001good evening welcome to the may 19th school committee meeting it is like 702 703 and we will call the meeting to order the first order of business tonight is uh the pledge of allegiance so if you would like to stand you can at this time i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all all right so we have a very long agenda tonight so we'll discuss that in a minute um the superintendent had a statement she wanted to read and then we will do the official tabulation of the election results great thank you chair i'd like to start by acknowledging the truly unfortunate and unacceptable circumstances concerning the chat on the hw cam
002youtube live stream during the may 5th school committee meeting members of our community posted homophobic and hateful comments in the chat that violated the core values of this district and violated every tenet of civil discourse and public engagement any commentary that disrespects or demeans an individual group or an individual or group of people will not be tolerated as a community we share responsibility for the tone of our public meetings in our towns and our schools we ask parents to reinforce these core values with your children it matters how we speak to and about one another hamilton wenham can be better and i hope you will join me in recommitting ourselves to respectful dialogue and building an inclusive welcoming environment for our students and all who live and visit our communities thank you thank you um
003so almost two weeks ago there was an election in town and the regional agreement says that the school committee must gather and tabulate the results i do believe however that everyone is aware of what the results were and that the town clerks are capable of adding but i will announce them so in wenham julia campbell received 274 votes in hamilton julia received 657 votes for a total of 931 votes jennifer carr in wenham received 257 votes and 650 in hamilton for a total of 907 votes those two candidates were elected to the school committee so welcome and welcome back i just address a chair i'm having a little bit of trouble hearing i just want to make sure our sound is okay they can hear it there okay and i will speak up sorry i'm
004used to being very close to the mic all day all right so we are now at the point um where we will hear citizens comments and for the time being we will continue to do this through zoom and in person although based on the governor's statements we do expect that the zoom portion of public comments will be going away but we're awaiting more clarification from the attorney general's office so there are people here in person is there anybody online just one person great so um and i really apologize i cannot see people that's one of the things i need to do when the pandemic is over so if you would like to come to the mic um you'll announce your name your address and tonight dana will be keeping the time oh there's no mic
005there oh yeah come on over here then thank you sorry i didn't realize that hi my name is erica mitchell on 30 marjorie street in hamilton i'd like to make a public statement on behalf of our parent teacher task force the parent-teacher task force has representatives from all of our schools and grade levels and includes a wide range of professional backgrounds this group was formed as a result to share a sentiment that our voices are too often not heard nor valued as evidenced by many of the actions of the administration's school day in our recent meeting we discussed two specific administrative decisions that we wish to address publicly the first is the sixth grade world language program a recent poll was given to both parents and teachers that asked the following questions do you feel
006at the hamilton water regional school district should have a sixth grade language program the results were that 85 percent of the teachers said yes and four teams maybe and 94 parents said yes it is clearly both parents and teachers over level support a sixth grade language program foreign language literacy is an important component of the district goal to prepare our students with a quote from our mission statement on our website the knowledge and skills needed to be successful members of our global economy and engaged citizens of the 21st century we implore the district leadership in the school committee to seriously consider their decision surrounding this and develop plans to provide our students with this opportunity at the 2021-22 school year the second issue is the reading specialist reorganization a recent poll given to both parents
007and of our elementary and our elementary school teachers asked if they support the district's plan to eliminate reading specialists and to replace them with pager5 literacy coordinator and to have teaching assistants provide instruction to the students the result was that 100 of the elementary teachers said no that's 100 of the elementary school teachers said no 57 of parents said no and 34 of parents said they don't have enough understanding of the structure to answer it is clear that the overwhelming majority of parents and teachers do not support this model or do not have an understanding from the administration about what it entails the superintendent has made a public statement that this model has been successful in other districts therefore we are requesting the following evidence to be provided in the weakness of the one of
008the specific issues that have used this model and has shown success how the assistance has to measure what data is used to support this plan and what is the training model that will be used to train the teaching assistants and when in microsoft's training be given you'd like a copy of the training model it has become abundantly clear and obvious that many critical decisions are being made by the administration and superintendent that do not support do not have the support of either the teachers nor the parents thank you for your time we look forward to hearing back from you as soon as possible okay why don't we take the person online sure we have one person and okay um yes we can thank you we can hear you it says we are muted hi everyone
009can you hear us i presented two weeks ago about a uh advocating for a lane acknowledgement policy has a greater um to the school community and more recently i thought while we're waiting in the school committee to make the decision we might as well uh informally decide to do it uh domain to decide the agenda for the for the uh because hi julie mcdougall 57 blueberry lane there continues to be an abundance of concerns and confusions regarding the reading specialist reorganization the decision to implement this reorganization has included an appropriate input from our educational community it's not supported with data and should not occur until it can be a data-driven decision that's in the best interest of our children in schools our teachers this the actual adults that work directly with our students need to
010be more involved in this process on a much greater level that has occurred to date the parents of this community continue to be opposed to the decision or haven't been properly informed about the decision making process and the components of the reorganization a hamilton wedding parent concerned with the lack of understanding amongst the parents reached out to the superintendent requesting the zoom meeting to explain the restructuring to parents and was told no instead only being offered a one-on-one phone call in recent surveys regarding the restructuring hamilton educators stated tonight quote this move is irresponsible especially after a year like this one quote receiving instruction provided by a highly trained teacher of reading is a necessity not a preferred option quote i feel that classroom teacher sentiments regarding this change are not being heard and valued
011by our administrators we need to restructure our tier 2 instructional model however reducing the number of highly trained teachers providing interventions and replacing them with tas is not the answer parents commented i have a child who requires reading assistance i am definitely uncomfortable that the specialized professional for him will not be there another parent i understand it and find it completely out of touch with what is best for the students and teachers it makes zero sense to replace reading specials with coaches this could not be a worse time to eliminate the structure and support from students another parent communication on the details of this new model of support has been less than poor it's been misleading after spending time digging through the budget i can't imagine why we would cut reading specialists to replace with
012less qualified less trade replacements at a time when we need this specialty more than ever we cannot lose these amazing and necessary supports for our young children at a crucial learning time we've reached out to numerous reading specialists outside the hamilton welcome community with expertise in the science of reading they review the proposed restructuring and have significant concerns with the approach there is a lack of expertise required for the instructional coach position it puts unqualified tas with our at-risk students to conduct interventions without the knowledge base to do so effectively it removes the most qualified professionals the reading specialist from direct service with our children and makes them mental management one professional in the field stated and i quote after reviewing the job description it appears that the instructional coach role is focused on all
013instruction not just reading this is quite common in terms of leading data efforts rti supports etc however this person usually works in conjunction with a reading specialist and sometimes a math specialist in the building to provide services it sounds like the coaching position is also mentoring new teachers they are really cramming in a lot here end quote we implore this district to reconsider this model as it is not in the best interests of our children thank you thank you and kristen kristin crockett 5 birch road wenam and i'm here just to read a letter that my daughter wrote that she asked me to read to you guys i am a fifth grader at bucher school i heard the school committee was going to vote to put up the lgbtq flag tonight i hope you vote
014yes i know many people from bucher and not from bucher they are terrified to tell the world that they are different that they are who they want to be they're scared to tell the truth about themselves to the world the more i think about it the more i feel sorry for those kids and adult who are afraid about telling this truth we put a flag in all of the classrooms that honors the country why can't we put up a single flag to honor all of the people inside of this classroom who are part of this country riley crockett that's all thank you thank you um carrie hi carrie jelsma 35 hilltop drive wenham i'm commenting on why i support a yes vote for displaying pride or progress flags i'm glad you obtained a second legal
015opinion on this issue the first one extols the value of being viewpoint neutral but the opinion itself is not it frames displaying flags as political issues connoting fear of legal quagmires but it fails to mention another viewpoint lgbtq flags are also welcoming the first opinion also doesn't present a thorough analysis of legal doctrine which the second one balances out your due diligence includes examining differing legal opinions i ask that you also ground your decision making in existing precedent state educational policies and evidence-based research on how to support our lgbtq students who experience hate speech in our schools by doing so you'll find voting yes on these flags is well founded twice in two weeks we've seen hate speech against lgbtq students we're all responsible for calling out this wrong and affirming our lgbtq students like
016displaying pride or progress flags our school library displays a pride flag and images of it and hallways other school committees and schools display pride flags our towns voted to display them so have boston and u.s embassies i could go on our state board of education and commission on lgbtq youth created principles for ensuring safe and supportive learning environments for lgbtq students they state schools should review policies to identify barriers to a safe and successful learning experience for lgbtq students and promote practices that improve their participation the anti-lgbtq culture in our schools is a barrier displaying these flags could improve lgbtq participation i'm concerned that not following other local and state leaders on this issue could signal your lack of support for our lgbtq students evidence-based research also supports a yes vote a 2020 lgbtq mental
017health survey reconfirmed the lgbtq youth experienced higher rates of bullying self-injury suicidality and other risks more than 40 percent surveyed considered attempting suicide 68 percent had anxiety 48 percent self-harmed and 33 percent had been threatened or harmed evidence-based research also shows that school support improves lgbtq lives for example attempted suicide rates were 20 percent in schools that did not support lgbtq but these dropped to 11 percent in schools that did supportive schools cut the attempted suicide rate in half thank you for considering existing precedence state policies and evidence-based research as you decide how to vote in addition to flags i'd also like to ask what else can you do to transmute oppression into support for our lgbtq students thank you can i ask you a question gary can i ask you a question when you
018talk about a second legal opinion what are you talking about there were two exhibits posted okay uh on the meeting agenda thank you so maybe maybe it's yes maybe it's in a bud an addendum yeah okay so i thought that the second posting as i stated uh was a good use of my tax dollars thank you thank you hi and then after and i'm sorry i don't know your name but after this person well let me have finished uh public comments so thank you natalie hildreth 121 linden street hamilton hard to talk about this as a resident of hamilton and a parent of two children in the district i am requesting that the school committee set a new tone for their meetings and conduct as evidenced by last meeting's youtube comments the students are watching
019throughout the past year viewers have watched a tone of disrespect and hostility during these meetings at the last school committee meeting a request was made from a committee member for a student presenter to have an introduction this simple request could have helped alleviate wrong pronoun usage but instead the request was needlessly and rudely dismissed this is how our student began their presentation under this pretense at what point does accountability factor here we know this is an unpaid position that puts in countless hours but it is an elected position for which you chose to run if as an elected official this job and the community pressure is too much to handle please step aside for someone else who is up for the task it's a good thing that there are different perspectives that make up the
020school committee and instead of shutting down what may appear to you as opposition maybe listen to why your fellow committee member believes differently diversity is a good thing hamilton oneham needs more voices from various backgrounds orientations and economic status we can't teach our children to not be bullies if we ourselves cannot listen respectfully and reach outside ourselves to understand differences your family's experience does not represent all the families in this district this should never be the way that you come to your vote in closing i'm requesting that the district begin diversity equity and inclusion training and curriculum now we need to move the district forward to be an inclusive community that welcomes diversity and will not stand for intolerant language or behavior thank you thank you no applause thank you okay so tonight we have
021a very lengthy agenda one that i do not believe we will complete and in addition we have an executive session at the end so um would like to know if you guys would like to reorganize the agenda um or if you would like to just say you know at ten o'clock we'll stop and whatever it is we'll schedule another meeting do you guys want to hold to the times on the agenda like what do you want to do to be sure we get through this in a reasonable amount of time yep um i don't know next wednesday i don't i don't know i it could be next wednesday just because wednesdays are you know a typical school committee meeting but i don't know i literally was just looking at it and emails today and the
022things like that i was like there's just no way to get through all of this so yep yeah i agree i the the meeting the agenda is daunting i i guess my i'm flexible and respectful about what my other fellow committee members would like to do but i spent a lot of time today being really prepared and i feel like we should give it a go i really do okay i i would concur that we should all be mindful of the time but i think a lot of this could be relatively quick um i would say that since we're missing two of our members that if we get to a point on the agenda where a vote needs to be taken on any matter we should continue to push that down to all seven of
023us are present okay are you including the consent agenda in that i think we can go through the consent agenda i think i would exempt that from that but i think anything that might be slightly more contentious we should get everyone here okay all right so let's start with the consent agenda and at 10 o'clock we'll just see where we're at sure uh oh do you want to ask does anybody want to hold anything from the consent agenda yes saying none make a motion oh you do okay thank you i think we should uh hold the scholarships and donations thank you all right so we'll hold d and e uh i move that the hamilton regional school committee uh approve the consent agenda parts a b and c as presented on this evening's agenda is
024there a second a second second by anna all in favor great all right um dana what did you want to say about the wright memorial scholarship fund actually it reminded me i had the questions about i i mostly i don't i really held them because i wanted if someone wants to speak to them do you have a my question was i didn't understand if this was a payout to a student or if this was like an incoming new scholarship does any do you know vinnie it was it's an incoming new scholarship that's been closed by bank of america so this is the last disbursement but they had to disperse it uh before the students elected their college and everything was accepted so they asked us to take the money so they can close the account
025and then we disperse it one time super now i understand okay it's like this is weird it doesn't usually look like this it doesn't usually operate that way so thank you and congratulations to the lucky person who has yet probably to be announced at scholarship night do you want to make a motion to accept that i move that the hamilton regional school committee accept the wright memorial scholarship fund in the amount of 21 616 dollars and 52 cents second by jen all in favor and next do you want to talk about the donation um well i wish i think i wish david were here because that's who i was imagining getting to talk about this but um i just wanted to acknowledge and thank the youth sports for the thoughtful donation including i'm going to
026read it including labor and installation of the two new uh basketball backboards and the rims at the middle school right is it cutler right and the heist and middle school i think is that what it says it says the middle school i thought it was a middle school all right super i don't know we got pictures of it um it's for the outside basketball court of the middle school at the middle school oh this is a different one okay this is a different one all right okay there um a motion to accept that i move that the hamiltonian regional school committee accept the donation from hamilton when i'm youth basketball for 2693 dollars where's their second all second second by anna anybody want to discuss that no great uh all in favor yes that's five
027that's five um none opposed all right um i don't see ethan here right now so we'll wait on that what i'm wrecking what i'm realizing is that tonight may not have been the best night to recognize ap as it is the last day for seniors so i suspect he may be otherwise occupied um if you would like i can i'd just like to read a brief blurb and i'll be sure that super thanks and recognition is delivered to him um this evening we would like to thank ethan howell our student school committee representative for working with us throughout the school year ethan's reports were professional and informative ethan will be attending umass amherst where he has been accepted into the honors college he will be studying microbiology and biotechnology we wish ethan the very best
028of luck in his future endeavors and we will be sending along to him a umass t-shirt to get him started so with appreciation ethan and again i'll make sure that he gets that recognition good luck to him that's awesome wonderful all right um great the next thing on the agenda is um at the last meeting we had the first round of district goals for next year and those have been provided to us again whoops my scouts do you want are you going to present them up there or are we going to okay so before i actually present the goals what i'd like to do is just again share what um in a different format why the these goals are so important let me just um using a graphic i just try yeah i wanted a
029large there we go so what i have been we've been talking a lot about the importance of these goals as kind of a north star for next year's work um we started the our district leadership team has been working and discussing what to bring forth to the committee in terms of critical work for next year last meeting you saw our first draft um you gave us some some helpful feedback we went back to the drawing board did a second draft of the goals that you will see this evening and even this morning we had another meeting and so i would at this point say to the folks that i would anticipate that we will go to a third reading on these because the leadership team itself had some additional ideas and i suspect that you
030will have some additional feedback this evening once those district goals have been decided upon over the summer those district goals are in the middle of the table during our literature leadership team retreat and in the middle of the table of our professional development committee the leadership team is is planning for next year to ensure that we are well positioned to open schools and to be ready to address the goals and the professional development committee will be using the goals to design professional develop learning experiences for teachers that align with those goals what we would then see happening with these goals is that in the fall school council should be back up and running again and so we would like to have a district-wide school council meeting where school councils from all five of our schools
031get together and hear about what our collective goals are for the year and then in that meeting do a breakout group buy school and identify how these goals will be shown in the school improvement plan then in early fall school councils will present the school improvement plans that are aligned with these district goals once we have aligned school once we have the school improvement plans those documents help inform teacher goals they help inform administrator goals and they help inform superintendent's goals by by engaging in this activity we start to deliver develop some level of coherence in our district where everybody is rowing in the same direction so i appreciate the thoughtfulness that the committee is showing around these goals they are an important guiding document as we move forward and so i wanted to frame
032that for you prior to reviewing where we currently are one other thing that came out of today's meeting that i i wanted to suggest to the committee is that there was a conversation at our leadership team that because the goals are numbered one through five there there could be an interpretation that that those goals are listed in order of priority and importance and that is that is not the case the all of these goals are important and so one of the things that that we will be suggesting to you when the final document is released is that we re-envision how they are presented so that it does not look hierarchical because all of the goals are important so with that being said i have the version two of the district goals um i i took
033your feedback to our leadership team and we spent the better half of one of our meetings responding to the feedback that you provided one of the first pieces of feedback that we wanted to respond to was to ensure that the goals were were measurable and so what we did is bolded the pieces under each school that we feel are outlining what the deliverables are under each section so under building a district vision and strategic plan we have indicated that by june 2022 the hamilton windham regional school district will have a widely distributed portrait of a graduate and an approved five-year strategic plan designed to achieve the outcomes articulated in the portrait so you would by the end of the year you will have both of those documents as deliverables in goal two one of the
034conversations that occurred again we we made the goals more measurable and the the leadership team also felt that the mtss school really was flowing through elementary and secondary so we did a little bit of restructuring around that but for the elementary level related to mtss that the goal is that we will have a documented plan outlining structures and best practices built on a foundation of a comprehensive plan for reading instruction at the secondary level again there would be a documented mtss plan designed for to improve teaching and learning and again those deliverables would be available to you by the end of the school year with numerous check-ins along the way to update the committee as to our progress because of the restructuring the world language goal was pulled out to be separate and that the
035deliverable here is that no later than november 30th the school committee will have a recommendation for the long-term vision of world language from the world language advisory committee in gold 4 what we have here is that by the end of the 2122 school year the district will have act actively evaluated our dei practices and procedures developed an audit report and time and action step plan and have built a common understanding of dei competencies in order to foster a safe and supportive school community one of the things that was discussed was the timing of the audit and so that has been moved up and even today we made additional [Music] comments and changes that we would be looking at the deliverable instead of saying winter of 21 for the audit to indicate that that would be
036done by december because that informs a lot of the other work another major piece of feedback you gave us at the last meeting was that you wanted to see a facility's goal and one related in terms and integrated into the turf field work that's being done in the district at this point we have an initial draft of a goal that is talking about how our how we would develop a facilities master plan with the turf field within that i know that tom you're continuing to think about that and because this is a new goal that was not in the plan last time can i ask you to just talk a little bit about your thinking regarding this sure so throughout the years the district has participated in facilities master planning most recently in 2014 before
037that 2011 and i think this dovetails nicely with a strategic plan um i wrote the goal so it incorporated not only the turf field but we're looking at the turf field and the buildings holistically because that's what we have to be strategic about a lot of our major infrastructure and our buildings are coming due for major renovation at the same time that we're looking at a turf field project so the strategic piece is not just um you know stating the need because i think that everybody can see the need but it's how do we get it done so that's why i wrote the goal the way it is laid out on paper here and to try to incorporate all the learning environments from kindergarten classroom to science lab to playing fields to project adventure so
038i'm hoping that we have a comprehensive plan at the end of the year that will dovetail with the strategic plan that will be in front of you and then one of the things that i did want to share with the committee is that we as a leadership team looked at all that is encompassed within this plan and there was a conversation about you know is this um too much to be able to accomplish in one year um and the conversation that that uh pursued was that this is a lot but that there is nothing here that we think cannot not be addressed and so we are looking at having leaders of each of these goals within our leadership team to be able to break out the the number of responsibilities that are here and that
