School Committee 10.7.21

001that are suing this district a group of students wanted to because most schools were there good evening welcome i'd like to call the meeting to order at and i'd like to begin by asking uh inviting you to join us for the pledge of allegiance one nation okay next on our agenda we're going to take citizens comments um we well before we get started i guess i should mention we are this meeting is being recorded um and this meeting is also being streamed live on hw cam on youtube we will be taking citizens comments if any both here in person as well as on the zoom link if anyone is on the zoom link and you'd like to make a comment please use the raise your hand feature um before we take citizens comments i ask

002citizens to um keep your comments to three minutes um and as always we genuinely appreciate um anything that you have to say and we will be here to listen um i'm just going to check in do we have a do we have a sound issue back there okay great um okay uh mr tracy do we have uh people on zoom as of right now no okay all right maybe we'll ask the room um all right do we have any citizens who want to make a comment oh okay we've got him we've got a we've got a microphone issue we're going to take a moment okay thank you um all right and do we have any citizens on soon that would like to make a comment we have none um okay looks like we have no

003one currently on zoom that wants to comment if there is anyone watching on zoom please know that we will close the zoom link it's only available for the public comment but as as i just mentioned you can continue to watch on um hwcam on youtube okay madam chair can i ask a question about the agenda i'm sorry what was that michelle can i ask a question about the agenda absolutely so in the past when we've had this um recognition of professional status we've had a reception ahead of time and i can understand why we wouldn't do that but do we have people here that are being recognized that we could put that higher on the agenda we do not no that's no i'll let you answer that mr tracy we we do not have anybody

004here this evening okay we had more nays than yays so okay thank you thank you michelle um okay uh next on the agenda as we have been doing um at each meeting we're going to review some of the school committee protocols and julia has agreed to read for us this evening as elected members of the hamilton wynom regional school committee we including the superintendent accept the high honor and trust that has been placed in us to ensure that the students of the district receive the best education possible to that end we hereby commit to the following in the conduct of our business if an individual school committee member receives an email relevant to overall district policy or operations they will forward it to the full school committee and the superintendent school committee members will attend

005meetings on time and be well prepared to discuss agenda items while at meetings members will stay focused on the agenda items and will not engage in communication outside of the agenda being discussed when making decisions school committee members will keep an open mind utilizing the best information available including research best practices public input and financial considerations members will debate issues and not each other members will analyze carefully and debate fully whenever necessary prior to making decisions thank you julia and thank you to everyone it's been a really helpful way to keep keep our focus on those protocols to have people read them and i appreciate people being willing to do that um next up i'm going to ask superintendent tracy to introduce our student representative thank you very much tonight i have the pleasure of

006introducing our uh current student body president at the high school mr christopher domaraki he'll be joining us at school committees from this point on and giving a monthly report one time a month one of the two meetings share about uh he will share student experiences at the elementary middle and high school levels just as we did last year chris is an interesting guy he's a he's a three sport athlete a talented very talented singer uh district finalists for deca uh well respected and well liked by teachers and students both at the high school i know as a principal of high school chris was a go-to guy when you needed to know something or you needed to learn something about what may or may not be going on he warmly and and confidently welcomed our teachers

007back to the school year this year at the staff orientation at the high school did a great job with a very concise but but uh well-crafted speech and he's also helped mentor all of our incoming freshmen this year and that's a that's a big deal for us to really have a guy like chris out there as the the person to look towards as our incoming freshman coming in and learning about the high school and learning about you know all the things that are available to them uh it's great to have an ambassador like chris and and all of our other mentors for kids to go to and ask questions when they're confused or to see in the hallways and say hey what do i do here or where is this and chris have been really

008kind of a go-to guy at the high school so i like to welcome chris and he will be joining us from this point on at our meetings good to be here thank you welcome we're really happy to have you here and it's really nice to be able to have you here in person this year um so thank you yeah um and we look forward to hearing um from you in when you're ready with your first report next meeting next week okay great thank you um okay next up is the consent agenda um jen do you have a motion i move that we accept the consent agenda as written so can we ask if anything's going to be held before we make the motion thank you thank you for that michelle so we haven't had a

009second so before we uh make the motion i will ask does anyone have any items from the consent agenda that they would like held like to held the donation uh okay so we will hold um b the donations for the high school robotics program will be held okay thank you can we try one more time jen i'm moved that we accept the consent agenda as written except for the donations to the high school robotics program do we have a second second second by anna um and all those in favor and that is five in favor and that is uh unanimous of the members present and the motion passes um michelle you held the donations can you uh what would you like to address i just would like um us to recognize that there is being

010a large donation made by an individual uh jackie stanwood to the robotics and that we should thank uh them it looks like it's gonna help them cover costs for um entry into a tournament so thank you very much i'm pleased to have that acknowledged thank you does anyone else have anything to say looks like we're ready for a motion can we have a motion on the donations i move that we accept the donations to the high school robotics program second second by julia campbell any further discussion okay all those in favor and that is five in favor and the motion passes its unanimous of the members present okay uh next up on the agenda i'm going to turn it over to uh eric and i think you're going to introduce our presenters for the school

011improvement plan is that right i will it's this is a fantastic opportunity for our administrators our school principals to share the plans that they put together along with their you know teachers and school councils uh please keep in mind this evening these these school improvement plans are very aligned with our school uh district goals which we have right here the district goals are an extremely heavy lift you know and i think it's important to recognize that the district goals really get carried by the schools and and the work that gets done is generally done at the schools and led by our principals this evening they'll give you an overview of their their goals and some of the things that they will do as action steps towards those goals and certainly we'll take questions after so

012i think the elementary crew is going to start us out this evening mr sherston will begin all right so as we um get started and think about these goals um really what we tried to do is focus on the the district goals that we talked about in the spring um there is a lot there um and we have those conversations in the spring ben can i ask you to speak a little closer to the microphone thank you okay um am i good okay um thinking about those those did the district improvement goals um that we identified in the spring that there were a lot of things there and part of that conversation was coming around like you know there's a lot here can we do all of this but is there anything in here that

013that we can wait on are we better yeah all right let's you know save my lower back here um so yeah so thinking about those big things that we were talking about in the spring and we came to sort of the conclusion that like there wasn't anything we could we could leave off right everything was so important that we couldn't put it off a year even though it meant putting a lot on our plate so thinking about our elementary goals we're really trying to articulate um what does that really look like at the elementary level so we're not adding more um and really spreading ourselves too thin to not be able to put a good effort into those larger district goals um all right so our first school so our first goal is to improve

014district reading outcomes at the elementary level by designing and implementing a comprehensive professional development plan so this began this summer working with our new professional development professional development committee we had some summer work around this and they'll continue to review this throughout the year one of our big action steps will be professional development for our literacy tas in the science of reading um this allows them to be up to date it allows us to create some shared resources it allows us to have some consistency that work consistency is something i'm going to say a lot in the next few minutes so get ready for that and it allows for some for some more common assessments and training around those common assessments between the buildings another big action step is going to be professional development for

015teachers in the science of reading and the urgency of that change so looking at why are we doing this why does that have why does this have to happen right now again building some more of that consistency and also looking at some of the assessments that we'll be using how do we use them how do we pull data from them to inform instruction and to inform intervention our last big action step for this goal is to develop practices a practical classroom strategies based on the science of reading so starting out with that critical question around like why are we doing this and then moving into the what what are we going to do what does this look like in the classroom having some of that again that more that consistency between classrooms across all three

016schools and really focusing on those those foundational standards of reading so that as kids move through the elementary curriculum we have those foundations really short up as they move up into the upper grades all right so our second goal is to design and implement a cohesive multi-tiered system of support or an mtss targeting the acquisition of needed reading skills so this dates back actually pre-pandemic we had a group of elementary educators across all three buildings across grade levels k-3 looking at four or five years of historical reading data we had a couple of meetings we had giant spreadsheets taped up on the wall and then the world shut down and that all got put on hold and so we're really excited to be able to pick that back up again we had an mtss and

017literacy group going this summer to begin to be able to get that going again one of our big first action steps is going to be assess and document our current state of all of our existing k5 reading curriculum and resources one of the things that we know right now is that our current state is not consistent and that's one of the things that we have to get back to we know we have pockets of greatness throughout the district and that is really helping our kids but trying to get beyond those pockets of greatness to having a system that really supports everybody we are looking to develop essential agreements for our k-5 literacy blocks this is around looking at what we're doing right now again those pockets of greatness what do we need to be doing

018and let's agree on what and what those reading blocks are going to look like and finally sharing that plan out getting everybody on the same page what are we doing now how do we support those struggling readers and again that consistency piece that i keep coming back to that consistency piece is important but what we're really trying to do is build a structure here that can be responsive to individual students needs um so rather than having those pockets of greatness that are supporting our kids having systems in place to make sure that nobody falls through the cracks and everybody can be successful carolyn shadiak our winthrop elementary school principal i need to lower the microphone so elementary goal number three elementary staff will increase awareness and support our diverse community is aligned directly to improvement

019goal three district improvement goal three commit to diversity equity and inclusion dei practices through this goal we're working to ensure that all students staff and families feel a sense of belonging in our school communities as we increase our awareness and support for our diverse community members the important work towards this goal has already begun this summer the district offered a number of book groups to staff which included titles focused on dei and belonging which is now kind of our catch-all word some staff read the book stamped quiet and the power of neurodiversity is just a few examples at the beginning of the school year teachers reserve received training on identifying the seven most common forms of bias and stereotypes in curriculum and what the process would be to follow for reporting and responding to that

020bias when it is account encountered in classroom materials through a balanced conversation as well as reporting it to the elementary director of teaching and learning so that we can address those curriculum materials the dei committee has been established and has been working with regis shields from equity journey partners to prepare the the district for the dei audit as well as ongoing professional development to build our collective understanding of dei competencies and just as an additional note uh the stat the staff at all three elementary schools yesterday focused on relationship mapping to ensure that all students feel connected to adults in the school to support a sense of belonging and to make sure that we are supporting all students regardless of what their needs might want to do questions by be um yeah you want to

021pause for questions sure yeah okay um we don't have okay yeah so let's uh those are the elementary goals so let's um start with questions clarifying questions anyone had um jen um how are we going to address any dei deficiencies when they're found so that's part of the dei audit and they will be at oh sorry that's part of the dei audit process and as the dei audit happens we'll be um given some directives about how we're going to respond to those can i answer that yep absolutely please do there are community discussions that will occur as a result of this audit i mean that definitely will involve all of us um members of the community members of the school district i think it's important to kind of keep an open mindset as we go

022through this audit process in the next few months to be able to um kind of take that all in and then build kind of responses together it's i think it's really important to include as many as many groups as possible as we build those responses so it won't it won't specifically be just school level responses i think what we'll find in this audit as it will have we'll have kind of broader scope issues that we'll need to deal with that may not be directly related to school it could be related to items outside of school as well so thank you julia question can could we see the research on the seven identified biases i would just i'm just interested personally i don't know if that was a report that came out so public there were

023a couple of resources that were shared with us in our initial training and looking at curriculum in the um bias in the curriculum and i did not copy the links one of them no it's okay yeah but is that something we can yes it's something that's yep there's it's all available um and there was one one resource from wellesley and a second resource from boston public schools so those were two of the resources that we used as a reference point and that those those resources have been shared with teachers and we reviewed the seven uh most common bias that we see in curriculum which i can tell you what they are if you want to know oh no it's i'm gonna have to read them i just wondered if it was perfect okay thanks eric

024i was just for my own personal edification i was interested yeah there's a lot of stuff out there those were the two resources also eric is this something being done you might we might be learning later is this something being done in the middle school in the high school too so this was done through the entire school system okay we had we had we had in a response to department of education complaint that we received last year this was part of that response we did a training at the beginning on the second day in a couple buildings the third day depending on when they had time that was connected to bias and understanding bias identifying bias and then how to report it so we have not only presented we have a full presentation we use

025with this wellesley study the wellesley study is really what most schools have kind of relied on as as a you know these are the seven things to look for within within a curriculum or or within something a teacher might be bringing in from the outside in relation or in balance to something that they may be teaching um so the the all of the staff was trained in with the same presentation given the same materials so this is a sheet one of the sheets that was handed out and then they also now have a form that they can use to report when they feel like okay i think this may be biased or i know this may be biased and here's why and that will go to the curriculum leaders at the secondary level and to

026jennifer clifford director of elementary teaching and learning she'll she'll get the ones from the elementary level so thank you all right other clarifying questions uh anna um this is actually a really helpful follow-up uh from that complaint um and just to know that it's sort of separate from the dea work but there was something really specific that we were responding to um i think my question is the equity journey partners so they're also they're providing some coaching but they're also the firm that's been contracted to do the audit itself is that right i believe so yeah am i correct yeah just i haven't finalized the contract with them but they have they've met the rfp the request that we sent out um we're just kind of going back and forth right now to finalize the

027details of the contract that includes not only the professional development but also the equity audit the scope of the the equity audit so they're sort of doing everything okay all together for us and it's pretty comprehensive and in fact i'll give you a little more detail later this evening when i give the gold follow-up okay um my other question is have you at the building level had any pushback from anyone either parents or teachers or has anybody complained about this no no as a matter of fact some people are excited to see this happening um michelle so one of the things that was brought up a lot during the budget process is that we were going to have all of these untrained um literacy tas helping uh with our struggling learners and i see that

