and then I'll just transition to some of the newer initiatives. I'm going to start with innovative environment. Um, we're really proud to be coming off

078a pilot where all of our eighth grade students led conferences this past fall. Um, the student led conference is is not new in education. Um, if you did a Google Scholar search of it, you probably want to toggle it to make sure that you're within the last 5 years, but I just want to, you know, name it's it's been out there. Um, and there's different models. Um, and we actually leaned more into the models that failed um, in districts and schools um, and really connecting with those schools and wondering why it didn't sustain itself. And we really found the model that um, was the most successful in districts that we connected with was the ones that um, advisory programs or programs like advisory had structures in place where students were building towards some sort of

079presentation. they did. Um, and that is what we had in place with eighth graders this past school year. Um, and we surveyed um, all our parents who exited out of those studentled conferences in 8th grade. We surveyed the students. We surveyed the faculty and staff and it was a resounding success. Um, so much so that we are moving towards the entire school being a student-led conference school. Um, that's going to be happening uh, in November. Um, so once we enter the school year, um, every student has an adviser, a homebased adviser. Um, there's only eight to 10 kids in front of the adult. Um, I have the privilege of being an adviser as well. And, um, we are focused the the base in home base um, is an acronym for bullying bully proofing uh, curriculum.

080Academic advising though is the A and that's really where we see ourselves doubling down um in our advisory model and really focused on leading and being instructional leaders with our students from the second they walk through the doors to really staying close to their success and their challenges and their mistakes in their classes and making sure it's all captured in the portfolios that they're building towards with their advisor. And then the model is a simple one. Um, as an adviser, I have the privilege to sit for 25 minutes um, while each one of my students, my home base, presents to their family. Um, and it was just an incredible, incredible success and we're really looking forward to it being in place 6 through 8. um under inclusive uh culture um we have partnered with Joe

081Feldman uh the author and his book grading for equity and we're very proud to have in place some practices um that are universal in the middle school. Um, one of the areas that we have um, data from um, in terms of parents surveys is that especially the oldest parents sometimes struggle with um, going from one to two to three teachers, you know, to having 10 to 12 to 14 and especially when those teachers have different practices in place like writing grading practices. Um, it's really challenging for an 11-year-old to be told by one teacher, you know, not a problem, you can have extra time on this, and then a bell rings and they walk to another class where a teacher is like, h, I take 10% off. Um, which does not happen um at our

082school. But you know these practices um now further define the fact that it can't ever happen um because we brought a student and faculty committee together um to really lean into Joe Feldman's work and adopt these practices which again are under um inclusive culture. The well-being and mental health um I guess there are two that I want to um really highlight. Um the first of which um is extend ex expanding excuse me um our flex blocks and our extended home bases. Uh we're moving towards a model of being more predictable in our schedules. Um we're so thrilled to only have one bell schedule as we are one school. um and we're actually making it simpler for our students and we're particularly mindful of um the neurode divergent students who really struggle with different schedules um

083and different routines. So, we're moving our extended home base um which we do about every other Thursday and we're bringing it into um a Wednesday schedule and we're also um that bell schedule is going to be exactly the same every single Wednesday. Um because when we're not in extended home base um we're going to be in our third year of flex blocks where students have um accessibility to their teachers for additional work um extra help and such during the school day which I have to emphasize is so much more equitable than doing extra help like say before school or after school. Um I also want to shout out um the fact that the school council um which at the middle school is three students uh three parents, three teachers, community member, myself um we have

084been focused on decreasing um the digital pres presence that students have. Um, I sat here about a year ago, um, and shared with all of you, um, and I remember the positive praise and feedback, um, about exploring and setting limits on student laptops, um, and having those laptops um, for all middle school students shut down at 11:00 p.m. at night um, and not be available to the students um, until 5:00 a.m. Um, we surveyed the students um, and the families before doing so. Um again overwhelming positive feedback um moving into it. Um and then we surveyed everyone you know while it was in place and it's been quietly in place for a whole school year now. Um we are actually taking 11:00 and we're sliding it back to 10:00. Um the most common question that

085I get from a student and a parent, you know, is what if my child is still doing homework at 10:00? Um that's a whole another conversation. We do not want 12-y olds doing homework at 10:00 at night. So, we are very um you know willing to engage in a conversation about homework and you know what's happening. Is it the school? Is it overcheduling at home? Um because to be honest, if the laptop didn't power down in the fundamentals class that I explained earlier, we're teaching students how to email their teachers with a time stamp of 9:40, 9:45 saying, you know, I didn't get to everything tonight. You know, I'm kind of shutting it down. I value sleep. I understand how important sleep is. So, with the laptop kind of powering down on the student, you

086know, and that student laptop maybe being left in the bedroom by accident because we're also doing a lot of parent outreach of trying to keep the digital stuff out of the bedroom, it's not available. Um, I can say having two daughters myself who only have iPads at this point, you know, their iPads are not supposed to be in their bedrooms, but the fact that the screen time, like we have screen time limits um on our student laptops now, if that happens, I know they're not using it because my own children their uh iPad shut down much much earlier than 10 o'clock. I'm just going to move. Actually, I think I'm going to pause there. Um, I guess peppered throughout this as well, um, is just so fortunate to, um, be coming into a fourth year

087working with the student building committee. Um, this has been an unprecedented, um, opportunity for me to work with students um, as early as 9 years old in fourth grade. Um, we started with the student building committee when the students were in fourth, fifth, and sixth grade. Um, spread out in five buildings. if you can believe it. Uh the Elcott, Willard, Peodyy. Um and now they're all in sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. And we're going to carry in a fourth year the sixth and seventh grade um in doing a lot of the work that you see here. Um because one of the hallmarks of um our school is the opportunity for students to have agency um and voice in everything that we're doing from hiring teachers. Um this is the first summer that teach um teachers

088are coming together to do summer work where they have been strongly encouraged to uh bring a student into that summer work especially curriculum work. Um so really fortunate to have student engagement um in our community. Great. Um so I'll open it up to the committee for comments, questions, discussion. My comment was going to be your conclusion and I just appreciate all the engagement you have with the kids, the students, the agency, the onus that you put on them. I'm on the building committee. It's just very impressive the work they do and even um going all the way to Throw's uh playground committee. I love seeing that from the the kids. It's just awesome. So, I love seeing that weaved into all your themes kind of throughout. Um so, thank you for doing that. Thank you.

089I had a question on flexbox. So I don't I don't have a child in the middle school so I don't understand how they work. Is it the same as the high school where they can um choose where to get locked into or a teacher can choose to have them there or is it more of you can pick a class as it used to be when I was at the middle school. You pick a class or a flex block. you just talk about how Yeah, it's a little bit more student uh teacher directed in the beginning especially um because in the teaming model we're so fortunate that um our teachers come together twice a cycle um and they're talking about um you know in the same conversation about not overwhelming you know the 11year-old the 13year-old

090they're also talking about you know in the coming week the focus should be here on French and world language because there's a big project that's due. Um therefore a flex block we need to have in place that students might be accessing you know their French teachers or their science teachers. So it's a little bit more um educator driven in the beginning. Um you know what's interesting is a homebased adviser like myself who during the flex block you know I'm just staying very close to my students in my advisory group. um but I don't have to welcome students because they're not so much seeking me out for assistance in say a math project that's coming up you know so that's why in the beginning um especially it's a little bit more structured um and driven by

091the teachers and then have you seen new opportunities given the new building are there different learning opportunities that you're seeing already in those open spaces outside the classrooms in the shared spaces and are you seeing interdiciplinary work happening. Here's Gracy's reading a question that I asked I texted her to ask me. No, I I need to know I need to know what it looks like. Um so, thank you for asking it. Um yes, in fact, um I had the opportunity to walk around some of my colleagues who are sitting behind me just today. Um and the number of building walkthroughs that you know we did before we opened with the teachers. Um there are so many areas that I just guessed incorrectly. Um we have all these small breakout areas that provide you know um

092kind of a more intimate private setting for the students that I felt like we didn't have enough of and we have all these large group areas that I was like how do I you know really promote those big areas. Um, and it's been flipped, you know, right in front of my eyes. And the number of teachers, um, in the math, the science, the ELA, and the social studies that are using the common areas, the common team areas that sits right outside of their classrooms to flex kids out of um, and the number of teachers that are helping students out, um, you know, during classes have been, it's just been remarkable. Um you cannot walk the building without seeing this. Um and again my colleagues behind me saw it in place. Um again all of these

093smaller rooms you know are a little bit more dormant during these times but the big areas outside the classrooms um are alive and you can even tell it in an empty building. you know, um I love walking empty school buildings, um and getting a sense of the culture and the climate and how active the building seems and even when the students leave um you can really get a sense um of the team commons um how rich um you know the activity is in those areas. That's great. Well, you've seen it too. I don't know. I see it all the time. Amazing. Yeah. So, that was my question. and I wanted like an anecdotal like walkthrough of the new building. Uh so you you took my question. Thank you. No, it's good. So I have more