039there was a real commitment from the team that there is nothing here that we feel like we can pull back on and act responsibly regarding the needs of the district so this is our latest draft and i would welcome and invite any additional feedback that the committee may have as we continue to work on this important document let's go with you first sounds great julia thank you thank you i i appreciate you incorporating my feedback in terms of like goal four where the goal should look at what does the district look like a year from now if the goal was achieved so i think that's great i have a couple of um just questions one is um in the world language goal with the long-term vision would that also include like a a budget like
040a plan to fund it yeah so what the timing on that goal is really important you'll notice that that the deliverable on that goal is by november 30th that is by design so that we know what the recommendations are before we build the fiscal year 23 budget and at that time the the assumption is that we will build in a budget that has that recommendation as always in a budget process there are trade-offs but that is why that timing is the way that it is so that it can make its way into the 23 budget okay because i i'm only concerned if they come up with a vision that we can't fund or or that we wouldn't be able to fund that's my only concern another question or just a suggestion on the the dei
041goal yep i really think that the audit and the workshop need to be flipped i think we need the audit before we have the joint workshop because the audit is going to tell us where are the holes where are the challenges where are the things that we need to look at so i just worry if we have the workshop in october 21 we're going to be going in blind kind of and then we have the dei audit and then they might tell us something completely different than we determine in the workshop so the audit will will help us determine sort of where to focus our priorities so my only recommendation is to kind of flip the two and those are really my only specific questions the other one is just more on wording um would
042a goal be improved teaching and learning that's like the overall goal and then goal a would be this is more just semantics goal a would be elementary goal b would be secondary and goal three b or goal two c would be um world language that's just in terms of structure right so not breaking out the world languages [Music] as an overall as an overall goal and then i see all i see goal 2 goal 3a and goal 3b underneath the overall goal of teaching and learning okay so there'd be a 2a 2b 2c yeah that's actually probably those are those are my that's really helpful julia thank you comments okay did you want to make any comments um yeah i actually don't uh first of all that was helpful julia the a b and c
043i my i sort of didn't get to that point but i sort of toyed with that i wonder mary beth you sort of addressed that um each goal would have an identified leader from the leadership team um and again that's i feel like that's your that's not our micromanaging that's that's just useful information for us so i guess my feedback would be that i agree with julia as long as that structure makes sense to your leadership team like if there's a reason in terms of who owns which goal that it needs to be in other words i guess i had some more thoughts but i'm not concerned if there's a leadership team feels like there's a reason they need to be split up this way my feedback would be i trust them that there's a
044rate does that make sense i think yeah i mean one of the things we could even include in this if it's helpful is kind of who are the goal leaders um so that you know and particularly as developing the work plan for next year who will be the people that will be coming in front of us to present that that's another piece that we could add to that document if it would be helpful i think that would be helpful and also that i think i will we'll all need to be mindful of that that that portion of it is is really operational but it's helpful information for us just for us to understand it i think um i don't have a lot of other it was very helpful tom to have you sort of identify
045this this one is it is it feels good i'm glad you took our feedback and it also does feel like it's still a little bit in it or it is an earlier draft than their other goals and it is but i feel like i feel good i feel like i feel heard that that you took the leadership team really listened and took our feedback and i feel enthusiastic that these are moving on the right track um and i also feel good about or my understanding is that graphic that you showed with the general star in the center that that is just a draft correct yeah that was just a very rough draft because because my honest feedback was i was like oh this is such a good concept and then i started going oh but
046this needs to be so yeah now very very very good we wanted to show you how we think that if we put the goals out in a format like that it sends a different message than one two three four five because it otherwise it suggests yeah so yeah so my feedback is i really do and appreciate that non-hierarchical format and that that concept and also that it needed to be a little tweaked but thank you hi hi um just uh tom on goal number five and mary beth my concern is that um this past year tom you've been working 120 miles an hour i just want to make sure that goal number five is within your capacity i don't want you to be overstretched and i know it's an early stage i don't want you
047to be overstretched with what you've just come off of this year because just that's just my one concern um just to be aware of what your capacity is and and as a district too i can appreciate that um one of the pieces you know of note in this goal is that we would be looking at working with a consultant to try to help organize all of this because it is a it's a heavy lift but with the right team in place i mean i feel confident that this work is needed before we can even you know move our buildings and grounds forward so okay the the timing is right while the district is entering into a strategic planning process and this we need some strategy behind our infrastructure okay all right thank you welcome thank
048you for your concern though yeah my same concern is just managing expectations around goal five that the deliverable is coming in june that doesn't mean that the next year things are going to happen because we won't have incorporated it to the budget so all throughout we just need to be sure that we're um you know it's part of a five-year strategic plan and it might be year five when the capital is addressed so thank you uh anna did you have any comments yourself okay great thank you everybody um so i have a couple thoughts um the first one is i actually don't see that much of a change between version one version two like just objectively i think a bullet has been added here and there but structurally they they're they're very similar so i
049feel like to some degree some of the feedback around specificity wasn't really incorporated as much as i would have liked i share some of julia's concerns about just structure i i do feel like even though you've bolded it here to me there's still some ambiguity around what is the goal what is the deliverable and then what are the subtasks so i continue to sort of offer i think it's a little messy just from a visual interpretation of what we're what is the deliverable um so there's that one thing that i'm struck with now that we're sort of seeing it is in almost every case the deliverable is a plan goal one is deliver a plan goal two is a little more specific i do think that there are some elements there that are more tangible
050but it still will have a documented empty ss plan um same for goal three there's a multi-tiered system part the the long-term vision vision is another word for plan um dei practices talk about an audit report and an action step plan and then goal five is once again a master plan so i think for me it just feels like a plan to me doesn't feel like quite a goal because then from an evaluation standpoint if we go back and say well did we meet our goal and if we come at the end of it like well yes we have a plan then theoretically you could say well good we got it but that doesn't actually mean that student learning has been improved it doesn't actually mean that dei practices are better it means maybe we've
051had a plan to talk about making it better but there's no measurable improvement so i sort of come back to that idea that i would like to see something a little bit more tangible in terms of improvements or you know specific types of of activities and conversations so that's a high-level comment i think the other thing that really strikes me once again even within these new goals there's still consulting from here a new advisory committee there you know it's it's so many committees and i guess that makes sense because if the goal is a plan then a committee makes a plan but i just it to me it doesn't have enough measurable deliverables um on some of them i also question a little bit the timing i completely agree with julia i i have always
052thought that the audit needs to be first i've been talking about an audit for months um and i definitely maintain that that has to be an outside person for just objectivity it's i think it will be difficult for us to do much effective self-auditing especially when the district hasn't undergone the bias training so it's difficult to self-audit when you haven't identified how to look for bias in the first place so i would caution i think that's really important and i think that has to happen sooner the other thing in goal number two that strikes me as a little bit out of sequence again this is some additional specificity which i do appreciate but for example almost to the very bottom by may 2022 which is basically the end of the school year and then the
053next one june 2022 by may 22 you're talking about providing professional development around safe and supportive schools to target the social and emotional needs of our students i feel like to me that should be much higher in this order of operations because we know that kids coming back from the pandemic are in sort of a state of emotional dysregulation and we know in terms of readiness to learn that if kids come in in that state of dysregulation they're not going to be effective learners even if you've had professional development on the science of reading so i kind of feel like i i think we need to consider how how are our teachers going to approach next fall and embrace students wherever they are so i think to me that feels a little bit out of
054order and then the last one on goal five which i know was sort of in response to my statement around turf and planning and one just specific observation the word turf i don't think is actually in this document anywhere so i do think we need to be clear like how does the turf committee play with this because the way goal 5 is written there's a consulting firm there's yet another advisory committee but there is also a turf committee my other real issue with this is it feels like it's siloed from the master planning activities in two towns and so to some degree i wonder if updating our own siloed facilities master plan is as helpful as it might appear to be because i know on a town level there's a lot of conversation around revenue
055and what are we doing with these public spaces so i feel like if we spend a lot of time or money developing a siloed facilities master plan and then meanwhile the town master planning is going on over here it's conceivable they could come up with a very different conclusion about building utilization than what we've come up with and now both parties have wasted a lot of time and money not talking to each other as effectively so i feel like i would like to see this more explicitly tied into what does it mean for the community at large because the underlying budget problems are driven by a revenue problem we keeps hearing that over and over so for example i know within hamilton there's much conversation about what to do with winthrop and cutler and turning
056those particular school sites into something that generates revenue so if we create a master plan that says we're going to turn winthrop into this and we're going to fix this and do that and then the town comes back and says we think that you should repurpose winthrop into mixed-use housing commercial well now so now we have to reconcile two different visions so i think that plan needs to be reworked a little bit with that particular mindset the other last thing is sort of it's small it's kind of like dana's comment about the chart i do like the chart much better and then if i had to choose between this chart and this chart just in terms of output like this chart is is a better reflection i think but they're small things but they sort
057of add up like before this becomes real if this is going to be our district goal document for our you know 38 million dollar company so to speak there's some formatting things that are just inconsistent there's different types there's different fonts actually in one case sometimes things are capitalized sometimes they're not so i think that again that sort of attention to detail and proofreading is small but important so i i would like to still see more changes but and i still would like to see a technology goal as well i mean i i kind of agree with michelle we're talking about a lot of things but that's also sort of still in absence to me i don't see how technology integrates here at all that's not mentioned so before you jump in time if i
058can just speak to your point about the professional development regarding social emotional needs the reason that it says may 2022 is that pd occurs across the school year and so that that's not saying we'll do pd in may it's that the pd plans will be rolled out over the course of the school year we don't know what those will be yet because our professional development committee is going to be working on that but i i i can easily see how it could be interpreted that we weren't going to do anything to me but it means by may and that that means that pd could be occurring throughout the school year one of the things that i will share related to the social emotional needs is we have had a large number of teachers i want
059to say 40 plus take part in trauma-informed learning and practices and workshops and courses um so we already have a really solid base and that we anticipate that that will continue as we move forward but just that point of clarity there did you want to speak to facilities um is that okay if i just wanted to give a little comfort to the to the committee uh to your point about in um looping in the towns with their master planning process uh so i've been in conversation with margaret hoffman of wenham who's the planner um she loved that i reached out i said i really wanted to you know work together because they're going through the master planning i reached out to joe demellowitz before i put it into our document i wanted to have that
060conversation to see how it all lined up in sequence because hamilton and wenham are on different schedules for the master planning process so um you know we're going to have to have some conversations on how all of this stuff is you know incorporated into all of our plans and we do have a representative on the hamilton committee so our viewpoint is going to be communicated yeah and i just wanted just quickly to um when it come i know it seemed like especially in the facilities end that oh it's a it's a plan for plans but all of the grant applications that we fill out for msba asks for a specific they ask a specific question is there a facilities master plan is there a strategic plan and it's painful to check no right no i
061mean that's that's that's us in a tough position to be awarded a grant if we don't have you know a long-range plan in place hope that no i mean that's that's similar to uh you know from like a planning board thing you know having a housing production plan if you don't have one it's a deficiency it's it is sort of like a box ticking activity i just think that the plan unto itself is one part of the bigger picture but i i appreciate what you're saying there jen did you have any input i do i'm gonna apologize if this is the first time i've had a chance to give an input on this um there needs to be more detail here and not just to you with a district goal but so there's a document
062that parents can look at and can say oh well you know i can help out this way so it would be really nice when we see things like for example the first bullet point under under goal one key community stakeholders what do you mean by key community stakeholders how many parents how many teachers how many administrators are we looking for um also based on the the meeting that the teachers had this spring do we know what the plan put forward by the teachers for the portrait of a graduate or the similar thing looks like and are we incorporating that and if so why not if not then why not for your second goal i think there has to be a section here on getting teacher parent buying if 30 of the parents surveyed didn't even
063know what the program was we need to communicate better with the program so i think there needs to be a deliverable there showing that there was an attempt to get teacher student buy-in i also feel that we need a baseline measurement the program and the goals of the program are very very good um these are these are documents that i've done in various college trainings but we need to be collecting a baseline of where students are now at the same time because if we're not doing that then we get this wonderful program put together and then we spend another year collecting baselining and i would like to see those two things done at the same time so that we know where students are so when the program is like 100 everybody's in you know we
064can have quantifiable measurable results same thing with the goal 3 i think there needs to be measurable quantifiable baselines and julia covered everything i had before except um there are things we can do this year for example students get a teacher reading list every year some are reading less we could make it a or it could be a goal of the district to incorporate books and other materials having to do with diversity equity inclusion so african-american authors lgbtq authors those type of things i think would show a measurable step forward um and i agree i'm really worried that they're we're going to be committed to death you know maybe a better breakdown of what each committee is going to look like will convince me that that's not the case but right now there are a
065lot of advisory committees stakeholder meetings and that is still a concern of mine but i'm a scientist i want stuff that i can measure and jennifer i can offer a couple of thoughts on that two that i would just offer as a point of clarification so the question about portrait of a graduate there was some work done on a portrait of a graduate but it was done in a very very small group and that one of the things that we know about portraits of graduates their real value is the community conversation and building consensus around the vision of the district in terms of student outcomes and in fact when the the high school had its kneeask evaluation which is the accreditation group come in this is a standard that is asked to be addressed and
066after the first initial study it was indicated that the work that had been done did not meet the standard for just that reason that there had not been a high level of community engagement so i would you know i would certainly envision that that document will be provided to to everyone in terms of here's here's what we've come up with so far uh but that as a district we really need to expand that conversation be beyond the original walls that it was held in to have parents and teachers and community members and administrators all coming together to talk about this and gathering feedback from all of our community so i wanted to just give you a little bit of a little bit more background around that the the other piece about baseline data we we
067absolutely agree with you there there are a couple challenges some some places where we think we're going to land but part of what we have talked about is that we are still struggling with documenting curriculum um at the middle level at the secondary level and the elementary level which makes it challenging to come up with baseline data if you don't yet if you do not yet have real clarity around the the curriculum and what the outcomes are that being said in terms of i'll speak about the reading work this summer that is a a key focus to identify what are the assessments that we are going to be using in terms of ongoing benchmarking data and so what i what collectively the leadership team is feeling is that we can't say kids are going to
068increase 10 say on this assessment because we first have to identify what those assessments are but i think that we will be able to collect base selling data next year so that then in the following year we can say okay here here's the the platform in terms of where we we began and we are looking to improve those outcomes by whatever x percent feels reasonable so i just wanted to add that additional piece of information regarding the baseline data and i have captured some of your your other thoughts and feedback so i appreciate that just for the minutes if we can just note that michelle horrigan arrived at around 7 35 and david polito arrived around 8 o'clock david we're talking about the goals and i don't know if you had a chance to sort
069of listen in did you have anything you wanted to say about them and if you did if you can turn your microphone around it's been super contentious around being able to hear whatever um yeah i'm actually not gonna say anything at this time so sounds good okay great um okay so now we are on to item c which is a discussion of the school calendar for next year um yes yes yes okay um uh okay uh i move well i i can make the motion that i think that but i didn't make put this on the agenda but i can make the motion how i think it's intended and people could second or not right okay um i move that the hamilton wentham regional school committee amend the 2021 2020 school calendar to make april
07015th a regular day of school second by david all right so just for a little bit of history we were asked by well for a little bit of history back in the fall there was some discussion about this topic and i had recommended that we bring that up next fall to discuss it because there are some issues that need to be resolved which i don't know if we have resolved the one about the contract which is not the hwea but the uh uh audiobook we have not no there's no resolution um but they were made aware that this conversation was happening this evening perfect um so there's that so then at the last meeting we were asked by the hwea to move the um first day of school which we did vote to do based
071on their request and at that meeting there was a motion to also remove from the calendar a day off which coincides with good friday so that is where we are at today and i asked that it be tabled so that we could talk to the hwea about that do we have their yes i did have an opportunity to have a conversation with them and they were comfortable with moving forward with this change okay so the one thing that will be important is that our custodians do have that as a holiday currently so we would not have custodial services or we would have to pay some sort of holiday pay to them if we were unable to reach an agreement that we were to remove that holiday so that is an issue um we did like
072we did make it contract so pardon me this should be under the new contract though that's what i'm saying we would have to negotiate that yeah change so it may or may not cost us money all right um we started over there so uh do you want to make any comments jennifer are we debating or are we voting yeah no we're debating or if anybody has comments i have a question and a statement could we and i'm not involved in contract negotiating decisions but could we give the custodians a floating holiday i mean is that an option to replace the good friday can can i that would have to be negotiated right can i answer that yeah yeah so it would just have to be negotiated but like if you were in negotiations that could
073potentially be one solution but we don't know yet but no that was totally fine i agreed with moving the first day of school because the teachers agreed with that but this is something that i also agree with because i do believe that there needs to be a separation from church between church and state we are a secular school we can't be seen giving preference to one religion over another and by giving good friday off which is a traditionally christian holiday we are giving people this this message from not only is it a calendar issue but it's also an equity and inclusion issue because we have lots of students from many different religions who are left out when good friday is given preferential treatment over their religion's important holidays anna i think most people know how
074i feel about this i fully support it i agree that we have to be secular and we should give no preference to any religion of any kind at any time ever well just as a parent in the district for many years when my children started we did go to school on good friday and and it was easy as a parent from both ends from a religious standpoint and a non-religious standpoint to have them in school that day so i am in favor of that and i'm hoping that if teachers do need to take a day off for the religious beliefs it can be a half day on their part dana um so my initial um thought was that i would my initial instinct was that i would not have wanted to change this until we
075need until we created the new calendar december in december that i think i've stated that several times that however given the feedback from the hwa which sounds that they are open to this i am open to making the change um earlier than i had initially so that's my two cents david yeah i got nothing right yeah i fully support it um so back in the fall one of the things i had stated was my biggest concern and the reason that we do have this off because as michelle stated there was a point i think when my kids very first started that good friday was off and then the second year probably around 2006 yeah that they started to go to school well there was the move to go to school on good friday and then
076the first two years there were snow days called because there were too many staff there was a change in policy so that the staff had to notify the school by the tenth day if they were gonna of school starting we still had high absenteeism among the secondary school and the year that they changed it we had less than 50 of the high school students in attendance we had to pay for subs so it was costing the district and we weren't getting a good educational day out of it so that was the logic behind it we now have the hwea saying that they would support that so i'm hoping what that means is that their members will take it off as a religious holiday if they need it and that we will not have high absenteeism
077among the staff and students on that day so just as i had said in the fall i'm willing to see if the tides have changed because it's been maybe eight nine ten years since that happened so um so i guess if we're ready to vote we can vote all those in favor so it's unanimous so there's no reason to call for opposed um who is going to talk about the msba okay great all right thank you in your packets tonight you'll see as an exhibit there is an application for to replace the high school roof under the msba accelerator repair program so if you all remember throughout life there are milestones right so when you're 16 you have the opportunity to get your driver's license at 18 you get the opportunity to vote 21 you
078know that's it but at 25 years old roof is eligible under the msba accelerator repair program so that's why we're applying this year we do have some issues at the high school with leaks recently we did an infrared scan through a company we have about 46 places where there is moisture underneath the membrane it is out of warranty being installed 25 years ago so we are asking that the committee approved our application to the msba under that program i should notify the committee that it is 25 years to apply to get in over the past few years msba has only invited districts with roofs that are 27 to 30 years old so but it doesn't hurt for us to apply it's not it's a there's no commitment either way on msba's part or the district's
079part by applying so we would seek your vote tonight to approve us to submit the application do you want to make a motion dana uh i move that uh the hamilton regional school committee approved the uh msbi application for the high school roof i'm sorry um it's a little bit i need to do this to you there is oh a second exhibit and i apologize for how wordy it is but it is um i'm sorry i actually saw that of the msba law that it has to be a specific got it okay motions [Music] all right having convened in an open meeting on may 19 2021 prior to the soi submission closing date hamilton went on a regional school committee in accordance with its charter bylaws and ordinances has voted to authorize the superintendent to