028we have professional development here could you describe a little bit about what that professional development was thank you they are no longer untrained um so this year i am acting as the interim principal at cutler two days a week but i am also working as the district uh literacy intervention specialist so i have been providing a lot of the training to the teaching assistants so in the first two weeks of school we worked together we've done all kinds of training on the research about the science of reading the research that's been pretty clear for decades really and still just hasn't quite made it into schools in the way that we hope it will in the in the coming years a lot of the teaching assistants took the landmark course this summer around the science of

029reading and that was a great way to start us off with a common understanding we are creating common resources and materials to be used across the street three schools annie drews and i who is currently on maternity leave created a lesson plan format we are meeting regularly with tas the trainings continue we've trained them in the assessments analyzing the assessments they've been working to make groupings so it's really an ongoing training that will continue through the year and beyond but and would you say there's been any bumps in the road or would you say it's been going well and what been well received actually i'm incredibly impressed with the teaching assistance and the level of responsibility they're taking on feeling this confidence with the knowledge that they've gained and the understanding of the practices we're

030putting into place so i think it's really going well we are still in the process of the assessing piece and helping teachers who are doing their own assessments this year the teaching assistants have been supporting in the classrooms to allow the teachers the ability to complete the common assessments themselves to also be learning to analyze the data so i feel like it's really going well we'll be starting really regular interventions in the coming week or two so i think it's going well great thank you very much sure yeah look ben go ahead um just an additional piece of the training one of the things about this model that excites me is that we have somebody whose job is to support those tas but under the old model we had that reading specialist we had two

031tas but all three of them had full intervention loads so nobody there's no time card that carved out in anybody's schedule to provide that training and with this new system we have somebody whose job it is to just support those support those tas and make sure the system gets up and running and if there are bumps in the road we have somebody who is here to help smooth those out thank you eric did you have something further i i actually just wanted to recognize rebecca butler she's probably the most unknown person here this evening she is our part-time interim principal over at the cutler and really um has been driving this work you know i was at two of the elementary schools today and we started you know looking and talking looking at things that

032were going on and talk to people and it's obvious that there is a lot of alignment going on when you're talking to elementary teachers and they're able to now have discussions about things like like the dibbles assessment where rebecca and her team and the coaches that we put into place are now taking the opportunity to make sure that everybody's on the same page which i don't think has has been as crisp in the past and and that's one of the things that uh is impressive where we've taken that time to ramp this up so that everybody has a good idea of what they're doing and why they're doing it and and that certainly you know points to that team the work that that team's done to just get all these pieces in place thank you

033um what did i say one more thing just along what eric is saying you know i've worked as a special education teacher in this district for 23 years and so i feel really so good about the direction we're heading in because we are really developing a comprehensive system to support all learners from pre-k to grade five in developing their reading skills and so the mtss work is really i think we're going to have a nice continuum we're really getting there so it feels good from a special ed regular ed point of view thank you and i i i was just going to say my questions all i am impressed with the committee we all of my questions got answered and i see jen has another one go ahead yeah um so part of this mtss

034was to develop assessments so that we can measure baseline and moving forward make sure that bait that this program is working but i don't see that in these goals anywhere i think it was some of the action items yeah yeah assess and document the current state oh that was the student right that's curriculum and resources but not an assessment would be a resource eric do they have the the detailed document the grid document the blue document because it's in there okay no they have this okay um yes there's a there's a more nuanced version of this with who's responsible you know for each step um and the assessment is 100 a piece of that i just want to make sure it's not getting lost it's all linked to with us um and making sure that

035we have the same assessment across all grade levels so that we can really track those kids from year to year we're using the dibbles eight which is a nationally normed assessment thank you dana uh anna i can't read that one the first one i could read i can't read that one um i guess kind of related to jen you know i understand that this is a new model and it's you know october 7th so it's not like we've really had a lot of time to determine it um it sounds like what you're describing it sounds like it feels better to teachers would you think that that's an accurate statement the model makes them feel more supported yes i'm going to say that we're five weeks in um you know one of the things that that

036that is tricky right now is that we we it still feels like we're in this we're still in a pandemic and i think we wanted to come back in september and feel like things were back to normal and they're not um and there is this and we've talked about it leadership that there's this this this sense of i don't know if panic is the right word um but we're still in that like go go go mode and not being able to slow down um so you know we do have more folks that are able to support teacher teachers right now with those assessments it's been great to be able to have the coaches and the tas to be able to go into classrooms and in some cases give those assessments but in a lot of

037cases support the classroom so the teacher can come out and give those assessments so that's been a really supportive piece that when we when those assessments are given there there's the data sheets that come out of them but there's so much more you can learn if you're the one sitting with the kid actually listening to them talk and so trying to create structures where teachers have the time um to do that in the beginning of the year and that's tricky because the kids in the beginning of the year are not um they just they don't have that independence yet um and so making sure there are other bodies to be in the classroom so teachers can really spend that time with those individual kids for those assessments okay um thank you for that so the

038the the reason i framed my first part of the question that way is i like the fact that it sounds like it's feeling better but it seems like that's going to be quite some time before we know whether or not this is actually working right so if we're just developing the assessments now presumably we'll give them we'll get a set of data and then when will we reassess the kids to see is that because i guess my my the gut of my question is when will we know that this new intervention model actually is helping kids learn and read better i feel like that is like a year away or more like when do we actually know if this is actually working um it's not a year away um so there are a couple of

039things so um the big assessments that are given to everybody are done three times a year um so we do that in september early october we do it again um january and february and then again at the end of the year for those students that are identified as being at risk those students who are not where we want them to be that are working with the interventionists that rebecca's training they are continually assessing we're doing six to eight week cycles six weeks um so every six weeks they're being progress monitored to see where they are to double check to make sure that intervention is doing doing what we want it to do do we continue on with the path that we're on or do we make adjustments that they're not making the progress that we're

040looking for so at some point at a later school committee meeting will we get you know some sort of update about you know x percentage of kids were at this level and now six to eight weeks later this percentage is here and out there like i would just it sounds conceptually like everyone's very happy with it but much like dr carr i would love to see it actually track out in real time with students because just feeling better isn't really what we're going for but i appreciate the teachers feel better like i'm actually i'm happy about that it'll be easier to give that update in february after we do those mid-year assessments okay that was my question like when will we know data on everybody okay thank you thank you yeah and i just want

041to clarify that we're not developing new assessments we are using the dibbles and so the rollout has been having the teachers do the dibbles rather than the literacy staff that had done it at least it went through the literacy staff had done it in the past so the assessments were already created and we're just in the assessment stage right now and these assessments will be school-wide there's k-5 district all the students okay thank you okay good thank you so much i really appreciate it yeah thank you i like this okay the craig hobby miles river middle school principal all right good evening so at the middle school much like we've talked about i think you're going to hear this throughout all the presentations is we've really tried hard to align the school-based goals with the

042district goals we spent quite a bit of time in the spring getting the district goals into decent shape and what we did at the middle school is we tried to break them out a little bit into more manageable sized chunks so you'll see the first three goals relate to just the district goal number two which is the multi-tiered system of supports we broke them down so they were a little easier to understand and follow so our first goal is to reinforce and refine our universal strategies for accessing classroom instruction and the six through eight grade level so prior to covid we at the 6 through 12 level in departments had worked with landmark school on adopting and coming to some shared agreements on some high value strategies and techniques to help all of our students

043not just our language based students which was you know where landmark's expertise is and out of that we came to four d for specific inclusive practices including using the use of word walls um really emphasizing and defining the purpose of the instruction or defining the y uh using two column notes and um giving time cues for where people are in the lesson so to finding the midpoint letting kids know when there is only x amount of time left in the lesson or in a certain activity we were seeing some good progress with that before the pandemic and then you know much like everything else it got paused and we didn't want to lose that because it was such valuable work so one of our goals here was to re reintroduce and recommit to those ingredients

044upon inclusive practices this was also really important because over the last year and a half we've had quite a few new staff join us and we wanted to build that they do look a little bit different by department but that's why and grade level which is why we had those sort of agreements that made the most sense we're going to be monitoring and so we we've met with each department um and sort of reviewed those our curriculum leaders took the lead on that um we've been meeting as an administrative team at the middle and high school weekly with the curriculum leaders to check in on these goals and make sure that there's they've got the support they need and where our sort of next stage is developing we're in the process of developing a monitoring

045tool that we can that's going to be shared amongst curriculum leaders as well as administrators to really get a sense of where the progress is and who needs support in implementing these progress of these uh processes so that's that's sort of the next process and we'll be tying that in with our evaluation supervision cycle sort of starting in november and moving through may to build up that consistency eric the second goal is to complete an audit and action plan for updating our middle school curriculum documents so a few years ago we really started down the journey of documenting all of our curriculum in a ubd or understanding by design template and format the high school work sort of got an accelerated push because of the kneeask timeline our middle school documents are in process and

046in various stages so some departments are looking to be about 100 percent done some we have new units or new programs that are requiring additional work so by october 15th which was our district goal we're going to have an audit of those curriculum documents saying this is where we are and we're going to work we'll be working on them throughout the year as well as putting together some action steps for those that need additional time in the summer or beyond curriculum documents are never done you know it's like changing the oil on your car you get a certain distance and then you got to make sure you change the oil otherwise they're going to break down so this will be ongoing work you know at infinitum it i don't know that my latin is very

047good but you know what i mean um next slide please and goal three is really taking a look at our mtss supports and systems at the school the multi-tiered systems of supports and assessing our needs for grades six through eight so we are we've done a little bit of work in our professional development time taking a look at some of the things that we have in place our ist or instructional support team process the district curriculum accommodation plan the dcap sort of revisiting here are some of the things that are in place we're going to be starting the work with george and judy and eric can you refresh my my memory on the organization they're from mtss innovations okay mtss innovations thank you they've been doing a lot of work with the elementary school we're

048going to be we're in the process of meeting with them and really formulating a plan to work with middle school staff in the next coming months so looking at what do we have for our tier one two and three supports you know ben mentioned that we have pockets of excellence we have some great stuff going on at the middle school but we want to make sure that it's system wide evaluating our current instructional support team process and how can we improve that that's where we take a look at students who are struggling academically behaviorally emotionally and pull the team together to identify what supports they might need and how we can implement those and then we are also in the process of completing our year three of uh pbis implementation or positive behavior interventional supports

049um what the organization new england pbis that we've worked with has sort of paused everything last year as well and has given us an additional year this year to work with them we're noticing that as students are coming back into the school you know many of our seventh graders didn't have the same transition that we typically have sixth graders are new to the building and haven't necessarily been in a school building for a while so you know overall kids are being wonderful but we just want to re-revisit and reinvigorate those common expectations across the board particularly in the non-structured classroom setting so hallways launch recess etc next slide all right goal number four is to identify a high quality sustainable design for world language and instruction i narrowed the range a little bit for us

050here at the middle school just to six through eight this is more of a district-wide discussion in conversation but i my my main focus is here so one of the things that uh shifted with eric's uh move up to superintendent uh which is this is something he was going to lead is uh brian mannigoni and i are now co-chairing this advisory council um which we're very excited about and um we put out a call to families um for people who may have been maybe interested in joining us we were looking for a nice balance of families at the middle and high school and who have had experiences with both language and we wanted also to get some voices from the elementary level from families we also have uh teachers in both mandarin and spanish at

051the middle school and high school level as well as kevin sano our current curriculum leader and a few high school students are joining us so we have our first meeting next week to discuss our action steps and what we're going to do to get a some findings and recommendations to you by november 30th so that we can tie that into the budget process some of the things that we will be doing is looking at sort of the history of our world language program i know you've heard some things about that in the past as well as what are other districts doing and where they found successes and surveying families students and staff for their you know what are they looking for in the district so we hope to collect an enormous amount of data and

052process it and provide you with some findings and one more slot and then our fifth goal is sort of intentionally vague here i didn't have many details when these goals were written our our sort of partnership with equity partners developed during this process but largely we're going to work as a school in concert with the district work on programming reviews through the lens of diversity equity and inclusion so the i know the district dei committee has been established we are going to be having a sort of joint meeting with the district leadership team in the the dei committee i want to say that's coming up pretty soon in the next week or so so that we're all on the same page with that we are also going to tie in our work with the district

053professional development committee to make sure that we are providing adequate time and space for the professional development that might need to be done some of that may get fleshed out a little bit more as that process unfolds so we will be working in concert and you know our sort of next steps will be identified um by what is found in that audit in that professional development process thank you i'll pause and and take any questions or thoughts that you might have okay questions from the committee anna thank you mr heavy it was really good helpful overview i have two questions about the world language council and the sort of the dei committee and the dei committee is sort of this is more of a district rule but i've heard from a few parents that really

054wanted to be part of those groups that were not selected because the space was limited um i shared with superintendent tracy that that was sort of a little bit disappointing because i think people had the expectation that anyone who wanted to participate would be able to participate so i just wanted to make sure that you and everyone who was really working actively on this were aware that there's a little bit of a negative feeling of people who wanted to contribute that were not allowed and i think there should be some sensitivity there um so i guess my question is when you're looking at that world language redesign this is sort of a question and or request is is there some awareness that we could do something radically different that comes out of that process because