094of a comment which is um I appreciate both in your presentation and also in writing. Um and I I think like just historically how you talk about the middle school. um your just emphasis on the whole child and um focus on um health and wellness and um not at the cost of rigor but really I think actually to benefit of rigor um that really paying attention to um the kids stress level and um homework and technology and being you know trying new things of the um home base the expended expanded home base and you know I just I just really appreciate appreciate that kind of emphasis, especially at that age level. So, yeah, thank you for that. Echo what Carrie said, that emphasis on sleep. I've been already telling my daughter that uh once she

095gets to middle school, she'll have to sleep on time. Um, couple of questions though. The the the base you said B was bullying. Yep. Was academic academic advising. The S is the social and emotional learning and the E is actually entertainment and fun. There we go. Every time we ask the students what they use, they're like equity, education. They're just fun. They like those as well. You didn't touch upon this, but this is in the in the improvement plan. The this was a bias reporting protocol that's already been in place, right? For four years at the most point. Can you share about little more detail on how that's been used that's being used by Yeah, absolutely. So that speaks to um you know the work that the playbook initiative leaders um which again we're at

096about 120. So, um, every two months, um, we use our extend home base for the students to walk into a home base and take over for a complete hour and talk scenarios that were written by middle school students of students who are being unkind to students in the area of um, you know, being hurtful, religion, gender, orientation, race. Um, and we end all of those sessions, those student led sessions with, you know, and to be honest, if you just freeze and don't know what to do, you know, that is really very similar to adults, you know, we always are carrying that, you know, um, that it's not just a student thing to kind of freeze and say, I really should have spoke up, you know, I was at that training at the middle school. I'm

097not sure why I froze. So the bias incident reporting form, you know, is the opportunity where it's never too late, you know, to make that report and to share with a trusted adult. And you also can do so in a way where if you're not comfortable even sharing your own name, you know, um we will accept that report um and look into whatever it is that might be reported. So what feels really good about it, it's not a standalone reporting form or form that students can use, you know, if again they they are witness to something that's hateful or anything like that. Like it's not our students saying, "Oh, I think there was an assembly about this or you know, it is a student. it's connected deeply to what students are leading and that we

098have booster shots in almost every other month. Um that is why when Andrew came to all the schools and said you know we really want one school you know to pilot this and to lead this first you know our hands at the middle school were up you know because we felt like we had a framework um and really deep roots and you know this is in such great concert with the playbook initiative. That answer your question? Yeah. Thank you. You're welcome. Great. Anyone else? Just last question. You like focusing on academics, you want to increase um performance by 10%. Which is a big goal in two years, three years? Yep. Um you think that's linear? Do you have the curriculums in place, the learning plans in place to get there, the support, etc. that's achievable?

099Yep. So um you know, not mentioned because it was probably gosh five years ago. Um but every grade has um what we call an enrichment block um which is also where our intervention block is hiding in plain sight as well for the students. Um all the students um and we're grateful for this. They call that block enrichment. Um if they find themselves though in a very small group um in front of the licensed content area that they need intervention in and I cannot emphasize how important that is because at the secondary level sometimes you're in front of a special educator and that license is strong and that license is important but if you're struggling in math, if you're struggling in science, if you're struggling in ELA and that's the data that we want growth in.

100We want to put them in front of the science teacher, the English teacher, math teacher. And we're so fortunate at Conquered Middle School, thanks to the support of the school committee and Dr. Hunter, that six years ago um we dropped um all of the teachers fifth class and and we had their fifth class be this enrichment um or intervention class. um because we're also in a place um in our community, we're very fortunate that we want to grow the students who are also who aren't struggling. You know, that's how you move data is you look at growth. Um so for the students who are like I love science. Um and we want to continue to have them in a place where their curiosity is still on fire. you know, they can if their data suggests

101that they can be in a second science class that's above grade level, that will boost their um their scores, their data. Great. Great. Uh Michelle and Aisha, do you have any questions or comments? Nope. Okay. Well, thank you so much for being with us again and um enjoy your summer. Thank you. Oh, really? Oh, a couple more days. A couple more days. Next week. This time. Next week. All right. And now we have saved our elementary schools next. So, all three principles are coming up. So, we've met Lucy, Naomi Krakow, and Justin Sparks. I think I said your name wrong, Naomi. I should just said Naomi because I pronounce it wrong every time. Long. Long a long A. All right, I got it now. or the W. Good evening. Welcome. You guys can decide how

102you want to start. I think you've worked together enough that you probably have your own. Happy to go. Lead off. Good to be here. Thanks for having us tonight and thanks for the kind words earlier. That was really meaningful. Appreciate it. Welcome to the new members. Um so I have the privilege of presenting strategic objective one. um which is multiple paths to success. Um and we're really proud of the fact that we have through lines from the strategic plan down to our school improvement plans, but also across our three schools. Um we've been working on that quite a bit and we're um excited especially by objective one this year, which is all about our new knowledge building program. Uh so if you remember last year um a group of us and uh the literacy specialists

103came to present an update on our um K3 literacy plan and that was that included an expansion of our double screening system. Um it included uh an expansion of foundations through third grade. It included um a thanks to your generosity and the support of Dr. counter geode's decodable libraries in every K to2 classroom um as well as a phmic piece for our K1 students. Um but that was meant to be a draft uh not in complete form. Uh and we knew through conversation that it wasn't over yet, right? That we that we lacked that knowledge building piece. Um so uh we've been on a journey over the course of the past three year uh past year plus um with Dr. her support and and Shelley Chin. Um, of course, we had a we had a

104um really strong ELA committee put together made up of teachers and administrators um to take a look at um three knowledge building programs. Fish Tank was one of them. Um E was one of them and Arts and Letters was another. So really a shout out to all of the the the teachers that jumped on and did this um you know for for free volunteering right which shows their passion, their commitment. They put in a lot of countless hours um going on site visits, observing lessons, reviewing materials um and then ultimately coming together and rating all three programs and putting forth the one that we think um will work best for the students here in conquered. I believe the mantra is um challenge and joy in learning which I think fits nicely here with our with

105our plan. Um that was the recommendation made to the superintendent. Um so that's really where our school improvement plan picks up, right? This is all of the work into the summer and next year. So the a lot of the professional development for the administrators has been ongoing. We've had two sessions so far. We have our third. We're frontloading so that we can best support the teacher to support the learner. So, we're really excited about that. There'll be some summer work offered to the teachers this summer. Professional development leading into next year as well. Six in-person sessions um you know, and we're looking at the best model for supporting um the teachers with the resources that we have. But we're we're looking forward to learning alongside of of of the teachers. It's an exciting time for

106um for us. We've also built our our master schedule. We we've created block schedules this year which are pretty uniform across all three schools in order to accommodate um the appropriate amount of time to um to fit in all of the elements of that program. So just to give you a little bit about each module, the the um teachers on each team have decided on um which modules they want to teach. And in EL they have the opportunity to choose an explorer path which is more social studies based or um an innovative path which is more science and steam based stem stem based right um so for third grade uh they've chosen um the wide world of language wonder the wonderful world of frogs and the water challenge. So, some interesting um uh topics that

107we think will really engage um students and complement all of the other foundational pieces that are already in place at the elementary level. Um and each module also has a performance task embedded in it um and a strong writing piece. So, all in all, um we're excited next year for those early adopters of which we have the majority um you know, varies a little bit by building um but the majority of of teachers opted to jump on board early. Um so we're going to be supporting them a lot and um the second cohort will will uh go the year after and they'll learn from sort of some of the the growing pains that we go through next year, right? It's going to be a little bit messy, but that's part of the fun part. That's

108what we teach our students, right? So we're really looking forward to that. Um so that's uh just a little bit about strategic objective one. Um the only real difference between Thorough's um school improvement plan um and the others is strategic objective four which is um innovative environment and um I'll just say before I turn it over we're we're building stuff next year at we've got uh some exciting things happening um and uh you know for for a principal it's it's really exciting to be able to do these things. Um we had a consulting group come in last year. We've presented a couple of times already keeping all of you updated and they targeted certain areas of the of the building um that are in need of improvement uh safety, recreation, green space, play space. Um

109so we are almost at the point, I think, Mr. Conry, where we're ready to um move forward this summer. He's been working on bids tirelessly the last two days. Um, I've learned a whole lot about the bidding and permitting process from Yes, you sure have. [Laughter] In that form, etc. So, it's been a really good learning experience. Um, but thank you to Bob for for holding my hand through that part of it. We we're hoping to start the playground project uh this summer. Yeah. Um, we were hoping to open it for the start of the school year, but realistically, we don't know if that's going to happen. But at some point in the fall, the kids will have a nice brand new playground and some soccer fields on the west side of the campus to