080submit the massachusetts school building authority the statement of interest form dated may 14 2021 for the hamilton monument regional high school located at 775 bay road in hamilton which describes and explains the following deficiencies and the priority categories for which an application may be submitted to the massachusetts school building authority in the future to for in the future to for a full replacement of the 1989 installed roof and hereby further specifically acknowledges that by submitting the statement of interest form the massachusetts school building authority in no way guarantees the acceptance or the approval of an application the awarding of a grant or any other funding commitment from the massachusetts school building authority or commits the hamilton-wynne regional school district to filing an application for funding with the massachusetts school building authority and i move that
081we approve the aforementioned statement is there a second all second second by anna um does anybody have questions great david do we have an approximate price on what the real food would it cost do we have a approximate price on what the roof would cost to repair unfortunately no so some of these jobs could just be replacing the membrane if you get into more in depth but it'll be in the seven figures yeah and uh this particular process is this something we have to wait till here back from the fall or is this a quicker process it's the same process as going for a building it is so to to give the committee and also the general public a little comfort is one of the reasons why we embarked on our infrared testing was so
082we can actually you know repair in the process because even if we're invited into the program i mean we're looking at at least a year out before we'd even start doing schematic drawings so anyone else jen i know funding is always an issue for us are we looking at if major repairs have to be done making the repairs in such a way so that they're as green as possible for example incorporating solar panels so we might actually save on electricity it's the perfect place to put them it is i'm in order for and i've done a few jobs in the past where we've put solar on the roofs if the life expectancy of a panel is 20 years then you want to make sure that you know your roof is warrantied for at least that
083time period so you mean by replacing our roof we would be you know have a little more flexibility with installing that but we wouldn't even be able to get any engineering done on solar right now because of the condition it's in once we replace the roof that definitely be a viable option providing that the structure is there to support it john can i ask you was your question more along the lines of are we considering putting on a solar on the roof when we do the replacement i would if we were doing major structural changes like where you're replacing large pieces of roof would it be fiscally possible that's what i thought corporate solar panels on those larger sections to save the school money right that's what i thought your question was and i didn't
084feel like that was answered okay oh okay all right yeah this is sort of philosophical but just planning a seed um with these with these soi applications knowing that we're maybe on the early side of this right we're at 25 and sort of looking at 30 and i know at one point you'd shared a historical average of projects that were funded so it's a little and this is not a guarantee on some level you know we keep applying for these things and we haven't been successful getting them but at some point with the roof we're going to have to fix it no matter what regardless of whether or not we get state funding so i'm assuming that this is obviously plan a but on some level are we also working on a we just have
085to pay for it ourselves and hope for the best kind of plan yeah i think that eventually we would have to it is i would say the state funds more accelerated repair projects than they do the core program just because of the sheer numbers i feel like we would have a decent chance over the next few years historically the district has received about 40 reimbursement from the msba on these projects which you know is a significant dollar amount i think we're still in a position now where we can make some repairs to triage some of the water issues that we're having with the roof but eventually if we're not invited in a few years yeah i'm going to come in front of the committee and ask that we replace the roof okay great so why
086don't we vote if you are in favor of the motion raise your hand all right no need to find a pose that is unanimous um i'm assuming this is from you as well tom the update on the kickoff meeting sure so on may 10th we had representation from both hamilton and wenham's community preservation committee youth sports director of athletics vice chair horrigan and myself and we had a successful kickoff meeting we did start off by going in over introductions so everybody knew each other genualdo presented a brief synopsis of title ix and how when we're talking about plans moving forward with these athletic fields we need to think of all sports when we're having these conversations uh we it was fortunate for me being somewhat of a newcomer to the community that there was such
087historical knowledge over where we've been with this uh process throughout the years there's been really good document collection by the cpcs i found and some of the action steps that we're looking forward there there seemed to be consensus to build in tennis courts and softball facilities in any plan moving forward so part of my homework is summarizing all of those documents and also writing a scope of work for the next step in design for this project so that's where we are now we're we will be meeting in early june again and as i said earlier we'll be looking at incorporating that into a facilities master plan with the strategic plan you already have the funding for doing that that's correct that was voted not this past election cycle but the cycle before under the capital
088budget does anybody want more information about that okay all right um the next item on the agenda is about a request by as far as i can tell but from you anna i made the request from anna to [Music] have a flag raised on the flagpoles at the schools for the whole month of july uh for june i'm sorry there are two two related but separate requests okay so the first request is that we add the progress flag presumably to the area someplace near this display so that during our committee meetings it is up invisible so that's one part of the request i personally think that that flag can be up all the time like i think that flag could be there in the same way and that could be mimicked in all the elementary
089schools but specifically during our meetings the second part of the request is that we do indeed participate in traditional pride activities for flag raisings as happen in municipalities across the country across the state around the world so that would be flying the progress flag at all district offices and buildings on the flagpoles during the month of june let's take that one first okay and just for clarity because i know there was some question about what version of flag we're talking about i was specific to site the progress flag which is also sometimes called the unity flag the reason being is that as it explicitly is inclusive of trans community members as well as non-white community members so it's a more purposeful statement of inclusivity and is a relatively newer flag it was the flag flown
090by the commonwealth and the city of boston and numbers of other places so just for clarity there are lots of different quote unquote pride flags i'm specifically requesting the the progress version of the flag that was created in 2018 by the graphic artist daniel quasar okay you want to make a motion um it sounds like there might be two separate motions yeah yeah yeah yeah i if if i would like anna to make if just so that it's worded exactly but i would i mean my it would help for me to go two separate motions and it would also help if you would if you don't mind making it just so that it's exactly the way you want to make it michelle do let me start with the outdoor flagpoles first okay i moved at
091the hamilton winter regional school district fly the progress pride flag on all district outdoor flagpoles for the month of june 2021 and moving forward as a statement of support for our lgbtq community second you seconded it yeah i thought i heard that second by jen all right is there any discussion all right i'd like to still have a question okay so um this is sort of just to whoever knows the answer my understanding is that i have two questions i guess is this the progress flag is that the same flag that the towns are going to be flying in on their flagpoles in june um and i just want to confirm that both towns i have heard that but i didn't actually hear that from any town official i want to confirm that that is
092actually verified that both towns are flying out on all of their flagpoles not not quite all i can clarify it was part of the group that got that decision made in both communities um both towns flew the progress flag in 2020 it is my understanding that hamilton definitely will find that flag i think that the one m select board is awaiting a recommendation from the lenham human rights committee as to which flag so that is to be determined um that's worth coming in terms of which flagpoles lenham has approved flying the flag on the town hall flagpole hamilton has approved flying the flag on the town hall flagpole and the flagpole at patton park for what length of time right the uh it came out differently in both communities so um and in both communities
093the select boards gave the human rights commission and committee and each respective community a little bit of discretion about when the exact raisings would happen to coordinate with the police department dpw to get the flags up hamilton is going to simultaneously raise the pride flag in the juneteenth flag at the same time as the last we left it but they are also trying to coordinate with the north shore juneteenth association so it's a little more complicated but that program is being planned by the town human rights commission and one of it was more explicit that the pride flag will go up on or around the first maybe the second some communities are doing it on the fourth so again it's not at midnight on the first the flag goes up the pride flag will fly
094from um a date in early june until the 18th and then on the 19th the pride flag will come down and the juneteenth flag will go up for a week one kind of important point of order that's come up though just so people understand in both communities there's also a pow mia flag that is just below the american flag that will not be changed in any way whatsoever that flag will be up as it always is below the american flag in both communities so that's about as clear as i can make thank you i really i appreciate that um can i if this um i'm not sure whether this relates one more thing i want to say and i i'm not sure whether it fits better under this one or it might even be after
095the vote but i guess my recommendation or my hope or dream for the committee is that regardless of how the vote goes today i would hope that we would we as a committee would task the policy committee with creating policy on this because i know i myself would very much have liked to have a guidepost or something to look towards into for the future to how to make decisions regarding um this i'm just maybe that's a separate motion but i just want to put that out there to committee julia i think you had your hand up a second ago yeah i just want to make a statement for any members of the public that are confused as to the legality of this that might be that might have been confused by um legal counsel's exhibit
096one which they have since changed to exhibit two so um the legal counsel um to hingham public schools and also echoed by our only goal counsel says that the supreme court has stated when the government speaks it is entitled to promote a program to espouse a policy or to take a position if the flag is displayed by the school department it will be considered government speech and it will not be considered as creating a public forum in the use of the flagpole because i just don't want people to be confused and think that because we are flying the pride flag we are then going to open ourselves up to have to fly any flag that comes to us i just want to read another couple of statements from the hingham legal council government speech is
097necessary to government function a government exercises selectivity government decision makers make selections based on appropriateness for the place history and local culture and governments are allowed to express their ideas and views even when receiving private assistance in delivering the public message so it is not subject to the free speech clause and i i'm not debating whether it's right or wrong i just wanted to make a statement as to the legality and clear of any confusion that the public might have around that we are absolutely 100 entitled to vote on this and make a statement on this as we see fit so my comments are about the progress flag specifically i would wholeheartedly support flying a rainbow flag and in fact hingham did decide to fly a rainbow flag and not a progress flag i just
098feel that [Music] that flag is inclusive of all people that the colors do not represent any gender or any gender specific anything and they're about like love and peace and spirituality and it is a flag that is more recognizable and is more particularly in an elementary school more in line with sort of what parents might be comfortable speaking to their children about so i don't have an issue with flying a flag but i am more in favor of flying either the traditional rainbow flag or the flag that has the philadelphia flag that has the two additional stripes on it and that would be my only comment as far as that goes so i guess i would amend the motion or i would ask to amend the motion to fly the rainbow flag versus the progress
099flag anybody wanting to second that nope okay could i could i ask the follow-up though to that michelle's question why the progress flag did you as opposed to the rainbow flag sure um so the progress flag is explicitly inclusive of the trans community which within the lgbtq community has often been marginalized as sort of a marginalized subgroup within a subgroup so part of the new design incorporates sort of the pink and light blue of the trans flag which is there they're also the additional colors of brown and black to represent that historically again within the lgbt community non-white members of that community have felt marginalized as an additional layer interestingly this has actually become a pretty notable point of fracture within the community and boston pride itself right now is in the middle of the
100litigation suit between boston pride and black boston pride over this issue so my motivation here is that in light of current events both racial awareness racial injustice over the last year that this is an opportunity for us to explicitly highlight that as an additional piece of support for additionally marginalized sum groups i think especially in light of recent events regarding use of pronouns and trans students feeling particularly isolated that any time we have a chance to be more inclusive i personally think that we should err on the side of additional inclusivity i don't see any harm in doing so in this particular instance i do see optically there could be harm in choosing not to use this flag because this flag sort of came about because of historical undercurrents within the lgbtq community so given
101current time both nationally but also within our community i think it's also really important as a predominantly white community which we are that we take a little extra time to put a little extra thought into our messaging so i think the fact that this flag exists and the origins that that led to its creation in the first place to me i would err on the side of being as inclusive as possible and i i think to michelle's point about appropriateness at the elementary level the reality is there are trans students and trans families trans loved ones in in all communities and um to think that elementary students are not aware of this or exposed to it is sort of a false prophecy i think you know for families that have children who identify as trans
102or parents who perhaps identify as trans or loved ones i mean that act of denying that part of the lgbtq community is a form of sort of closeting it's sort of saying well we can talk about being gay that's sort of okay but if you're this version of gay that that's not okay i actually think that's a really damaging message to send to the trans community especially for families that might have children or loved ones in that community i think we need to normalize all aspects of being part of that community whether you're l g b t q plus they're all equally important of recognition so that's my motivation for that particular flag in this community at this time thank you i want to be clear that i did not say what you said that
103i said what i said was that i felt like parents would be more comfortable with the rainbow flag because it does not talk about gender or sexuality but it talks about spirituality and other things that i think they would feel more comfortable with discussing so i don't want to be characterized in the way you characterize what i was saying that i was against transgender children or that i didn't understand that there are transgender children in our community or that families might have transgender people in them that is not what i said okay all right so uh we're voting on yep i'm sorry i thought i didn't realize that you hadn't spoken go ahead thank you first of all i'd like to thank all the community members who stood up at the beginning and supported this
104and supported our lgbtq plus students i'm glad that a majority of our community at least ones who have contacted me supported but even if they didn't part of our role as community leaders must be representing the minority of our students we have to protect the feelings of our kids that are harmed or disillusioned and this has to be our priority particularly after the anti after the homophobic and threatening messages that were sent out in the previous chat if parents don't understand what a flag means then i think those of us in the community who do understand need to make it part of our job to educate the parents and other people in the community who don't understand why this flag what the flag means and why it's so inclusive and widespread all right so um
105we're voting on the motion which is whether or not to fly flags on the flagpoles outside of the schools sounds like for the month of june i would have a question about where the flags are coming from are they being purchased by the district what's this i can actually speak to it with seeing this on the agenda and i checked with our supplier for [Music] flags and they had the sick stripe the 1978 six stripe pride flag they set six aside for us to be able to get them on the polls and they informed me that that was what they were able to find because just supply chains in that field too has been strained because stitchers are at a high demand right and believe it or not there is a flag shortage because of
106that that's through our you know prime supplier because where it's going to be flown outdoors we want it to be stitched not just a screen printed indoor flag so it has to be able to withstand the weather i asked what they had for because i know there's 30 somewhat variations of the different pride flags that's what they were able to find could look at other sources yeah there if i may there are lots of other sources um one group locally that would be good to throw some support to is nagli which is the north shore association of gay and lesbian youth i know for a fact that they have a lot of that particular flag there's also a company called flags for good that has them i personally my possession have some i'm happy to
107donate some i'm sure others in the community as well so i think that particular challenge could be overcome but i appreciate your point about the supply chain but so i think what tom is saying is there's a difference between an indoor flag and an outdoor flag and that he's concerned that they're still stripe i have two i'll gladly give you my two kills we get okay the ones we need you know as i said i just called our supplier that we get all of our flags from and sure no i think that it wasn't so yep yeah like i know first church just had to replace theirs because it my fear was three and a half in the morning i didn't want to do something that was inclusive and then have the weather destroy it
108and make a worse statement right so exactly so do we have do we have another meeting before june 1st we don't can we no the next meeting will be on june 2nd okay so in the event that you cannot identify a supplier do you want us to have a motion or other flag or i mean are we okay with it being whatever flag tom gets no we can work we'll work with tom to get them okay we will figure it out sounds good nowhere to find me okay and i think the motion is to fly the flag it's it's an operational problem-solving issue after that sounds good okay anybody else in favor that's unanimous so there's no no votes in that um then there's a second request and i you want to make a motion
109um i move that the hamiltonian regional school committee fly the progress flag on the wall of on the wall of whatever room the committee meets in so it's visible to the public second i can find julia all right do we have a discussion on that dana okay so i think this is where i should have really asked my question or the first time um so i want clarification on is the proposal to permanently install the progress flag here in bucher or is it that you want to put it up and take it down every time and if and in both cases or i guess in the second case is it just for the month of june for in perpetuity or that's a good clarifying question the reason so right now we're meeting in the bucher
110multi-purpose room but we don't always meet in this room i guess if this is our normal meeting place ideally and my my preference would be that we put the flag up and we leave it up and when we meet here it will be visible um i i see your point if you if it if we do end up moving our meeting location i could see that being a drain on tom's time to move a flag find a flag put a flag up um so i think in my mind you know visually this wall seems to be pretty consider i mean we meet here pretty consistently so to me i think that if this is the room that we meet in i think it would be a strong visual statement to have it be behind us
111on a practical matter i also have no issue leaving it up at all times in this room but i think you know that's a that's another sort of layer we could do three motions i suppose we could split it apart to get another one but i see those as two different motions just for this particular committee can i amend the motion yep i'd like to have a which is what i said before is that i'd like to keep the motion as it is and add um that we will task the policy committee with creating a policy that will inform us on our flag policy going forward a second for that amendment second okay do you have any discussion on that yeah i actually think those are two different conversations i i think the conversation at
112hand is as a body flying you know having a flag represent you know um flying behind us or you know behind us while we're meeting and the policy to you know display flags in school is a separate idea right so right now we're talking about the body the committee itself excuse me you know as anna said we do occasionally meet in other places predominantly we meet here but you know the idea is as a committee to you know fly the flag while we're meeting to show that you know as a committee we are fully vested in you know um supporting excuse me um you know like it just it really just goes back to supporting our idea of diversity and inclusion and you know in its two separate issues i i don't think that they're
113unrelated but they're two separate issues okay can i ask mary beth a clarifying question so in terms of of pride flags being up visually it's my understanding that in many places in the district particularly at the middle and high school there are pride flags up in many places and i know there's one up in the library because i remember when we were there before i got distracted by the original art on the wall that the flags are up i mean so it it to some degree i think this is a little bit of a more complicated question i think the outdoor flying is one particular celebration and i'm glad we've separated that out i think on a practical basis we already have pride flags up in district buildings that remain up year round and i
114feel like the inclusion of the elementary schools in that ongoing display i'm not sure i mean if we need a vote to do that then we can take a vote to do that but i think it's interesting that those flags are already up in the middle of high school so i guess can you confirm there are flags up in the middle in high school dairy level we do have pride flags on display okay so you know to me that may be to david's point is the the nuance here is the flags are already up in some places are we wanting to put them up in others at the elementary level and then separately do we as a committee want to have that flag be part of our meeting process and you know if that wants
115to be separated out i think flying it on the wall there is the best place visually for the public but there are other ways that we could include a flag in our meetings as a visual statement that are not necessarily on the wall but i don't think they're i mean i i would like the flag to be on the elementary school world i think it's important but i hear david's point and dana's point and others point that that's a little bit of a different question okay so right now we go oh i just have a question yeah so i guess it just gets into the purview of the school committee do we have the jurisdiction to make that decision to to fly the flag inside the school um and definitely we have the purview to
116decide to fly to our meetings so i think that should be a 100 separate vote but that's yeah that brings up a separate question i mean because i'm not even sure if that's in our is that in our purview is that part of our role is that something that we are that we can do and if we can do it then maybe we should make a motion and bring it to a vote i don't know i would say it's difficult to tell the school how to decorate like we wouldn't say we want blue carpet sorry michelle can you speak i can't i can't i would say i i agree with you we wouldn't say i want blue carpet here blind green chairs put up a poster about i don't know counting that has the count
117from sesame street on it or whatever so i think that's an interesting question that i don't know so um but i think the motion the amendment is to do the policy and i'm and i think maybe we need to separate them i'm happy to withdraw my amendment and and make two motions after this one yeah okay all right so that has been rescinded so we're yeah go ahead julia yes no so i was thinking it should be separate very very all separate the policy should she'll be all these separate motions so personally i feel like this is a government meeting and so flying government flags is appropriate i would have no problem with if we had a flag over on the side during our meetings during the month of june but i feel like if
118we're flying any one particular flag for the whole year that we're it's more important to live the values that the flag represents than it is to fly the flag and so i just feel like it's not i don't feel like it's appropriate to have a government body flying a flag that's not part of their government and i know that the town hall will fly the flag because it's in recognition of a federally recognized or a recognized holiday but they're not going to fly the flag every day of the year because they're a government entity they're not the whatever the human rights coalition headquarters or whatever so i would be in favor of flying a flag for the month of june on a pole but i am not in fever of hanging a flag permanently on
119the wall at the school i think we need to be careful about how we're conducting this conversation right multiple times this past week and tonight um just the title of this conversation on the agenda right was actually um you know put out incorrectly right in and as someone who you know this flag represents they could feel that as a form of microaggression against them right the idea of saying i'm comfortable with this flag can be perceived it is often perceived by the people who you're are being excluded in the choice of flag right can feel attacked and marginalized right that's the whole reason why this flag is so important this is what i think as a committee we've been speaking about on this sort of ground level of really seeing what it is to be
120truly inclusive as a district right and and this is that when we spoke to that and i said you know doing a survey is going to be a really really tough slap in the face to this district is because there are items like that throughout the district up and down right that we as a committee should be setting as a goal to eliminate from our district and this is a great first step for that and so that's why i think we need to start being careful i understand you know i am a cisgender heterosexual white man you know from the middle class i understand that that flag doesn't necessarily represent me personally it represents a heck of a lot of my family members um but you know i need to say okay you know i