055i know that we've sort of his we have the historical legacy which is helpful we have examples from other districts but is part of that process going to be a real sort of table clearing moment of saying what what do we want to do as a district with language and is that on the radar or is it still sort of within the confines of historically we've done this and this is the usual way i'm just curious to know what the mentality is of that um language council moving forward so so part of that process is we're going to be reaching out to to all of our stakeholders and getting that information i did get an email from a from a parent who wanted to you know express that they would like to have been on

056the community i think we're probably at 15 or 16 people on that group already so in the interest of moving in a timely manner we tried to keep the numbers fairly low um or around 16. i what i expressed to that parent and you know i've certainly expressed to any other parents is if if after you've gotten our survey there is more that you want to share send me an email you know and i can we can incorporate that into your findings or i'm happy to have a phone call as well okay so um as far as table clearing we haven't quite hit that stage yet so we haven't had any conversations with the group um brian and i are in the planning process on that okay thank you other questions are middle school students

057part of this dei group because it seems like that's when a lot of this at least for with my daughter that's that's when she started talking about differences in gender and pronouns was in middle school and i hope that those kids have some input into this process we don't have a formal middle school presence on any i'm not on the actual district dei committee um i don't know if there are high school students on there i don't know if anybody can add that there are the ui committee yes okay what i would imagine is part of this process and what may come out of the audit and i'm just guessing and speculating here is having some local you know school-based organizations where students and staff will have a particular voice in the process so that

058that may be a next step on this is how do we form maybe a locally based committee i want to see the process unfold before we go too far down that path thank you other questions i had a quick question could you just say a little bit more about the i think it was the behavioral the pbis it was the behavioral so you said it was year three and and i understood it got put on hold i just i didn't know a lot about that so if you could just so one several years ago we were having some behavioral challenges at the middle school and one of the things that we were noticing we needed to work on was consistency um consistency in expectations and and sort of um how do we educate students on

059what is what are we looking for you know how do we provide modeling how do we sort of show them what we want them to do rather than just you know telling them that they're not doing it right so we worked with our staff we created a school-based pbis group that received quite a bit of training we set some common expectations and values for the school the staff have done a pretty good job of keeping actually a really good job of keeping that consistent we need to reinvigorate that piece because again with covid it all fell apart and expectations and behaviors all changed when you've got masks on or half the kids are in the school or we're not in school at all so we're going to be working on just sort of revisiting and

060solidifying that um we have liz lovell and one of our teachers uh chrissy delima are co-chairing that group and have really done a nice job spearheading that great thank you okay thank you very much i appreciate it thank you mr manigoni high school high school interim principal i did what he did the other day in a meeting he called himself the assistant principal i almost just did it again nice time that's all right uh so good evening everyone and i'm here to present our school improvement goals for the 2021-22 school year and they will mirror what you've heard a little bit from craig at the middle school but we do have some high school specific goals as well the first goal that we have is by the end of the year we would like to

061design a multi-tiered system of support for the high school level and it's going to look a little bit different with the older kids certainly but the basics are still the same in terms of offering tier 1 2 and 3 supports the action steps that we're taking we have already reintroduced our inclusive practices that craig spoke about they're the same practices between the middle and high school because we did that as a 6-12 endeavor a few years ago after we or at the same time that we have been reintroducing these inclusive practices in the classroom we're continuing the audit of our curriculum to make sure the documents are complete and this will link to a couple of other goals and i included this in there because one of the most important parts of mtss is tier

062one and having a well articulated curriculum that identifies the supports that are available to all students so we feel in order to build a robust mtss structure you want to have a strong foundation and that starts with the curriculum and knowing the roadmap for where the kids are going to go and how you are going to help all students get there we're going to begin in about another month or so monitoring the use of inclusive practices so we can collect data and see how those tier one supports are being used throughout all of our different classrooms so we are going to begin first of all the development of an instrument that allows us to go into classes and just see how often these different practices are being put to use i would say probably by

063the middle of second quarter through the end of or to the middle of third quarter or so so you're looking about mid december to probably early march or so really completing an audit all the support structures that we have available to students in the high school we have quite a wide array but what we would really like to do is curate those organize them and then we can start to sort some of those into the different tiers of support and finally by the end of the year complete the design of the mtss structure and i heard a question before and i thought it was a great one how do we introduce data into this how do we know where kids need to go how can they move from one tier to the next because you

064don't want a kid sitting in a tier 2 support all year long because then it's probably not working so i think that's where the consultants are going to come in and really help us with that designing data structures for high school can be very challenging because kids have six or seven different classes and we have young adults who a lot of times can sort of be resistant uh to that support so i think we're going to lean on the consultant quite a bit to help us with how to track that data because like i said kids with seven different classes different teachers that can be one of the biggest challenges i think at the high school level in terms of mtss okay uh this is a high school specific thing in our schedule this happens

065about every five or six years in high schools uh this is my 12th year i've seen two different schedules so we're due for maybe a revisit of the block schedule that we use during the school day so we've already established a committee who is going to look at this we have two high school teachers one of them is in the audience mr beckwith is in the back uh he and cecilia pernice mr beckwith is a math teacher sale bernice is a science teacher they're leading the committee which is made of other teachers curriculum leaders students i don't know if we have parents on it mr beckwith yeah we have a parent there just to get a lot of stakeholder feedback in terms of what the high school block schedule actually look like looks like and

066the way these processes usually go is you just collect lots of information from all over the place what are different high school schedules that you could use what are our needs specifically from a curriculum standpoint also looking back what i just talked about with the mtss because one of the things that mtss says is that if you want to help kids you really need to do it during the school day so the high school schedule that we develop needs to be done with that in mind any of the support structures that we want to offer really should be around between 7 40 and 2 20. you also need to pay close attention to the constraints of various bargaining agreements to make sure that whatever schedules are out there are going to work with that the

067committee's job is to really put together three scheduled possibilities that could be considered gather feedback on these possibilities from stakeholders and then make a recommendation and the the timeline for this this really needs to be done by march because the the block schedule actually does impact our overall scheduling process um in terms of what classes kids will choose and what they'll actually get into and you know ultimately um as somebody who's made the schedule for a number of years now my my most important driver i think is can we get the kids the classes that will best prepare them for their future for what they've identified for themselves so it's complicated but like i said this is work that's done probably every five or six years in just about every high school and also with

068the mtss goal i think it's a it's an important important task to take on goal three this is increased staff knowledge about di and its impact upon the experiences of our students and i i want to highlight that last part of the statement because i think that's one of the most important things to recognize is that as we work with our students understanding background and experience of our students is really important in terms of how we establish relationships and what experiences we're going to offer them and how we can move them towards their future and this is coming right out of the the district goal and i did not provide a lot of specifics there because i i'm excited to see what the audit is able to teach us what directions it can have us

069look in and suggesting future action um really throughout the year um at least once a month faculty and staff will be participating in dei specific trainings and ultimately at the end of the year we're going to ask our high school faculty to reflect upon what is it that they've learned about this both through perhaps working with the audit when the audit comes out what the audit says but just in our experiences together on the monthly trainings what what value have they taken in through this tei work the nice thing about i think the high school level is that we have student groups who are able to help drive a lot of this work and contribute meaningfully to it so that's an exciting part of this work and because we are a high school our friends

070at niask will be coming back again this year and this is another one of our goals so we do need to complete the requirements for this spring visit that will be happening the biggest thing that we need to attend to is our curriculum that was the top priority area of the visit that took place in 2019 and the nice thing about this is that ties in very tightly with the mtss work that we have to do niask identified this as an area in 2019 we're engaging in the important mtss work in 2021 uh so it's good to know um that there's real meaning behind what niask asks us to ask us to do it's not just to get it done but it's so that we can provide a very enriching experience and supportive experience for

071all of our students we also need to develop an action plan for completing the documentation of the curriculum because when you do the audit you're not going to you're going to find that there are some some areas that need to be filled in so the next step is going to be an action plan of actually identifying how we're going to get to that end product and we're working right now with the curriculum leaders in terms of finalizing the audit but also beginning that action plan based upon the data that we have retrieved out of the audi audit and finally there are some other requirements that were outlined in the knee ask report specifically i can just talk about them quickly here the vision of the graduate was one thing that they brought up which is

072nice because we're engaging in that right now curriculum documentation was one uh social emotional learning which is very important everyone has recognized uh the need for that they in the last niask report called for us to connect students to adults which we actually have already done through our advisory program so we had that last year i think it was very necessary last year but certainly this year as we can continue those relationships that we already established on the final priority area from neask was facilities and that could be tied to some of the district work that we already have to do anyways this is a personal interest to me i guess but maybe to other people in the room as well increasing the proportion of students from miles river who attend the high school i

073mean this the last two years have been a wake-up call just because of the pandemic and some of the shifts that have occurred typically will have there will be about 12 of the kids from miles river who will not attend the high school the last two years it's been in double that and i think it's it's pretty safe to say that the pandemic has had a significant impact upon that but at the same time i'm wondering can we think more entrepreneurially about how we present ourselves how we promote ourselves uh to the students and to the parents that are coming up so what we've already done is to look at the withdrawal data over the last five years of kids who just have chosen not to come interviewing some of the families who have chosen

074not to come just to get an idea of what really drove their decisions we are currently in the process of curating um our transition information and by that i mean what are all the things that we do at the high school to help eighth graders get ready for high school but also to begin their four-year journey with us we also we have a ninth grade teaching team in place that meets regularly right now to talk about ninth grade students and how they're doing later in the year we would like to connect that ninth grade team with our eighth grade students to start to build those relationships really cool thing that we have our ninth graders have one guidance counselor matt fitzgibbons and so he gets to know all the freshmen he actually leads this ninth

075grade team but he has already also begun the process of meeting with eighth graders so that bridge between eighth grade and ninth grade actually started at the beginning of the year and i think that's going to be an important driver in terms of keeping some kids here sharing extracurricular opportunities with eighth graders i think is important because that that does drive some kids to different places what's available to them after 2 20. and then finally at the end of this just really tracking the data to see how this shakes out do our efforts pay off in terms of getting more kids to make the decision to come to the high school questions from anyone thank you questions from the committee michelle bailey i have a question about the schedule so how will you ensure that

076the new schedules provide equal access to the curriculum for all students so that's a good question um and there i guess i might ask for a little elaboration but in a minute you know one one thing that we would have to uh make sure um in addition to meeting the stipulations of the bargaining agreements is how does this work with students on ieps does it allow them to get the services that they need so that's one way i would answer that access question do you want to maybe expand upon your question a little bit in terms of access i guess that was basically my question because during the last schedule it took a complaint to the state to get the high school to agree to make sure that all students had access to the curriculum

077so yeah so i think that learning out of that experience just you know you have to make sure that students iep services don't impinge upon their ability to experience all the offerings of the high school you know any sorts of individual decisions need to be worked out with the family liaison and the student as well and then i had a different question on the last goal and um other than just satisfying curiosity how how would you determine that goal five was a priority and then how will gathering this information benefit our students in terms of what i'm sorry how did you determine for goal five that it was sort of a priority and also when we gather that information how will it benefit our students uh the last goal about keeping students in the high

078school yeah okay um so just looking at you know a quarter of the students not coming to the high school i think that it just hit that threshold of like wow that's a lot but also that was double what we would normally expect and i just think the confluence of that made me wake up a little bit and it you as you reflect too it's like what have we ever really done super proactively to help keep our kids here i mean private schools will have open houses at night at some point coming up to invite parents in you know your kids come into high school see what we have to offer there's no reason why we can't do something like that so i think that i just the what's happened in the past two years

079related to the pandemic really kind of made me think a little bit about things like that anna my question is about goal number five as well think it's fascinating that there's been that much of a jump and i do think the pandemic has something to do with it but it's amazing to hear us talking about the language of needing to promote or be entrepreneurial about our high school because on first blush those are not words that you would think we would have to market our high school but clearly clearly something there is a disconnect not for everyone but a significant number of students so i'm actually really interested in some of these answers sooner than later because i feel like it does tie to you know the the budgetary goals and the facilities goals and

080the course curriculum goals and if you get feedback from parents that well the facilities are falling apart and i want my kid to have a better athletic experience well that's a major thing if it's that there are more in-person ap classes that somebody wants to take i mean those are all things that i feel like could really inform our budget process but actually i'm this one is really worrisome to me because it affects enrollment it affects funding and it's strange to me to think that our high school would have to sort of try to it reveals to me that perhaps we're not as competitive as we ought to be given the amount of resource that we give to them so i would be really interested to know when when when do you think you'll have

081some of that analysis done i'd like to come back to this before budget season i guess is what i'm really saying so i guess maybe you're asking about that second arrow that's up there maybe is that a little bit i mean and where they're going and why yeah i think that second arrow would be good to do you know that's probably a mid-october to mid-november thing because when we're looking at you know perhaps having a an open house type of thing um you know that might be an early december type of move so you know getting something in getting some answers you know mid-october to early mid-november to help inform what an open house would look like i guess that that in my mind right now sitting up here at the podium is kind of