110start. So that's great. That is it for me. I'm next. How close to this do I need to be? Pretty close. Oh, okay. There we go. Um, so I am also talking about something from the first indicator, multiple paths to success. Um, but before I jump into the example that I want to share with you, I just I wanted to mention how struck I was by listening to um uh Justin and Brian and Katie about how many uh similarities they are. So like we we do our plan together because we are really committed to being consistent across the three schools, but we don't necessarily do them with the middle school and the high school because we just we're doing very different jobs, right? Working with five-year-olds versus working with 18 year olds. But just in

111listening to them share what they're working on, there are so many similarities, right? Like we also are focusing on transitions, right? We named that we're we're focusing on the transition from the preschool into kindergarten and then from fifth grade into the middle school. Um, you know, I think we also we also referenced how valuable we found the panorama survey to be. Um, you know, I can speak about Alcott and this idea of onboarding. You know, we're not doing uh a home base for kindergarteners. like we don't expect that kindergarteners come with anything. Um but we are thinking about how you know we're thinking about how we work with the PTG for onboarding onboarding parents and how can we make that transition better. And so that's that's work that we're doing um with families going into

112kindergarten. So we're sort of thinking about how we onboard families. um you know in terms of student voice we're really thinking about how we bring um elementary appropriate student voice to things and um you know for the first time this year uh at Alcott for our kindergarten orientation we had fifth graders give tours like studentled tours to um to parents and students you know prospective kindergarteners um which was great and so um this was not the stuff that I was planning on saying but as I was listening to to them present I was just struck by how many similarities there were and it was really nice to here. Um but what I was planning to talk about um is something else that is under um the under multiple paths to success. I think um we

113ended up deciding to talk about a couple of things from there because they are things that are really big and new, right? Like a new EL curriculum is very big. That's going to be really time inensive. It's going to be a huge focus. Um and something else that's really new that I think we're all really excited about um is that we have a new special education administrator in each building. um which might not might not sound like super glamorous, but I'm going to talk a little bit about why we're so excited about it. Um and I think the theme in why we are so excited for this new position is that it's going to um really give us more capacity capacity to do great work with supporting students, but also supporting staff. Um, and so,

114um, you know, one thing that we're really excited about is the role that this position is going to play in supporting, um, our special education programs, um, that that are across all three of our schools. We have four programs across the schools with varying sort of varying ages. So, um, the newer ones are five and six years. The the ones that are a little more established are a little older than that, but they're all relatively new. Um and and so I think you know I um I am so grateful to work in a district that is committed to educating students in the least restrictive environment and that a district that is building these programs and these they're intensive programs right they require a lot of support and um students require a lot of support and

115I think that having a special education administrator is really going to help us support the programs better. I think we've all been doing a wonderful a wonderful job up until this point, but I think it'll let us be even better. Um, and it'll let us provide support for the programs and for the students in the programs in a really um purposeful um just in a deeper way. Um, and so that's something I think that we're really excited about. I think it'll also just as we have more support for the programs, it'll help us build the capacity within the programs um to support more students as needs arise. Um so that's one thing that we're really excited about with this new additional um special education administrator. I think the other one other thing that we're um

116looking forward to in working with this person um is our capa it's going to increase our capacity for supporting differentiation and inclusion within classrooms. Um you know I think that that is something that I can certainly speak for Alcott but I think I speak for all all of the schools. This is something that our staff are very committed to. They want to do the very best that they can. um in supporting all of the learners in their class. But again, it's something that they need support with and I think it's something that we will have more capacity to support with with this additional position. Um and then I think the other thing that we're really looking forward to is the role that this person is going to be able to play in helping us collaborate

117across the buildings. Um I think we really see the importance in having consistency in certain things. like it doesn't make sense to have a different curriculum in each building. Um it also doesn't make sense for some of our uh for some of our special education practices to be different in each building. And I think that having someone in each building who can see what's happening in the building but also who has the capacity to do that collaboration across buildings is going to be huge. Um, you know, I think as one example of that, um, we last year realized, and this was on the improvement plan last year and it shows up in another place, um, this year, but last year we noticed that our SST pro every school had an SST process, which is a

118student support team process. Um, and that's just a it's a collaborative process where teams of teachers come together and they say, "How can I best meet the needs of this student? This strategy has worked. This strategy hasn't. You know, what could I do differently?" Um and we all had different processes that we we were all doing it but we were do we had different protocols we were using. We had different procedures we were using. Um there were different members on the team. No one approach was wrong. It was we were all doing the work but we were doing it differently for not any very you know no good reason. So last year um teachers from each building came together and did some summer work around developing a consistent process. So this has been the first

119year that we have had the same referral process um the same protocol for going through the the sort of brainstorming process. Um and it's been I mean it's been wonderful and I think we're now in a place where we want to look and say how did it work? What you know what do we want to change? How do we want to do it differently? And I think having someone um having someone who can do that collaborating is just huge. Um, and I think, you know, ultimately having someone who can help with this work, um, leaves everyone, you know, teachers, us, leaves us, um, more responsive to families, students, and staff. And so, um, we're very grateful that that this was added and very excited about the work that we're going to be able to do

120with them. The end. Um so thanks again for allowing us to speak with you. It's um a once a year uh opportunity but um I'm struck by next year will be my ninth year in the district and when I arrived here Dr. Hunter and I arrived the same year that each of the buildings um had a unique character and that unique character remains right. There's this place of home, community care that every child and every family feels that is connected to a building. Um what we've done successfully is leverage each other's strengths and I can't ask for better uh partners in this uh the Naomi um and Justin and that's why you're seeing the continuity across the buildings and then the continuity from the preschool coming in and to the middle school. Um, kudos. This

121past week, um, uh, Justin didn't, um, uh, I don't think heralded enough the, uh, success of the transition of our fifth graders to the sixth grade building, right? It really was a new unique experience. But what occurred is all the kids were together at one time. And in the past, we would go over one building after another. So is symbolic, yes, of the unity, but also it's I think it's a real tangible reflection of the work that's been done that enables three buildings to come together and have a successful first experience in a new building. So um kudos to to Justin and I'm grateful for the work of my colleagues. U I'm going to talk a little bit about um uh district strategic objectives u uh two and three inclusive culture and well-being and mental

122health. Uh we have the great good fortune of uh uh embracing once again open circle. So for those of you who have been around for a little while um open circle um is a uh lesson based approach to social emotional learning. It was developed in partnership with Welssley College and for years Welssley College um maintained it and a few years ago it sunset um you know just a change of priorities for the college. Um it put us in an awkward position because um we had invested deeply in it. Uh our staff believed in it and it showed its uh great value. Um it the shared language, the communication to home, um the concrete um uh lesson planning that was successful that enabled our students to grow um and uh uh thrive in our buildings. So

123the good news is it's back and um so for those staff that have already been trained um they will receive a new binder for you know a nominal fee. um we'll get the new materials that have been updated and you can imagine um as we have all experienced um over the past few years uh there's a lot that students are feeling these days. There are many ways in which adults uh need to be more involved uh so they can develop as individuals um capable of managing a complex world. We're marrying the open circle curriculum with our existing responsive classroom m uh um millu. So, and I just take a moment to just explain what that means. So, uh responsive classroom is the air we breathe in a building. It's the way we speak to each

124other. It's the way we care for our students. It's looking at particular variables like cooperation and assertiveness and responsibility, empathy and self-control. So that's the lifeblood of a classroom. And um through those variables and and they are affirmed and affirmed and affirmed then students feel ready to take academic uh risks. They feel ready to uh persevere. they are more engaged and ready to learn from each other and from their teacher. Um so what we'll be doing this upcoming year is marrying those two together. Uh those who haven't yet been trained in open circle are going to be trained um uh instilling a broadbased approach across all three buildings. Um, you heard from uh Justin that we're going to be um investing deeply in uh ELA and specifically uh EL curriculum, but we know that by

125investing solely in the academic and not paying heed to the social emotional needs, then we won't have the traction that we were hoping. Right? It all starts with the child, the soulful uh being within uh the uh the human body. And by reinvesting in open circle and leveraging responsive classroom um across the board in all our buildings uh K through five uh we'll be in our best position to do this other really good work. Um and then beyond the classroom, how do we have continuity throughout our buildings? Um uh Naomi and her uh team uh were in the vanguard of building expectations and a vision of what it looks like across um a grade level in all spaces within all with within the building because if you're in my classroom and then you go to

126art or you go to the dining hall, right? sometimes um there's a loss of understanding about what do we expect of each other and what should I expect of myself. So returning to the idea of if I care for myself and I care for others and I care for our community, what should it look like? So we're taking time to invest deeply in what does it look like by grade level throughout the building every single day? And this work will be done throughout the school year. Again, we're going to be investing deeply in EL um and uh for those in cohort one who will be doing the work this year or preparing cohort two and when we're not doing that, we're going to be working on our social emotional uh learning um training uh to