121l i fly this flag in support of them in support of all the people that were marginalized to get us here and we're trying to get us to the next level excuse me the adults in this room are going to care about that flag flying on the wall way more than the kids are right and you know i can tell you that as soldiers surrounded you know i just came from a gaggle of 14 year old girls that flag is all over the place you know it is not even an issue um it like i said it's more of an issue that it's not here so you know let's be let's be the leaders here anna i think you know now that we're processing this as a group i think really the the real issue
122is that i think the real issue is that this particular room where we happen to meet happens to be an elementary school and the absence of the flag here is particularly notable i think were we meeting in the high school library we this motion wouldn't even have to be made because the flag is already there so really if we want to get to the heart of the matter it's that this is a symbol of inclusion and representation which i actually think is really important visual representation is hugely important for those people who are typically ignored or unseen or worse bullied so i think really the issue is that we as a committee meet in a room where that flag is not part it's not part we have healthy kids we have the american flag we
123have our world we actually have a lot of visual um statements of value in this room right there's the getting the game there's the peanuts gang everyone's playing together if you if you look at it like there are statements of value throughout the room but this is one that's absent from this particular room and it's not absent from other rooms so really i think it's just a convergence that the school committee as the governing body happens to meet in an elementary room so maybe really i mean i think actually i would like i guess the motion's been second i think i would like to withdraw my motion for simplicity and state that i move we fly the progress flag on the walls of our elementary schools in a highly visible place and in this room
124in particular next to next to the globe so it's visible during our meetings is there a second can i make a statement or a question go ahead sorry i just want to say the supreme court stated when the government speaks it is entitled to promote a program to espouse a policy or to take a position we are allowed to do this whether it's right or wrong we are allowed to do this so i think we need i firmly obviously support it um but i think the important thing to to know that i i don't want the public i don't want the teachers i don't want people to get confused is is that legal to do it and are they bulldozing their agenda on to everybody we are allowed 100 to do this so i just
125had a point of order yep go ahead um i'm trying to keep track of where we are too so i hope we can clarify that yeah go ahead with the motion seconded now anna can withdraw it is up to and she can withdraw that correct even though it has been seconded i think the original motion or can withdraw it i believe so and then i think now she would need to actually put a new that i think you can just withdraw and change the motion i think it has to be two separate acts i can i can move again if you want she did move it again i think she did yeah i think she did i simplified it i took out the language of um no no totally i didn't get it and if
126not that's what we'll record in the minutes dana can i move to vote yeah we can vote on if we're going to vote all of those in favor of voting now you're not voting yes or no you're just voting to vote raise your hand all of those opposed oh it was unanimous i don't even know i asked why i asked to post okay so the motion is basically to direct the superintendent to be sure that a pride flag is flown in a prominent location at every elementary school in the district yes with the stipulation in this room it should be visible during our meetings that should be what that in this room it should be visible during our meetings if this is where we're meeting but the original motion was at the elementary level and
127in this room someplace visible during our meetings which would be that part of the wall unless we reconfigure how we sit we can put it somewhere else i mean that part i think could be worked out but the motion is at the elementary level so it's visible during our meetings in all the buildings well there's that but there's also like there's different camera angles so it's not going to always be visible but right visible at some point during the meeting understood okay all right any comment we can't we move to vote yeah let's go don't don't make a motion or do that we're going to vote no no i know that'll say okay raise your hand all opposed that is six to one i probably believe we have another motion coming um i i'm happy
128to hold it for another meeting okay well it depends was your meeting that we should actually solidify this in policy correct oh yeah i think we should do that now i agree okay well i guess i want to say that i wished when we got this that i had had something to look at in our policy that would have been helpful and guiding and in the future you know there may be similar or different requests for flags and i so i move that we task the policy committee with creating a policy to address excuse me flag display in the district can we have a date on that motion bye oh um uh sure i don't know by the fall september 30th is there a second for that what was the what was the date you
129said by september 30th september 30th david yeah no i was just wondering if the we pigeoned hold ourselves a little with the because we're talking about a flag right now but i think what we're talking about is some sort of inclusive representation so but i i i i think the policy committee can sort of take that they can that's the only thing i was worried about yeah so it starts with a flag i think maybe it starts with a flag because i think the biggest issue that the towns have had is they don't have a policy and that biggest issue that the maic had is they can't find a policy anywhere so it's something that you're going to have to do from scratch essentially so it's it's going to be a task yep um so
130one just so i have two questions one of them is i don't know i mean september 30th is going to be a quickly policy doesn't meet all that often so i don't know if we have i mean i don't know that we're going to have a perfect policy by september 30 i think we can try but i think that's a goal i will make a comment about policy in general that was interesting as i was i mean i've been i've been researching this for the last year and a half about how to do this and to some degree the absence of policy is a derivative of the government speech issue if the government's choosing to speak you don't necessarily need a policy like the government can choose to speak on an ad hoc basis so
131well i don't disagree with dana it would be good for policy to look at this it could be the policy recommendation is to not have a policy so i just want to throw that out there and it's interesting because one of the legal arguments that i came across in looking at this is that the creation of a policy itself takes it into some sort of other forum kind of question if it's just the governmental body choosing to speak at their discretion that is the policy government speech is government speech and it's not necessarily policy so i think i think it's going to require some unpacking and i do know that you know some towns have them sometimes don't to some degree you know the basis is in those federal or state proclamations and then they're
132interpreted by the governing bodies as they will so i just i think it's great for policy to look at it but i think it's also indicative that the absence of policy indicates that perhaps no policy is a policy if that makes sense to the motion i would say it is the advice of our lawyer it was the advice of the lawyer from hingham it has been the advice of the lawyers that represent the towns that there are policies and so i would encourage us to follow that legal advice so anybody else all right then uh all in favor of having policy be charged with coming back with a report on a policy by the 30th raise year of september raise your hand okay that's unanimous so there's no need for whatever no votes okay so
133now um we are going to have a report on the status of our budget and funds from our assistant superintendent vincent leone and we'll see how we're doing because it's been a very interesting year with you know not knowing what the year was going to bring and then it's bringing some good news and some bad news how long do you think you're going to need to set up just a minute okay i was like we could go through some of these policies if we yeah the password has changed i can't get in either it's for the record we're not that far off our timing or not michelle and mary beth did a great job um how do you do it [Laughter] oh and there's the picture of you in your suit three by five is
134easy to come by uh thank you for letting me present to you guys tonight we're here to go over our fy 21 year-end forecast as of the quarter ending march 31st today is may 19th i would like to point out that after once the quarter ended about the first week in april the second week in april we ran through all the purchase orders and payroll and got them into the system around april vacation i conducted the actual year-end forecast at that point i noticed uh the unspent funds so we originally had this on the um agenda for the may uh third meeting but based on the availability of funds i called a capital finance committee meeting so we could schedule that in between the last school committee meeting and this one so we could vet
135the unexpended funds through the capital committee uh so like most of my forecasters forecasts i always take a conservative approach when forecasting our expenses so what that basically means is i always go on the side of over expending over estimating our expenditures so if things come in a little bit higher we have a little bit of wiggle room to cover it and we don't over expend our funds at the end of the year in addition this the second approach to this forecast like many third quarter forecasts is we we more accurately accurately reflect our actuals so what i mean by this is in the first quarter or the second quarter forecast if there is a possibility that there are funds being saved i don't exactly record all of them because there's so much time left
136within the year that i don't want to overestimate what we have left but with the third quarter especially it now being may 19th i'm confident to put in any savings that we realized because there's really only about one month left in the year so while going through the forecast there was a few uh budget realities that i noticed this quarter uh not the biggest one but i think one of the most important ones is just the fact of our covert 19 expenses came in much lower than we originally anticipated back in july the the main reason for that i think is the next two items here so out of the 180 school days students were either not in school or were fully remote about 16 percent of the time this includes the first 10 days
137of school or the additional five days after thanksgiving break when they moved to a fully remote platform in addition to that about 58 of the year we were hybrid where only half the students were in uh in school in addition only about 26 percent of the time will be fully in person so if you think about that just when it comes to consuming materials for students if only 26 percent of the year all the students were present you could see that there would be an extent excess balance at the end of the year in addition to all the amount of time that students were not in school we did have a reduced enrollment so again when you think about materials we originally budgeted materials for around 1800 students but come this year we only had
138about 1700 i think it was around a reduction of around 8 percent of our enrollment so again uh one could see excess funds being left over at the end of the year and then the last reality uh that i noticed while conducting this forecast is the stimulus funds were received at the beginning of the year when we did our budget we did not anticipate uh receiving this this large amount of stimulus funds we are just under i believe six hundred thousand dollars uh in grant funds we received this year so just to get right into it uh when conducting the forecast uh we're realizing an excess balance of approximately 1.89 million dollars this is obviously a substantial uh amount of money this is the forecast presented in dac form uh here you can see just
139some of the big big budget leftovers is the special ed department that we're going to go through in a little bit i want to thank stacey busick for coming here tonight to answer any questions anyone might have in detail around that in addition we're seeing a positive balance in our fringe benefits accounts which i'm going to go through shortly of approximately 400 thousand and lastly just to pick on one of them is the regional high school uh balance of approximately 230. so that was it in dac form or uh by location or school this is it by the deci category which is what you guys approve during the budget process again you can see some of the big balance uh relates to tuitions which again relates to the special ed department that we'll go through
140in a minute and again the insurance retirement in other deci category uh the same balance of approximately four hundred thousand so after going through this one of the big questions i had obviously was why is there so much money left over so most of these items or at least 90 percent of them are are because of one-time covert related activities that are leaving these kind of balances so just right here i tried to make a list of the big ticket items this obviously doesn't include everything uh the district currently has over 500 active gl accounts this really only covers probably about 50 of them so we have a lot of ins and outs i didn't capture everything i just tried to capture the big ticket items so you guys can kind of make the connection
141of why there is there is so much left over so i'm going to give you just a brief intro on all of them and you can ask me uh in detail questions if you want but just starting from the top are out of district special ed tuitions we're seeing a favorable balance of a little under seven hundred thousand dollars this has this isn't just covert related but it does have a little bit to do with it uh some students we were able to keep in-house some students we originally budgeted for did not go out again if you have more detailed questions stacy can help me through those the next category is non-teacher turnover or unused payroll so that item and the teacher turnover item about four down is basically the same thing the reason i
142chose to break them out is so you can if you're trying to trace this between the dac category or the desi category they're broken out separately between teachers and pretty much everyone else so what this is is is a combination of a lot of things it's unused stipends it's hiring new people at a lower salary than their predecessors and it's not hiring people at all for instance the payroll position the it technician position they were all in the budget but we managed to go through the year without hiring them so all that leftover payroll is lumped in to that one amount for non-teacher payroll of just under five hundred thousand next on the list is special ed transportation again this this isn't just covert related but does have a lot to do with it uh
143one good example of this is some out of district schools this year were fully remote so if the program was fully remote we obviously weren't transporting the student to the school thus we didn't spend that that amount of money a lot to them in addition to that even though the school might have been open the family might not have felt comfortable uh with the student traveling with other students on the bus so they decided to drive their own child thus saving us money again the next category is health insurance so what happened here is last year during our budget cycle once once covet hit we had a few resignations on the books that we didn't fill uh we included health benefits for those employees that weren't on the books in case when we hired them
144um they did take the benefits so if somebody's not here we always we always budget some sort of benefit package for them to give us coverage in case they enroll in addition to that um even though there were budget cuts last year and we did eliminate nearly 23 positions there were also new positions in there so for instance our slp position or our bcba position those were new positions last year there was nobody in the position prior to that so again we budgeted benefits for those individuals as well but we didn't hire those individuals so those the benefits from them is sitting in the health insurance account i believe that happened to about uh seven people in addition to that within our health insurance line we always budget about a one or two percent uh
145increase in enrollment when we actually saw a decrease in enrollment so just that two percent amounted to seventy thousand dollars and we actually saw a reduction in enrollment so all those combined accumulate up to about three hundred thousand uh the next one is unemployment we're seeing a favorable favorable balance of about 277 000 um so the story behind this is when we made those budget cuts last year and eliminated approximately 22 positions we budgeted the full unemployment benefit for every single person for the full year but what ended up happening is only about four or five of those 22 people actually enrolled in unemployment and actually took benefits and most of them only took benefits for july and august and september came they got a new job so we didn't actually end up expending uh
146majority of that budget i believe our unemployment budget was somewhere uh just south of 400 000 so through the year end i think we're going to spend around 130 in addition to that back in i believe is the november december january time frame we got hit with legitimately over 70 fraudulent unemployment claims so at the time after seeing all these claims when i did my quarter uh two forecast i i i didn't predict us saving any money i said we were going to spend the whole thing because we there's really this unemployment situation is out of control during the months of uh january february march i literally um i don't know where i i contested everyone sorry thank you i contested every single one of those claims and i believe we won on almost 98
147of them so i am now confident that that balance will still be there at the end of the year i touched upon the teacher turnover a little bit earlier again that's just uh again the bcba or the slp that that we never filled it's hiring people lower on the salary scale than we and originally anticipated uh next is professional development i did not really see this one coming at the beginning of the year so i thought i thought throughout the year we would still see teachers going out to professional development we would still see uh instructors coming in and provide providing professional development but most of the conferences were cancelled throughout the year or they were all virtual so the cost was drastically reduced and i believe we're going to anticipate savings of somewhere around
14880 000 between the year end materials again is what i hit on earlier just the fact that there's not students here and we're not consuming the materials at such a rate that we thought the reason that's not as high as one would think is because we did purchase a large amount of in soft hardware ipads chromebooks so it did offset the total balance a little bit but we are still seeing a favorable balance uh the next one is school choice i also didn't see this one coming this is in direct relation to our enrollment decline we had an enrollment decline in kids coming in and the same thing happened for our students going out a few of them i think it was about six of them didn't choice out to beverly or ipswich those are
149usually the the two uh big towns that take our students they either you know stayed home and uh were homeschooled or actually enrolled in our district for for one year so those are kind of the positives that we're seeing but at the same time we also had unbudgeted expenses that we've kind of been talking about all year this include the tents and the furniture just so you guys know this is just the amount that is hitting our general fund so both these items did cost us more but a lot of it was picked up through the stimulus money so this is the net result of what the the stimulus money did not pick up in addition to that we saw uh uptick in our maintenance upgrades uh related to the hvac uh in addition to
150that we saw about a 2 000 uh i want to call it liability but a 132 thousand dollar increase in ppe that we never had in our 21 budget in addition to that everyone knows the cafeteria is seeing a drastic deficit this year we're projecting that to be uh roughly 000. so again this this isn't a complete list but if you add just these items up alone i i think it's somewhere south of about 1.7 million so from a big picture perspective you can see kind of where the the big balances are rolling over from so i do have a request for transfer here um i i don't know if you guys want me to stop and take questions on it or do you want to go through the motion i can kind of just
151give you a synopsis on what happened here so back on march 3rd we approached you guys at the school committee meeting asking for a transfer to purchase additional desks for social distancing for the reopening of school before the meeting i had contacted desi and did not get a response contacted our auditors and didn't get a response that day but the auditors answered me the next day my question to them was where should i be charging uh the furniture if you look at our the desi chart of accounts they say anything under five thousand dollars for one item shouldn't be charged to fix assets but when you do a bulk purchase it should so i had a question on on where exactly should go i'll admit it i chose wrong i told you to put it
152instructional materials it should have been fixed assets so the first transfer i'm requesting is to reverse that transfer i asked on march 3rd and the second one if you remember at the same meeting we did mention that we might need a lot more chairs than we anticipated but at the time we weren't sure if we were going to need them we were in the middle of a chair audit to see how many we had what ended up happening is we did need the chairs it accounted to about twelve thousand dollars so the second part of the transfer is to account for the additional chairs so the next slide is the motion for that but if you want i can stop it if you want to ask questions or i can keep going keep going um
153so let's see can we this is non-controversial but i think we probably should ask questions about the other stuff first so um why don't we go through that anna um i think did you say stacy is here yep she's here um hi um so i know this is always it's always a question in general under normal circumstances but those out of district tuitions i am wondering without going into detail for individual students obviously so i want to be clear i'm not asking for that but do you anticipate in looking ahead to next year you know we have this huge unused balance now but as much as you're able do you foresee that that that number is going to swing back radically the other way next year i'm just sort of i'm i guess i'm a
154little bit concerned of where it is now and wondering if you can add a little bit more detail about how that overage occurred and then looking ahead is that something that we anticipate carrying forward or do we actually anticipate our out-of-district costs are going to go up again or i wonder if you can answer that a little bit more because i know the public is going to look at that number and say whoa what happened here i'll give you the microphone honestly anna it's a it's a difficult question to answer in terms of special ed is a constant moving target we have some things shifting and moving for next year so we're going to be adjusting projections throughout the remainder of the year and some of the things that impact our different differentials and out
155of district numbers or total costs we have some families that may be moving out of the district we have a couple coming in with established programs um so it's just it's hard to predict the other piece is after this year it's so unknown what challenges we may have with students moving forward in terms of their level of need but um i'm hoping as we're kind of watching the numbers that even with the the pluses and minuses we kind of stay within the same range we've predicted so far and i don't see anything extraordinary at this point but again it's just it's a constant moving target we've had changes through this week coming my way so yeah yeah please do just to add to your common stacy i think that one of the things that both
156the committee and the community should be aware of is kind of the word of the day with the special ed budget is volatility right that that we are just not able to predict and these are large numbers that have a big impact on the budget so that can be a challenging thing but i know from one day to the next what comes through stacy's door in terms of students needs can change and depending on what that is that can have a significant impact on what happens to that number so that while we are showing a surplus now i think it is wise to be very conservative in terms of thinking about that as additional funds because we do not know what we will see next year even in a non-covered year the possibility of that
157number being volatile is large and then following covert i think that the level of volatility is even higher so part of this out of district tuition savings is related to students who we anticipated needing to go out did not can you talk about what it was that we maybe did that allowed the students to be able to function here versus needing to be placed in a you know less or more restrictive environment there are there are several factors a lot of the factors kind of were kind were due to covid starting with i believe i talked about this at the january presentation i did one of the things that happened through the course of the school physical building closures and going remote where some students we were anticipating who were not meeting graduation requirements or
158for our students who we typically provide services till 22 we're not meeting transition goals stacey i'm sorry can you talk into the mic i see that the audience can't hear you okay sorry i was trying to project louder too than i typically do so one of one of the things we saw was with with the the coveted school building closures that happened um some of the students who were struggling again to meet graduation requirements or transitional goals we're able to do that in a remote setting versus a physical building setting for a variety of reasons so we had some students who successfully graduated or successfully moved on to post secondary education or employment we had some unknown moves of students out of the district and we also had some ability to bring students back into
159district i think the biggest factor for some students that we we had projected for moving out were lack of space in a in a placement at the time and also we saw transitions of students into the next level like middle and high school where we were really concerned did a fairly well transition because we had smaller group settings with the hybrid model and again some of the students who stayed remote remote worked better for them so we were able to kind of educate them still in district with the different models we had for for educational support that's kind of a success story remote learning works better for some kids you know as as horrible as covet and the pandemic pandemic has been there were some things that worked for some students throughout this whole crisis
160so just add one other piece to that the the other thing that we saw is that for some of our students the smaller class size was actually really beneficial that that some of the stress in a larger class when we were in hybrid was not it was not existent and that for for a certain part of our population that kind of learning environment was actually pretty powerful and you know that's a conversation we've been having about what does that mean in terms of moving forward and programming potentially for some of our our more vulnerable population the other thing that worked for a lot of our students who were in higher level programs or more restrictive programs is we weren't able to do the inclusive piece so they weren't we did a more substantially separate program