082how i would answer that and we'll have the enrollment data it was due on october 1st i guess this is a vinnie superintendent tracy question but will we get the enrollment report at the october 21st meeting no we have it on november 5th i believe we're going to get that on the november 4th meeting i think that's when we have it yeah the data actually start is the data collection starts october 1 but goes all the way till i think october 23rd okay then they finalize the data then and then once we put it together yeah i think we have it on the november 5th okay um meeting november third meeting sorry it's third or fifth i think it's the fourth oh yeah okay thank you thank you for putting this one on i'm i

083think i think you've i think you're on to something and i want to know what the answer is so thank you for putting it there welcome okay uh julia um it's not really a question it's more of a comment on goal three um under action steps i think it's the only goal that doesn't have develop an action plan so i think i mean it might be implied but i think it should be spelled out that there will be some kind of fun some action plan that comes from the audit or comes from the committee recommendations correct just all the other goals had develop action yeah so i think i probably left that off i'm still i'm really curious like what the audit's gonna yeah you know what direction it will point us and what steps

084we should take i speak to that as well sure eric thank you so also keep in mind that there are two committees that will integrate as we go through this process there's the dei group then there's also the professional development committee so they're they're meeting i believe next week to be able to pull kind of okay here's what we have to work with here's here are the offerings that are going to be available through the consultants and then share it with them so they're still a little vague because they haven't seen kind of the whole picture and what what our teams are are hoping to do is lay out the whole year so the professional development committee met in the summer twice and during those meetings we just laid out a rough kind of here's

085where dei can fit in on our wednesday trainings they'll now refine that and and pull some of that around and about it so it'll fit basically what this consultant and the dei group are have worked out there's quite a bit coming our way great yeah um jen did you have a question no chris oh yeah i have a question um make sure you lean into the mic yeah being a three sport athlete i think we see a big trend with students not coming for sports facilities i know this year there was only two freshmen who went on the football team this year and usually we get about like 15 or 17 and i think students are going to schools who can offer more for the team so i know budget is a big problem and

086it's hard to get that funding but i feel like if we get more funding especially for these facilities and stuff like that it'll introduce a lot of more students i feel like okay brian i don't know if you i was that really sounds like a little bit lit to um the response that you had about it interviewing families about it possibly of their own facilities correct i mean looking at what drove the families to to make their decisions and that that may be some of certainly what they highlight i mean it wouldn't be a surprise but hearing it from people that we know i think can and can really influence our future actions great thank you um okay do we have other questions thank you very much thank you um i guess i'll just add

087my cue thanks thanks all of you thank you thank you everyone and i just wanted to add i on it just an observation i was really heartened to hear how many times this group used the word relationship and relationship building um especially after the year that we've had that really seems essential and it really was something i heard throughout everything you all said about building those strong relationships it's encouraging thank you okay uh i believe this is vinnie our next is that right oh no i'm skipped oh sorry i skipped right over sorry um is it brian it's you again with the high school handbook come on all set all right so i'm just here to update uh the committee on the status of the high school student handbook so you can go ahead mr

088tracy and here's the timeline as i understand it the high school school council approved the student handbook for the current school year on august 12th and then on august 19th the student handbook was approved at the school committee level pending some changes proposed by the school committee we then met as a high school school council on september 21st to consider the changes and then the school council approved the changes as presented by the principal on september 21st so that's just a timeline to give you an idea of uh how i understand the handbook to have moved to its current status all right and so the categories of changes now as i reviewed the handbook and some of the comments that were made and places to look i put i lump them into three categories i

089called it mechanical i really couldn't come up with a better word so i apologize for that language policy alignment and then school level policies so i'll first go through some of just the mechanical stuff as i understood it and these these seem to be some simple editing changes that could be made so these are the things that i showed to the school council on september 21st there was a portion in the handbook where it talked about graduation requirements and some of the electives are described and then it gets to a point where it just kind of says okay you need to take one of this or that and really didn't describe what this or that was and so it comes from the fine art fine or applied arts or technology area so i just added

090that description in to the graduation requirements then there was another spot that deserves some attention in terms of plagiarism and to sharpening what that actually means and you can see the definition up there but really the addition has to do at the end there without proper citation just to make sure that uh kids know that yes you are going to find things in different places you're going to use sources but you need to cite them appropriately there was a redundancy in the bullying procedure as described on page 29 that i think was really just a editing issue and after some of these changes are made and you refresh just make sure the table of contents is in good working order in other words when you click on something does it actually go to that place

091so i checked it probably 50 times and hopefully um i don't have to do it 51. okay this is where i i got um i slowed down a little bit i think because i'm just looking for language and policy alignment in other words the language that's in the handbook verse versus the policies that we have as a school district and making sure that they align um the way that we want them to is the language in the handbook correct or even you know is the language and the policy exactly where we want it the non-discrimination statement in the body of the handbook as it reads um you know it came from i believe a desc review a few years ago was provided by some attorneys who looked at it and it starts with all students

092regardless of race color sex religion national origin sexual orientation gender gender identity disability or homelessness and you see this throughout the the body of the handbook as you're reading through the different sections that phrase is embedded in the different parts of the handbook but what i did notice is that that statement doesn't always appear it didn't look like it shows up necessarily in our policies or in just different places in the handbook so i'm just trying to figure out um you know really what what should be there um you know should we be looking right at the policy to determine what our non-discrimination statement is or is that non-discrimination statement that's there is that more inclusive than what our policy is so i'm kind of i think i'm looking to the committee for a little

093bit of guidance on that so i mean i'm not going to we're not going to read this together as a group you guys read the policies as a school committee but i put them in here uh if the public is going through this um just in terms of the different non-discrimination policies as i could see them especially with the looks like the revamped identification of the policies beginning with a whereas ac appears to be our district non-discrimination statement but when i held that up against the one that i had showed previously that appears in the body of the handbook policy ac does not appear to use the word gender and i the word homelessness does not appear in there as well um so i was just trying to trying to figure that out like how

094we want to handle that then i put i just put the rest of the the non-discrimination policies in there for a matter of process here so mr tracy if you want to keep scrolling up aca i believe was title ix acab talks about harassment which has not all of the same classes that we would necessarily have identified in policy ac or in the non-discrimination statement then finally policy ace just has to do with the americans with disabilities act so it's more specific i guess um you can keep going up mr tracy so i can maybe illustrate this um for example in appendix b um which isn't necessarily a district policy but it might be a district practice it talks about how to handle discrimination and harassment complaints and it mentions race color national origin sex

095disability or age but when you look at our harassment policy it names race sex gender identity creed collar national origin sexual orientation religion marital status or disability so i and i just found a discrepancy there and i didn't know if that's something that we needed to handle here um but also in appendix e which i believe has to do with pregnant students it um it talks about the hamilton wenham regional school district does not discriminate against students by reason of their sex um however uh the the non-discrimination policy notes race color sex gender identity religion national origin sexual orientation disability pregnancy or pregnancy related condition so again i didn't know if you should be moving some of the language around just make sure it's really consistent and i did you know i didn't know if

096the committee wanted to adopt like the most inclusive possible non-discrimination statement and that's what we do so that way we see it all throughout the handbook and it can really be used interchangeably in as many different situations as possible because i just feel like it's it's hard for anybody to like make sure these things line up all over the place i mean we understand the spirit of it but if if we're looking for detail and and strong alignment it may be work that still needs to happen here a little bit even at the committee level school committee level okay so that's the policy part um school level stuff here graduation attire you know the way this the handbook reads it talks about you know having some sort of a vote student input on this um

097you know maybe a suggestion was made that perhaps we don't do that because it could certainly lead to some uncomfortable situations for students you know my recommendation is that we just keep student input as an important part of this recognizing that they are young adults they're they're the ones that have to wear the graduation attire for a couple of different ceremonies but i understand the spirit of it i guess and we definitely have moved past the handbook language of boys will wear blue and girls will wear white that's not anything that we should even be considering you know i did meet with the senior class officers today and some of this is a timing issue we just we did our class elections this week so finally we have our student leadership structure finalized for the

098year so we have our senior class officers they are the individuals who are going to be doing a lot of work this year making sure graduation gets off the ground so now that they are in place we can work on some of this kind of stuff you know i i put forth my my feeling is that you know we're one team or one family or one group we need to consider that as we walk across the stage and what we look like that's my own personal feeling you know the students haven't weighed in on it yet but that's i just let them know what my thoughts were on that uh drug and alcohol consequences i know that there was some discussion about perhaps removing suspension or expulsion as a possibility at least on the first

099offense in reviewing the handbooks for all of the cape and league schools suspension and or expulsion was always a possible consequence and my feeling and what i recommended to school counsel is that we you know we keep the current language in place as enumerated in law and in our handbook but with the important point that the principal or or deciding administrator exercise discretion because we are dealing with young adults who do make sometimes not the best decisions in the world and we need to be measured in terms of what actually happened the age of the student how many times something has happened but i have worked in enough different places to know that every once in a while something really does cross the line and you you do need to draw that at some point

100you know at this but at the same time and i still want to bring it back to the fact that i think that we've always handled this type of stuff pretty delicately provided families with support and really worked with both the kids and the adults in a manner that that shows that yeah you made a mistake but you're still one of ours and and we're going to help you get back into school once you've been able to work with your parents and kind of figure things out on your end a little bit so future work you know and i want to point this out because um you know it's october and you know we're talking about a handbook that we're already may have to look at tomorrow if something crazy happens we want to make

101sure that we have our student handbook really in place for the very start of the school year so how should this look i would like to begin by eliciting faculty and student input through our various leadership structures in the high school we have student government we have class officers we also have a building leadership team which is composed of teachers teaching assistants administrative office staff who can provide feedback on the handbook any changes that may need to be made so then we can kick it to the school council in the spring like we're supposed to i guess as it calls for in the law that way you can bring it to the committee in a timely manner so that it can be approved before we leave for the summer because one thing that would be

102nice to do in the summer is formatting the handbook and just making it look like a more finished product and that's a great summertime project you can sit on the beach and do that you can sit in your backyard and do that kind of work but the real substance of it really has to start in the winter time and because high schools really get busy and things go crazy after april vacation we want to make sure we have most of that stuff wrapped up before then so that's that's where we're at with the handbook right now okay um do we want to pull up the second exhibit there okay questions i think we'll have the exhibit up but um go ahead julia is there a reason we can't just have the discrimination policy written once

103and then just cite it the rest of the time just say as written in the discrimination policy so that the ac policy that was up there i mean if it's just written once and then cited as per the district's discrimination and harassment policy so the the point i was raising i guess is that when i looked at the wording of the the non-discrimination statement i won't call it the policy the statement it uses the words i think maybe it's if it's gender and then homelessness are additions i don't think we have that in our non-discrimination policy per se so i don't know if that's an addition that you would like to make i can clarify this uh it's been an interesting road we've been going back and forth and kind of digging into this and

104we are um actually we have the good fortune of being under review by the state right now and part of that is that tiered system they look at all of the things uh related to civil rights and and discrimination and things like that they took a look at the policy that um excuse me the language that brian initially had put up and said here's what we are recommending we add homelessness we've always added homelessness in our district and that's was fine with with the department of education so that that's the most recent uptake procedurally this body will need to go back and update our policies that were just recently approved i think could last may and and change that language i think i think i think antacids that came up with you know one of

105the one of the policies is totally different than any language we have um so what i asked brian to do was look for all the times that this occurs throughout the entire handbook change what is not directly related to school committee policy and now we're asking that this body comes back and just reviews and updates those policies and then we'll do the same with the with the updated handbook and that way everybody's on the same page procedurally i think everybody will be will be comfortable with that and and i feel a lot more comfortable that we happen to be able to a week and a half ago get the support of destiny to say here's the statement and it's okay to add homelessness um yeah well uh go ahead anna are you going to respond

106to that on that yeah no i just want to i wanted to say a couple things the first one is i feel seen and validated because i've been banging on that particular drum for the last two years saying like these protected classes are all over the place so it's nice to actually have somebody else have gone into the madness a little bit and say yes they are all over the place i think what superintendent tracy is talking about does make sense i think um the only the only issue and i think michelle can probably help um answer some of this too the a batch of policies that were officially adopted in may i think actually were last looked at in the policy subcommittee it must have been two years ago a year and a half

107ago because when i started on policy we were at i so i'm not even sure when a was would it have been like how many years ago was a approved inform probably when i wasn't on it it was a couple years ago so what was that three years ago probably about three years ago okay so i think i think then what you're proposing doesn't take a long time yeah that process of reviewing the policies was supposed to take like a year or a year and a half and it's taken a long time so and we're not even actually done yet so i think um we do have policy subcommittee meeting coming up and i think that what would make some sense is to sort of take take what principal matagonia sort of identified and look

108at those and try to find that but i think if we do that then we would have to go back and redo you know ac aca a c a b like all of those policies we'd have to swap out the protected classes for this new language and then reapprove them again which i think some of it's just that this process as michelle said i mean it's it's taken however many years and i'm not even sure that this was something that's being tracked as a problem so i think we could add that to the policy subcommittee's agenda um how urgently do we need to sort of have that aligned would you want it aligned before next year's handbook is approved yep go ahead i think that makes sense i mean given given that the process is

109really pretty well laid out right now it's really a replacement and bring it back for the readings um so if we can do that over the next eight months through the policy committee i think if it pleases the committee i can just make a recommendation based on the research that brian's done say these are the policies here's the area to look at so that we can focus right in on that okay i could put that on the agenda for policy on the 25th i do have a couple other questions for brian but i don't know if other people have questions about that issue uh okay i'm gonna just i did david did you have a question nope i'm gonna let jen ask a question then we'll come back hannah go ahead jen so my question