127ensure that all our students are best prepared to do really good work. Um and uh Justin had a um spoke a little bit about his work outside. One other area that I would um note for Willard is we've got a passionate um group of kids who are deeply engaged um with our green team and so uh they um want to right that yeah they want to show off I'll start they show off how much like if someone left something outside they want everyone to know that they picked it up and it is not because look I'm a good kid look at me no it's like this is what we do for each other And um uh when one student does it, another student does it. When one student feels good about it, another student feels

128good about it. So it's being done now. The leverage has occurred where it's a perpetual me uh motion machine. At this point, kids are regularly helping each other and picking up when it's not theirs and helping and being the best they can. We call them door holders, right? those kids who just do because you build a a culture and environment. So, it's within the building, but then it's beyond the building. They want to talk about composting, right? Turning off the lights. How much energy uh did we uh uh generate through the photovotayic cells on the uh on the roof of the building and then spending more time outside. Um uh there's been a a garden at Alcott that's been thriving for years and we always you know our motto is corn beans and squash and

129we never had a garden right so next year we're gonna have a garden right so um so we're we're we're building gardens and again thank goodness for our PTG who are so um remarkably supportive and I say that across all three buildings um that um they are working with us and um this past year we u had a um a series of all school meetings and our last again was in caring for uh the community and we looked at um the analogy to all of us as flowers and so all of our students at Willard uh scattered wild flowers across the back of our building the southern facing side of the building and each uh uh you know seed was slightly different and will grow at a different time and but together they will be

130beautiful and they will make the the building uh resound more joyfully. Um and so we couldn't uh um be more happy with the way that our students are are responding to this opportunity to be outside to embrace the nature and have it how it reflects in their learning. So thank you tonight for uh your time and your interest in our work. I guess get their questions. Great. I'll open it up to the committee. Any questions or comments for elementary principles? I have a question. Um, first of all, I um love elementary school. I think you guys are wonderful. Thank you for everything that you've put together. Um, my my question revolves around just technology and the balance of it. Um, so obviously it has a lot of benefits and it's part of our reality. Um,

131and then I'm just curious how you think about introducing technology into the classroom at different ages, how you think about it, and how you'll continue to think about it. Any of you? Well, I I can start. There's a We actually just met with Peter Kelly um about this topic. So, we're always trying to strike the right balance for our elementary school students. Um, and and even I would say try to trying to pull back a little bit more. um there is a a time and a place especially with our third, fourth, and fifth graders to learn those typing skills and certainly we'll say uh in their library media classes to learn about digital citizenship, right? To learn about internet safety and those sorts of things. So we're we're very proactive with those. Um and then

132the learning applications, we I think we scaled back this year quite a bit. So we're looking at what's working, what's evidence-based. Uh for instance, we have um a contract with Lexia that we've extended um you know uh and we're looking at that as a um supplement to what the teachers are already doing as a way to enrich um and that might happen for 15 to 30 minutes a day when the teacher um is meeting with a small reading group, right? And others are doing those really rich centers. a small group of students maybe 15 20 minutes or so practicing those foundational skills. Um so you know research typing um those 21st century skills and then to practice the foundational skills I can add briefly um just in terms of striking the balance. We actually talked

133about this at our elementary principles meeting the other day that um you know the the new ELEL curriculum is very heavy in writing which is wonderful. Um there's lots of opportunities for writing about reading um for different types of writing and they are largely um paper pencil tasks. So um it was one of the things that we were wondering about like with this new curriculum will this increase our reliance on technology and that doesn't seem to be the case. like I think it's going to help us strike the balance of you know using it purposefully as you know a to you know Lexia as a tool but not necessarily be um tied to the laptop. So I feel good about that. Yeah, I appreciate that. Thank you. And the last I would add, Carrie, is

134during our um kindergarten orientation, parents are always wondering what can they do, right, to best prepare. And of course, our answer is we take all comers, right? And every child comes to us in a different place. And that's all good, right? Um but if you're looking for something concrete to do uh as a as a parent uh of a incoming uh kindergartener is provide them with more unstructured playtime, right? Provide more opportunity for them to have natural curiosity in their life. Provide less opportunity to have them see you on your phone. Provide more opportunity for you to have conversations with your child. Right? Provide more opportunity for them to have small achievable tasks that they can do on their own. Right? So, um, we're, uh, finding there's a time and a place to proitize a

135bit about less technology. So, within our buildings, right, kids go to the library and pick up books, right? And when they're in a small reading group, they're reading books, right? Um it's when the kids get older, yes, they're doing research and they're preparing and they're editing, you know, using uh Google Docs, but um we make a conscious effort to ensure that uh technology is a very um um wellthoughtout decision, right? And not one that's uniformly adopted, but rather why do it with technology if there's another way of doing it. Can I ask the one other followup on that? The flip side of that is technology that's brought into the schools. And I've noticed even in my um I have a fifth grader as my oldest. Even in my tenure that has drastically changed. Um and

136maybe that I just didn't wasn't aware of it. But I'm just curious how you're thinking about that. Um if you're seeing the distraction like ask smartwatches or cell phones, things like that, how you're thinking about that. Well, and I know we just have now we can just tell them to put it away. Um I I think um we do see particularly in fifth grade, often halfway through fifth grade, um more smart devices coming in into school. Um, I will say at least from from like the educator's perspective, it may be different from the parents perspective, but from the educator's perspective, kids are really good at knowing the rule is we don't use it and it's not present. Um, and so they're away in backpacks or they don't bring them. Um, I it's not very common

137at the elementary level that technology is causing an issue with with distraction. Occasionally there will be a student who needs a reminder or someone who got something brand new and they're super excited and they want, you know, they really just wanted to show it. But, um, for the most part, even even prior to the, um, the new policy, I think it was, um, it wasn't a significant distraction at at the elementary level. Um, far between. I'd say it's more the the smart watches than the phones. Yeah. And they're mostly very good. Um, I would say earlier this year walking down the halls uh in the morning I witnessed a child um I thought they were talking to themselves and as I got a little bit closer as it turns out they were having a conversation

138with with the parent and they gave me one of these when I asked we're pleased with the policy. It may be less of an issue at Alka because we don't have very good sell service. Very true. Fair point. Yeah. Yeah. Car K Carrie, it's um we we've sent out um reminders uh to the parent community um a couple times a year because it's not the kids communicating to each other in class, it's the families, right? And and so I think this is a reflection of um the need for uh parents given a time of crisis and trauma in within our community uh through the pandemic and all to have more control and more care and increased concern for our child's well-being. And what we need to work with our parents on and we communicate it

139regularly is um your children are safe. um if there was something that needed to be communicated, we could communicate with you. Uh but they're here to learn and they're getting mixed messages because they're trying to do what we're asking them to do here and yet you're implying that there's a a different need. And so we're having that conversation. Um and but it's it's very rare like kids put the phones away when you know they they they come you know because kids are riding their bikes and they and they arrive and they put them away. So, it's very rare, but now that we have some some um some additional muscle on it. Um but it's not it has not been an issue at at the schools. And so, what I've noticed over my I don't know

14020 years, I'm going to date myself. Um in conquer public schools is really that the difference of the three of you are really together. The schools felt very different. When my kids started school, it was, you know, Alcott was good at this, Theo was good at this, Willard is good at this, and now I feel like we're good at everything. And really to see this through your school improvement plans and what you're doing and just your collaboration with each other, that really is the strength of the leadership team and having that time together to be able to do that. So, every child that enters one of your buildings has the same education because I think that is the goal is that everybody's getting the same education. And then just in terms of special education, I

141mean, this was definitely something that was needed and our programs are more intensive now. And so the fact that you're not now chairing the meetings, I think is a huge win for, you know, the entire school. Um, and and really to have another set of eyes on our most significant kids within those programs to see if there's a movement or, you know, can this child be included more because that is not really the role of the principal. you were doing that role, but I think that this will just make our programs really exceptional. So, um, thank you for your patience on that and we were happy to get that done. And then lastly, just the transition from the SE I mean the SEAL curriculum is so important and I'm glad to hear that open circle

142is continuing and you know way back in my teaching days I would sit in the open chair so I love the open circle language and and it was just like I was a special ed teacher. I'm like oh I want to sit in the open chair and then you'd be able to participate. So to really have that structure in place for the teachers and the students I think is really going to be beneficial. So glad to see it's coming back and the training there and if you need anything additional training wise I'm sure we will hear from Dr. Hunter. So thank you. Thank you. One question. Uh so this is not something you guys touched upon but it's uh in the in the in the plans. um 24 it says convening a task force to

143examine staff stress develop recommendations so on and so on is that going to be individually all the schools are together we actually taken I we've had a lot of conversation with staff this year and it turned out to be more effective to go to the buildings and so we've been holding joint mult building based um forums with the staff so I've been traveling out once a month to every building and found staff to be really engaged and very much like what you heard at the other schools. They want to they want to sit with us. They want to tell us where what's working for them and what we can work on and it's been really effective. We tried the committee model and it was wasn't the right fit. So we've we've morphed into these forums