161model and that worked well for quite a few of our students just because we could not be moving around the building and going into multiple classrooms any more questions for stacey okay how about questions on other topics on the list there right why don't we do the motion about the line item transfers then thank you stacey okay you ready yeah all right i move that the hamilton one um regional school committee approves the fy21 operating expense budget transfers as recommended here herein by the assistant superintendent of finance and administration ends and as presented on the previous slide entitled suggested budget transfers quarter three for a second second i think and i got that first second by anna um does anybody want to discuss more did was it clear what we're doing here sounds good all
162in favor it's unanimous no need to call a post all right there you go okay so with the such a large balance uh the reason i wanted to call a capital finance committee meeting was to kind of come up with a recommendation or at least come up with a direction for a recommendation so at this time we're somewhere in the middle we still definitely need to talk over this more uh in the capital finance committee meeting but first off we're asking if we can prepay tuitions for the last time this year unless another emergency arises now a personal view of mine is i hate pre-paying tuitions unless there's an emergency to do it coven 19 is obviously one of the emergencies we still don't know what the beginning of next school year is going to
163look like and this will give us some sort of protection for anything that might occur next year if nothing occurs we would return it through e and d back to the towns if we if we obviously uh don't spend it um but one of the reasons i hate pre-paying tuitions is i believe it just muddies the water a little bit people who aren't directly involved with school finances on a day-to-day uh basis they kind of see it as as you're you're moving funds around and which year does this belong to it it creates a little bit of confusion people think that just because you prepaid tuitions this year how come you can't lower your budget next year by this amount but not all the time people don't make the connection that if you do that
164your following year's budget is going to see drastic increases so you're better off not reducing your previous year's budget so just trying to be transparent and trying to be open with people i personally just don't like pre-paying tuitions unless again it's an emergency and there's some sort of huge shortfall in the following year's budget so that that is our number one recommendation at this time the remaining part of it has to do with our fy 21 chapter 70 money so for those of you who are on the school committee last year and were involved in town meeting in the budget process last year for fy21 um and of course you all already know we reduced our fy21 chapter 70 uh projected budget for this year but what it ended up happening it was level funded
165so our representatives uh told us to predict about a 20 drop that never happened i believe it actually increased a little bit uh so at the end of this year i'm predicting that we have about 773 thousand dollars left just from chapter 70 alone uh during the town meeting last year we promised to return that to the town so my second recommendation is to fulfill our promise we we promised we were going to give it back so at the end of this year as as long as you guys agree with it i think we should do that and then the remaining balance is what we are still kind of not to say at odds on we just we're still working through it in the capital meeting we want to make a financially responsible decision uh
166that takes the taxpayers um you know dollars under consideration and doesn't create a shortfall in our future budgets so we're trying to come up with some sort of uh one-time not to say you know uh ex one-time expense uh that that won't cause uh future turmoil in the budget process in years to come and bring some sort of stability to the budget process as we as we've promised the towns uh in the past so this is the about the pre-pay if you want to do that but i can stop again to take questions so and this may be to stacey one of the other arguments that people make about pre-paying is well then you're just going to send the kids out of district and i think one of the things that people often don't understand
167is like we have commitments for three years to send the kids out of districts so by pre-paying it's not as though we're assuming that the kids are going to go out we know they're going to be going to those schools because we've already committed um so we should just keep in mind we know that these are real bills that are coming in so there there is a motion to allow us uh to prepay for fy 22 out of district tuitions with any fy 21 funds that remain this year there is laws around it obviously you can't prepay the whole entire year for most of the students you can only prepay uh the first three months the first three months differ depending on whether the student's involved in a summer program or whether they just start
168school in september if the student goes to a collaborative they do allow you to prepay the whole year under the collaborative so basically we're asking permission to use these funds but obviously not to exceed any of the thresholds that the state puts in are you ready for motion yeah let's go forward okay this motion has a symbol in it that i don't know how to pronounce but i'm going to just go for it anyway the hamilton wenham regional school committee authorizes yeah yeah that was i was going to guess i was getting a section so i was going to you know be close the hamilton went on regional school committee authorizes the assistant superintendent of finance and administration to prepay fy22 out of district tuitions with fy21 funds not to exceed the amounts established by
169mass general law chapter 40 subsection 4e and chapter 71 subsection 71d our second second second by david does anybody want to discuss that more um much flexibility as possible until after the finance committee has met and made their determination um if i could jump in so jennifer we did meet on may 10th and we are we were in agreement the three of us that the prepayment was the best option for the money the two other options were what we were discussing and if you want vinnie to put those two other options back up um i don't know i don't know if you did list the two options they're on the other presentation i had for capital finance yeah so this this one we did agree upon that was the best um the way to use
170the money all right well then um we'll take a boat all in favor it's unanimous so we will not see who was opposed so i just wanted to leave you guys with a little bit of timeline on what the remaining funds and and what we're going to do so obviously uh today we gave you the third quarter forecast uh at the end of next month the actual year end closes um beginning next week powers and sullivan come in for their pre-field work audit and then they come in again in the middle of july for the they have a word for but either way for their for the actual audit and then they will conduct that between july and august they'll wrap that up sometime in september when they come give the presentation to the full
171school committee in september once the audit closes we uh we calc excuse me we calculate our e d and then in october i will submit our e d to the dor i believe the deadline for that is either october 1st or october 31st i always flip the tube halloween yeah i thought it was good um and then the dor has been uh has been different year to year on when we actually receive the certification sometimes it's early sometimes it's late but it's usually never later than january so once they certify the the excess funds that's when we can actually use it so once june 30 comes that money's locked away in a vault and you can't touch it until they certify it sometime in january once they do that and in conjunction with us building
172the fy 23 budget we will incorporate the final recommendation from the capital finance committee along with the fy 23 budget think that is it unless you have more questions do you anticipate further line item transfers next uh quarter definitely we will have to do it for prepaid tuitions because this does not cover that okay so we don't exactly know yet what the prepaid tuitions are going to be because okay we wait till the very end and see what actual students are are out where they are because that depends on how much we can prepay what programs they're involved in so i didn't want to ask for the transfer yet because we don't know what that exact amount is yet super so there will be another one um presented in either july or august with the
173year and close all right so the good news is is we did have enough money to get through the year yes so a lot of it had to do with the government too so yeah all right so thank you thank you so thanks vinnie thank you guys thank you stacy thank you stacy thank you stacy we are a little bit before 10. so let's go over the policies here the well who wants to tell the story want to tell the story tell the story um so prior to um my arrival and others i know michelle and peter i think had worked on the ongoing policy review with masc and it's been a long slow-moving process so dorothy dorothy's recommendation superintendent's recommendation is we have a large batch of policies that have already been approved in
174form meaning everything that's you see here in these very long exhibits for a section b so on and so forth they've already been to the committee once and the committee's already proved it once but it was in form at that time and i think i think michelle will be really the only person in this table who knows exactly what had happened but you know they've been accumulating for a while so it's the recommendation that we actually finalize the approval of these large sections the superintendent requested that they take effect i believe it's september 15th that sound right with the idea that that gives the administration time to go through them very carefully and if there are new policies that have been approved they can align to handbooks codes of conduct procedural things at sort of
175the administration level so this is sort of a little bit of housekeeping to catch up so that we don't have policies that might have been approved in form two years ago just sort of hanging out so that's what that's what this is um just so people know throughout the last year there have been a few that we took out of order and tweaked again so for example dana's amazing good work on executive sessions i believe was policy bec so where we've taken something out of order and changed it i worked with dorsey dorothy to incorporate that in so bec is one example bedh is the new public comment policy that's another one that's a change from when it was so there have been a few that we did that too the a section had acba
176which is the harassment policy which given the change in administration at the federal level i bet we'll come back around again so there have been a few outliers that came up throughout the year those have all been incorporated into the section summaries that you have in front of you now and if michelle horgan thinks i missed something please augment everything i just said at all well done so do we have a specific wording on the motion or we're just going to approve them to be effective on september 15th isn't it okay okay uh i move that we approve the policies uh previously approved in form listed on the agenda to uh implement to be implemented beginning september 15th 2021 second second by anna all right so this thing there are some policies that i feel
177need to be reviewed because it's been a while and there's some issues with them but i think that it's more appropriate to let the process go through and then in their regular thing to go ahead and review those at that time so i'll just not say anything other than that all right so anybody else all right so then let's vote all in favor of approving section a b c e and g to be effective on september 15th raise your hand right that's unanimous seven votes all right so my one of my favorite governors this week gave us a little extra super surprise with no notice and no warning and um the msc gave us a fantastic policy back in the spring or in the well maybe it was in the summer um and one of
178the things that it said is that we would follow guidelines and then another thing that it says is that this this will be in effect until the school committee rescinds it and so we're just going to talk about the face covering policy right now even though we've already sort of implemented it yeah and more coming on the 29th so as you had indicated on monday we received somewhat of a surprise from the governor indicating that students were no longer required to wear masks outside for recess for outside learning environments for sports this this through a a problem to to all districts and trying to try to pivot quickly there was really significant concern from our building administrators around clarity for what the rules were the next day um and as michelle had mentioned the policy
179has somewhat conflicting information we're going to follow what's happening in the guidelines and we can't do anything the committee should rescind um so in the face of that we we made the decision to go forward with the governor's orders as as we have been following state guidance all along um but there is the other part in this policy that says that the committee has to rescind it we know again on the on may 29th there's going to be some additional pieces around that um and that we anticipate that the mass guidance that we're going to get from the state is going to continue to evolve and change and so to put this into policy with the existing guidance and then needing to change it over and over again does not make sense so what i
180am doing this evening is bringing forward to you a recommended recommended motion um that says a move that the hamilton wedding regional school committee rescinds face covering policy ebcfa and directs the superintendent to follow desc and governor's guidance in determining appropriate mass procedures in the district and that that should cover us but there there is that policy out there with kind of two conflicting pieces and i want to be sure that the committee has an opportunity to weigh in on this go ahead and make a motion in the affirmative and then we'll discuss it sure okay i move that the hillary regional school school committee uh rescind face covering policy ebcfa and direct the superintendent to follow jesse and the governor's guidance in determining appropriate mass procedures in the district is there a second second
181second by anna anybody have questions or um the policy in general that that this is something that happened on monday and what i what i heard from our principals is what people wanted was clarity you know should we have mass on outside or shouldn't we we're all going out to recess and we need to know what's going to happen so what that's what i got in terms of the message is that people need to know what the plan is for tuesday if they're individual parents who still wish for their children who wear masks at all times absolutely that will still be allowable right this is only lifting the requirement to mask but if a parent's still uncomfortable for whatever reason they can still ask that their child keep their mask on and until that's a
182parental decision right absolutely and the the communication that we sent out to families actually said that we invite you to continue to wear your mask should that feel like the best choice for your family okay my only question is sort of similar to what jen has said is having the mask policy was a requirement of the mou and the emergency hasn't been lifted yet so we have our mou still in place so i'm not a hundred percent sure what we have to do about that that's all i wasn't sure about so what i what i could do is just confirm with um the hwea this policy and the next policy and from the commissioner's meeting today it's not likely that there's going to be another policy that says no mass in school we are getting
183direction now that that will probably stay stable over the course of the school year so this policy and the policy that is coming on may 29th is regarding outside behavior so if you're outside you can remove your mass right now adults actually can't remove their mass unless they're six feet apart but on may 29th that will change um so when you're inside a building students and teachers need to continue to wear their masks so i would not anticipate any significant issues with that but i i appreciate what you're saying and i'd be happy to reach out and just make sure that there are no different interpretations yeah because i think the dese guidelines only require mask wearing inside by is it second grade and under or above or was it i think it was second
184grade and above i think they updated it did they eventually update it to all it was below yeah pretty sure they they did okay that's yeah i'm just going to say it because i want it makes absolutely no sense that the vaccinated adults have to wear their masks and the unvaccinated children do not it just makes no sense to me okay i feel better anybody else want to say something no okay all right so we have a motion in a second nobody has any comments so why don't we vote on this all in favor all right that's unanimous so we don't need to ask an opposed um all right so we're two ten o'clock we've got probably an hour left how do people feel about that and then probably executive session as well i'm getting
185no feedback this is just like at school oh that's what you were i was saying at 10 o'clock i would check in with people and see if they wanted to move any items to another meeting or if they wanted to continue just keeping in mind that this was a very long agenda i'm not hearing anything so yeah don't assume that i'm just saying do not assume we're not going to beat you o'clock because when the cameras turn off yeah we're still here i'm i'm going to keep going all right great okay um all right it's i see you okay couple things from the superintendent's report one i want to share that we are getting prepared to launch a summer partnership with the ipswich ymca oymca this partnership will enable us to provide opportunities for some
186of our elementary students that are most at risk in terms of literacy and other needs where in the morning they will be receiving literacy instruction um and then and at the noon break they'll be lunch and then they will be transported to a ymca camp and they will have the opportunity to spend the afternoon with their friends in a socially connected camp environment it will be a four-week program and because of some of the s or money that we have coming in we should be able to offer this program free your charge to our students that most need it i'm so we're excited about that opportunity i really wanted i see jen caufield here give her a shout out as the first contact came and we were up to our eyeballs we put jen on
187the initial meeting she came back said you guys got need to move forward with that so we were able to meet with the folks from the ipswich ymca and we are excited about the ability to offer this programming this summer next just a quick reminder to the committee the community that on saturday is the senior parade so our seniors will be headed down route 1a this is the opportunity to congratulate them put out a sign and and celebrate their graduation in a remarkable year so the class of 2021 will have lots of stories to tell as they move forward and then finally i wanted to just update the committee on the cutler principal research we went out for a search we had three three candidates that we were excited about but before we were able
188to move forward with the decision two of the candidates dropped out so it was my determination that we were going to determine that we were not going to move forward with this particular search and that had putting an interim in place made sense met with the cutler faculty met with the parents on the principal search committee explained the reasoning had general consensus that that was a good move to move forward i am in the process and a couple of moving parts but the plan is by the end of the week to have three candidates identified to be able to put in front of the cutler faculty and cutler parents for an interim position for next year the both the parents and the faculty will have a chance to interview all three candidates and based on
189the feedback that i receive i will make an interim appointment for the 21-22 school year and then what we will do is in early 2022 get out early and look again to move to a point a permanent principle so i wanted to let you know where that search stands and where we are in the process i am hopeful by the end of next week at this point that we will have an interim candidate identified can i ask a question on that absolutely is that okay michelle yep um is there a reason that we didn't go ahead with the third candidate who did not withdraw yes so in looking through the evaluations of parents and faculty the candidate had some decent support but it wasn't strong enough from my perspective to say this is a permanent
190person particularly given the sense that it it was the only candidate left but the level of support again was was certainly there for the candidate but it was at a very different level than one of the other candidates and i i think in talking to the faculty and to parents we want somebody that the um school is really excited about and that it's it's worth waiting to get that fit okay do you have any underlying sense of why not necessarily why people pulled out but why in the end the the pool was thin or why people did withdraw because it would seem like being the principal of cutler school would be a really desirable position but it sounds like is there something something structural that's going on or timing or is it just because of
191the pandemic still do you have any insight as to why it sort of stalled yeah actually i can speak to speak to that from both candidates the first candidate was involved in a number of different searches and one of the searches was further along and she was offered a position and so she chose to take that whereas we were just beginning which is one of the values of trying to get out as early as we can um and in the second position the the principal had indicated that her her current school has been impacted significantly bi-covered that there there have been a large number of retirements there are a lot of teachers that were out teaching remotely that are just coming back to the school for the first time the next year and this was
192the only position she had applied to but upon reflection she felt that her school was struggling enough at this moment that it wasn't the right time to leave it and she felt like she could not do that okay which could mean she's available next year but what i certainly would say is that all of the candidates have spoken very very highly about the cutler school um and the community um and that there are life circumstances that have occurred that that are just sometimes part of this process yep i don't mean to hold people i i i don't know if this is helpful but i myself have only been involved in one principal search it was here in the district um for a middle school principal several years ago and many years ago and it was
193non-coveted we actually had the exact same experience and then we hired an interim principal so i just wanted to throw that out there that it happens it happens right and it was exactly that we had three exactly that scenario we had three candidates one took another job it was the same exactly scenario yeah and the other candidate was decent but yeah you know okay uh moving on to committee reports capital finance planning subcommittee do you have anything to add other than what we've seen nope all set thank you i'll see anything to add other than what we've seen uh no we are meeting tomorrow uh today right we have we're meeting tomorrow so we'll add um the flag policy to that i guess well we'll talk about that that'll be a new thing but we
194have we're meeting tomorrow and negotiations will give their report an executive session all right so i'm going to call a five minute recess i don't like the number 13 10 14. how about 10 15 10 15. all right we're back from break because he was like i just go there all the time i have one on my plate but some people aren't the one that flag was first created i don't know maybe 10 years or so ago in response to the initial sort of racial inequity part of it so like initially in the six stripes i just have stopped guys i was dead all weekend it's you want the one that has the chevron with the pink and the triangle all right with the d yeah the philadelphia was an outfielder sort of that same
195racial injustice awareness so in the first place that's what you do in class right you just wait all right and you guys like a flags 101 kind of situation if you want there's a lot of versions yeah all right why did i think there were two things oh wait a minute so did we remove the other thing i'm sorry did we remove the other thing that's under the chairs report the minutes because now it's not on the agenda but it was on the agenda i saw what minutes exactly the executive session minutes they were part of the consent agenda they were part of the company oh that's why they're not there yeah okay that's right thank you we did it already okay yeah it's been it's been a long week okay all right so the
196next item is um annually now i can't remember if it was before june 31st or june 30th or may 31st the school committee is supposed to have the chair create a compilation evaluation and present it to the superintendent and we are supposed to provide our individual ones to the superintendent so i've done that and i wrote and i'll just say one of them was turned in a little late and it might have been mine and the compilation also has been compiled and was sent to the committee today the advice was that the superintendent shouldn't have time to review it first and that the document itself is a form of deliberation because it's getting input from everybody and so my sending it back out to you becomes a form of deliberation so you should get it
197at about the same time as the public does so i kind of coordinated that so that would happen so this is it and i went through the process that was recommended and i gave if someone gave an unsatisfactory i did a one need to prove it was a two proficient was a three exemplary was a four and then averaged them out um it was rather unsatisfying but that's what you had said because in reality proficient is like 80 percent of the bandwidth and that needs improvement is another percent and then unsatisfactoring exemplary are these little little slippers on the end so i don't know you guys will have to decide if that was the right way or not all right so overall the committee felt that there was significant progress made in the professional practice
198goal there was some progress made in the student learning goal and some progress made in the district improvement goal and we ranked overall the standard two needs improvement standard i'm sorry standard one needs improvement standard 2 proficient standard 3 needs improvement and standard 4 needs improvement and then overall based on that superintendent banos received a needs improvement rating so um i discussed that with um dorothy at the mesc to see what exactly that means and also naomi i've had occasion to talk to her recently with various things that have been going on and um she mentioned that needs improvement is coming up a lot around the state um just because we need an improvement over this year to next year um in that many superintendents have been receiving that rating so um i described the
199methodology and then um i did i have heard dorothy speak about this and i have also heard superintendents speak about this and my unions speak about this but inner integrator reliability being important and i'm making note that there was not inter raider reliability because in almost every standard except for one there was some people who would rate a one some were in a two somewhere in a three and in one case somewhere in a four so um so the comments are here did people have time to read them do they want time to read them now do you want them to be read out loud what do we want to do i didn't have time to read the response exhibit two i don't know if anyone else did i didn't i haven't i haven't had
200time to read exhibit two i don't know when it was posted uh what is exhibit two is that your response yeah yeah okay i have not read the response either yeah i had time to read the yes yep as did i'm high i don't i just didn't know if any if ever so part of the process and if you've been reviewed at your own job you know you come in you guys talk about it you know you give feedback to your boss your boss gives you feedback and it goes back and forth so um in in education usually it's in writing because in education you really don't have time to meet a lot so um superintendent provided a written response so do people need time to read that sounds like yes or do we want