110is about the drug and alcohol policy because this is kind of a hot button for me yeah based on your policy in the student handbook you have two tools to use you can suspend a student correct or you can expel a suit you can't do anything else so if somebody's dad left a case of beer in the back seat of somebody's car and the student didn't notice it that student the only thing you can do is suspend or expel even though it's not the student's fault the dad forgot the material in the backseat of the car i just i think the policy is written is a not reflective of what actually happens and b doesn't give you enough options to react depending on the situation i guess you basically have two yeah i guess i

111i have a different reading of it um i read it as first of all i look at just about everything that's written in the handbook as a ceiling this is as far as you can go so that's how i read it and there there may be cases where um an exclusion from school is appropriate um however i believe the language does not say will be suspended anywhere it did three years ago used to read will receive a 10 day out of school suspension and that has been removed well it says after hearing a principal may in his discretion and that should be his or her discretion decide to suspend rather than expel a student so those are your two options based on what's right i guess i i read it and operate as may decide

112to but i that the may decide to suspend could be different um can we change it then so it says may instead of will yeah i'd have to look specifically at that and think about that i guess but i mean i just would like the policy itself a i think it's incredibly punitive punitive as written but b i think it should reflect what our students are actually going to experience if they screw up yeah and i don't think based on what we've talked about with superintendent tracy and what you've said that students are either suspended or expelled i think it's more nuanced than that and i think the handbook should reflect that yeah i would say to that if a student is caught on campus with one of the identified substances suspension generally is what

113happens however the duration of that suspension or the location of that suspension is where the discretion comes in the other side of this which may be something that as i'm hearing you that probably could be added in there would be at least putting it in the language because it is what happens in practice is having the school the students come back into school through our return to learn program the rise program the nice thing about that is that when students do come back from a suspension there is a counselor and an academic advisor in the program who can obviously help with the social emotional readjustment school but also help them manage the academic side of it as an aside you know being suspended from school is a big deal i think kids here want to

114be in school they care about how they do and ultimately everyone finds out that that's what happened i mean just the way things work but it's 2021 so before you know in 1990 if you were suspended from school you probably weren't doing a lot at home now we tell kids okay if you are serving an out of school suspension you can email your teachers they can email you you can email your counselor they can email email you you have access to everything through classroom you just can't come on campus if you're serving an out of school suspension an in-school suspension just to sort of help everybody understand that the kid is actually in the building teachers will come down and meet with them counselors we'll meet with them so sometimes we will use that you

115know in combination like you may need to spend a couple of days out of school you and your family working together to get some things in order you come back into school um to serve the remainder of the suspension and then the rise program is also there to help you so maybe if it was that something that you feel would be beneficial to add to that language perhaps i absolutely think that would be great i think it would indicate that this is not like smacked upside the head with a baseball bat because you made them yeah right um so i think that's a point we'll take him um eric did you have something to add i just just want to clarify the there's a state legal requirement to include the language of the law of

116chapter 71 37 8 and 37 8 and a half and that's pretty explicit about not only what occurs but the process as well it's a pretty detailed process you really can't eject a kid until you notify them of their right to a hearing notify their parents of a right to a hearing and that whole entire legal garb if you will that whole all that language is required to be in student handbooks by state law so you can see parts of it up here on the screen and it does say may um in in two sections of that i think you're more looking towards what's written about in the school procedure yeah you know that's that's the piece we can we can adjust yeah i would just like the school procedure to reflect what's actually happening

117not what you know yeah there's also a secondary piece that integrates with this the special ed portion of it that really requires us to take an extra look at the student special ed status number of days they've been out of school there's a whole separate process manifestation determination that that comes into play during during this process so suspensions aren't like they were maybe when most of us were in high school where you were just out and forgotten if you look at our record we rarely suspend kids for long terms and there's not a whole ton of suspensions racked up at the high school it's more there's been much more discretion especially with the the addition of the rise program and that return to learn and our school councils are really good at connecting with families

118and kids during those those times yeah i just think it would be great if the written policy reflected everything that both of you just said because i think that's what's missing um anna thank you i have uh three questions one of them is just a procedural sort of point of order i'm trying to remember if we actually voted on this and approved it or did we say come back to us and we'll vote again or did we take a vote when it was first presented i don't actually remember which way we went we voted on it anna we did we did so that we were able to start the year with a handbook okay i just wanted to clarify that so um i have two sort of uh follow-up questions one is similar to sorry

119no i was just gonna say eric put up the original motion there your motion amended originally back in august so it's in currently the handbook is in place and this is our opportunity for the secondary review and at the time we proved the changes presented were just discussion of them no you had some questions about periods oh yeah yeah there were some typographical things so i guess so i just want to clarify all of the revisions that have now been made or not made in some cases are for the next round this handbook is is approved it's in place what was i just want to make sure because we approved it with this sort of idea that we want to see changes but those changes are not actually in the handbook officially is that right

120i had to go back and watch the video with this one because i wasn't sure myself so i i um i went back and and we had an initial amendment to approve the handbook you amended it with the language i just had up and then this document the set this exhibit here outlines the requested changes or or discussions that were requested of me at that time during that meeting brian took all of those back to the school council and this outlines their agreement or disagreement but basically this is the point where the handbook would be if we say we'll approve the handbook based on the changes that were presented tonight okay the update will occur now okay so uh thank you for that procedural clarification so i have two comments one of them is sort

121of aligned with what dr carr is saying um i would just say is a point of order we should suspend the him her he has it just say there that way we cover all the bases like i think that should just be general practice i also i understand completely that there's a statutory requirement to have the language there but i agree wholeheartedly i still i don't like the way this reads because it almost reads as though starting with expulsion is the first point and then after some discretion you could choose to suspend i have the exact same read that dr har did which is those are the two options with expulsion being the former which seemed wrong to me so i i still feel like i understand we need to have the legal language and

122i understand that that could be framed as per state law all parents and students should understand that they may be subject to expulsion blah blah blah but i still don't like the fact the first offense starts this way there's still no mention of counseling there's no mention of community service um i think it was actually michelle at one point posted on social media so credit to michelle bailey i think it was the manchester um code of conduct has a whole bunch of language about counseling and therapy and other things she can jump in there if she if she wants so i i actually i still don't even like the way this this reads and um if this were to be presented as is next year like i this is still a no-go for me so

123i just want you to be aware like i want to see an alignment with with practice and policy i think dr carr is totally right that if you soften it you need to put that in there but i still think that our approach is wrong and i understand that we need to have a heavy hammer in some cases and legally we have to disclose that but i don't like the approach here um i think it's way too harsh for first offenders and i think there's no mention of holistic therapy so yeah anna can i just jump in for a second so this may be one of the things where we just expand upon the follow-up in the handbook is that counseling is part of the return from a suspension both in terms of the student

124doing it outside of school um but also when they come back as well i mean so it's it's something that we do in practice but maybe not in terms of how it's actually written in the handbook but could we offer counseling in lieu of suspension not just as a transition mother measure um again i would go back to my review of the cape and league student handbooks and everything's started with some degree of suspension from school and i wouldn't categorize that necessarily as an out-of-school suspension it could it could be an in-school suspension but you know if you're asking me as you know the the administrator at the the high school level i i think if i if a student brings drugs or alcohol to school there's there's got to be a time out here

125and we say well what's going on um and that could occur at home that depends upon the age and the severity and all that kind of stuff but i just think that there needs to be a stop and we we look at you know what does this kid need um and what do we need to do moving forward um so that that's my my personal take on it just just know that you know since eric and i have worked together that that automatic 10-day exclusion from school has been removed and that was literally how it was written is that's a long time for a kid to be out of school for making a mistake yeah all right well i'll look forward to more language discussion that the other thing i did want to come back

126to is the graduation gown thing i guess it just comes down to the fact that i disagree i mean i think that we have an obligation to ensure equity there and we have an obligation to ensure that students don't feel singled out and right now there's they're going to be there's no assurance in the language of the document that a firm students will not feel excluded in some way based on graduation so i understand that students want to have a say and maybe in some ways in other ways can express you know individual preferences they know they decorate mortar boards and all kinds of things but strictly speaking i i i don't like the fact that we're still sort of rolling the dice on this and not mandating that we know that the students are

127going to be treated treated equitably there and will not fall in line along traditional stereotypical bias so again that's a place i would love to see us put that into writing and i'm uncomfortable with the fact that we we are not doing that but i understand that i i might be the one who disagrees so that's okay okay can i ask a follow-up to that my understanding um brian was that um it would not be an option for the class to choose to say that they could not vote to say that boys would wear one color and girls wear a different color that's correct correct but i think anna's point was that if a if a student chose a color what you would normally expect maybe not take all of a sudden it's like whoa

128what's that all about like that's kind of the i think but in other words the choice the that there would no there wouldn't be a gender choice that could be imposed upon the student correct okay just making sure um so i'm not does anyone else have any questions before we not quite sure what we would like what we're looking to do i do want us to remember as a school committee that this handbook is a little bit tricky because it really is the purview of the school council to do the work and they have done a lot of work on this handbook and that our responsibility is to make sure that it aligns properly with our policies um and you know so that's a little bit i'm finding that a little it's a little bit

129of a complicated um to try to tease out who's which where the purview is of each um group oh i do i have one more question actually is the is the handbook reviewed by the dei in the audit will the consultant is that part of it i don't know so i would say yes okay they they'll go down a lot of avenues yeah and i think that those those policies and those ways that we get information to kids and families would be examined see how those impact some of those equity issues that may or may or may not be identified some some may come out of this this the handbook review or some may cal come out of a policy review or just a procedural review so there's a lot of discussions across the way

130too with disciplinarians to say okay walk us through your process so i think i think you'll see a lot of that get covered through the through the entire equity audit thank thank you um so i guess i'm going to ask brian um are you what are you looking for do we think we are looking for a vote this evening and i'm asking i guess brian and the committee are we looking for a vote to approve these changes that are listed in the exhibit too which um is that are we looking for that or because they i'm just some people are looking like yes and some people are looking puzzled so well but that was that was why i asked the question it sounded as though we already approved it so would we be reapproving it

131so my understanding is we did already um approve the handbook but what i'm asking is if you look at exhibit 2 which we had pulled up a second ago which are the proposed changes for council um if you look at that some of the changes are my understanding brian in your presentation as some of these changes have been recommended to be made but not actually implemented so like the first one for example addition of the words find slash applied arts or technology that hasn't actually been already put into the handbook right right so we would need to review we just need to um approve the updates that was the request so right so the request for this evening would be my understanding would be that we would be looking for a vote to approve the

132proposed the changes on this chart is that correct is that what we're looking for there's a virgin version that was approved in august these these are reflect some of the requests that were made by this group for change in order to say yes those changes are agreeable we i think we need to re-vote so that we can replace the document with an updated document and that would be an updated document that carrie would carry us just through the 2021-2022 school year and then brian has already outlined the process for the upcoming correct okay all right so to be clear then it would be adding the words in red adding the red here he's fixed the table of contents we've standardized as much as humanly possible the protected classes with an acknowledgement that our own policies

133actually create conflict but you've made the changes you can and then there has been no change to the graduation bit and then the only change to the drug and alcohol consequences was the removal of the sort of mandated 10-day suspension but the rest of it sort of remained the same yeah well the the 10-day suspension that's actually been out of there for a kind of a long time i was just alluding to that to show you how things have evolved over time okay and then you uh you uh remove the bullying redundancy yeah okay so if if what you're saying then is if we were to take a vote and approve that those would be the changes we would be approved correct okay okay does anyone else have questions about that okay um do we

134have a motion jen can i make a statement first oh yeah absolutely i'm not going to vote for this with this drug and alcohol policy in place i want to send it back okay um is it possible to approve to to split apart the changes sorry no no i'm just saying does it have to be kit and caboodle could we do parts but it's not some or take separate votes on each item or something like that so i'm is it okay go ahead michelle that is not within our purview the school council is the one who decides what the disciplinary policy or procedures are in conjunction with you know the staff that's appropriate our purview is only to decide if it aligns with our policies so whether i agree with how they handle that or

135not is irrelevant because that's not part of my responsibility as a school committee member or my authority so then why do we have to approve it at all thank you that that was sort of the what i was interested in the policy we do not have a disciplined policy because that is an administrative decision so thank you michelle because that that is one of the things that i think is really complicated about this and it's helpful to have you outline that which is sort of what i was trying to get out which is that our job is to specifically say whether does this align with the policies that we've approved as we've just talked about some of that is a little bit challenging because some of our policies have different wording um well then we

136also it sounds like we don't even have a drug and alcohol policy other than what is at the school by school up correct i think there is a policy there is another policy but it's not something so i don't think it's really the question is and i think this is what michelle was just it's not really that it's a drug and alcohol policy it's a really that it's a procedures for um discipline so it's it's it's a administrative decision about how that step-by-step process would go i don't mean to am i paraphrasing you correctly michelle correct and whether i agree with this or not is irrelevant to that process so okay thank you um anna so i think i think if what michelle is saying is accurate then i have two issues number one that's