144and that's I'm going to school to school to school and working with the leaders there. So we're no longer doing the the task force or Yeah. I put out a call for another committee and didn't get much response and it when I said let me just come to you and if you're interested in talking and sharing and the principles will be there um we're getting a great response. So I think this is the more effective model for us than when we wrote that. So thanks for the question. Okay, anyone else? Thank you very Michelle. Thanks. Okay. All right. Well, thanks for coming. Thank you so much. Have a good night. Thanks. Have a great summer next week. Yeah, next week. Have a great summer. All right. Um, so that brings us on to our goals

145review and I think I can share my screen. Not completely positive. Should be able to. I'll try. Yeah. Okay. So, I had included I think as one of the links we had our goals review and this is just our updated goals review and I did um Julie asked me to just go through this with everybody because I think it's important this our June meeting just to see where we're at and it looks really good. I mean, I think we got a lot done. Um, and story of the school. That was a a decision that we chose not to complete that given the timing. And it just was something that I think it's important and and maybe we should just talk just a little bit about this as a committee um to make that commitment to,

146you know, maybe that continues on as a goal for next year or we, you know, revamp that. So, I don't know if you have any thoughts on that, Carrie. I think it's just up to the committee to writing our goals next year if it's something that people want to continue or not or not. Yeah, I'd like to I definitely would like to see us continue it and actually on bringing it forward in Carile tomorrow to talk about it as a goal in Carile next year. Yeah, because at town meeting we actually got a little push back in that we didn't tell our story okay in the leadup to town meeting like we I apparently had done pre- pandemic. Okay. Um, so I think it's important for people to hear what's going on. Okay, that's good

147feedback. So perhaps we talk about our goals at our next meeting, we go back to story of the school and kind of see where and we did and I will say thank you to that committee. There was a tremendous amount of work that was done and even the leadership team really participated in that and it was really going well and I think we just got to April and you know some things happened that we just were beyond our control. So more to come on that um for August. Can I just say for an extra I like this framework and the visualization. The visualization of the goals. Yeah. So good. Did a great job. So on the visualization, it is a stoplight chart, right? Green is good. Red is bad. Yes. Why did some of them

148go from green to red and then back to green? Um if they were off track, I think they were off track and then they went back on track. So, some of them actually probably should be green. I think there was one that went green to red then to green. But yeah, so really the only thing I think that um and I can share that again. Let's just see. Cell phone. It might be because we did it for CPS but not not for the region. Yeah. Half red, half green. Half red, half green. I do like this because it really did keep us on track and it forced us to talk about our goals once a month which was super helpful. So that's that's good feedback. So, thank you to Julie for that. I don't think

149she's out there listening, but maybe she'll rewatch our meeting. You never know. Maybe. Um, this is our goals review and our draft school committee schedule. Do you want to talk to that, Lori, a little bit? Sure. So, we've been bouncing around ideas in the theme of maybe there's different ways to do things. Um when I started here we were meeting as a conquered committee once a month and as a joint regional committee meeting once a month. Um I think you know and just sort of thinking about some of the things and Brian sitting tonight was a good example. Uh maybe we want to start peeling those apart a little bit more distinctly. I think two and hearing from committee members, you know, the the pace at which we operate and this is true for the

150three of us. I'll name that. Um maybe we could alter that a little bit too if we looked at a different structure. So if we were to do this was a suggestion that I sort of resurrected from way long ago. Um consider a conquered meeting once a month and a joint meeting the other week. Um and it would certainly alleviate the Carlilele representation and the demand on them because they have a whole another set of meetings to manage. And in the throws of um last year's schedule, we did this um little experiment the week after vacations and we moved to Wednesday. I know this is really groundbreaking, so hold on. Um, it's a totally different pace for us because we post on Monday instead of Friday and we have the weekend. Bob said he means

151you so when I work over the weekend I'll be on time and early and not late like like we are right now. Um, it just really changes the way we're we're rolling on our end. Um, and so I had asked if we could think about more Wednesdays. Now Carlile meets on Wednesday. So that actually puts a parallel structure in there too. So we drafted it would be a good thing. And yeah, Tracy and I reviewed this earlier today. There's there's a few dates right now, but I also was looking at it as do I really believe we're going to have separate meetings. I was kind of just scanning all the yellow. I will say personally not to have the double header weeks Yeah. is going to be because you're out tonight and tomorrow night and

152Thursday for eighth grade graduation. Oh well, I'm really popular this week. Um so I like the idea of Wednesdays. Um and you know in Carlile we can be flex fairly flexible. Um we you know we put our draft together and um we'll work to marry the two together. But yeah, I'm all for Wednesday for sure. So I mean nothing's in stone, right? If it's when we did Wednesdays, it was it's it did change the pace. It does change it. Yeah. Agenda planning. I was surprised we hadn't really ever done it. I had done Wednesdays in another district and forgotten that the pace was a little different until we did it. So, so that was a thought. Um Erin decided to help you get started with this conversation and she too tried a new format which

153was also exciting. Um so you can see usually we just give you a list of dates but this helps you actually see how they fall. um and proposed Wednesdays throughout the year. I think probably you do the conquered meeting first and then the regional one second. But and when I looked at when Brian and I looked at what the proposed Carile schedule is, I think September and October were the were two of the conflicts and there was one other conflict maybe in February. February. Yeah. So if Carlile met and it was a Carile public schools meeting on that first Wednesday and a conquered public schools meeting that first Wednesday, we actually wouldn't have a conflict. So and I do think also for our Mecca representatives, they would be able to come to one meeting instead

154of two meetings. So is the plan still to have it start at six? So we had talked about um yeah I I think the plan is still six because I think every I Brian you had a conflict with five. Sorry not to say it out loud but yeah know five is just tricky for wrapping up the actual like okay work day work day. Yes. So it would be six o'clock Wednesdays. Does anybody you can see the first meeting is August 20th which didn't quite fit on the calendar at least the proposed first meeting which would be the week before school starts. And you'll send this. I don't think this was linked, right? No, we were still working it this afternoon, so it's kind of live time here. But yeah, we'll send this out to you.

155I can do that now. And Brian, do you think that any of those Caral meetings are going to shift or should we just try it and go for it and just really make sure that September and October meetings, they're both conquer public schools meeting? Yes, I think it's very rare that we we change one. So, um, and I think we're in a good place because again, Carlile was just drafted end of last week. So, I'm confident that this is all going to Okay, and I do think more attention to conquered public schools because it it would become, you know, at the end of the meeting, it's like, oh, let's get to CPS or we would put at the beginning of the meeting and this would give more focus to conquer public. All right. So, I

156like it. You like it? Yeah. You like it? Okay. Do we don't need a vote tonight? Um, it's a draft and I want people to look at it first. I don't think we need to actually vote on it. Okay. Do you think we have to vote on it? I don't think you need to. You just need consensus that it that it works. And this way people can plan their schedules. Aisha, looks like you had your hand up. Yes. I just want to say I love it. Oh, she loves it. I love it. and and even Zoom or in person. Either way, how are you feeling about the Zoom? I would definitely be there in person. Yeah, but the Zoom works, too. And if you ever have anything to say, just say it if I don't

157see your Yes. Okay. All right. Great. All right. Um, so that's the schedule. New member onboarding. So, we have two new members here tonight. And Brian, do you want to just talk about the Carell situation just so people are aware of what's happening? I was going to save it for liazison updates, but sure, I'll talk about it now. Only because we'll be another new member from Carile. Yes. Uh, so Carile, we're in a bit of a funny situation in that as everyone knows, Julie resigned effective actually today. Um, we have our first meeting tomorrow. Our town elections were just last week. So, town elections on Tuesday, the school committee met on Thursday to seat um seat themselves um and um the chair and the and the vice chair. Select board was seating themselves tonight and

158then tomorrow we will have a joint meeting with the select board. Um we've actually had five people come forward expressing interest in joining for the year uh vacancy uh which is fascinating because we did not have a contested school committee election. Um but uh we have five people who have uh expressed interest. We will we have a series of questions we will run through with each one of them tomorrow. The vacant spot in on this committee on the regional committee. I'm getting to that. Oh okay. Yeah. Just for car I was like five people. Yeah. for what? For to replace Julie. Okay. Just for the region. Yeah. Um so we will review tomorrow night. The school committee will vote and then this we our vote is basically a recommendation to the select board and then

159the select board will uh appoint somebody. Um we decided to wait and see who that fifth person on our committee is going to be before deciding who was joining me here. So once we know who's replacing Julie, yeah, then we'll be able to identify who uh is coming up here. So there will be, you know, my ego is not that big that I think I can do the job of two people. We will uh have somebody else uh coming in time for the next meeting. And Brian is the chair of Carile. Um so do you appoint the second person or do you have a discussion about it? So or is it a combination? It will be a discussion and it's a vote by the by the school committee. Okay. Okay. And you have a relatively