201to read it out loud uh i don't know if we want to read it out no i think we could i haven't read it i don't know maybe we should just should we take a few minutes a couple of few minutes to read just to read it yeah and then we'll let mary beth read what she wants to read about it so okay i appreciate that yep thank you michelle can i ask you a question about the individual evaluations yep so i was under the impression and i understood that can can we oh sorry can we read first and then sure sure is this the letter is this the letter that was oh oh all right now we'll see what happens just checking with michelle ready okay all right so um so the compilation is
202here the individual ones have been provided to mary beth so i figured we would just go around and provide our input on the evaluation and then you're welcome to unplug that david if you need to yep go around give your individual um if you have any comments about this and the edits that you should make and also just your individual feedback i would suggest next time instead of having the individual evaluations come in and then a compilation we put together that maybe there's an individual meeting with the superintendent and then the compilation is put in that way there's like you know a lot of stuff can be just talked about and responses can be whatever done in a personalized way it's this is a little impersonal that's all does anybody want to go first i
203will go okay i was like i'll go first i'm not i'm not really going to talk about my evaluation i mean it's it's public record people can read what i wrote you know read my whole thing i'll send it to anyone if they want to read it um and i also feel like mary beth and i did talk about it um and i think we'll probably have more discussions around it because one hour was not sufficient um i i think the composite like i felt represented in the composite i mean i didn't think it was it's probably not the one i would have written but that was not my job i am not the chair and i did not feel misrepresented i felt like i saw myself i heard myself um i heard i read
204some of my comments um so i i felt okay i felt pretty represented in the composite so i'm not sure what else we're supposed to say we're just going to be sure that that's how people feel however long 15 pages of my evaluation yep okay um michelle um this was a very stressful exercise and luckily we tried to warn you but i'm i'm friends down the street with a former educator in hamilton when he's an administrator and i reached out to him after i submitted my um evaluation um he's 80 now so he was around here for a while and he was the principal at the middle school and this was his response to my text when i told him just how stressful it was he said evaluations are a stressful document to create i
205can remember when i was a principal of the middle school i had to do approximately 20 per year evaluations are not meant to punish a person but rather a way of praising a staff member for the positives in their performance and also a way to offer recommendations for improving one's performance is a delicate balance of praise and recommendations and the evaluator needs to work from observable observable facts and not opinions and after reading that it was i wish i had had it beforehand and i think if i can i'll grab this and we should remember this for next year too because it's just important to know that and this is 20 years of experience so so i'm glad it's done yeah dana um so i guess um i want to first of all michelle bailey
206i want to say thank you for doing something that was an incredibly challenging task and i feel like julia said i felt um well i'm going to say it's sort of even bigger than what julia said i felt like you managed in this document to do what i actually think that is a very difficult thing to do which is that i felt heard and i still saw that there were other sides that were represented but it was clear that this is a composite and this represented the whole board [Music] and i really i think you did an excellent job with what had been really challenging um i don't know if all we're speaking to right now is so i guess i feel like that's what this is is a compilation i'm saying i think you
207really did a good job representing it i don't know if we're talking about any other things right now other than that so yep um so yeah i also want to say thank you because it's you know it's difficult to take clearly seven different opinions and try to even remotely put something cohesive together and also just a sheer volume of words i'm sure your body had to read just from a processing standpoint is a lot so i think that does need to be acknowledged um i would say i felt i felt like you did a really good job trying to quote me at times a couple of the quotes are a little bit inaccurate and i don't know if that's because you had to retype them or copy and paste but a couple of places like
208i can tell that you were you were you were trying to say what i said but instead of actually just quoting me it was a little paraphrased and then the paraphrasing wasn't quite exactly what i said so i think that's just something i want to note um there's a couple of things that i don't know if they're like factual errors that matter but there's a couple places where like i think there's some things that are asserted that are not 100 true like and one of them is sort of like the methodology i think you meant one two three or four but it says one two three four or five on the front page um because up here it's one two three four five right so i think that's you know that's that's good clarification um
209so i feel like there's a couple places that i too would have you know i think there was a little bit of editorial license taken that again as julia said like i don't know that i would have phrased it that way i will say it's hard for me to know how accurate it is without seeing everyone else's so i i would like to see everyone else's individual evaluations um i would also like to request that they are made public because we do clearly have very different voices and perspectives and i think that just for the public's ability to evaluate us is there elected representatives i think for transparency's sake i i do think we should make them public individually because that way they can see what we did because even though reading this i can
210kind of pick out yeah this is me and this is me and this is me they have no idea really um so i think that would be good and for me like i'll feel more comfortable knowing that this is a accurate amalgam if i can read other people's and be like okay that seems fair like that's a fair summary of all of this so and that's sort of high-level feedback um you know i think it's probably clear to everyone that you know i see things differently sometimes and view things differently and i will say it's some of the phrasing of my feedback one one thing in particular like i spent a ton of time quoting the actual indicator versus the evidence that mary beth provided and i don't know from a very analytical standpoint that
211that level of sort of objective analysis like in my introduction i talked about i took the evidence and i took the standard like the exact language of the standard and the exact evidence and did a lot of like cross-checking i don't feel like that part of my approach is was reflected i feel like it was a little bit more um anecdotal so i would have liked to see a little bit more specificity because i quote the indicators a lot and i don't actually know that in this composite a lot of that's not there so i guess i would say i feel like halfway heard but you know i think once people were to see the individual evaluations they'll they'll be able to see for themselves like where that comes out so um yeah i mean
212high level it's i think i think it's good that we defined our approach i think it's interesting that mathematically sometimes you know in some of these cases the fact that three of us said unsatisfactory i forget which one it was three of us said unsatisfactory and three of us said proficient which that's actually a pretty wide gulf in between you know so i think i don't really know how to make that better if we all have such different perspectives on what constitutes performance i think that's a hard spot for you as the aggregator to be and i think it's a tough spot for mary beth to be because depending on whose evaluation you read she's proficient on three and unsatisfactory on another and that's those are far apart so you know i i accept it
213as uh i accept it i mean i i do accept it as a record but i think the schisms present in the document itself are an indicator of our committee i think you said that pretty accurate in the beginning like it reflects us and we are very we ourselves are very fractured and the community is very fractured and so i think it's accurate in that way so all right um david i just want to say like in reading through this you know two or three times um i actually don't feel represented at all in it really because you are directly quoted in several places yeah i mean there so i'm i'm push i'm going up against mine right now because i just didn't feel like um you know i read you know i've been through
214this process before and i understand what is going on here and why um you know i my worry is not so much with the superintendent because i think the superintendent has the um the ability to see where everyone is coming from and see that but with people at home who you know want to make sure that us as representatives are seeing what they see and speaking for them um you know and that's a fine line to sort of balance because obviously we want our superintendent to succeed and we want to you know help um you know give her the tools she needs to um really fulfill her plans and you know as she sees where she'd like the district to go and build the district um you know but it's been a tough year and
215i've said all along that it was almost it was a herculean attack right it was it was almost impossible she was given really an impossible task excuse me um you know but they're they're the the what's great about this you know and it's not great and i understand that like uh you know being on both sides of um you know these evaluations it you know it it sometimes it's it's tough pill to swallow but like there's you know there's there's just room for growth here right it's just as things are starting to get back to normal as you know mary beth is starting to get acclimated to what it is to be i remember so distinctly a year ago you and i talking when we first you know they're like this is a really tough
216place you know to sort of to be a superintendent you know um these these the parents are so um involved in you know to a fault at times and and as you sort of now you sort of have a better understanding of the community i'm looking really forward to moving you know to moving forward um in in in hopefully just a nice smoother sailing um you know but but there there are definitely some lessons to be learned from this year and i want to make sure that we don't you know that that we i i like that it does seem like there's some consensus there right like okay it's a tough year let's let's let's move on but you know i just think it's um i i do think it's important for you know everyone
217at home who is not seeing this because they've gotten like 16 texts saying that for whatever reason they can't see this online or anything um but you know that they that they know that you know we hear them as school board members and and you know that we're that we are um advocating for them and ultimately advocating for you know the children of the district and you know and that's sort of we're trying to all use this knowing that we're coming from such different places to like use this as some as a one of uh unifying event to then bring you know um bring us to the next step and just try to actually have a much better year building off of this right so i i want to make sure that's the one thing
218that worries me about this right in that and again i know how big of a task this is is just to make sure that people can read this and and and see that that's what this is saying right is saying all right we had some bumps in the road you know let's work to it because there's also some really great things that came you know came out of all of this too so i just wanted to sort of put that out there okay um dana i know i already spoke but i i i when i first spoke the first time i thought we were really only just saying whether this it was an accurate right so is it okay if i yeah that's great um i would like to echo i think that david said
219the most important thing that i hoped me personally to say to you mary beth is what david just said which is that i am very much looking forward to what next year will bring and to working hard with you um to what david just said about this this this reflects a really difficult year literally worldwide and also a difficult year here in our district for a whole number of reasons and that i agree very much with david that i i too worry that it'll be difficult for people perhaps for the public to sort of look at these check marks and really understand that the complexity and the nuances of things that went well and things that were struggles this year and that you know that that i feel great hope for next year that things
220are gonna that we're ready to move forward in a really positive way so and i think that's to david's point sort of hard to find in in the very in the weeds that michelle did in an excellent way i that i you know but i just think it's a very difficult thing for them so thank you um i would just say that it was extremely difficult to write this everyone should pretty much see themselves in here because i literally typed your words off of or copied them off and then just put those connecting words in there and then added what was from my own evaluation i think what it's to me what the overall message was in the evaluation was that there were expectations this year that weren't met and that perhaps those expectations um
221were not possible to be met that was brought up by a lot of people um this year and that um everybody is pleased that there is a budget that's been passed and that there's a a path forward that's been presented so i think i'll let you speak and then i think we'll decide if this is the document that we want to put forward okay sure so thank you for the opportunity to speak um and first of all i would like to thank all of you because i know that it is not an easy task to fill these out i've i've been doing these documents for quite a while myself um and i it was clear and evident to me the time and thoughtfulness that you put into those and i i want to thank you
222for that i felt that it was important to also respond in an equally thoughtful way to what it was that i read in the documents um and i i have a kind of thorough response back in terms of my experience and and how i um took some of the the feedback so that feedback i found particularly helpful and some of the challenges that have occurred this year along with a list of what i saw as the critical aspects of stewardship of the district and i i'm not going to obviously read the whole the com whole document but i would like to make a few comments as many of you alluded to this was a remarkably difficult year um and i we know that there have been tensions and fissures within the community um that have
223led to situations where people were frustrated and angry they were diverse and conflicting needs we had limited resources and people were frustrated and those tensions have resulted at times in targeting and blaming individuals and groups of people and i would share that i've experienced that in this role and that that has not been easy at times but i have tried to hold to my core values and i have tried to explain that to the community in my open letter as many of you have mentioned that this document i think is actually a pretty fair representation of the committee right this is a committee that is split and that there has been a lot of challenges with within this committee and part of what has been difficult for me as to at times as your superintendent
224is to respond to a vast gap in terms of what it is that i get for feedback and direction many of the votes are split so that we do not have consensus on anything and that can be difficult and challenging to move things forward um i want to i'll read a little bit from here that the challenges that we are facing i i have to put forward to say predate me i'm the third superintendent in three years and there's been remarkable central office turnover and shuffling of positions during this time as well right last june prior to my arrival in the middle of a global pandemic the school committee needed to vote to reduce the budget by over a million dollars and this resulted in the elimination of eight percent of all district staff two
225weeks before i arrived the reductions included every position dedicated to instructional leadership the hr director and numerous teaching and support positions and i know and i have heard from families that there has been frustration about consistency in some of the experiences that have happened from classroom to classroom but i would ask you to consider if the department that was eliminated was vinnie's what would that have meant for the budget when you take out an entire department of teaching and learning there is an impact the reductions also resulted in a major restructuring at miles river middle school that did not have enough staffing left to maintain a middle school model and prior to my arrival the leadership team was coming to me with really high levels of anxiety about the state of the district and the
226lack of any viable plan for how to address the looming expectations regarding the opening of schools in a pandemic that is what i walked into 10 months ago there there has there has been um some comments made by a member of this committee that at times i feel has indicated that i behave in an unethical and in some cases illegal manner not only i but the leadership team and that t and i really want to be clear that that this team and myself work from a position of ethical responsibility to the students and the tasks that we are asked to carry out and i have given some examples of some of the things that have been said and when those things are said by a high-level member of a committee or a member of a
227high-ranking body that impacts the public trust and i i need to share that some of the things that have been said again about me and by default to the leadership team in terms of our professional behavior has been has been hard and i i want to put that out there [Music] i also want to note that there is a there were important feedback that i that i heard and received in these documents that helped me to grow as a professional right that and how do i improve my practice as a leader i know that i need to prioritize more in-person and parent-teacher in communications and opportunities for personal connections there was a lot of good feedback around that and i appreciate that there's a need to develop a more planful strategy to address the high
228level of dissent and disagreement within the district and that is that is part of my role that is part of our rule but um i appreciated that feedback and um the the clearly identifying of that work to be done um i appreciated the the feedback around the implementation of the restructuring plan that will clearly require some additional work to ensure that our teachers fully understand the the plan that's being put in place and really helpful feedback around the inconsistency of instructional experiences that students receive across the district and that this was particularly evident in the digital environment and that the committee is clear that this discrepancy needs to be addressed and i appreciate that feedback and and we'll certainly be working on that um very quickly you know in this role there are certain things
229from my perspective that have to happen in order to move a district forward we certainly you had a return to school plan to jesse by the due date by 8 10 absolutely no work had been done on that plan before i walked through the door and it was delivered on time i've personally negotiated three separate moas to ensure that we were able to bring students back in absence of any staff dedicated to instructional leadership whose role it is to support the development of instructional programming to meet students needs to ensure consistency and alignment and facilitate the use of data to inform instructional practices we still were able to provide hybrid programming fully remote programming live streaming of instruction and options for families who are unable to participate in in-person learning even with the elimination of
230the director of human resources position we were able to process leaves and respond to remarkably high levels of hr issues that take place in a pandemic environment i'd like to give assistant superintendent vinnie leone credit for his help in that and also recognize eric tracy who also stepped up and helped us facilitate those issues i've been working with the committee around a three-year collective bargaining agreement that is something else that came due this year and that is once every three years but it hit this year in the middle of the pandemic and i am i am hopeful as i think all of us are that we will be um able to resolve that in the near future um one of the things that happened when i walked through the door there were no goals in
231the district there was no direction in the district i moved to put in 2021 different district goals there was no strategic plan to to uh refer to so all you walked in and that's what that's what was was there right um we have you know i've worked with the leadership team around the 21 22 district goals i've felt really good about the collaborative process we've had here about refining those goals and responding to those goals in order to make them better and that talking about why those goals are so important so that when the school year starts and even when the summer work begins we all have a sense of direction clarity and coherence [Music] one of the things and i i certainly acknowledge it was not a landslide and it was not easy right
232but the fiscal year 22 budget for the first time in recent history was unanimously supported by the select boards the finance committee and the town administrators in both the towns of hamilton and wenham and we were able to avoid a situation in which both towns would have needed to pass an override in order to fund the schools and that we were able to bring back some of the significant capacity that was lost last year had the budget not passed the impact on trying to stabilize this district and to restore and rebuild key areas of function would have been substantially impaired i know that that all of us know that leadership matters words matter tone matters right this is a meeting of a public publicly elected officials who are tasked with overseeing the district district and
233i i know we all know that the type of discourse that occurs here the treatment of individual people and the problem solving that incur occurs in these meetings are authentic models that our students observe to learn about our how our communities and how our democracy functions and i know that all of us know that this is not a responsibility that should be taken lightly i thank you for the opportunity to offer some of my thoughts i thank you for the time and energy and thoughtfulness that you put into your evaluations and continue to be committed to fulfilling my responsibilities to the students of this district thank you okay so um then we need to vote that this is the evaluation that we want to give um and then on our agenda well let's do that
234first we need to vote on if this is the if this is the document that we want to submit where do we submit it what what do you mean submit waist minute oh for the wreck goes into yeah all right i move that the hamilton oneham regional school committee um accept or approve i don't know approve the com compilation end of cycle summative evaluation report as compiled by the chair michelle bailey and presented on today's agenda they're a second okay okay um do people want to discuss it more yep um there's one thing i think that the only thing gives me and i i'm i'm in favor of accepting it because i think it does it is an accurate reflection of the committee um one thing i think is going to be helpful as we
235look to goal setting that i found really challenging and maybe it's because this was the first time i think this group had really used the indicators i i mentioned on a number of occasions i think the artifacts that you presented did not track to the indicators i think there was an evidentiary disconnect so i think now that we've gone through this so for me a lot of my difficulty was just saying the indicator says these things should have happened but the artifacts in my opinion did not demonstrate that so i think as we look forward to setting goals for next year i think before we and i remember that meeting i think i was sitting in almost this location we were kind of haphazardly oh that seems like that yeah that sounds good we added
236indicators and i think in retrospect we we set up sort of a disconnect in that way so as we move forward to your goal setting for next year i want to be more thoughtful about as we assign an indicator we really look at it and then we kind of think through well what is what would piece of evidence like that look like how would you prove that because that for me was a difficult part of this process so i'm comfortable accepting the document as a true reflection of this again i don't feel like it totally captures what i really said but i accept for what it is but i think next year we can learn from it as a body about how to do an evaluation that uses the goals and the rubric in a
237way that maybe will eliminate that kind of disconnect if that makes sense does this um evaluation have any impact on superintendent banos not really other than um so if we give the rating of needs improvement then um we will need to work with mary beth i'm sorry yeah we will need to work with uh mary beth somehow to create a self-directed improvement plan so we'll have some work to do to support her in doing that so does that have to i mean is that in in other circumstances does that take the form of like um measurable you know like a performance plan you know like does this is this the same as like an hr warning of like you have some things you need to improve upon at all okay have you ever given a
238teacher a self-directed plan um yes i have yeah so yeah this report gets the because this isn't like a an improvement plan this is just a self-directed so what happens is that for every educator in this district um we submit the um the ratings only to the department of education that are submitted to the department of education um in as a record of that particular employee's performance and so it is relatively rare in this district for folks to receive a needs improvement but when that does happen then there is a self-directed plan that is put into place to move things forward yeah because when i consulted with dorothy she was like well this kind of never happens so they're not really sure um and that you know yeah so and her recommendation was that um
239well first she said do you have a personnel committee and i was like come on and then um she recommended that maybe the chair and the vice chair work with you and jane jane no yeah that's her name your coach's name um to put together some sort of plan so um but i was going to talk to that after we approved this so um i'm a little bothered by this process i i think we've sort of have this review compiled that we haven't even addressed on the public record and gone through we've already allowed the super attendant to rebut it before it's even made been made part of the public record and i'm pretty disturbed by the response to be honest with you um you know i think that we are way out of sort
240of whack on how this should be going right that this is excuse me this is a review process from the board right and whether or not you know the the you know the the entirety of the compilation should have been put on the record and then we can speak to whether or not we want to move it forward that if it's a representation right because it's it's it's not on the record now right we're still talking about anyone who's not in front of a computer right now has no idea what we're talking about but they know exactly how mary beth feels about it so we put you know we really messed up the process um can you elaborate on that i'm not sure what you're saying so i i had it posted at three o'clock
241this afternoon can anyone over there tell me what the review what the review says yeah it was posted to facebook already so but i mean by people in the audience here it hasn't been read on the record it hasn't been discussed on the right oh you want to oh okay i'm sorry i didn't shout out so you think we should read it it should yeah we should be going through this okay i thought that that's what we were doing in the comments and nobody was like saying anything so okay i'm fine with that well before are you suggesting we actually read all 15 pages into the record what's that are you suggesting that we read all 15 pages into the record the it has been past practice that we've gone through and said on this