137never been how this is presented it's been presented that we are approving the handbook it does not our charge was never please go and compare the handbook to every stated policy because if that was the case then we as the committee would have gone through upwards of 90 different policies to look for alignment and that was not what was ever asked of us i mean gen raises a good point no one ever said compare our drug and alcoholic policy with what is here i mean that level of review is not what i feel like has ever been asked of us it's certainly not something i've ever done i mean if i was supposed to be going through and read the handbook and read every single policy and look for alignment and then my yes or

138no was yes we confirmed a policy or no we don't confirm that does not seem at all like that's the matter on the table so i i'm i mean so just just so just to be clear i think that um that is my understanding of what our role here is that the school council creates this document and our role is to say whether or not this document aligns with our policy um which is you know that is our that is our role in this um well i just as curiosity has anyone on the committee actually done that has any one of the six of us here read every single policy and compared it to every single piece maybe michelle has yes i think michelle might be the only one who could credibly say yes so

139if that's the criteria then frankly i mean none we should have abstained except for maybe michelle because i couldn't credibly have said yes or no time because that's that's not what was asked i was asked to approve it or not which to me is a totally different prompt than does it align with policy okay if you want my approval i'm with jen my approval would be no i don't like what this says and i don't approve it and technically it we now know for a point in fact it absolutely does not align to policy mr maniconi has proven that so i mean i i think i don't know this is a frustrating conversation now because i don't like the policy i don't i don't like the handbook in the particular ways i have no problem

140with adding without proper citation fine arts involved i have no problem with that but i do have an issue with these two other pieces and i would be inclined to vote no on them and then we're but we've already approved it so i'm not sure what you want to do with those at this point um david do you have something to say yeah i just want to say for five years now i think i voted no on the school hitbook um largely in regard to dress code policy um can you i'm sorry can you talk into them this is the first year that um we as a committee have really had an active voice um and been heard in changes that we've actually wanted to see in here and it's been brought back to the

141school council so i mean that's tremendous progress it is it is not in our scope um but i i think the you know administration that the council hears what we're saying and it sees the direction that this board would like the district to move and is making giant leaps in in regards to trying to make that happen that being said no this isn't a perfect document but oh my god is it so much better than what it was six years ago when i got in here um and i think we have to really act in good faith that we are in the right direction and there is yes a ton of language that still needs to be updated but it seems like we have a really good group of people that are hearing what we're

142saying and willing to you know really go in in you know do their part on their end you know as we now know that we have work to do on our end too you know um in regards to policy uh updating excuse me to align with this and just realize that we're actually working in a partnership and you know unfortunately everything can't happen overnight you know so i i just want to say that because it's been like a point of contention for me for years and and i could be happier with the process this year thank you and and i think this this chart reflects that right these were the specific changes requested by the or concerns and in this chart shows and and brian's presentation shows the way that school counts are considered and

143listened and that as we all know from being on this committee sometimes you being heard doesn't mean um that they agreed with us so they but they did consider all the recommendations that were or concerns raised by this committee um to anna's point at this point the pro the school handbook is currently approved so right now we would be voting to whether or not not to accept these proposed changes i believe um michelle did you have something else you wanted to share no it's just chapter 71 37h appendix b says that the school council is in charge of reviewing the handbook the school council shall review the student handbook each spring to consider changes in disciplinary policy to take effect in september of the following year but it may consider policy changes at any time

144so it's really the school council's responsibility to determine what disciplinary policies happen at the school it's our responsibility to be sure it aligns with our policy so if their policy was to whip the children then we could say that does not align with our policy of how we you know treat children but otherwise they have the discretion again i have to say whether i agree or disagree with that policy or procedure is irrelevant in this vote right in a similar way that other procedures at school would also fall under that category if there were other procedures that happened at a school as long as they were in align with our policy it wouldn't be in the purview of the school committee to say how you know for example how students line up for recess or

145right you know but we're not asked to approve eric other things i think when you're looking at the perspectives over the years the changing committee results in changing conversations across this document as as dave alluded to eight years i've been going through it and depending on who's sitting in the seats depends on the response you get i think this is a good open dialogue and i truly believe we all get what this committee is asking for and it it it makes sense you know okay let's organize the way we are looking at our state law aligned with our policy and our procedure we're talking about procedure when we're talking about disciplinary response we're talking about procedure and i think i would i would bet my check on it that brian understands it just as well

146as we do that you know the procedure is not clear how it happens i think that's what dr carr is saying and i think it's important for us to continue to review that and until we come here we really don't know what the group is looking for so it's kind of that back and forth and i think i i hope we can appreciate that that will continue along with this group and getting an understanding of how how you feel how we respond to it i think the school council's done a nice job at at going back and reviewing each in fact i i think brian did what i did i went back to the video and listened to everything exactly and tried to pull them all out and then bring them back um and as

147dave said i think that it's been it's really been a different process than i've ever been involved in usually it's kind of come in here's the changes okay go so now we get some direction and i think i think that's it's really good because it hasn't happened like that in the past and sometimes you know it's okay we want to change this or adjust this but this is good direction i think for this next iteration coming up really in december in a month and a half two months down the road okay um so in the interest of moving forward with our um not only with the evening but just with the hit with the handbook um i guess i you know would entertain us we can either have a vote on whether to make these

148changes i i mean it seems like that's the only thing that's on the table is to make these changes at this moment um regardless though whether we i mean we're not my understanding is that at this point we're not going to leave the high school without a handbook because we have an approved handbook so we're not going to right so um so i agree i think i think we are being listened to and i like dave's point that you know we're not gonna make every change that everybody wants the first time um i mean i i'll and i agree i understand what michelle is saying that we're not responsible for district procedure i am looking forward to seeing the policy change but it doesn't have to be now all right um jen would you be

149willing to make a motion i move that the hamilton wenham regional school committee approved the hamilton wenham regional high school student handbook for the 21-22 school year based on the changes presented second seconded by david pelito all right do we have any further discussion [Music] anna i think i think this conversation is fascinating because michelle and i applaud and recognize your years of service and experience i don't i actually that's really valuable here but there is a profound disagreement between what michelle is saying which is it's not our place to talk about the paul the procedure it's not our place to tell the council what to do it's not our place to talk about graduation not our place all we're supposed to do is say this aligns with policy that's what she is saying and

150i i i can hear and understand why that would be true i'm profoundly then confused why then we are ever asked to approve it in this form and to superintendents tracy's point and mr maniconi i love that we've had this conversation and i love that we're feeling heard and i think the idea that you can be heard but still not agreed with is valid but if what michelle is saying is true none of that is relevant there's no obligation for you to listen to us whatsoever so i don't quite understand still what we're being asked to a quote unquote approve because if you're asking for me to approve the substance of this handbook it's a no but i don't think that's even the question that's been presented to us so i i there is a

151philosophical misalignment within the four people sitting at this table where we're talking about listening to us and hearing us and making these changes and david is right there's been this great lovely but if our purview was truly limited in the way that michelle says it is none of that matters anyway so i i still to me you're asking for my approval on something approval means that i agree with what's in it that i like what's in it i feel like it is the direction the fact that it's supposed to be a policy alignment is something that has never been elucidated it's never been prompted i i don't i mean other than the the protected classes i certainly have not read every single policy to say yes this conforms because i didn't understand that that was

152what we were supposed to do because when someone says approve it means you're approving the substance of the book so i just i feel like i have to make the point that two things are being said are true at the same time that are actually in direct conflict with each other uh david i i just want to say i i i challenge you to change your perspective on how you're viewing this because you're right we don't have say in what goes in that handbook yet the people that do are hearing what you're saying and making those changes right so instead of saying that you know you know looking at the negative value of you know it's that the point is moved from me doing this to say you know he look at the fact that

153they're actually saying all right we're here with what you're saying we see these changes we we actually agree with these changes we want to make these changes and we're continuing to we're saying that we're going to continue to work with you and make these changes together right that that that's progress right it doesn't matter sort of what it's been this is where we are now and it's a wonderful place and if you look at that and say okay well this is how it's been this is as a result of of you your voice personally that this change is happening in in and sort of take that as a moral victory is it the are you at the mountaintop or you want to be on yet no and that's perfectly understandable but at the same time

154like i said i've been here five years five six years i've lost count but you know in in the movement we've made this year's is earth earth shattering right it's so like i you know i'm definitely looking at it from a much different angle than you because the the you know i have been muttering you know some of these changes for for years that just have not i don't want to say fallen on deaf ears but have never gone anywhere in in in this chart is tremendous it's tremendous growth you know and a tremendous improvement and and i you know want to say that it's your voice largely that has helped move that you know so so take that for what it is it you don't need to be satisfied where you are but you

155know you you deserve to you know be happy and that it is movement right education doesn't move very quickly in any direction and i would add that when i came on the committee the committee had a policy that said that the superintendent reviewed it for policy alignment and it was david and i on the policy committee that was like no the law says that the school council goes through the discipline but that all of it in combination is supposed to be under the alignment with our policies so we should be approving it so that it aligns with our policies that way the high school knows that yes in fact the committee is aligned is to the lines with their policies so it's only really been in the last three or four years that the committee

156has even had any insight into this at all so the fact that we're as david said that we're having dialogue and any sort of back and forth is actually amazing and we should be happy about that and just because i don't agree with this particular procedure doesn't mean that i'm going to vote down the whole thing because in general i agree with most of it thank you um okay are we ready to vote okay is everyone clear on what the motion is okay all right all those in favor those opposed okay and then uh it is five in favor one oppose and the motion passes okay thank you mr manigoni i appreciate it thank you okay [Music] i i you're all welcome to stay but i am noticing that it's late and i so appreciate

157you all being here and thank you please go get some sleep thank you um next vinnie is going to present the student activity club information for us thank you i just felt uh this might be useful in my student activities yeah well student activities is relevant okay okay so beautiful okay tonight i'm here to update you on the student activity accounts as of june 30 2021. now normally this would be presented to you as part of the treasurer's semi-annual uh report to the school committee but as you know with the turnover in the treasurer's position i'm kind of stepping in for him momentarily because there's a need for an annual approval of the high school student subsidiary accounts so one overarching theme that i noticed while reviewing the student activity accounts is that the coven

15819 pandemic either drastically reduced all the student activities or in some cases completely uh stop them uh in their tracks entirely so just to give you a brief overdue overview before i do this each of the schools have a student activities account and within each of these accounts they have a checking account and a savings account so all the money that they take in gets deposited into the savings account when the principal goes to write a check they ask for a transfer from the treasurer and he transfers the money from the savings account to the checking account along allowing them to draw the funds so at the beginning of fy21 in overall we started the year with a 114 thousand dollar balance within our student activities account uh throughout the year we our net activity

159increased by approximately twenty three thousand dollars and we ended the year at roughly a hundred and thirty seven one thing to point out is obviously the high school has is the biggest contributor to the student activities account they make up approximately 81 percent of the overall balance uh in addition every single school except the high school deposits all their money into one account but at the high school there is subsidiary accounts that break it down in even more detail that is what we are going to mostly go over tonight so right here on this slide and the next slide i've broken out every one of the subsidiary accounts i've listed their beginning balances all the revenues they took in during the year and all the expenses they paid out and ultimately their ending balances there

160are over 37 active subsidiary accounts at the high school within this chart i've also put an asterisk under each account that has not had activity since july 1st of 2019 now we have our own internal policy that states if a student activities account does not have any activity over two fiscal years that we will automatically close the account and distribute their funds amongst the remaining act um amongst their remaining other activity accounts but there's a little bit of problem with that which is why i invited brian to stay this is the complete list of approximately 17 accounts that i listed previously that have not had activities since 2017 you can see that most of these are field trips and at this time we're requesting that we maintain these accounts obviously because of coven 19 we

161haven't seen the activity but nearly all of the accounts all of these groups have either started activity this year or will start it before the year is over so if we were to ultimately follow that policy and close these accounts tonight we would take the funds away from these groups and give it to everyone else and then come back to you in a few months from now to authorize you to for us to reopen the account but now they're going to start the year without any funds so tonight we're asking that you allow us to maintain these accounts and keep them open for at least one more year to see how this coming year pans out if you do that this list here will be the complete list of authorized accounts i'd just like to

162point out when i did copy and paste this over i accidentally copied in the hidden accounts so i have struck them out right now i do apologize for that but in total when we are done there will be 36 active accounts the only account we are asking to close tonight is the class of 2018. for some reason they have a residual balance of seven dollars but as another policy states if the class after the class graduates if they do not collect their money within two years of graduation it'll automatically be closed and disbursed to everyone else so at this time we're only asking for approximately seven dollars to be distributed amongst the rest of the grades um that really is uh the brief kind of intro uh brief overview of our student activity accounts again

163there is there is an annual requirement that you approve the list of high school subsidiary accounts that is the main reason of our presentation tonight so i can kind of answer any questions i know that was brief i thought we did hope sorry i didn't mean to speak out a turn david actually i i just i i thought we did five years i didn't realize that we shut everything out down after two years so anna um thank you for this only because i know that they exist and they're active i'm curious to know why the social justice club is not on the list of clubs to authorize if i had to take a guess i would assume they have not taken in any money or dispersed money but i'm not i'm not positive but i