160young school committee also. Do you Yes. I mean I think I'm uh second senior. It's Sharon and then me in terms of longevity. So yes, it's a pretty new school committee. Which will bring us on to new member onboarding. So, there is um there's a folder in the drive with new onboarding materials, but I think Andrew and I will talk about, you know, maybe having a meeting this summer, you know, with new members just to bring you up to speed on any questions you might have. I know Michael, you did your charting the course already. Nice work. You get the gold storm year. Took him a year. I think he saw what they did to you and was like, I don't want them in that position. there's a course um so you have a year

161to take it sund deep so don't don't worry about it um and falling okay and there's benefit to taking it early middle it doesn't really matter like you get something out of it every time everybody knows I like to take more than once um so you know you just take it a second time and see see what happens um so you have a year to take it and you can coordinate with Aaron Higgins who is our school committee secretary and she will, you know, can send you dates of upcoming trainings. Um, yep. Go ahead. I found that once you get into the system in the mass system, it will they'll refer you things. They'll send you things. You'll have to update them directly to you. Yeah. Yeah. And so the paper updates, I don't know

162why, but I get them in the mail at my house and I get them when I come in here. So I think they double mail them. Do you get the same? Everybody else get the same? No, I just get them here. I get them at my house. So, I don't know why you do. My address is Ripley. Is that a Oh, yeah. I don't know. Um, so, so you get those. And the other thing that I would encourage you to sign up for is the MASC, um, their daily emails. They're really great. Um, actually, there was an article about you today from the bridge. So, that was on today's reading. So, you'll get updates nationally, um, in the state and locally of just kind of what's happening in other school committees. There's always a lot

163in there on budget. So, it's good to read what what other districts are doing. So, I would encourage you to sign up for that. And I think it's just I can't even remember how I did it, but I think you must go on the MASC website and subscribe somehow. Right. Do you remember how to do it automatically once you create an account with MASC? You don't even need to be an MASC. I get it too. You get it too? Well, the daily emails are really good. They come at like either 6 a.m. or 7 a.m. They clearly schedule them, but a lot of them are paywalled. And so if you are not a subscriber of like the globe, you can just um reply to it and then they'll send you the article and they're actually

164pretty quick about doing that. I didn't know if you need to read it or the Eagle Tribune or wherever it's coming from because you'll get like you know two or three free articles and then you can't get them. So So just send them any just reply to it and say can I have this article and they'll send it to you. Usually it's within the hour. So I don't they're really good about that. Um so more to come a new member onboarding. We u for our medical reps, they're also eligible to go over the mask to supporting course there. Yep. Yep. So for Aisha and Michelle, if you want to take charting the course, you certainly can do that and you can look on the website or email Aaron if there's one that you'd like to

165go to. Okay, great. All right, so new member onboarding. more to come on that, but you can definitely look in our Google Drive. There's um a folder in there, but Andrew and I will be in touch with you, you know, over the summer. If you have questions at any point, feel free to reach out about anything. Um, you know, if it's CPS related, Andrew, if it's the region related, it's me. Either one of us can answer anything as we go. And Brian, you know, if you have new members from Carlile, you know that maybe we could work together on that, too. and I can share what we have for new member on boarding in case you want to use any of it. Okay, perfect. Okay, great. Um, and then we're on to our practices and

166protocols. So, let me see if I can share this. I opened up one. See if it's the practices the protocols first. Okay. Um, so these are our protocols and we worked pretty extensively with MASC to draft these. I think it was three years ago and they actually use this. I don't know if you saw it at your charting the course. Um, I've been looking at Okay. Some sometimes you'll go to the MASC training and they actually use us as one of their model districts for our protocols. So, this one we worked on with um I think it was Dorothy Presser three years ago. So, everyone's had a chance to take a look at it. Um they've been the same for two years. I don't know if anyone has any feedback on any additions that you'd

167like to see or questions as to, you know, why something is the way it is. I know we had a comment tonight about um you know, going through the chair and I'll just address that. So that is the MSC does actually have a lot of districts that recommend that all feedback comes through the chair because otherwise Lori would be receiving nine different emails from all of us like hey Lori can you answer this question. So we do like to consolidate it and um that's why that protocol is in place and that is a best practice. So I just wanted to put that out there. Um of course Lori is always available. You will get emails at 4:00. You will get emails at 4:00 a.m. which you've probably gotten them already. [Laughter] I guess I see

168a difference between um bullet five and bullet seven for information. U it certainly seems that bullet five makes sense. You don't want to have to repeat doing things for the same question for a number of different people. But for um developing communication or exchanging ideas. Um each of us individually might have our own best skill or best best flavor in highlighting a point or highlighting a concept. Um is there is there a mechanism that we can do that? I'm just referring to play of ideas um among all of us to come up with the best best result. Is there how can we discuss how we ways of doing that in ter so is this in reference to bullet seven bullet seven bullet seven the avoid surprises. So in this one, this is really more of

169say um say you had a parent come to you and which that we don't deal with, right? We always refer it to a principal or something else. And this is just kind of an easy example. So a parent comes to you sometime during the week and you come to the school committee Tuesday night and you choose to surprise the committee and Dr. Hunter with, hey, I had a parent come to me and this is what the parent said. That's what we're trying to really avoid. um happening when we say avoiding surprises or if you had, you know, questions about the budget um that we could possibly get the information to before the meeting. It's really just avoiding any type of surprise to the committee or to the professionals. So that's why we had that protocol

170into place. That's that's fair. I guess I would look at it as just a mechanism of communication. Um if you if you have an issue, certainly you it appropriately. If you have questions or or an idea, y um if it's your idea, if it's your question, you you can probably best flavored best describe it rather than having it described by a telephone. That's that's what I was trying to get. In that case, it would be we put on the agenda, right? Because I can't really talk about some stuff. serial deliberation serial deliberation we we want to you know avoid that obviously so you wouldn't talk to one member like hey I have this idea and then call krie and say krie I have an idea sandep I have an idea I guess the again bold

171seven I was thinking communication not offline among ourselves but communication between members with superintendent is there a mechanism to do that and so that communication does go through the chairs. So, and that's just the way we've operated for the past three years, three years. Um, so I feel as though that works. Um, I'm certainly open to feedback from anybody else and any experience that you've had or if you think that that's something that works, doesn't work. We're not voting on this tonight, right? So, no, we can incorporate some No. Yep. Yep. It's good feedback. you know, I think it's it's a good comment and I think that um we always want open communication between members, the superintendent. Um, so I think there are definitely ways to do that and maybe suggestions as to like thoughts

172on on what you think may be a better way to work it, but I I do think this is something that I was hoping that we were going to have our MASC rep come and do maybe a workshop because we will have three new members just to kind of hear what other districts are doing, what works, what doesn't work. um you know when I was chair the last time I had talked to the chair of another school committee about you know texting and he's like oh no there's no texting like like we just make phone calls so so other committees do it obviously differently but that might be something that I think would be helpful if we do a workshop because where we have three brand new people even to a school committee where that

173might be helpful to do that that'll be possible sometime over the summer yeah I can reach out I've already reached out to Alicia and unfortunately I haven't heard back from her yet so I'm going try again. Um, I reached out to her by text and email. I'm going to call her and go back to email again. So hopefully, you know, we can get that in place and have a workshop. Cool. All right. Um, so this is just for you to look at. And does anyone have any other comments on any of the items on our protocols? Okay. All right. So, I'll stop that share. And then we also have this practices document. And I always found it like a little bit interesting that we have practices and then we have protocols. But this is the

174way I guess it's always been. And maybe this is something too that we can ask Alicia if districts have both items or just one. Brian, do you guys have Carl, do you have practices and protocols? They are quite redundant. They're a little bit redundant. Not broken out to this level. Okay. So again, this may be something that we also consider combining them. So it's one document because honestly, this was just something that I got when I had my onboarding. So, and I think we've just used the same document every year. And already if we're going to change our meetings from Tuesdays to Wednesdays, we could definitely, you know, make that change. And so I think this is definitely worth a look. Mhm. Um, you know, the only difference that we have in here too is

175the chairs will provide the agenda overview and so that would also be something, you know, Andrew and I can talk about that. I like that format because I feel like then everybody comes to the meeting with the same information and you know what to expect. I don't know if people find that helpful or not helpful. I found it really helpful. Really helpful. Okay. the A is very helpful especially in your first year just understanding what's going on. Okay. So I mean maybe that's why we have the practices and the protocols and there are two different documents but maybe we can get them all in together. Um and then I did look at we probably should have reviewed all of these and and so I'll just make a note when I do the schedule for this