242goal i know but it was only a few sentences yes okay well i'm good with that but before we before we do that can i say something else let's let david finish and i will and then we'll let you talk i'm done okay okay um so before i move on to something david said the only reason i'm asking about what does this mean like substantively does it mean i'm just looking at the guidance from a rating of needs improvement which says needs improvement slash developing equals performance on a standard is performance on a standard or overall is below the requirements of a standard or overall but is not considered to be unsatisfactory at this time improvement is necessary and expected which sort of denotes like i guess it just may i mean i guess i'm
243wondering if this rating is sort of entered in as the record now and then next year we are still in the same place like i just maybe this would be helpful to hear from dorothy or someone else like that line of improvement is necessary and expected in hr language to me that means like this is a little bit of like a subject for growth then we need to monitor it as like a benchmark so i'm still i am a little unclear about what it means um i think what david's saying is sort of what i was trying to say is that especially in response to mary beth's rebuttal which you know quite frankly is very much targeted to me personally not by name but that's okay i do feel like in order for the public
244to properly contextualize this the compilation but especially to contextualize her rebuttal it's they they have no idea what she's responding to because they haven't seen it right so i think i mean i think there's a transparency issue that we have to address and i think that is sort of procedurally it's a it's it does feel a little irregular because i think there's we're sort of talking in a code i know exactly what i wrote and i think if other people on the committee and the public saw what i actually wrote they might look at the response and say okay it's not quite i mean i think there's a disconnect there so i do feel like we need to make that more public i don't know and while i well i have the floor for a
245second the only thing i'll say to the superintendent specifically is when you say criticism towards you by default is of the leadership team i actually want to be really clear that that is i don't think that is by default i have no contact with the leadership team i don't meet with them i meet with you you're my point of contact so for the leadership team that might be extrapolating that i just want to be really clear like my comments and evaluation is of you not them because i don't know what happens in those meetings all i can see is the work product of it and for you you are the ceo of this organization so regardless of what happens behind the scenes ultimately the work product i see as being your responsibility so i just
246want to be really clear i think in your response you are extrapolating criticism to the leadership team in a way that i most definitely do not mean because i have no way to evaluate the leadership team i don't meet with them but i know i'm evaluating you so i just want to be crystal clear my comments are and performance review are of you and solely you not anyone else within the leadership team i just want to make sure that that's made clear go ahead and then i'll read it yeah i would just say that there have been comments made you know such as that that the shameless manipulation of data right when it when a comment like that is made knowing and the data comes from our principles is it healthy for the review process
247a review process is a conversation what's that a review process is a conversation we haven't reviewed the documents right it's a personal conversation going on right now i get uh instead of a board evaluation to the superintendent this has now turned into a personal conversation right we could be playing cards over here because those two are just talking about back and forth to one another okay so what are you suggesting so again i think we should be reading the entire evaluation into the public record okay all right do you want me to read the whole thing or do people want to take turns six of these yourself all right here we go [Music] so the methodology per the school committee vote on april 28th ratings were assigned a one two three four or five in
248some cases averages of the rankings were averages of the rankings were then averaged that's a bad sentence for standard three the diversity of ratings caused the average to be a two with three members ranking proficient three members ranking unsatisfactory and one ranking needs improvement the rating ranged from one to four in many categories and the integrator reliability on the standard does not seem to have occurred iterator inter raider reliability is vital to employee evaluation practice to eliminate bias and sustain transparency consistency and impartiality and then there's that's actually a citation the superintendent should work closely with the committee to define goals and work with the chair to provide additional training this is my editorial and to provide additional training of the rating process in the next year overall the ratings of the superintendent varied from
249proficient three members needs improvement three members and unsatisfactory superintendent banos entered the hamilton winter regional school district on july first in an uncertain time with without a settled budget in the middle of a pandemic after last-minute drastic staff cuts and several years without a strategic plan any one of these concerns would be a large undertaking for a superintendent it cannot be ignored that while the overall rating here is needs improvement it is highly likely that no person would have entered this situation and created systems that fully met the needs of our community during this time of crisis our districts our district parents are extremely demanding during the pandemic those demands increased exponentially the district the decision regarding the modality of learning in the fall was fraught with emotion and differing opinions community members wanted students
250back in school but also wanted to support teachers requests to work from home other parents wanted all students to be remote like neighboring districts so that all students had the same educational opportunities ultimately in a four to three vote under the superintendent's leadership the school committee voted to start the school year in a hybrid approach michelle before you any further yep i i just wanted to clarify that i think the process of going through step one assess progress towards goals of reference i think that's what really we should be discussing um rather than going sort of more into the weeds i think that would just be the broader overview don't understand what you're saying so um the endocyto summative evaluation report for the superintendent step one is to assess progress towards goals reference performance goals
251check one for each goal for professional practice the cumulative average is significant process for student learning goals the cumulative average is some progress i thought we did that already the cumulative average is some progress yep step two and i just think that is what i say it should be read to the record that's the part that should be read to the record i'm confused because i already did that excuse me i've already done that you've already done that maybe not i don't know at the beginning i said that the ratings were this and then that the overall rating was needs improvement is that which so we went do you want to just i really don't remember going through okay but that's fine i don't know i don't know i i i'm not sure that reading
252the entire document into the record is a good use of our committees or the public's time considering that it is available to to read i just i mean if if the committee wants michelle to do that we can obviously do that but realistically like that might that will take an hour just to read it into the record so i want to understand what david's getting at but i actually think we should not read the entire document into the record i mean i honestly feel that the only one who made a clear distinction of how they feel and where they stand on this has been the superintendent well i'm sort of counting on the release of our individual evaluations for people to be able to see for themselves where we stood julia i think going forward
253for next time we do this evaluation we need direction as to what this process looks like like if if i had been told come prepared to talk for five minutes and synthesize your evaluation then i totally would have you know i think i think like our expectation was that we would have this document it would be shown to the public they'd have time to read it we would have time to read it and then we would maybe discuss it if we had issues with it but i understand what david is saying because he had a different expectation and maybe the public had a different expectation so i think if the if it's clear because there was only half an hour allowed for this on the agenda so i i didn't think there would be a
254lot of debate i didn't think that was the intention but if that is the intention if that's what we're supposed to be doing then i think we need some some headway to prepare for that so i think next time we definitely need to determine like are we talking one-on-one we're defending our position we're explaining maybe three key points and then we are talking about the composite i don't know so i just i guess i don't have a comment on tonight but i also don't really i don't think it's a good use of time to read it into the record um because it can be put i mean can be i we don't we don't normally do that with all documents though it's literally your the the culmination of the past year in your assessment of
255the superintendent if you're comfortable with not having that clearly put on the record okay well i'm not i'm i would say it's on the record because it's a document that's accessible but that's i'm really trying to know what it is because i thought we you wanted i heard you that you wanted to have this read into the record but then i thought you said for her to stop so i want to know what's usually done do we usually read the whole thing it's the record or do we usually just have a the last time i did this no gregor we didn't do one last year but and it was much shorter and it was much shorter but i mean it is what it is yeah and then there was not a remodel from okay so
256no there was there was feedback from the superintendent there was feedback yeah there was it was a discussion yeah it wasn't a published well pre-written i will say naomi had recommended to mary beth that she write a letter so she did i don't know it leaves me really really not easy but what would make it cause i like this is it is what it is at this point i'm putting on the record that i am not comfortable with this process i mean from sorry oh yeah um i mean i i'm responding to david's discomfort and validating it i'm a little bit puzzled on how to make it better right now in this moment but i think that you're expressing a genuine concern that we're doing something irregular and that that i want to just validate
257that i think for me and i'll say it again the only way i frank frankly the only way i'm comfortable accepting this document as an amalgam is with the explicit expectation that everyone's individual evaluations are made public like as soon as the meeting is done maybe it gets added as exhibit maybe they could pose like i don't know how mechanically how that happens because i as the one person who did rate as unsatisfactory is the one person who is you know very much sort of targeted in this rebuttal i feel like the only way for me to show the public where i was coming from the the information mary beth is responding to is in my personal evaluation parts of what you're here sort of accurately but close enough like i'm okay with like i'm
258okay with it but the only reason i'm remotely okay with moving forward is with the explicit expectation that my individual evaluation is made public as soon as possible because frankly there's there's a disparagement my direction as well so the only my my rebuttal so to speak is my evaluation which i is there you know for the public record so i wish i could understand what david is getting at i wish that we didn't have to read all 15 pages into the record to satisfy it like i wish there was a clear solution here but but i mean it's 15 pages like that's not really a good excuse on why we shouldn't be going through it thoroughly it's one of our three primary jobs as school community members trust me i don't want to be here
259to read through 15 pages of this but that reflects poorly on us that we're sort of willing to let it go right it's it's a key process it's literally what we're here for right and and i just have to say that i'm not i'm not happy can i make can i make a suggestion because i'd like to not i'd like to move forward so would it make sense to finish reading what the overall comment that that michelle was you know part way through and then the next thing that i'm hearing is it might make sense to say okay so then the first standard instructional leadership does anyone have any comments about the composite here regarding instructional leadership would that be an appropriate way to do this i mean honestly it's a band-aid but well i
260don't know what what purpose just reading it now i i i'm withdrawing my comment okay i'm just gonna back off because i don't want this conversation okay okay um all right so does anybody have any further comments on the evaluation itself all right so go ahead i don't know i i i don't understand because when i was reading it then i felt like i was cut off not to read it and now that i don't know oh can i say he i didn't think he was cutting you off i think he was just saying you missed the reading the first part but um i don't i don't know if maybe we should vote on this or if you want to make a motion david i don't know i don't know where we go from here
261you did make a motion i think dana did yeah we did make a motion i okay i guess i i as much as this is a hard conversation i i hear your feedback and i think we should try to do a better job i i feel like i if that means continuing to read i think we should continue to read or we should at least i mean i don't see any harm in going through each standard and just taking five minutes or whatever it is a few minutes on each standard i mean i don't because i hear what you're saying that i'm going to read the rest of the summary and then we'll go from there while planning the return to kindergarten and first grade students in late november the state recommended more in-person learning
262this hamilton winter regional school district was able to meet this threshold due to her foresight and planning however this return was met with demands to return all students and requests from school committee members for a state audit of the time on learning report there has been mistrust between the superintendent and the community and this mistrust has also extended to the school committee it should be recognized that the superintendent faced the daunting and seemingly impossible task of responding to hundreds of emails per week many of the emails demanding the superintendent implement conflicting actions regardless of which action she took a number of community members would be upset some members of the community suggested a vote of no confidence should be taken but failed to gather little more than 100 unvetted signatures and was never presented to
263the school committee the concern of mistrust was comment a common theme for the committee members the most unsatisfactory aspect of the superintendent's fundamental competence is evident in the heavily fractured relationship with the stakeholders that matter most in our district parents and teachers her leadership style poor communication skills and inability to build consensus are not necessarily evaluation criteria they can be improved they are a core weakness if we are continually being told by the stakeholders the community the teachers and the parents that the ship is sinking we must address this head-on the superintendent needs to lead in this effort members suggest that the pandemic restriction as the pandemic restrictions are lifted the superintendent and there's a misspelling there meet with more parents and teachers as interpersonal communication is an area of strength for her the process
264of developing the portrait of the graduate and the strategic plan will give her this opportunity some committee members describe the superintendent as having a clear passion for putting the needs of the students first and standing up for her beliefs on items that are impactful to student learning safety and student social emotional needs they believe the superintendent daniels has a vision and proper skill set to bring stability and continued educational excellence to the district other members state that they did not think the superintendent banos has the innate capacity of leadership and collaboration we need to heal after an incredibly difficult year in the pandemic the juxtapic juxtaposition in views seems to be a theme in this evaluation the superintendent met all the daunting challenges of the last year with grace and diplomacy even in the face
265of personal attacks she continued to innovate and negotiate for improving learning in the district it is believed that the upcoming strategic planning will provide an opportunity for superintendent vanessa to shine she understands the importance of getting community input and having the hard conversations superintendent banyos is a competent and focused educator in her first year as superintendent of the hamilton wyoming regional school district she has led while dealing with the decimated budget parent disconnect hamilton wenham education association discontent and school committee dysfunction through the turmoil and many issues miss banyos has remained focused on moving the district forward and creating programs that serve our students mary beth has a clear vision of where she'd like to take the hamilton wynonna regional school district but she must address the state of the district and contentions currently in
266the community okay so student learning goal there was some progress made professional practice goal met district improvement goal number one significant progress district improvement goal number two some progress district goal number three significant progress just for clarification michelle that's the average of our uh readings correct okay and then um a1 curriculum uh needs improvement b1 instruction um insurance practice and that goes with goal three and four needs improvement assessment which had to do with goal three and goal four is needs improvement overall needs improvement um there were two that rated proficient three or four that rated needs improvement and one that rated unsatisfactory um talks about things like let's see coordinating to reopen the school district was it positive responding to parents demands that we open the schools with a split vote there was some
267concern around the hw well actually four people brought this up the hwea members survey about 86 of the teachers disagreeing with the restructuring plan there's some praise having to do with implementing live streaming as a response to feedback that they needed more one-to-one not one-to-one but more contact with their teachers um but there still does seem to be a discrepancy in the way curriculum and instruction is delivered across the schools during this hybrid period without district-wide curriculum leaders it suggested that a learning management system might have been able to help with that there's peter there's some discussion about how there were many different iterations throughout the year and how superintendent vaniers had to work with the leadership team to create you know new rules and schedules and things like that and that the staff had
268worked together to sort of share their best practices through blogs but someone was concerned that there was no evidence that suggested that any of the blogging activities yielded district-wide practice implementation since there was only evidence of the blogs at the high school and administrative level more talk about bringing back our youngest learners and that um the leadership team was planning ahead with that um back in november and then the desc brought forward ways for us to do that then there's some discussion about one of the well a couple of the evaluations talk about families being worried about the time on learning being inflated and that there was a a complaint filed with the dese but at this time we don't have the response we don't really know if those concerns are valid or not and
269that one of one of one of the evaluations mentioned this being an important point in the decision-making process for standard number two superintendent was ranked for standard 2e proficient that was the only standard we were rating so overall she was also ranked as proficient there was one exemplary 4 proficient one needs improvement and one unsatisfactory and a lot of this was about the collab um the unsatisfactory one said there was not evidence of collaboration and there were financial irregularities and the concern about the literacy support in the budget for next year um and that there was a concern about collaboration with the hwea stated that the teachers feared retribution if they spoke against the budget um there was a discussion of one of the ratings of misuse of public funds for the private pr firm
270the late notification about not hiring the what was that called teacher on special duty or something like that questions about bid bids related to the strategic planning and a couple of people talked about a failure to send out the rfq to the dse consultants for the portrait of a graduate and there was some concerns about the student opportunity grant funds proposal not soliciting enough community input on the other hand five members commended the superintendent for her thoughtful budget that recovers a lot of the capacity addresses a known need in early literacy and allowed the towns to avoid overrides there was also town officials that commended the superintendent in the budget process for this year saying it felt more collaborative and represented the shared sense of ownership and the superintendent does make sure that the committee
271receives regular updates as we did tonight on implementing the budget in the district and that you have navigated the various emergency grants to allow the district to provide a safe learning environment standard three is on family and community engagement for shared responsibility which is 3b and relates to goal 2 rated needs improvement on 3c communication about engaging in two-way culturally proficient communication with families related to goal number two rated needs improvement overall rated means improvement again as previously noted there's a wide discrepancy of ratings with three rating proficient one that needs improvement and three at unsatisfactory uh let's see so for unsatisfactory the trust and communication between the district and community has never been at such odds um stakeholders have there was a discussion about like people being rebuffed and having to turn to the
272school committee to get help someone said based on observations the superintendent does not set clear expectations for or provide support to administrators regarding regular culturally sensitive communications and they were cited evidence that was cited for this is that the school committee received a complaint from a parent that their child was forced to say i like christmas during their world language class christmas decorations are pervasive and heavily dominant in the district buildings and the high school winter music program drew exclusively from selections from the christian holiday canon additional evidence is that there remains ongoing tension about the designation of good friday as a vacation day on the approved school committee calendar that the holiday message sent by the superintendent on december 23rd used the greeting or closing thoughts and prayers and that would make it makes
273the superintendent contradict the requirement of cultural competency that respects the different family home languages cultures and values whatever that's missing um someone else talked about instances well actually this may be the same person instances of racial and homophobic language reported to the school committee through zoom bombing at school a tick-tock video and then comments on a youtube school committee meeting which may have been the last meeting um and then there were several people who brought up that the superintendent's district-wide message was too vague that the reference as being inappropriate and hurtful did not condemn the events and correctly identify them as hate speech and that the committee is unclear of what consequences if any of the students have received for their behavior lack of clear force by the superintendent shows failure to meet to see
274which is culturally sensitive communication and that the superintendent has been made aware the district's website titled commitment to equity has only a message information coming soon and that that the superintendent has not had that page removed and that this constitutes a clear deficiency in the superintendent's cultural competency on the other hand the members saw standard three was actually a strength for superintendent banos in the summer and fall she responded to many emails and voicemails whereas prior to covid communications from the former superintendents were limited um that superintendent daniels actually started working here earlier than her first day of her contract to make sure that things went smoothly that this is brought up twice that there were typos in things that she had provided but one person said she'd taken the feedback and had improved and
275that the consultation with the pr firm act which has been a point of contention seems to have steadily improved communication and the virtual coffee hours were great but unfortunately there wasn't enough time to do as many has been planned and that the one-on-one and small group um communications is one of the superintendent's um strong points and that she has a great ability to calm a situation and to find a common resolve even when a common result is not met and then she's fostered relationships outside of the school with the town managers select boards vincoms also working at the north shore superintendents roundtable and also responding to media requests this year superintendent has encouraged appropriate family communications with the principals to get their questions and concerns addressed um recently the superintendent has the restructuring of the
276family engagement coordinator and this position has helped increase communication with parents and organizations and organize the website um and in the spring the superintendent um attended the training with us and then led the discussion afterwards and has set a dei goal for next year standard four is around professional culture did i get this fixed yeah it looks like i got this six um 4a is a commitment to high standards it relates to goal number one i think it was like it was a two four something so i marked both like it's kind of in the middle i feel like that's what it was i feel like it was a two point four something um sorry i'm not i should have wrote the number in so that's between needs improvement and proficient um continuous learning um
277you know she cultivates that people you know are continuously learning and in her case she is continuously learning um through the new superintendent induction program as proficient shared vision has to do with um making sure that all stakeholders are involved in the vision for the district and again it was that same weird four two or four three so i put it in between both and on for f managing conflict um it had to do with goal number two which was improving communications which was needs improvements overall it was needs improvement so on this particular standard there did seem to be consensus that because five members ranked the superintendent is needing improvement um superintendent responds respectfully to to dissent lives here mantra mantra mantra hard on the issues soft on the people um she's often says
278to us when there's opposing views that both can be true even though that they can be opposite of each other their tensions were high in the fall and she tries to work through the many issues of dissent and disagreement however some of those have remained contentious um it was suggested that if this was allowed to continue it could foster an unhealthy culture there were examples of excerpts from emails from teachers written into the evaluation on the return to hybrid learning provided as evidence that by a school committee member that the teachers were not engaged in decision making the superintendent as she stated led negotiations for four mou agreements and i think it may even be more because i started to think about the custodians and their thing about the hazard pay so there was that