164know that they got i know the ed fund grant is separate but are we saying that they're not they don't they're not using any any club money in the same way that others are i'm just curious to know why they're not on the list is this from fy21 this activity is from fy21 right so was the social it was okay um they did receive head fund support but that money stays at vinnie's level it doesn't go into the student activities account and then they bought books as one of the things so they would make their purchases we would do it through the school the district level accounts and that's kind of the agreement we have with the fund um because some sometimes the accounts are fifty thousand dollars we don't want to drop that into

165a student activities account but they that's really been the money they've received they're not they haven't like done a car wash or any specific fundraising and that's gen you generally where the money comes from you know the food night out at fuddruckers or a car wash or some type of other fundraiser but they they got a really sizable chunk it was almost i think it was like 7 000 maybe yeah from the ad fund and that money stays at the district level and then they access it through a different process so if well if i i'm just going to add a little bit to that from my ed fund days is that it doesn't even actually stay at the district level it actually um it's actually a reimbursement so they actually never get the money

166they they actually purchase something and they s and the and the school asks the ed fund and the ed fund reimburses the school so i believe many of w i might the robotics club had a similar thing where they didn't actually show up on the i actually think i asked about it the robotics club didn't show up right away as an authorized club because they had been funded in the same way by the ed fund i believe so i guess the question i then have is the word authorization is strictly financial we're not saying that a club not on this list doesn't exist or can't operate you're simply saying they don't have a financial account correct but if in the future it says that they do not have the authority to fundraise collect money or

167expense money if we want them to in the future we need to bring them to you and get your approval to open a new subsidiary account for them it's something you'll probably end up seeing come across in a couple months yeah yeah i might be wrong but i believe we had a very similar conversation about the robotics club we did yeah okay okay okay are we ready for a motion okay good i move that the hamilton windham regional school committee vote to approve the list of high school student activities subsidiary accounts as presented on the previous slide titled quote authorization of clubs end quote second seconded by anna cedzek and is there any further discussion i have a question michelle so if a club has a raffle of any kind what is the process to

168ensure that they've gotten a raffle license do you know that brian or eric i think it goes through that principle eric do you know so actually there is a requirement to go to the town right and get authorization for any type of a raffle because it's considered gambling at the time ordinance level remember the last one we did but the part of the process of requesting to do a you know a raffle for fundraiser does entail saying did you go to town hall talk to this person and get this and this so we do we usually do that with the adult liaison of the group okay we look like we're ready to vote okay uh all those in favor and that is six in favor and the vote is unanimous and the motion passes thank

169you thank you okay uh next up on the agenda is um our every meeting we review the face coverings policy eric yep great thank you i think it's this one um can you exhibit one is the actual policy that's been approved that we're working under now um notice the additions there there has been a rise in cases in hamilton a drop on the wenham side and then across the schools we've had two cases at cutler the 923 to 925 two cases of winthrop not all picked up in the pool testing i want to make that clear some some kids have found out before they've come to school so they they don't reflect the same number as you see below in the pool testing okay i just wanted to make sure people were aware that so

170we may find out from a parent that a child is coping positive but they didn't come to school and they weren't foolish they just have so that's the difference in the pool testing versus the new cases um so that's really the change the positive test rate has gone down by one and said i mean uh yeah i've gone down by one to 24. again that's a longer cumulative average over time that doesn't exactly line up with the seven day averages i learned from talking to do you have questions anyone i have a question can you explain so the extension of the mask mandate by the dese had something about school committees requesting something or other can you explain what that was go ahead so the commissioner recently extended the mask off deadline if you will

171if you imagine from october 1 to october 15th and the stipulation of that is you need to actually submit a request with state to do that if you intend to do that you have a form that gives us a form that you fill out it's signed by superintendent uh school committee and then i think a school buddy rep and then sent to uh the state which they promised two day turnarounds on on these requirements so you even though you may say yes sorry october 1 the high school because they've reached the vaccination rate you still need that approval from the state for it to be 100 approved okay that was a stipulation they added that was not part of the original october one deadline but it is part of the october 15th there's no requirement

172to automatic there's no automatic requirements still left in the hands of the districts to decide on that and what we're finding there are multiple factors the superintendent list servers are loaded with what are you gonna do if you have seven through twelve or six through twelve all of them a number of schools in our area right um so that's been put past back of the commissioner we're waiting for a response to how to reach how to actually respond at the school level uh mass i think misc was involved in those conversations about a week ago and were just kind of they pushed back a little bit and said here's what's coming out of reality what do you think so we're just waiting for some more some more guidance from the state so can i ask

173two more questions about that um so since you just brought up are we one building or two i'm sorry say that again it's hamilton wenhams middle school and high school one building or two because do they run off of the same error handler system i don't know so the the air because the middle school is newer than the high school they do not run on the same air handler they don't run on the same water heaters they have their separate utilities if you will i mean electricity is probably shared but yeah the buildings are connected by shared spaces yeah please keep that in mind we have a library that we share middle school in high school we have a gym that we do share in some ways although there is much more separation in the

174gym um than in the library so that could be of concern and then my other question is i'm just curious and i i do not expect for you to have this number now but in in the in the future like what percent of students are still pool testing because we really had a push to get a lot of students last year and i wasn't sure if we still had the high rates of participation this year so i don't i wouldn't put a number out there but i know there's 122 pools that run between 8 and 10 people in a pool but that also includes staff so i could be in a pool with nine kids or right or myself and brian could be in a pool with eight kids so it really depends on the

175pool makeup and then there's always one pool that's kind of the last pool that might have six in it so i would say it's a pretty low percentage especially at the upper levels because of the the vaccination i mean there's a there's a higher comfort level with vaccinated students you know i think most vaccinated students aren't lining up to be pool tested honestly so i think that's part of kind of what's at play here yeah so we're missing the breakthrough cases then well yeah this masking seems to be necessary because we don't have i'm just saying i i don't want to i'm not saying i won't vote to put that through but i think before we do that we're going to need to have some higher participation in pool testing because you need mitigation strategies

176so if this is your mitigation strategy great otherwise your migration strategy is pool testing and so i'm a little uncomfortable well and i mean if i may at this point you know we have a policy in place and nothing changes at this point the state has not said anything that would make that change without our consideration and our vote so um you know that would need to be something that we would be able to debate and discuss so uh eric i would ask one thing to make whatever metrics you determine clear yes you know i think it's important to give people the opportunity to make the move if they you know okay here's you know i'll use lexington lexington was up front if the high school gets to here with their vaccination rate and this

177much pool testing then we'll move here and i think that's that's appropriate for us to do it in this district as well i think it's important to be transparent in that expectation of and i think it'll motivate some people to move in that direction we also might want to include a hard number for percent positivity so if it goes above x you start wearing a mask again well and i would love feedback from the administration because you know unvaccinated students are still going to have to wear a mask and how difficult is that going to be for you to administer i mean there's a lot and i think that it was set up that as soon as we reached a certain level that boom it was all going to be over and i just i

178think we need to just set the expectation that it's not boom it's all going to be over as soon as we hit the percentage vaccination and we appreciate everybody who's been vaccinated because that's kind of makes things easier but yeah and to your initial question michelle um would you have to consider that at the our two or one connected buildings have sixth graders who are for the most part not eligible to be vaccinated at this point so it's a factor okay i think it's really good that we keep having this discussion at each meeting because it'll give us the opportunity um to make those decisions julia did you have something oh no i didn't ask you i know this is more of a topic for a future meeting but it does fit in with this

179topic like literally the day after we met the cdc said booster shots now for teachers first responders nurses health care we have to address that at some point in time don't we whether we're going to require boosters or not um we can't we i mean i think if it's a topic for a future meeting we can write it down and we can have it as a discussion at a topic at a future meeting i just didn't know if it was something we needed to talk about or if um eric is just going to make the decision i'm fine either way i just wanted to know eric so the memo i sent out last friday to all the staff i outlined your decision of the previous meeting outlined kind of how it works what the expectations

180are what the exemptions are and the language in that memo for all staff is fully vaccinated and i think that covers us in that case if there's a booster it it may be worth a discussion to say you know are you fully vaccinated if you were a modern and you have your two shots or are you fully vaccinated if you go to have the booster as well i don't i think that's a worthy conversation i think i do think it's it'll be it'll be a it'll be definitely a community conversation so i think it's important especially with with the teachers group i've been working with them in the ask me group to try to nail all this down okay i'm writing it down as a future discussion because i think it's important okay um uh

181okay are we ready do we have any other questions on that are we ready to have eric move on he's got i know he's got other other updates for us ahead eric happens when you have 75 tabs open so some some of the pieces and parts of this report just to let you know and i just wanted you to know that recently have sent out uh an opportunity for parents to join the district parent council um five or six people that have jumped in right away so we're just we're leaving it out there a little bit longer to try to we'd like to get three maybe four people at each of the levels um but really i'm not holding anybody back and and there are so many opportunities in the district to get involved i

182think people are starting to see that that they can be on you know the portrait of the graduate committee they can be on the dei committee they can be so it's we're trying to keep those opportunities available also next week i begin three different public meetings two in person one in hamilton just at the high school middle school complex one in wenham at the buker um and then one on zoom so that if parents want to connect with me uh talk with me chat with me um it's just kind of be an open kind of an open meeting where i'll start it out and say here are the things that we're doing kind of like what i'll do tonight and and then just open it up i'll be spending an hour at each one um

183just kind of connecting with people and and i think that that adds to that kind of increased communication that i've set as a goal initially we do have a blog up and running we do have an instagram up and running we do have a twitter specific to me uh up and running and hopefully you follow and and uh certainly always looking for we're always looking for more followers right aren't we more likes um but those uh have been pretty good you know the kids are generally on instagram adults will be on um you know their email and twitter sometimes and and i think we're i think we're hitting all the avenues with the weekly and then all these different social media outlets so that's been that's been really good and then looking at all of

184the committees all the kind of goal oriented committees the portrait of the graduate group had their first meeting last night it was great we had over 50 people with us the high school library mike nicholson from battelle came in and and did a great job kind of running us through some of the changes what the landscape changes are for kids and what that means to the future of of their their job opportunities we talked a lot about you know jobs that are here today that won't be here tomorrow and jobs that you know don't exist will suddenly appear 10 or 12 years from now as our kids get out in the world and so we've taken the first steps it's been great we had community members we had parents students teachers administrators really good robust

185conversations and some great kind of great outside some of the community people that we talked to after and we got some feedback forms they were really excited to be involved in this process it's going to be a necessary evil for us as we move forward because because of the work we need to do in the next probably five to eight years um this will be a good foundation so we're on our way the dei as you know the the applicants have been selected it's been rounded down to 12 members which last meeting stacey busick outlined how that was uh done and there are three high school students a three student excuse me one high school one middle and one elementary staff member one high school one middle and two elementary parents and then two more

186community members and then the leadership team which is stacy's group of four will be meeting with equity partners to really lay out as i explained earlier with the along with the pdc lay out the process for the rest of the year one of the things that we've learned in our conversations with regis of equity partner equity journey partners is that she said i can do your equity audit in your timeline but i don't think it's enough time for us to do it well so we've spread that out a little bit to be able to give them more time to do it well and that's that's a risk i took before coming back just to say i think it's important to give that time to do it well um and and she felt like it made

187better sense in our kind of i mean what we're looking for in trying the data gathering and so that's that's one change um that occurred over the goal the goal so the goal is a little bit different just because we've spread now that equity audit piece so it's it's gone from like um i think we had a month window we really spread it out to two months to buy some more opportunity for uh the kind of learning and gathering aspect mtss literacy stuff is still cruising i i was able to spend time in three schools today two elementaries in the high school and um you know we talked about dibbles earlier and watching teachers and and tas interact with kids while teachers are taking kids and and going through these assessments as we explained earlier

188one at a time one kid at a time really gathering this data and really personalizing um those opportunities for gathering data the data intervention specialist is working with the coaches they're observing model lessons and kind of getting to know their students as they kind of build this program all the teachers at the elementary level did training on administering dibbles eight and and that was a kind of a high kind of an eye opener for us when we learned that some teachers really weren't comfortable we just kind of assumed that they knew how to do it so we we uh turned around jen uh clifford along with rebecca and the coaches did the dibbles eight uh training and though that assist assessment window began last friday on october 1st so that's already started i was able

189to observe that at the two elementary schools i was at all the instructional coaching training is completed uh the four administrators have been part of that the building principles and the kind of the coach connection and then the three instructional coaches are are relying on the essential guide for student-centered coaching to continue to start that process of working with our teachers so it's it's really coming together and the ramp up has been smooth but also again opening where we made some assumptions initially and we were able to um clean up some things along the way to to give some some comfort level to some of the the teachers who weren't as comfortable uh secondary as we learned they they have been reviewing the inclusive practices you heard it mentioned a couple times that this next

190window coming up november through march is really when they'll observe it if you will this year the curriculum leaders are evaluators this is new for us so now we've got seven new evaluators out there part of the evaluation process we've asked the curriculum leaders and the administrators to specifically look for instances of the inclusive practices in the classroom so we've gone kind of down to the fine grain they're also working with teachers they did initial training on the district curriculum accommodation plan which is um complex you know but it's it's a tier one support that a lot of teachers don't generally turn around and go to seek out so we're trying to give them the opportunities the understanding before we build this mtss structure up we want to have them look at what's available at