176year. These should be reviewed when we do our school evaluation which I didn't pick up until I really dove deep into the drive. So, we would have done this at our last meeting for the upcoming year. So, you're supposed to evaluate the school committee and then look at like what's working, what's not working, do we want to make changes. So, yeah. So, I I literally came across that today. Yeah. Um, so that's good. Thanks for having that. Yep. So, if we think that this is redundant, we can work on that, but I will reach out to the MASC and and maybe we'll bring Alicia in to do this work with us as a committee. I don't necessarily think it's redundant. I think some of the information maybe you might be able to combine the document,

177but I do think this has information that the other one doesn't. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is more of like the nitty-gritty of um you know even with the chair's breakfast and the PG president's meeting. Um and I think when you go to that last one, that's where I found it. The school committee will review and revise our practices as needed as part of the committee self-reflection and self-evaluation each year. And we've never done that since I've been on the committee. So it's always in there, but I think we just don't get to that number in the document. Okay. Anything else on that? All right. We'll move on to superintendents, chairs, and liaison's update. And I guess before you start, Lori, I really like what the conquered select board does with their updates, and they

178do them in writing. And so they and I would encourage everybody to take a look at their packets, um, the select board packets in conquered. So each liaison does like four bullet points of what was covered in the meeting and then if anyone has questions so they actually don't report out at their meeting because we're really just reporting out on another public meeting when we do our liaison reports. So then the whole committee would get it and be able to read it and then if somebody had a question like hey Carrie you went to FinCom this week and I saw that you wrote this I had a question on whatever and we would could have an open dialogue about it. So that forat I like the way that they do that. Do you like the

179way they do that? I mean that part of the meeting can get long. Yeah. So it's a efficiency thing too. Yeah. Yeah. Because I do think you know I look at it. So now it's 8:30. We've been here for two and a half hours. Sorry. This is always a long meeting with the school improvement plans. But it does pull out probably 15 minutes of the meetings that we could be more efficient. So those would be put in this agenda. So those what the select board does is they put it in their packet. So um you know we don't do a packet, we do the links, but we do our own internal packet that we certainly could put that in. If that feels good to everybody. Okay. So I'll let Lori start. Sure. And I can

180be brief because with all the principles here, you've heard some of my highlights. So um just in terms of how busy it is this last week or two. Uh, so eighth grade spent all of last week in Washington DC. Was a highly successful trip overall. Really appreciate Mr. Cameron's leadership. I um for the first time I was on all the texts that went to the kids and the parents and I really see why now parents are so grateful for um how engaged he is while they're gone. And as you said, they had a great time. You saw the photos. Um tomorrow morning very early the high school trip to Hawaii will depart. So, doesn't that sound nice? I know. We also have a trip going out to the White Mountains here as part of the

181end of year. That's all timed with Q5, which just thought I'd define that just a little bit more. You heard about it a lot earlier. We did it in 2018 and 2019 where we really transformed the last four days of school. At one point, it was eight. We scaled back to four. teachers have proposed all of these various uh activities, instructional sessions of things that they're passionate about and kids have selected their top choices among those um offerings over the 4-day course. And the goal we had initially was to just transform the high school, put all the structures of the schedule away, put the containment of being in the building away and really just give a freedom to kids and staff. And it I mean the first year we did it, you just walked and

182you were your jaw dropped about that you could transform a high school. No, the amount of prep to go into this for all the, you know, courses to be ready and the processes to be played out and the assignments of who's doing what for um a thousand people. The seniors aren't there. So, it's about a thousand kids. Um is obviously significant. So, it's a year's worth of planning that is going to kick off tomorrow. Um just a really exciting end to the year. I left the year otherwise we end the year on finals and the kids come in and take a bunch of tests and they leave and they leave staggered because the tests are staggered by period. It's just a very different end of year. So I'm really excited for what the next I

183think of any year we we need we need the joy it will bring and the connection between adults and kids is phenomenal in the way they're connecting over whatever activity they're doing or wherever they're going. And um if you haven't had a chance to look at the menu of offerings, it's pretty amazing the the scale and scope. Well, and and I just have to interrupt for one second. So my daughter's doing urban walks, so it's four days of being in Boston. She doesn't know any of the teachers doing it, and she doesn't really know a lot of the kids going. So it takes them a little bit out of their comfort zone, too. And you've got three different grades of kids going. And um so she was excited about that. And like there's pickle ball,

184there's paddle boarding, and a lot is parent donation of things. So they put out a call to the community for donations of blow up paddle boards and things like we learned a lesson last time that um this could get really expensive if we don't put out for some help. So um so really exciting time I think at the high school. Um tomorrow, you heard the ribbon cutting at the Ellen Garrison building at um CMS is at 5:00. It'll also be a community open house. Justin's prepared a very student centered um short program. So we're excited for that. I can feel a lot of momentum from the community about wanting to get in and see the building. So I think it's going to be really attend well attended and we're excited for that too. Um the

185AI committee had its last meeting last week. Shel's been pinch hitting with me as I get called off to other things. So we kind of did this one tag team uh last week. We have a draft set of a draft policy and a set of guidelines for you to look at in August. That was the goal. Um it's definitely probably still a work in progress, but this eclectic K12 group um of varied teachers who volunteered to do these meetings at four o'clock in the afternoon, really thoughtful think tanks and um really positive about our balance of pro- AI and challenges of AI and a lot of um positive feedback from especially the humanities teachers that there's a little bit of guard rail going out to the families and kids as we start the year. So,

186we're really excited by that and the momentum of this group was really great. I think we're going to continue to do something next year. I think we're still forming what that looks like, but um I feel like we're a little ahead of the curve there. In going through MAC's book, I can only find one other AI policy in a school district that they list. So, that felt good. I think I think we're ahead of the game there. Um, and just the last note, I have um, three fifth grade graduations and an eighth grade graduation in the next few days. Um, really fun times with families and getting to see kids be celebrated. Um, certainly I'll be out in classrooms and enjoying that while we balance all the other things at the end of the year.

187But, um, half day Monday will be our last day with kids. Teachers are back. Tuesday. You can hear we're packing Tuesday in with probably the most active things I've seen in a long time with different meetings and PDs and things like that. So, real productive way to kick the summer off. Um, but yeah, we're we're a week shy. Thank you. Great. Um, does anyone have any lesson reports? No, you did, Carlile. No. No. You know, it's been a little while since the building committee met, but obviously Sambourne is down and we were there last night. I texted some of you pictures of the uh student band concert for the elementary school. Carrie was Carrie was there. It was awesome. So, just so cool to see that building come along. Um, you know, we'll talk about

188contingency fees and fun stuff, you know, in the next few. Yeah. Sidewalks is coming your way. Sidewalks. Yep. So, I'll have a more robust update in August. Yeah. And are you guys meeting in July, August? Because we'll need around there. Okay. We need a monthly meeting. Almost one more year we'll be meeting. Yeah, probably Februaryish maybe. Great. Okay. Um just a town meeting, quick town meeting recap. I think we were all at town meeting. Um the budgets both passed. The amenities building passed and the vote has been scheduled for the ballot. So on the conquered Carl, we don't need a vote because Carl CBC funded their share. Conquered, we have a ballot vote. I believe it's August 19th, August 19th, and there are two items on the ballot. One is for roads and paving, and

189one is for the amenities building. So it does need to pass at the conquered ballot. So I said that out loud again. It needs to pass at the conquered ballot. So if people are away, they can fill out their absentee ballots, right? So So get the word out there that there still is a vote. Um, I think the summer elections are hard. Uh, just because people are traveling, they forget. It doesn't feel like the normal cadence of, oh, there's an election in November and there's one in March. This is a special election for two ballot items. So, um, ask for the absentee ballot as soon as possible. As soon as possible. Now, I don't know that they I don't know if they have them yet. I'll I'll check on the town clerk's office. They usually

190put out um a message when they're available, so I don't think they have that date on there. The select board might have sent it to us though um the date that you can request it. So so more to come on that but I'll send out um when you know that's available. Can we put on we can put on the website? We definitely put on our website. Yeah. [Music] Ballots are available for vote by mail July 29th. July 29th. All right. So it's like two weeks before. Yes. July 29th. And I'm sure you can vote in person absentee if you want and just go to the town hall if you know you're going to be around. You could go to the townhouse and vote or vote absentee for the ballot. Is it just a majority or

191is it two? It's a majority majority. Yep. Um, so that's to come. And then the only other thing I went to the DI commission meeting and they had town council there to talk about there's an extensive discussion about ICE um and what people should do or not do and it was about impeding um impeding ICE from I don't know entering like you don't want to be part of impeding them. you can say things, but you can't physically touch anyone. And then it turned into a couple questions about what we do as a schools. So, I had the attorney attorney general's um guidance um in front of me also because we do have guidance from the schools, you know, what what should happen. And it really is if they were to come to the schools and