279too um let's see yeah so and and there are several of those needed as modalities and guidance changed from the state and um we've seen that the superintendent has been an effective communicator and has an ability to calm situations intense negotiations and i think that has not been more evident than it has been in the last few weeks [Music] there were concerns raised about the recruiting of the bidders for the portrait of the graduate for the district okay which i just won't say anything about that and [Applause] there's a statement and that there was also concern about there wasn't district-wide buy-in that there was a vote by the school committee that was four to three regarding the portion of the graduate and that teachers have raised concerns that the portrait of the graduate has already
280been addressed through the district's transfer goals um and the teachers hosted a meeting where multiple teachers stated that much of the portion of the graduate work has already been completed and it just needs to be augmented internally without the need for a paid outside consultant and this was brought up several times the committee seemed to be very concerned that votes were not unanimous and giving examples of the modality of learning was four to three the soa the soa grant was five to two the portrait of the graduate was five to two the pull testing initially was voted a no and then revoted as a yes and that the town meeting budget was not a landslide the superintendent has participated in the new superintendent induction program we've met her coach she's implemented recommendations from the coach
281and she worked with her and the masc and the mass to provide an opportunity for the community to explore ways that we can work together better and then people several people brought up probably because it was a very current topic about comments during the last meeting and that the statement was too vague but it did not i guess probably because well you sent out that email to us about the having the chat turned off and the actions that you took that night but nobody really talked about that so those were the things that people talked about when you see these evaluations you are going to see that probably 85 of this is literally lifted right out of the documents so okay so are we ready to vote on this being the final evaluation do we
282want to put it off a week i think we should go ahead and vote um but i do want clarity about how the individual evaluations are going to be made public the issue is that they were all in different formats so i got some in pdfs some in word some and whatever so it was a it would be a process for me to turn them all into one format and get them all into one document so it's going to take some time and after spending at least 24 hours taking days off from work and giving my entire week into this i just didn't have time to do it oh that that's not my i mean that's that's great and i mean i'm just simply saying i feel like 10 days to respond to that request
283and i will be sure that the public documents are ready in 10 days i'm very tired i did a ton of work on this a ton of work all i want to do is just vote on it everybody's in violent agreement that this is what we want it to be i i'm very frustrated that we can't just vote but you're yes angry and you're not being professional or kind you are correct i feel like i'm being attacked and i've been asked this question five times the answer is i will get to it as soon as i humanly possibly can but it is never quick enough fast enough or good enough i'm telling you all year long it's always i'm never good enough fast enough or quick enough i am trying very hard to get it
284done but i'm not going to get it done tonight okay so so i think i think we can agree that what anna's requested michelle said within 10 days that she will be able to provide it to the public and dana has asked that we move to vote i move to vote if you send them to me i'll do it send if you send all it i'll do it for you no problem again that's requires me if every individual here wants to send them to you that's fine but the issue is i literally do not have time to do my job well and it's a very stressful time right now at my job michelle i take care of these things that i'm happy to do but i feel like i'm being told that unless i explicitly
285say how i'm going to do it so that i can later on be checked and verified that i actually did exactly what one person wanted me to do it isn't good enough i i am telling you now that i am feeling attacked that i am never good enough i'm never quick enough and i never do it right and that is how i feel whether it's your intention i'm telling you that's how i feel so as a practical matter if we all just turn ours into pdfs which really should be the simplest form we all have our originals i feel like that's something simple can i have a suggestion in a few minutes we're going to vote for a new chair would it make sense at that point that everyone could send their document to the
286new chair the new chair will put those into a readable format and provide that within 10 days to the committee i like that idea so can i guess the motion on the table is to move to vote correct yes correct okay so are we voting to vote to vote are we just going to vote let's just vote okay so if we can vote um if this is the document that we want to be our final evaluation all in favor all opposed vote is six to one all right is there gonna find my agenda uh we're going to reorganize reorganization of the committee so at this point i think i'm up i think it's you because i am no longer the chair and you will open up the nominations for the next thing yes um so
287at this point i will take nominations for the next chair of the hamilton wenom regional school district school committee so do i hear any nominations yes we have a nomination for antecedent is that seconded second okay any other nominations i nominate dana alara okay and a second on dana second what i would suggest is that we'll ask each of the individuals to spend about five minutes talking about why they are interested in this position and then we will move to vote so anna would you like to start first sure um thank you jen for the nomination julia for the second um i accept it procedurally i think my motivation is that to me the role of a chair is primarily administrative and organizational and those are really my core strengths it's just making sure that
288documents are prepared things are are thorough and complete and everyone has information it's been my observation this year that there's a lot of it's just logistics it's really just putting the meeting together putting the documents together and then running an efficient meeting so i think it has a certain element of command of robert's rules which i think i have a reasonably good command of that already and then i think for me just the the willingness to really sort of validate everyone's individual perspectives even even when and perhaps especially when there's dissent i think that that's to me to me the chair is just really the chief admin there's no additional power involved it's organizational and i think really finding ways to let people feel heard and i think that is one of my core strengths
289i think that trying to find ways that i can hear someone if they disagree and not not not over personalize it and there's been a couple moments you know and i'll use dave as an example where sometimes things get personal but they don't mean to be and i think i i think i you know i i think i keep my temper quite well um despite frequently being sort of the one voice of dissent so i think that disposition is helpful but i think my real strength is accessibility approachability organizational power robert's rules and i'd just like to help us put together agendas that are reasonable i think um i think i'd like to take a closer look at what we're really trying to accomplish and i think that you know when we have nights like
290this you know none of us function well when we're tired or stressed out and it's been an extraordinarily difficult year so i think i'd just like to try to bring a little bit more palatable bites and then try to help us navigate conflict with a little more elegance knowing full well what it feels like to be on sort of the receiving end of what does that look like what does that feel like so i think i have the right skills and i think i have the right disposition and i care passionately about our committee and our schools and our community i think we all do and i think that's come up as a theme in this this year over and over is that we all care powerfully and no one i think i've said this
291before no one runs for public office because they're shy or they're selfish we all volunteer thousands of hours and i think that you know just sort of approaching each other from the place of mutual respect and appreciation for the commitments we're making is important so i would love to be the chair and i think i could bring some good utility in terms of my skill set to just organizing us in a way that everyone feels really prepared and ready to have a good meeting when we finally do meet thank you thank you anna and dana okay i have to say i was not ready for a five minute speech but i can do it so this has been a very challenging year for everyone on the committee [Music] and i feel that i have hope
292that i would be able to bring as the chair um a tone or i would bring forth a tone of compassion and hopefully a tone of bringing people together and that doesn't mean to anna's point that doesn't mean that we would agree but i think we really are trying to set a model for our community about the way that we talk to each other and it is challenging and i would approach the chair job with my whole heart of trying to model that for our students trying to model respectful conversations in which really hard dissenting differences are able to be hashed out in a way that everyone still feels heard and heard and understood even when they get outvoted and to set a tone i do or have facilitated many groups and i do think
293it's one of my skills is to [Music] bring out people in a group not that this group needs any help being drawn out but make sure that all voices are heard and represented have done that professionally i've spent the last year or last 10 months i guess or as the chair of negotiations not all of you get to see me in that role but those that do i hope that you feel like i have been able to work with both sides in a very complicated negotiation to and to facilitate thoughtful respectful um and efficient conversations i would very much like to take on the challenge of working collaboratively with all of you and working side by side with with mary beth in terms of making this committee and the district better for all of us
294thank you dana i think at this point what we'll do is go around to committee members and if you can just share if you would like to have anna or dana as the chair um we'll just go one by one does that make sense sure yes julia anna david uh dana dana oh dana i'm gonna vote for myself michelle dana other michelle dana anna i would like anna and jen so that is a four votes for dana three votes for anna so dana you have been elected chair i think it's the opposite i'm sorry did i say that wrong um four votes for data three votes for anna i think it's still the opposite oh did i did i hear i heard anna dana dana dana dana and anna i thought david voted for me
295now dana okay thank you yep no worries at all so with that election having taken place i will now turn it over to dana who will lead the nomination for a vice chair thank you and um it's i'm really honored and excited to get started okay so thank you all um and do we have a nomination for vice chair any nominations for vice chair i'd like to nominate david polito and if i could just give my reasoning for david polito that's okay having sat in this chair as as vice chair i feel that you need to have experience as vice as chair to sit in the vice chair spot because i feel that i did not serve michelle well or the committee well having not had experience to be in this hot seat i feel
296that david's experience as chair would serve the school committee and mary beth and the district very well it is a it is a reverse succession plan um but i think this year it would serve us well thank you do we have other nominations for vice chair well i nominate anna czech if you would like to i don't know if you want to take this i'll serve in any capacity that the committee uh feels i would accept it but i i accept it but thank you are there any other nominations okay i think last time we just moved to a vote right we just went around um all right i'll go in a different order i guess um no speeches what there's gonna be no speeches oh i'm sorry you're right i was we were forced
297to do speeches you don't have to i don't care actually actually you know what i i i'm gonna i'm gonna pull myself out i appreciate it very much julia i do just about to pull myself i beat you to it i i actually i actually doesn't bode well for my chairmanship does it it no it's not that right it's it's i understand and i appreciate why you know you guys would like me to be vice chair i i'm nervous about the time commitment to be 100 honest right you guys know where my priorities lie i i put that right on the table and you know these these are tough meetings right it's it's midnight we haven't even gone to executive session yet um and i mean i would hope that if you know i would
298try to bring these meetings back down to earth but i see a lot of value in having anna and i understand why you wouldn't no i i i mean i i i okay i would accept i will accept and not understand can i do that where where there's a divide i don't really see it as much of a divide i think i see it as more of a lack of understanding that i think that if you're sort of in the driver's seat or at least the co-pilot seat i i think you guys would make a great team i do and i think that would be really good for the committee moving forward and then maybe even getting back into the idea of the vice chair sort of being that warm-up role for the chair down
299the line um you know i in you so that's that my thought process i you know um because i really could see that as being very successful of course i'll help out in any way that i can um but i just think that you know to be honest with myself and to be honest with all of you i'm very nervous about that that time commitment all right well in that case then i will re-accept the nomination with the caveat that you know i'm i'm you know one year in just like dana and i think together i think together the two halves of our brain are definitely better than either one of us independent you know so i kind of like that thing going on can be really strong yeah well and out of respect for
300my fellow committee members you know i think um it's flattering to have other people who you respect offer you up as well so i i would accept that nomination david does that mean you're not going to accept the nomination then i would nominate julia i feel like it's important that we have a representative from each town that's kind of like how we've been doing it for quite a while it does help out um [Music] you know when you're coming to budget time to have those relationships in town with one member from each town so i agree with that but i also have a time commitment issue so this turns into my really busy time i do a lot of speaking and i do a lot of traveling which it's going to be picking up again
301um and i just i i'm also concerned but also i i just don't feel like i have enough experience so i i really appreciate that though thank you yeah so i know it's two hamilton people but oh well i'll have two one on people for a long long time thank you i'll nominate well i do appreciate it jen because she's from well okay so uh shall we move to a vote we're going to ask jennifer oh i'm sorry to do the vice position i wish i did but i think i mean i'm right okay so um thank you jen thank you um all right let's move to a vote it seems like anna oh should we go around i think we did run around um we'll start with you julia anna david anna anna anna
302anna anna and it's unanimous so anna you are officially the vice chair thanks all right i look forward to working with you this is going to be great um all right so now we i will take nominations for secretary i nominate jen okay i'm getting i'm going to make my own nomination too okay go ahead i'm going to i actually nominate julia and i don't know if you want to give a reason or i'll give a reason yeah i i find that um being the secretary is very valuable um because you're going back and you're reading through what happened in a meeting and it really helps you to kind of learn what kind of things have been said and to review that and in your first year on the committee it's it's really helpful but
303um i'm going to actually nominate julia for very similar reasons i i myself have been the secretary and i got nominated in the first meeting and it was what michelle just said was true and also i think ideally i would have rather had a few months under my belt before i took it on although it what michelle says is accurate about it being an excellent way to learn um so that's my reasoning for nominating julia because i think she's had those few months and um but honestly i think you both could do an excellent job okay um do you want it i wouldn't be happy with either of us so um okay i accept the nomination don't forget there's the exciting rule of vice secretary too which correct vice secretary assistant secretary it's assistant secretary
304okay thank you so much um okay so are we ready to move to a all right why don't we start well can i ask a question of both of them just you know because of time and oh i'm sorry speeches and all that well no it's just more i mean i think in general people do well when they're excited and comfortable with the role so i mean i think i'd be curious to know i mean julia's expressed a concern about time i know jen also has a full-time job i mean every honestly everyone in this committee is crazy busy like every single one of us so i feel like if the two of you are sort of indifferent then maybe it doesn't matter but if one of you had a stronger feeling about the time
305commitment i will just say observationally watching dana from that vice secretary position that the secretary position is a heavier lift than the vice secretary but you know so i think you should go into it with an awareness that it is not an inconsistent it's not it's not nothing i don't think it's nearly as much as the chair of the vice chair but i don't it's not just you occasionally do minutes and that's that i think dana's put a ton of time into it and it's again it's been a very unique year i looked back at how many executive sessions used to happen and it's a different world so hopefully that will not continue that'll be well it happens every three years yeah i will say that i really find one of my strengths strengths is
306to take multiple points of view and to concisely and clearly communicate so i think for that reason i would be good as either a secretary or a vice president well i think i mean for me like anna said that the time is always timing is always an issue um so i i mean i would be happy to i would be happy to to i don't know what withdraw my nomination and second year nomination and then maybe submit myself for a vice chair um they're just out i just like i said i would be fine either way but i want to do it i'm not teaching as much next year okay well then that could probably that should probably be the deciding factor and i'm happy obviously to step in any time so we can switch
307it all right there so collegial at 12 15 in the morning okay so um right it's not good night it's good morning it's good morning okay so it looks like uh why don't we so i appreciate the nomination but i will refer to john okay so jenna so jennifer carr is the nominee for secretary i'm going to start with anna for your vote for secretary yes go jen go michelle jen jen jen jen okay congratulations jen you're the secretary um and now if we're ready to move to a vote for julia campbell as the vice secretary it's assistant official but it's assistant secretary oh i'm sorry assistance correct assistant secretary um david nominated her did you accept julia yes i accept okay are we ready to vote david yes julia julia julia julia julia julia
308okay julia you are the assistant secretary um as the chair i know that at some point we need to reorganize the committees but i might ask the group to let's do that next time shall we and i might task all of you especially jen you might and i'd be happy to chat with you or you could chat with someone else it would be really everyone should really be thoughtful about what committees you'd really like to serve on so that when we come together you'll be really ready to think about you know where you might best fit in okay topics for future meetings or shall we just move to executive sessions good question do we have we have to go into executive session right now no we could put a time limit on it we could
309put a time limit on it like literally like like 10 minutes we could absolutely essential right now it's yeah it's not thank you that it's not essential and or we could do yeah i mean it's not essential if we want i want to defer to what the committee wants to do but um i have a topic for future media or whatever i do but i would love to anna um before we go to that i did have a question about topic for future meeting i'm a little concerned about the email we got from everett and they're speaking a public comment in regard to graduation i am tremendously unclear if that's actually within our purview or not but i feel really i feel like that request is caught in some sort of time warp collateral consequence
310and i want to know how to resolve it definitively one way or the other um okay so i would say that's a topic you're asking i mean can we set aside marybeth do you have any further information about the graduation agenda yeah in terms of what's on what's on the graduation ceremony that's something that that the principal eric tracy puts together um inter the the feedback that we have given everett is that there hasn't been any decision from the district about how we're going to move forward with that in terms of land acknowledgment if the committee would like to make a determination on that we'd be happy to do that technically i am not sure but we could certainly find out whether or not that decision would be made by the committee or by the
311principal but given the fact that there hasn't even been any debate around that yet with the committee the decision was to hold off on that so i guess mike it would be interesting to have guidance on whether [Music] it whether or not an an agenda i mean a i guess it's not an agenda it's a uh what i don't know what do you call it it's just a statement no but i got the program whether or not we ever make comments on the program um i think that's that's sorry that's my question is is this even in our purview or is this something that honestly like maybe you and the principal yeah and i honestly don't have the answer to that either julia but what i'd be happy to do is consult with council tomorrow
312and see if we can clarify that right because we we're happy to get into the weeds as you know but not if it's inappropriate and if we don't have to i i i i i my question is it seems as though this specific request is not the larger it's not the bigger proposal it's literally everett wants to read land acknowledgement at their graduation i mean i think so anna here here's my why i like what uh you know mary beth and julia kind of just my concern is i think everett did an excellent job both in the email and today of expressing exactly specifically what they are requesting i think that was actually very helpful that it was very clear that it was a not the bigger picture i think right they did a really
313nice job expressing that my hesitation in is that it seems pretty evident to me that any number of students might ask for any number of things to be on the program at graduation in any given year you know anything reading a poem acknowledging of some perhaps a student who you know passed away something i mean any numbers of things could be requested and i would hate to to be in so in the weeds so if i mean if we can task very badly the reason that i i think that that's the best course of action is that this was a proposal that came to the committee and again that that there has not yet been a chance for the committee to debate it and to your point dana it does put the principle in a
314very difficult position because there there may very well be other requests or other needs from students and how do you start to determine where that line is and so i think that the the principal does not want to say no because there he's you know he's trying to abide by the fact that this is a topic under consideration by the committee um but he you know he also has challenges in terms of keeping that agenda tight and having criteria for by which he decides this should go on the agenda and this shouldn't so i'm sorry just for clarity are you saying that the principal would like our guidance or are you saying i think that i'm not sure you know because we had the same conversation like is it is it for us to decide
315is it and that where we landed is that this issue came in front of the the committee as to whether or not the school district was going to engage in land acknowledgement there was a presentation but there had not been any conversation related to it yet so at this time we said because of that we are we he he is not moving forward with it because there has not been any direction from the committee as to how you want to handle land acknowledgement requests in our public schools sorry okay um yes where do we go i'm not sure what to do with that anna well i think i think we've sort of created a chicken and egg problem then because um and i think everett raised an interesting question i mean i don't know that
316the i don't know that the school committee ever vets what students might say a graduation like ever like i don't it would strike me as procedurally irregular that this would be something we would open away i think the fact that there's the broader request which i do agree merits a broader conversation and then there's this really sort of micro request within it um i guess to me there they can now be differentiated so i would like us to perhaps set aside the broader proposal for a time the committee can really consider it and pretend as though this is just a student of the senior class who would like to say something at graduation and then whatever process principal tracy would normally have and i'm assuming any number of students have ideas like hey can we
317do this can we do that whatever vetting happens i think i would like to sort of disassociate the bigger request from this small request and let the small requests be handled by the building principle in whatever way they're usually handled and then we the committee can come back to the bigger proposal you know soon but not necessarily in june 2nd under the gun to make a decision does that sound fair i'm hearing you correctly anna what you're saying is we would basically as the supreme court might do sort of decline to hear the case at the moment is that kind of what you're saying well i would and and separate it out and maybe even provide the feedback or guidance to principal tracy that this ought to be treated as any other request like i
318just said for a request for i think everett offered is it possible that we can put this on the next agenda because i feel like i'm channeling david we're having a discussion right now i'm sorry what the topic is i think the answer is like where were you the next agenda right so i mean i appreciate your solution i do too so maybe so i guess my request is topic for food to me could we spend a couple of minutes on the next agenda trying to formalize that so that eric feels as though he has sufficient direction the only thing that i'd offer is that graduation is coming up right i think any kind of determination by june 2nd will be too late so what what i can do what i what i think i
319can do one of two things for you i can contact the attorney and ask for clarity or i can tell eric that there was a conversation at the committee um and that the decision at this time is that this is his responsibility and to handle it as he would other requests that come through for students at graduation i see nodding heads on the second one so does that work for everybody i think so i think we have consensus without necessarily having a formalized vote does that seem accurate because even bringing it up on the second does it give enough time no i think that sounds accurate all right could i ask just another topic i will translate that to uh principal tracy for a future meeting for um subcommittees yes to put in place protocols
320for whether we're meeting in person or or zoom first for subcommittees for subcommittees yep okay because if the kids are in school and we're meeting in person um we need to discuss it now i actually think that would be guidance by the end of the month from the ag's office i um agree michelle this came up in my husband's work calls i think once the emergency order expires on june 15th our authorization to meet remotely also expires no matter what i don't think that's a decision that's even in our control okay so we can we will put that on our next agenda sounds good um okay um do i have a motion to adjourn without going to executive session without going into executive session do i have a second david polito with a second all
321right all in favor of adjourning it is unanimous we are adjourned