191that first tier that includes instructional practices strong instructional practices and equitable instructional practices are certainly on the line as well as we go through this evaluation process and then in conjunction with the curriculum work that they're doing at the secondary level with the curriculum maps and in the curriculum audit and then the action plan today i was able to work with i'll meet with kristen borges who's the curriculum leader for social studies and she's been working with the administration at middle and high school and the curriculum leaders on this unique little document that allows them to look at a curriculum map for a unit or or a set of units and identify specific things that we want to see in there you know what what are kids going to know what are they going to

192understand and this uh document allows the curriculum leader to review this them review them the same so if you're a math curricular or social studies you're looking at these documents and looking for the same kind of standouts if you will and then it pushes you into a number of directions based on the completeness or incompleteness of the map or based on the quality of what you've written in this kind of in this map so a teacher will this summer write a unit biology that unit will come back to the science curriculum leader the science curriculum leader now has this um kind of running tab of going through and checking off okay it has this it doesn't have this essential questions not quite there and that puts them into either kind of the red zone is

193like this one needs some more work or the green zone where we just continue to grow this this um document which is which is what happens in good curriculum work teachers will continuously go back to them through the through the year and say this is what i wrote about in this lesson it didn't work i need to change it or this is what i wrote about it worked really well and then also share so there's this a lot of good things at the curriculum level going on and while i was gabbing my computer went to sleep so excuse me for one second do you remember your password under pressures right right so the world language study group has been kicked off their first meetings october 12th 15 people on that committee again our committee requests

194really high and i have to say thank you to people in the community for for really jumping in and saying i want to be part of this it's hard to have a committee of 50 and do it well so we kind of set that limit right around 12 to 15 to to get it started but i want people to know from from the school perspective people will still be able to be involved there's going to be opportunities for surveys and focus groups and things all along the way through the school year so please don't get down if you weren't selected for a committee but we really do intend to get feedback from everybody in the in the school community um especially our parents to to be able to to kind of make better decisions that

195impact everybody the learning facilities uh most of you i think all of you know that we have been put on the short lists from the msba for the cutler school project we have a couple of meetings coming up in uh the next couple of weeks the first one will be a zoom meeting with the msba um some of the school people uh we need we'll need a school committee person and then um there's a second meeting that will be on the 20th that will be an in-person walk-through of all three elementary schools this is important that we show interest that is a key factor for the msba they really want to know if you are really interested in this project and that's that's it couldn't have been underscored anymore in the meeting that tom and

196i had with the representative from msba she she really said we want to know and get the feeling that the community wants to do this and and that you know in that case we've invited the town administrator the town managers because i think that's an important conversation down the road it does impact both communities in some way shape or form and it'll it'll really drive our decision of what we want this project to look like if we get selected to move forward currently haven't been selected but we're on the short list there were 58 original uh projects we're on the shorter list of 20 now and and they'll review us through this process after about 10 or 12 weeks when they go through all 20 projects they'll come back to us and say we don't

197think we're you're ready and these are some things you can do or you're now in the accepted list and then we move forward so it's exciting it's exciting news and i think that's one of the bigger the bigger things on the facilities front i was gonna just as a matter of business i do want to make sure we get uh make choose one of us to be on that so can i just interrupt and do that quickly um dan i can ask a question oh sure anna has a question um so when you say for the cutler school project meaning only the cutler facility or all three schools together so all three elementary schools together the soi went in cutler school winthrop school those were the focus points um we actually convinced them to go

198through the buker as well i have to give tom credit on that tom went back to them and said listen this is going to impact two towns three schools can you at least walk through with us and give us a better idea i i really need to personally clarify the why we're doing this and i don't know if that's really clear and i want to make sure because there are options you know okay do we build one school do we combine two schools do we combine three schools if you combine three schools you have a regional agreement issue so so there's some bigger conversations we'll need to have you don't have a regional agreement issue if the school is in one of them yeah right but when you get to one school but when you

199say the cutler school you're really meaning the elementary schools correct it's not as though the only proposal on the table is only to do something with cutler specifically right so i think just as a point of terminology as we're talking about it i feel like we should talk about the elementary schools because when you said that at first i thought well what about the other two so it was submitted as a college it was submitted as the cutler school project and in if if you go back to the original submission it was just the cutler school and as the submission went in i think three maybe four times it expanded into cutler winthrop and then what will happen the msba will walk you will have the meeting with us they'll walk through they'll try and

200get an idea of the vision that we have and they'll also give us some guidance to say here's what we think makes sense because they'd be initially funding it so um the process is still a long long where we get a long way this is the moment of these towns have have this is the moment where we get to talk about what we're going to do about our elementary schools yeah all three of them not just color okay yep and there there's no decision yeah is it there's no decision made like oh we're actually just doing this msba will help point us in that direction that's part of their role in these meetings and these walk-throughs and then we we'll we'll go from there it's gonna it's a long process still but yes i'm hoping

201we can get into the accepted list what was the date of the meeting that they're coming october 20th so yeah so there's two meetings uh make sure the 15th is the first one which is a zoom meeting at nine o'clock and then the second one is october 20th at 9 30 a.m we will start at the cutler school and i sort of calculated that out i think it realistically it might go till noon maybe depending on three schools travel time they've given us a very tight window they um they were very specific and underscored it several times we don't know they want to spend most of their time in cutler because that's the base project um winthrop you know they were like cutler winthrop 30 to 45 minutes and then we'll give you 15 minutes

202for bucher that was kind of an add-on so we'll take all the time whatever we can get take him to the basement not a wet day [Music] so i'm sorry to step in on you but i do again i just want to just jump in and see um so i guess my question in it sort of a casual way is who if anyone is interested and available on those i at those days and times um if you are i'm definitely interested i'd make myself available what time on the 15th oh you said the 15th 9 a.m for a zoom call on the 15th and then 9 30 at cutler on the 20th for the walkthrough i'm super interested but only available on the 15th okay but i could be on the zoom call on the

20315th yeah well david it sounds like are you saying you're interested and available i was involved in the first walk through i was involved in the first walkthrough so okay i really would like to stay because i i mean if you i don't know if other people are interested i mean i i think i said in my email i am available but i'm certainly open to someone else doing it so if you're you raising your hand david okay anybody else okay i could do it if it was after 12 but i can't do it at 9am okay so i don't i mean i don't know if we need an official vote or if we could just say thank you to david thank you david um and and please know i am certainly available for emergency

204backup um you got that excuse me all right i'll send a link to dave great and then again again i can be there in an emergency okay sorry keep going i'm going to move right on to the um the request that dr carr made last meeting the impact of vacant positions i did put a memo together and wanted to put this right out here but see if i can get on to back on airplay here so this information is is still accurate it's been extremely difficult to hire to the point where when you look at positions like the high school kitchen manager our director is stationed in the high school kitchen serving food our high school principal is serving food our high school assistant principal is serving food because we only have really one person

205assigned to the high school we're not if we had a second person who's given their notice unfortunately because of the disparity between pay versus paying for insurance it was kind of a shock i don't think they understood that when they took the position so um we're down to one so there's a number of hands on deck there that in that you know that you can see the open food service workers so there's really a number of food service worker positions open across the district it's been a really tough position to hire and if you go down to the teaching assistant we're still trying to put a teaching assistant in the middle school cover special education um right now we're we're actually back filling with teachers there's a clause in the contract that if they work

206an extra period outside of their five we pay them a percentage of their salary so we're doing that now to make sure that that's that is covered because it would be an iep uh coverage issue point six title one at the winthrop we're still missing support but covering with other people kind of same way across the district tlcs in the cutler school we've been able to bring one in we still need 1.8 more which is actually two bodies one full-time position and one part-time position this is our highest level of concern we were able to get one person in the position because carolyn shadyac actually had somebody to hire for her school but we had we had all met the week before and said if you have somebody please send them to cutler and the

207person was amenable they're going to cutler so we're able to pick up one of them and the teachers again are covering these spots and it's um that's that's a program that needs the personnel in it it's not it's not um one we want to kind of let go because there are definitely compliance issues within that program um lunchtime monitor at the buchr school it's kind of a a lower level not higher on our priority but it is an open position we're using tas to cover those those opportunities during the day we have an ittech it's they're just advertising that position now really they could not uh realistically do interviews at the beginning of the school year given the massive workload they they took on and they're still going they're still pumping ipads into the seventh

208grade and and they are they are 100 miles an hour so we finally got that in in motion that will be advertised uh early next week the slp speech language position is currently being contracted out that is one where we don't even have an applicant even though it's been advertised for quite a while that's a specialty position and uh hard to cover but we cannot ignore those services those iep services so we're contracting out which which is going to get expensive but right now that's the way we we have to cover it to cover ourselves for um the services and speech and language we have an el tutor position open i think it was previous previous meeting we have had a pretty good increase in the number of ls in our district a number of

209kids who are both younger and have less language acquisition or language knowledge if you will english language knowledge so that's been a complexity where you know in a kindergarten class when you have 22 kids and and one or two in the same group that have limited language capacity that's um it's it's difficult so we're trying to get that's another priority position for us and then an hr person at the district level it's just again vinnie is doing the work of three people in his office and really uh you know i'll say publicly i commend him for keeping up with the tidal wave it has been non-stop since before since june in his office with hr and and the budget stuff and and it just has not ended we hired well over 70 staff people this

210year and every one of those goes through quite a long process so this will be a bonus for vinnie yeah um we'll get that advertised in the next week or so and then uh that person will have to come in and get trained and kind of get into play so we're we're actually trying to determine the best place because we have two two holes if you will that are related to either payroll or hr so we have to kind of figure out how that all connects together so those are the positions that are either open and advertised or soon to be advertised it's tough everybody i talk to every superintendent is struggling you know um we were joking with each other like okay if you enact this policy then they'll quit and come to me

211and like it's it's a kind of a running joke about how we get people at each of our schools you know it's it's it's across every district i've talked to every principal every superintendent uh even in today i had a class for the superintendent's induction program and that was a piece of the conversation where the bigger towns are missing 30 people they're missing larger numbers so we are trying we continue to bump up our ads on on school spring we keep rotating them through we bump them up they kind of reset and people get to see them again and they go out on indeed so we have coverage it's just there there's no one applying for positions okay are there other non-school specific job boards we i mean maybe you are approaching this place do

212we need to cast a wider net outside of the industry specific places so i talked to a an individual that does recruiting not not education specific but they're even having difficulty connecting the dots for people um so it's not it's not just our industry it's it's really everywhere um and you can see it when you restaurants are all looking for help there's everybody's looking for help cumberland farms closes at two o'clock really yeah that's right we did not own it yeah so it's it's not just the education industry it's really everywhere right now unfortunately i even heard the ski slopes may not fully open because i heard that too um thank you i really appreciate this it gives me a much better idea of what we're dealing with julia um just in good news i

213want to say that just thank the i.t people because my daughter got her ipad and it was flawlessly set up and we've had no problems so so thank you to the i.t people if you're watching and also thank you we've just had we've been having a great experience so that's that's some i'm glad some positive news it's important to know that people are stretching for us we are very lucky people are stepping up to do some things that they could say not my problem and we're not seeing that you know it's all about kids for everybody and i think that's important to note that across the district every level people are doing multiple jobs right really they really are doing and people are stepping out i watched i watched an elementary teacher take a student

214who was off that period take a student from a kidnarring class who was having a difficult day and take that student with them to just calm them down and instead of you know that was their prep period but no they're working with kids trying to help out their colleagues so it's been it's been fascinating but also a little bit unnerving because we do want to fill these positions and get people in place thank you um oh david oh i'm sorry michelle no um it was the hr position one that we had budgeted for which one the uh the hr position was that one that that's why payroll slash hr we really didn't it's in there but it might be defined as payroll right now we have two holes both payroll and hr uh we're kind

215of doing an analysis now we think our weaker area is hr so it's hr that's why we put the hr one on that slide i don't know i gotta say it i'm just thought i'm gonna keep it i'm not gonna say it though because you knew what i wasn't saying i'm not gonna say it are we good okay [Music] one more okay one more i just um hope everybody got an opportunity to take a look at this last memo for two years due to cobit we have not well actually last year we did not present our professional status um golden apples to our staff members because we were out at the time we were able to do it we were remote by time we got back in it was just kind of like okay let's

216wait and get it done when we do it so the list on this memo are the people on the left people obtain professional status in 2020 and the people on the right obtain professional status in 2021 and professional status but those who don't know is when a teacher spends three years in the district and then successfully so successfully completes three years and on the first day of their fourth year they're eligible for professional status there are ways to not award that we haven't had any of those issues so we've been we've been lucky we have some really strong teachers and and this list is representative of that excellence across our district so at the faculty meetings last this past wednesday the golden apples for two years were presented in front of peers which i think

217is important it's a mon it's an important milestone for our teachers that are newer to the district and it's good to share with with our um with our current staff members so that's our list thank you thank you and again congratulations to all of those um that have achieved that and it's really wonderful to have such a nice long list of people that have achieved that okay um so it is um is there any i'm sorry what did was there anything else eric no okay so it is uh 1005 and we have really made it an effort to be finished by 10 and so i am looking at the rest and if anyone feels like there is something on there that they need to have addressed please say it now otherwise i'm going to be

218willing to take a motion to adjourn i make a motion to adjourn at 1005. is there a second second by julia campbell all in favor and the motion passes unanimously and we are adjourned