192you can jump in at any time. If they come to the schools, they're in the office. We contact RI the office contacts Ripley. Ripley contacts our school attorney and they guide whoever the professionals are that are dealing with the situation. Is that correct? Yes. It's make a phone call to the superintendent. Make a phone call to the superintendent is what it is. Um and one question just while you're on that, we do not ask we are not by law allowed to ask immigration status. So I don't it feels worth saying we we are asked this question a lot in the last few months. Um we are not allowed to ask. Yeah. And I did say that the DI commission that we do not ask. So, um, that meeting happened and then there was a coffee

193after. Michael and I were both there. Andrew came. Um, the police were there. Different members of the community were there. It was great. So, I think Andrew near me chief, sorry. Sorry, not not this Andrew. Um, I think their coffees typically happen in the afternoon and not in the evening. So, that can be challenging. I think it they typically aim for like three times a year. So, more to come on that. I think that's all I have. Um, so no one else. Aisha, Michelle, just check in to see if you had any anything to add. No, no, I just want to say welcome to the new members. Thank you. All right. Um, all right. So, we have a couple of votes. Um, and Sandep did let me know he's going to recuse himself from the

194first vote on the CF grants because he sits on the board. So the one, two, three, four, five of us will vote and you should we have you can just make the motion. It's right in Yep. Okay. I move that the conquered and conquered Carile school committees vote to accept a donation of $70,878 from the conquered ed fund. Second. All right. Any further discussion? Thank you to the ed funds. I know it's so great. Um, thank you to the work of the ed fund and their fundraising. We really appreciate it. Okay. All in favor? I region for both. Yeah, that's the tricky one because it does come kada to it comes for conquered and conquer crow. So, it's both districts, two separate rules. Yeah. Okay. Uh, then we have a vote to approve to appoint

195a signatory for the conquered public school warrant. Um, so the warrants and I had talked to both Sandep and Michael about this. the warrants will come to all members of the committee and we move to a single signatory I think two years ago and so one person will say yes I approve but we all see them so yep Bob go ahead just make a comment this is one is relatively timesensitive so if somebody who's going to volunteer for this um it would typically need to be turned around pretty quickly so we can pay our vendors on time you can certainly ask questions you know whoever the approver is so let's just say I was appointed the approver um my first year on the school committee and I was printing out the warrants and I was

196reading them and it took me a few days and I didn't realize that I wasn't supposed to do that. So, and I didn't realize the time sensitivity of it. So, it's something that it's usually like a 24-hour turnaround time to do that. Brian has said he will continue with the region. Um and Cynthia was our warrant signer. Thank you to Cynthia all last year. So, we need a warrant signer for conquered public and I and Andrew, you had volunteered to maybe do that unless unless somebody else is really dying to be the warrant signer. No. Okay, I will do it. So, I would entertain a motion to uh appoint Andrew Herek as a signator for Conquer Public Schools. Moved second. All right. Any further discussion? All in favor? I I And that's just Cocker Public.

197That's for Cocker Public. And then Brian didn't vote. Yeah, it keeps us on our toes. One just quick thing on that. If you have questions on the warrant, just direct them to me. You can copy um whoever's sending it. It's usually one of the staff, but just direct them to me and I'll make sure we answer them. Yeah. And then if anyone has any comments, please let me know. I'm happy to incorporate. Great. All right. Okay. And then we have one more vote um to delegate authority in awarding the thorough campus improvement bids. Bob, do you want to say anything about that? So, uh Principal Sparks uh talked about this. We're working on um campus improvement. There's two bids. Um we had a conquered um the CPC approved one scope of work. We also have

198a playground happening at the same time that was funded by um the the uh the playground committee and the PTG. Um, so we have two separate bits that we're going to go out during the summer and we're not going to have any school committee meetings. Um, we're legally obligated to accept the lowest responsible and responsive bidder, but our policy says school committee accepts it. So, I'm asking that the school committee delegate that authority to administration. Um, we can't pick any bid. We have to pick the lowest one. But this is more of a process issue where the school committee is not meeting during the summer. I wanted to move this along so that we could have the project start hopefully in July um and um get the work as much done we can this summer.

199And this is just for conquered public schools. So just the conquered committee. Yes. Does anyone have the motion language up or did did Oh, do you have a Can I ask a question? Do you have a question? No. You already started getting bids back? No, there uh one of them's we have to there's a process. you have to advertise um you have to advertise on a on a state website has to be up there for two weeks um and then you have to allow some time to respond. So we will get some bids back probably uh later this month for one of the two and then the other one we'll probably get the bids back um the July 8th whatever that is somewhere you know beginning of the second week. Um so that's when we're

200going to get the bids back and we have no idea if those are going to come back within the fundraising budget. I'm pretty confident they are. Okay. Yeah. I I think we have a little bit of room on the scope of work, too. There's also ways to set up the bids where you can um have things that you don't necessarily have in the scope. So, I I'm pretty confident we're I mean, needless to say, if they come back over, we should talk about it, right? Yeah. We'd have to come back. We don't have the authority to just accept something we don't have the funding for. Yeah. Okay. Can you share a little bit about the the wiggle room you mentioned um in in the the bids in the sense that do they have is there

201a certain blueprint that they have to follow or is there any kind of for uh well there's two the playground committee selected the equipment the bid is actually for the installation. Okay. You're allowed to use the state contract for the equipment but you're not allowed to use the state contract for the installation. So, um, we we anticipate having the company that did the picked the materials be a bidder for the installation as well. Um, there's benefits to that so we don't have somebody pointing the finger at the other if there's a problem. So, you know, um, but, you know, we need to be neutral and post the bid and follow the required process. So, that's the playground bid. Um, the other bid is the soccer field. CPC approved that. There's some work to like behind

202the campus there's a a pathway that is is it's conducive to the area around it washing out with when there's a lot of water. So, they're going to change that a little bit and a basketball court and um and then do some landscape retention. It's, you know, it's sloped there and it just kind of washes away. So, they're going to put in some um I don't know what it's called, but landscape retention materials and do some receding. So, there's a bunch of things there. Um, and that's the So, two separate scopes of work. Did you have something? Yeah. Who's I have the Oh, the do it. Great. Let's do it. I move that the conquered right into the microphone because I'm hearing from people, so I can't hear you. Okay, move it closer. I move

203that the conquer public school committee delegate authority to the superintendent of schools and the assistant superintendent of finance and operations toward bids for one playground installation and two CPC approved scope of work field installation and other improvements to the exterior campus. Bids will be awarded to the lowest responsible and responsive bidder in accordance with Massachusetts general laws and procurement guidelines. Seconded. All right. All right. Any further discussion? All right. Actually, you should be doing this. It's conquer public schools. You do it. Oh, okay. All those in favor? Just thought it'd be funny. Passes. Thank you, Bob, for doing that over the summer. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Bob. It's great. It's an exciting project. All right. And now, um, for the public, we are going to go into exe executive session, but we are going to

204come back into open session, um, and take a vote in open session. And I would say to Aisha and Michelle, you can feel free to stay or go. It's totally fine if you go. Um, so it's really up to you when we come back because we'll be we'll be in for a few minutes and then we'll come back up. So, no worries. I have a two-hour drive in the morning, so I'll probably get off, but um, have a good night. Thanks, Aisha. Thank you guys. Have a good night. Okay. Thanks, Michelle. All right. Do you need a motion? Yes. And have to read the whole thing, right? The whole thing. Where's Alex meter? The conquered school committee and conquer Kyle Regional School Committee will enter into executive session under purpose three to discuss strategy with

205respect to collective bargaining with the CCTA tutors and the transportation. and purpose seven to comply with or act under authority of any general or special law or federal grant and aid requirements specifically Mass General Law chapter 30A section 22A and F with regard to the review and approval of executive session minutes from October 8th 2024 November 6th 2024 November 19th 2024 March 25th 2025 April 10th 2025 and May 30 May 13th 2025 and under purpose one under which the November 19, 2024 executive session was held and under purpose two under which the October 8th, 2024, November 6, 2024, November 19, 2024, March 25, 2024, and March 13, 2025 executive sessions were held and under purpose 3 under which the April 10, 2025 executive session was held and under purpose 7 under which the November 6,

2062024 executive session was held. Excellent. Do we have a second? Second. Uh, any discussion? Okay, we have to roll call into executive session. So, this is going to be tricky. Move to learn the alphabet. Alphabetical order. Who's first? Um, I am. So, I say, her eye. That's it. That's it. Yeah. Her I. Morano. I. Shardy. I. Limbs. I. Rank and I. It gets late. Waters and I Williams. Perfect. Okay, we will be back. Um, but if anybody needs to take a quick break before you go in, I'm going to take just a few back everyone. We are back and we just need a motion for our action item. If anyone is willing to make that motion. I motion to approve the CCHS tutor collective bargaining agreement 2025 to 2028. Second. All right. Any further discussion?

207All right. All in favor? I. And with that, I move to adjourn. We don't need to vote, right? Yeah. You're supposed to get a second and everybody says I I think we should I feel better about that because we weren't doing it and it stresses me out. So So moved. And do we have a second? Thank you. All in favor? I. Thank you. Good night.